[CharlesColeman]

> Google didn't follow all of Safari's decisions, and eventually they forked WebKit. Why shouldn't Microsoft do something similar when they have different goals?

Didn't Microsoft recently throw in the towel with Edge, and switch to Chromium, because they thought it was too much trouble to maintain their own engine?

[skybrian]

Yes, it's a smart move that frees up the engineering effort that was previously devoted to catching up to Chrome, rather than improving on it. How they redeploy them isn't something we can tell from the outside.

There are occasional debates on Hacker News about when you should rewrite your codebase. Similar arguments apply here: when should you rewrite someone else's codebase?