I've been wondering. What happens if Edge beats chrome?
Chromium is developed by google, and used by Edge. Will google continue developing chromium just to have Microsoft reap the rewards. If not, is google going to abandon chromium? Will microsoft pick up the slack? If so, are they going to fork chromium and develop on the form, or are they going to work on the original repo? What about the chromium name / trademark.
If this goes wrong, what is google going to think of open-source development. If the second biggest (I think) open source application turns out to have been a failure for the company backing it, what is that going to do to commercial open-source development?
Desktop browsing is the minority and shrinking every year. Google will always have more Chrome users on Android than there are Windows devices in existence.
If it goes well enough for Microsoft, I'd expect Google to change the license/stop publishing and Microsoft to fork from there.
The point of the chromium name is to provide a name that's not the general product name. I haven't looked at the license, but I don't think Google can take that name back; but if they do, Microsoft would just change it to something else, no big deal.
Google has already turned their back on open-source development; so much of Android isn't in AOSP, and I don't think it's coming back. Chrome so far has stayed open-source, but whenever it becomes inconvenient for that to stay, I expect it will. Such is corporate life.
If this goes wrong, what is google going to think of open-source development. If the second biggest (I think) open source application turns out to have been a failure for the company backing it, what is that going to do to commercial open-source development?
I find this a scary prospect.