> Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium.

Why would people trust Microsoft more than Google, though? Even with really bad actions, switching browsers is very difficult (i.e. it requires making an active choice and change about an obscure topic) and I don't see normal people doing it, which is what would be required for this to happen.

Microsoft can't get any traction for Edge even with the pushiness on their OS and massive market share. I recently installed Windows 11 on a box and even searching for Chrome had the top portion of the screen show "You don't need a different browser!" at the top of Bing. Did that stop me? No. Not going to use a Microsoft browser, thanks.

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doublerabbit 4 days ago | parent [-]

Edge solely exists to keep the Windows OS bundled with their own browser.

My 70 year old mother doesn't want the faff of installing Firefox so Edge fits the bill. It provides for her, her needs. I've installed Firefox and it sits untouched.

Microsoft doesn't care if people use it or not. It's easier and cheaper for them to integrate as Chromium does than it is to upkeep Trident. It's not their business too.

My take to why they chose Chromium is that Firefox (Netscape) has always been seen as an independent rebel.

Microsoft is corporate as is Google. I'm sure some backhand deals too.

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cosmic_cheese 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Why they chose Chromium and not Firefox? Firefox has always been independent whereas as Microsoft is corporate as is Google. At least my take on it. I'm sure some backhand deals too.

I don't have any more insight than any other commenter, but in my estimation a major factor is how practical the browser is to fork. By the time Microsoft switched to a Chromium base for edge, creating and maintaining a Chromium fork with meaningfully different UI was fairly well-trodden ground because it had been done several times already, whereas almost nobody had forked Firefox (except for toggle some flags or keep the UI frozen in time). The one countervailing example, Brave, also switched to Chromium for similar reasons.

Additionally, this was the beginning of the arc of working overtime to court web developers that it's still in the midst of. By shuttering Chakra (the old Edge rendering engine) and switching to Blink, Microsoft improved its reputation with web devs.

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baq 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Edge has windows-integrated o parental controls which Firefox lacks entirely and Chrome has its own implementation of. Non-parents probably have no reason to care, but edge has an advantage in Microsoft households.

	▲	password4321 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Also: reset/change selected client certificate without restarting.