[danShumway]

If Mozilla can't maintain their own browser codebase that competes with Chrome now, what makes you think they'll be able to maintain a fork?

The moment they fork it and make their own changes, they are now back in the same position they were in -- a separate codebase under separate branding that needs to keep pace with Chrome.

There are two reasons forks work:

- They allow you to pull upstream changes. That's nice, but pulling upstream changes doesn't work once your codebase starts to heavily diverge from its source, so getting that benefit means you can't make changes that are too divergent from the upstream.

- They also allow you to get rid of upfront work and start from a solid base. That's also nice, but getting rid of the upfront work isn't valuable to Mozilla. Firefox is already basically on par with Chrome where most features are concerned. It's not the upfront work that's the problem, it's maintenance, advertising, and monetization.

A Mozilla fork of Chrome would be effectively the same thing as giving Google control over the entire web standards process.