Worrying. Extrapolating a (speculative) future, this means (Google will feel) that soon the chromium base will no longer need the crowd-sourced bug hunting that is open-source. I expect Google to eventually stop working on chromium (in the open) and all current chromium-flavours will become de-facto forks of the last published version of chromium. These forks won't be equally easy to maintain given that the groups running them do not have access to the same level of subsidy as Chrome does with Gemini.

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dybber 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Google already controls Chrome/Chromium direction so much that you should use Firefox if you value an open web.

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Phemist 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Which I do (actually a fork of firefox - waterfox), but it is still worrying as the viability of chromium-base browsers is what's keeping us having "merely" a chromium-monoculture (with viable ad blockers e.g. and website operators that check compatibility with more than one browser), rather than a chrome-monoculture (where ad-blockers surely would have been killed by now).

	▲	Alpha3031 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Microsoft surely has enough resources to keep their fork going if they choose to, so I see no reason why Google would try that given they would likely end up with less control over the web.