[brendoelfrendo]

Other browsers use the open source Chromium project as their base, not Chrome. If Google killed off Chrome tomorrow, those other browsers could continue using the Chromium codebase, and new maintainers could step up to manage the Chromium project. Nothing needs to change.

[diffeomorphism]

Wishful thinking. It is much too large of a project for "new maintainers could step up" once google jumps off both chrome and chromium. Chromium would either slowly wither away or the new maintainers would be MS Edge or Amazon or some other large company.

[stephenr]

Before the current Chromtastrophe, multiple companies maintained their own, fully independent rendering engines, according to web standards.

Microsoft didn't stop developing EdgeHTML because it's too hard, they stopped because Google kept giving them the fuck around on sites like YouTube.

The whole point of web standards is that you can have multiple implementations for the same thing - there's zero reason that post-Google, Blink needs to be maintained by a single entity.

Microsoft can maintain their own fork of Blink, or bring back Edge, or adopt WebKit, or whatever works for them.

Opera and <insert laundry list of chrome-but-not-chrome browsers> have the same options, sans EdgeHTML.

The whole reason these companies are using Chromium/Blink is that Google has a stranglehold on web standards, and by being a me-too Chrome-alike they get support for Google's half baked ideas for free, to prevent the ever-fickle user base from switching browser because their browser doesn't support the latest half-written web standards draft.

[account42]

Right, making a browser is "too expensive" largely because Google can make it too expensive by dumping tons of money into Chrome.