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.
To repeat the question from above, where is the downside?
Microsoft only abandoned EdgeHTML and adopted Blink because Google owned sites like YouTube were deliberately breaking in Edge.
At this stage I don't imagine they'd go back (to EdgeHTML as their engine) specifically, but it's not hard to imagine a world where MSFT maintains its own fork of Blink for use in Edge, Opera potentially the same.
As for Firefox: they get money for being the default search engine - if Google is broken up, the search engine company that emerges will have even more reason to want to be the default search engine on as many browsers as possible (and thus incentive to pay money to other browsers).
> So if Google dies then we'll have more diverse browser and mobile ecosystem
Initially, this won't be true. A lot of the browser ecosystem relies on Google right now. Eventually it would be replaced. I just don't think that it would be immediately true.
No they abandoned EdgeHTML because it was shit. Seriously there are plenty of posts right here on hacker news about the internals of that decision. The team and product failed to deliver so badly that it got the axe.
There sure are:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824
> This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.
> Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced - and they're the ones who looked into it personally.
Now it seems to me that 0.5 billion is the "cost of not technically being a monopoly" when they are indeed a monopoly, and it's a net win if they're pulling say 10 billion synergistic monopolistic profit from not being broken up into baby googles as a monopoly trust buster case.
I would say this is capitalism in a pure form, the kind the communists rail against, the kind where a monopoly crushes out all the benefits to the people, government corruption, etc. True "for the people" style capitalism would mean two browsers truly competing, ideally more than two (duopolies are monopolies by another name and poison our society broadly). One browser as part of an american zaibatsu, with the zaibatsu punting a little money to save face and claim competition exists - by propping up the competition financially - is absolutely a disgusting thing. To say "oh no, the thing they're propping up will no longer be propped up" is also disgusting and capitalistically twisted.
This is not a good reason to break up anti-competitive monopolies: that it would harm the technology their monopoly depends on