I wish MIcrosoft would have worked off Firefox for the new Edge instead of Chrome. Just doesn't make sense why they would feed into a direct competitor. Bagging Edge off Firefox would have made it a real option for me as well as creating an opportunity now with all the ad blocking stuff going down...
I'm just going to copy pattpass' response to a similar comment here, because the decision to use Chromium makes more sense with this context:
What benefit does Microsoft have by using Mozilla instead? Earnest question.
Electron, the software framework VSCode uses, runs on Chromium. Github maintained and developed the framework and they are currently owned by Microsoft. If Microsoft contributes to Chromium and improves performance they benefit in a lot of places: their new browser is improved(Edge Chromium), their own framework(Electron), and their own product (VSCode).
On the plus side, we now have another large player working on Chromium, which may help prevent Google from forcing design decisions which benefit them alone.
This is going to become massively important. As Brave gains market share and Microsoft Edge becomes the defacto browser on Windows machines, Google Chrome could easily become the new IE6 if Blink strays too far down the path on upstream compatibility.
