[toyg]

You have your cause and effect backwards. That market share was achieved in large part by ease of embedding. Google itself started the project on WebKit because it was easier to embed and manipulate than anything else, and were pretty careful to allow others to do the same one level higher up the stack (i.e. making it easy to build your own branded browser on top of Chromium).

[pcwalton]

It's never been easier to build a custom branded Chrome than to build a custom branded Firefox. Building a custom branded Firefox is very easy, which is why tons of people have done it.

Google achieved market share by taking the embeddable WebKit, wrapping it in a non-embeddable wrapper called Chromium, and eventually forking WebKit to Blink in large part to make it non-embeddable and more tightly coupled to Chromium.

[BenjiWiebe]

Custom branding and embedding aren't the same thing though.

[pcwalton]

Correct. And Chromium, as shipped and supported by Google (not third-party projects like CEF), is no better than Firefox at embedding (and certainly wasn't when Chromium was taking off in market share). There is a reason why Chromium-based browsers are forks of Chromium, not embeddings of Chromium.

[scrollaway]

There is a parallel universe where Gecko was always more embeddable and approachable, and Google used it as the base for Chrome.