[qxcbr]

There's a big difference between writing their own engine from scratch and forking Blink. For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink. After all Webkit is under the GPL so they can't just close the source.

[anoncake]

> There's a big difference between writing their own engine from scratch

That's a strawman. Microsoft already had a browser engine, no one's talking about writing one from scratch. They are unable to maintain one.

> For starters, even if they fork, they can still keep cherry-picking fixes and new features from Google's Blink.

Yes. All of them. Because otherwise they aren't compatible with the Google-controlled web anymore. That kind of "fork" is pointless.

[underwater]

They were able to maintain and extend it. But they were starting from way behind while Google was rapidly adding new features.

Microsoft had to choose between adding their own enhancements and standards (the reason for having an engine into the first place) and playing catch up to Google. With Blink they can have both.