My guess it's MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.
I was at Microsoft (and on the IE/Edge team) when that movement started. The writing was on the wall; too many developers were targeting (and testing in) Chromium (and/or Webkit) alone. The iPhone in 2007 pretty much claimed the mobile-web as its own.
Massive efforts were made to bring IE up-to-speed. Support for -webkit- prefixes and more were added, but that proved to be too little, too late. IE 11 eventually even had pretty stellar ES6 support.
Forking Trident into EdgeHTML (for project Spartan) was a good move, but still not the right move. Hundreds of thousands of lines of code later, it was clear that Edge would need to adapt or die. I left before the decision was made to drop EdgeHTML (I went to Brave), but I think that was the right decision for Microsoft.
I've seen saying for years that I think Firefox will eventually do the same, or suffer the same drift into irrelevancy that Microsoft had been experiencing for so long.
> I've seen saying for years that I think Firefox will eventually do the same, or suffer the same drift into irrelevancy that Microsoft had been experiencing for so long.
Man, that would be something? Firefox forking Chromium to replace gecko would be a very sad day for the internet, but as of now it does kind of seem inevitable.
I might be wrong but i guess thats what Mozilla is about right now, is to have enough resources to continue to support Gecko. If things continue on the same way or turn worse its inevitable or they will just stop producing a browser.
I dont think there is a point to continue Firefox without Gecko. Of course im with you, if Gecko dies it will be a very sad day for the internet.
My guess it's MS will let Chromium do the heavy lifting, and they will integrate it nicely with AD etc and all IT departments will make it the new corporate default.