I think this point often isn't mentioned enough to be fair. Chromium is a ridiculously complex project. Most of these "independant" browser teams are simply no

I think this point often isn't mentioned enough to be fair. Chromium is a ridiculously complex project. Most of these "independant" browser teams are simply not capable to create a browser from scratch. I'm not saying people should praise Google or anything since they obviously have interest in it, But Google is still the one who (mostly) build chromium and leave it open source (I understand they have to since it was originally a fork of Webkit, but I feel Google can do it from scratch if they wanted). Without it none of these browsers would exist. If anything, why almost no one uses Gecko/Firefox as a template/start point instead is a more interesting question, TBH.