Google is much more at the reigns of Chromium than your comment perhaps illustrates. The only way to really innovate would be to make a full-fledged fork which

Google is much more at the reigns of Chromium than your comment perhaps illustrates. The only way to really innovate would be to make a full-fledged fork which would soon diverge enough to require as much development resources as Chromium, thereby negating many advantages of a common codebase. Also, even Chromium has many Google-specific features and integrations which make it worrying from a privacy perspective.