The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch.
The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.
Anything forked from Chromium can’t be significantly different from Chromium, because any change of that nature increases divergence from Chromium and makes it more difficult to keep pace with the firehose of changes being pumped out daily by Google’s massive Chrome/Blink team. It means that forks can never be anything but mostly-cosmetic reskins unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed.
> unless the party forking sinks resources equally large as Google’s into the fork, which gives Google power to shape the web as they please unopposed.
I imagine even this already very unlikely outcome would also depend on said fork having a big slice of market share before they even try to drift away from Chromium, otherwise it won't have any effect and will likely die exactly because of said differences.
There are several chromium forks that do more than just "cosmetically reskin" the browser and they definitely don't have teams as big as Google's.
Additionally, nothing forces a company/group to merge that "firehose of changes". If google ever oversteps sufficiently, there is always the possibility that companies that are maintaining forks will stop integrating those changes.
> There are several chromium forks that do more than just "cosmetically reskin" the browser and they definitely don't have teams as big as Google's.
Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink, which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
If forks don't keep up with Google's changes they're putting their users at risk of getting hit by 0days and other vulnerabilities.
> Very few of the changes in even the most diverged of Chromium forks change anything significant about Blink, which is really what matters. The bulk of differences are tied up in the bits wrapping the engine.
That’s because they don’t need to because there’s nothing wrong with chromium. In the hypothetical situation where Google goes rogue and messes with chrome to the point that forking is required, this would be done differently.
Google going rogue isn't the only concern. It's also that in a Chromium-dominated world, there is no room for other parties' voices in shaping the web. Google gets what Google wants, regardless of whatever protests Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, or any other organization might have.
The standards and functionality that are required in a modern browser are already far beyond what "an individual or small team" could build from scratch.
The existence of Chromium absolutely makes it much, much more feasible to launch a Chrome competitor than if Chrome was entirely closed source.