Yeah I mean, they have to. It's open source software so it could be forked otherwise and also, if they abandoned this core principle anyway, they would lose their entire user base in droves.
There would be no faster way to nuke the entire product. Which is a good thing.
A browser is hard to fork, and a fork of a browser is hard to maintain. They might be able to get away with not doing this.
The reality is that this time, they are taking a good decision, on its own, not because they have to for some reason, and this should be recognized as-is. They took enough bad decisions we can attack, no need to belittle them for this one.
People belittle Firefox and its parent company out of both love and fear because it's one of the few bastions remaining in a sea of botnets and data siphons. And no, le shill lion doesn't count.
I think the assumption is that some browser engineers will also break off if a fork is ever created. Because I agree, a browser fork is hard to maintain. So we plebian users must rely on one or two experienced engineers being on our side.
I can't answer that, I guess what I was trying to say was that if a fork is ever created its chances of success depend on how many, if any, experienced browser engineers join it.
