This sounds dramatic but Microsoft is a company with 150000 employees. Maintaining a fork of Chromium while open source development continues is probably not an insurmountable feat, and I don't see why it is in principle more work than switching to and contributing to Gecko.

In terms of market share Chromium has essentially won. It's where all the addons are, it's what websites are being optimised for, and so on.

> "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface.'"

Microsoft isn't the gorilla it used to be, but never forget it is a gorilla, and knows how to play the gorilla game.

If Google becomes sufficiently annoying, Microsoft can say "Well, sure, Google's Chrome isn't very fast on Windows, and crashes every so often. Google must be slipping. Here, Edge is just as good, being practically the same technology, and it's from us, your friend, so you know it won't crap out at the worst possible moment."

[1]: https://www.techradar.com/news/windows-10-gets-cheeky-with-a...

Microsoft can manipulate Windows to make Chrome look bad, but while this could have been useful fifteen years ago against other less popular software, now Windows has serious competition in the form of smartphones and tablets.

Microsoft can't do anything about Android. And people are using Android instead of Windows to browse the Web more and more every day.

A hard fork of Chromium specifically for Edge might not be the worse thing ever. Having two independently maintained versions of that engine might be enough to force more standardization than in a Chrome-only world.

Two years ago Firefox was such a downgrade I concur.

One year ago the reverse was true and I switched to Firefox without regrets.

Just managed to finally make the switch.

As silly as it sounds, feature parity on selecting and moving groups of tabs between windows was a big factor.

I still use Chrome at work for development, though.

Google has always been this- they use OSS for PR and are bigger enemies of openness than Microsoft. They just had the luxury to pretend otherwise

I also tried using chrome as a "work" browser and firefox for the rest, but it's all a big mess. Not to mention that a lot of pages are not working well.

I am now using Brave to at least mitigate the privacy nightmare of Chrome.

as a user i want new features to work and be taken up quickly. i don't want to be told that a website doesn't work in my browser, or worse, have it fail silently.

different browser are fine for the UI, tab handling, bookmarks, extensions, etc. but rendering a website should work uniformly without fail.

the reason why we need multiple rendering engines is because monoculture is bad for security and it's also not a good idea to allow a single company to define how the web works.

however, most users or developers don't care to much about that.

if that rendering engine would be developed and maintained by an independent consortium like mozilla, then this would actually be sort of acceptable, as it would at least solve the monopoly problem (if a resource is best managed as a monopoly, then that monopoly must be owned by the community at large, and not by a company with selfish commercial interests.)

it wouldn't solve the security problem however.

Old Edge was already getting the same treatment from web developers as Firefox. If they picked up Gecko they might as well have just stayed with old Edge for even less effort.

Could you please give some examples ? Did windows ever blocked a competitors product ?

> The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS structures and functions to perform its work, and appeared in the installer, WIN.COM, and several other executables in the OS.[1]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_i...

> Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging the use of DR-DOS with Windows, one incorporated into "Bambi", the code name that Microsoft used for its disk cache utility (SMARTDRV) that detected DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. The AARD code trickery is well-known, but Caldera is now pursuing four other deliberate incompatibilities. One of them was a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

I think the IE6 era was bad for the web for a lot of reasons, but fortunately the investigations into Microsoft made it harder for them to abuse their overwhelming marketshare.