> And your point? That they are "a community that will pick up Chrome dveelopment in a flash"? That's not how it works.

Yes it really is how it works. You see, Chromium is used by numerous teams and products already. Developers from these projects already contribute support and patches to Chromium on the regular. That's exactly how open source development works.

> Browser development is prohibitively expensive. Even Microsoft, a trillion-dollar company, gave up on developing their browser. What makes you think that some magical community will just pick up the development of Chrome?

Microsoft (especially Ballmer era MS) sucks at a number of things. That internet explorer was a bloated piece of trash beyond all repair is hardly an indication that browser development is beyond the capabilities of an open source community. It wasn't that it was "too expensive" for Microsoft to maintain IE. It's just that IE could not possibly compete with Chromium, because they were saddled with too much technical debt from years of bad decisions.

Entire operating systems and databases are maintained by open source foundations. Have you ever heard of Linux? MS cannot compete with Linux at the server game. They waved the white flag on that battle a long time ago as well.

Besides, when you fork a project, you don't have to instantly rebuild everything from scratch. A foundation would kick things off by prioritizing bug patches, security fixes, etc. The RFC process for deciding new web features is already handled by a consortium: https://www.w3.org/

Browsers are now so essential, that there is little incentive for Google to drop out and very much incentive for everyone else to continue or increase their involvement.

With Firefox there is even a viable alternative that isn't controlled by Google in any form. I'd agree on many projects that would be the case. For Chrome, no.