Same reason people want Chromium to stay around: their forks will collapse within months if the free work from upstream stops happening.
replyBrave, Vivaldi, Opera, Tor Browser, Librewolf, they're all little more than reconfigurations and reskins of Chromium when you look at the entire code base. Yes, the Brave as block engine and Operas power saving modes are non-trivial, but the engine they're built on is the size of an operating system.
Librewolf: "This project is a custom and independent version of Firefox, with the primary goals of privacy, security and user freedom."
reply"Tor Browser is based on Mozilla Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) but has been heavily modified for use with the Tor network."
Those are direct quotes from their respective web pages. Neither of them has anything to do with Chromium.
You're right, I edited my sentence to include more examples and forgot to add "or Firefox" for Tor and Librewolf. Sorry about that.
replyI would edit my comment above to clarify, but the limited edit time window for HN seems to have passed.
Maybe they're being realistic about how long these projects could survive without Mozilla doing all the work upstream?
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