It would have been jaw-droppingly shocking if Microsoft ever chose Firefox or a similar "free as in freedom" project as the basis of their own products because

It would have been jaw-droppingly shocking if Microsoft ever chose Firefox or a similar "free as in freedom" project as the basis of their own products because they are not goal-aligned. Whereas Webkit-based (which did fork from KHTML...remember Konquerer?) browsers have long since been serving as the platform for big-software webtech, Firefox and Mozilla largely remain oriented towards the interests of users. This means decisions that could help commercial entities take a far second to the needs of direct users with few exceptions (I'm looking at you EME and DRM).