It does seem odd to me that they chose to fork Chromium instead of Firefox
WebKit/Blink/Chromium have a large webcompat advantage due to superior marketshare, and Firefox's embedding story is weak. WebKit is big enough that it's hard for Google to bully out users even if they can make piggy-backing on Blink more annoying. It depends on how hard you depend on Chromium vs how hard you depend on the underlying rendering engine.
IIRC at least their first Android browser did fork Firefox, simply because it had a much superior embedding/customization story than the desktop version.
WebKit/Blink/Chromium have a large webcompat advantage due to superior marketshare, and Firefox's embedding story is weak. WebKit is big enough that it's hard for Google to bully out users even if they can make piggy-backing on Blink more annoying. It depends on how hard you depend on Chromium vs how hard you depend on the underlying rendering engine.
IIRC at least their first Android browser did fork Firefox, simply because it had a much superior embedding/customization story than the desktop version.