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Ostensibly Microsofts browser team is the size of Googles’. They could just fork once and never look back.

Merging incompatible changes seems like a win compared to doing everything themselves.

That's what Apple did by forking KHTML and starting the Webkit project. KHTML is still maintained and both KHTML and Webkit can be used in KDE.

And even more recently with Blink forking WebKit.