Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The real problems with Gecko is just that it’s harder to fork That goes contrary to my experience. I'm a maintainer of a Firefox fork (with rather extensive changes to a lot of the internals), and it is pretty manageable to maintain. We manage to keep it roughly up to date and add new features without financial backing or folks working full-time on it. If all you do is change the branding and apply some superficial…
Thats interesting. Thanks for sharing. Why do you think that very few projects adopt Gecko then?
Also, I feel working with the Chromium codebase is easier if you only apply superficial changes, e.g., the linked browser. The patch files are all very simple, so the fact that Chrome is generally less crufty (Mozilla is working on cleaning up a lot of ancient stuff, which causes us a lot of pain but is probably great in the long term), simply due to being newer, might make it easier to get started. Although I always felt the most significant hurdle (if you know C++ and JavaScript sufficiently well to patch a Browser) is getting the stuff to build, Mozilla is doing reasonably well on that front. Building Firefox always felt less annoying than building Chromium.