[mdasen]

Really, the worst case scenario is that the current Firefox codebase is dumped for Chromium which is completely open-source.

Nothing is stopping you from creating the next Mozilla off the Chromium source - in fact, I don't think Google would be anti that at all. They're looking to make sure that browsers can handle web applications. They don't make money off the browser. The better the browser experience, however, the more people are going to use their web applications.

Do I expect Mozilla to dump their codebase? Hell no. Of course, someone at Mozilla might start a nice open source project to port Chromium to XUL (a Firefox powered by Chromium). They've supported lots of different small things in the past - in fact, Firefox was such a project at one time.

As long as it's open source, there isn't a big problem because Google can't exploit anything. If Google starts doing something evil, it would be trivial for someone to fork.