Not denying than many engineers work on Chrome just wondering how many of them work on Chrome features that are anti pattern, reducing privacy, improving information collection or tracking or against users interest in broad.

Can anyone actually share 1 - 3 examples where a hard fork of a living os project has actually succeeded ?

If AMZN couldnt make their fire whatever it was called fork of Android really grow, what chance has the community got ?

>wildly underestimate how many engineers work on Chrome.

It is completely insane how many people work on Chrome. It seems like it is time to deprecate web browsers and do something different. Like you get a frame-buffer to draw on with something like a wasm vm. Web pages get replaced by programs (which they essentially are anyway). Get rid of 99.9% of the cruft that has accumulated over the decades in browsers. If you want to have some of that cruft, that is a library you have to send.

But the open source project wouldn’t need to invest as much as Google does. There are all kinds of features and things they are working on that the general public really does not care about.

The bigger problem is wasting developer effort contributing to Google's platform. The real secret behind Android being "open" (sorta) is that while almost nobody runs AOSP, Google has tricked a bunch of fools into working on Android forks instead of building a real competitor.

Playing at their table is a losing game, the house always wins.

but perhaps we dont need several gigabytes compressed code to have a browser. perhaps what google have been doing is an utter abomination?