>They will eventually have to maintain a hard fork, the differences will grow such that they eventually have to increase their engineering spend on it to keep pace with just managing the rebases and patches or reimplement features themselves,
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.
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.