I think people attribute too much to Chromium’s open source nature.
The repository is controlled by Google, it’s their project. Whatever Google wants in Chromium goes in.
The only path forward in a case in which Microsoft disagrees would be a fork. However a fork would do nothing to Chrome’s market share. Microsoft failed to gain any traction with Edge and that won’t change after they start building on Chromium.
This is also similar with Android, an ecosystem that Google managed to control even if there’s a lot of incentive for the phone makers to fork. The reality being that no fork would succeed for as long as Google is pumping money into the project, because it benefits from the network effects of their app store and of their flagship apps.
This is why open standards are important, with open source being in fact an orthogonal issue.
I'm not against open standards... however, when Google was having issues with Apple in terms of priorities, that's when they forked off... if MS has the same issues, they can do the same. In the end, there can still be standards, and I understand that if it hits like 75% market share overall that it becomes a defacto standard. I saw it with IE6, and it was painful after a while.
However, I don't think Blink will stop getting better just because MS starts using it, or Google stops. Worst case, we see a fork. Also, now Edge can at least be available outside windows. I do think the biggest mistakes MS made are as follows.
- Tethering Edge releases to Windows Updates.
- Renaming IE to Edge instead of updating and hiding old ie better
- Making it Windows 10 only
Those were the worst mistakes that MS made, and to the last one, at least they made updating to win10 free for a couple years. I also, despite reporting, don't think the front end will resemble Chromium so much, I do think they will take some of their own UX lessons and tweak the front end while keeping the Blink engine in place. Also, swapping a lot of the synching services for MS equivalents, while keeping plugin compatibility.
The repository is controlled by Google, it’s their project. Whatever Google wants in Chromium goes in.
The only path forward in a case in which Microsoft disagrees would be a fork. However a fork would do nothing to Chrome’s market share. Microsoft failed to gain any traction with Edge and that won’t change after they start building on Chromium.
This is also similar with Android, an ecosystem that Google managed to control even if there’s a lot of incentive for the phone makers to fork. The reality being that no fork would succeed for as long as Google is pumping money into the project, because it benefits from the network effects of their app store and of their flagship apps.
This is why open standards are important, with open source being in fact an orthogonal issue.