I've been wondering if Mozilla ends up owning Chromium eventually.
It would make sense... it's the part of Google's business that they'd be most likely to be okay parting with (after all, it's open source), they wouldn't lose much (Mozilla would still keep Google as the default search engine), and they could get regulators off their backs.
Plus, Google and Mozilla have a longstanding relationship – the early offices were provided by Google and for a long time, every Mozilla employee had a Google badge. The Chrome and Mozilla teams like each other.
The only way that makes sense is if you kill off Gecko (or, more bizarrely, Blink/Chromium). which cuts the number of browser vendors down to a very lopsided 2. And you end up with a very complicated, extremely essential piece of modern computer infrastructure reliant on a single underfunded organization--which is the sort of situation that resulted in the OpenSSL failures that led to Heartbleed.
Right now, a ton of vendors spend a lot of time on negotiating standards, which are written in English. And then that English is translated into code. And at this point, it's really just for the sake of Gecko – every other major player just uses a derivative of Webkit.
So, if you had Mozilla take stewardship over Blink, you wouldn't really need a "standard" anymore. Everyone could just use the same rendering engine, and the code itself would act as the "standard". Each vendor could then build their own chrome around it.
Instead of everyone trying to implement the same stuff the same exact way in multiple rendering engines, forces could be combined.
The latter part of your statement isn’t true. Yes, some people formerly in charge of security response were unfortunately laid off, however that is not indicative of that entire team nor its capabilities.
I assume that the idea is to "break apart" the company voluntarily--in a way that doesn't affect overall profits that much--before the US government breaks apart the company by force (through anti-monopoly laws), where Google would have less say in what the end results would look like.
It would make sense... it's the part of Google's business that they'd be most likely to be okay parting with (after all, it's open source), they wouldn't lose much (Mozilla would still keep Google as the default search engine), and they could get regulators off their backs.
Plus, Google and Mozilla have a longstanding relationship – the early offices were provided by Google and for a long time, every Mozilla employee had a Google badge. The Chrome and Mozilla teams like each other.
(I'm an ex-Mozillian with no inside knowledge!)