I don't think your claim is entirely accurate. Google's blink and Webkit are probably very different after all these years. And even at the very beginning of Chrome, Google had to make quite a bit of changes because of Chrome's process / sandboxing model , which was the main reason for the fork later (also related adaptations for skia graphics engine and v8) See [1].
Besides html rendering is only a portion of what makes a browser. considering today's Chromium codebase as a whole, I would guess probably >80% of it was written by Google engineers (and certainly not in their off hours). Still I would consider it a successful open source project as now it has quite diverse contributors, (Non Google contributors now amount to ~30% [2], biggest are Microsoft, Igalia, Intel etc.).
To clarify: I implied that Chromium is run and stewarded in Google employees' off-hours, which is different from the project being developed in Google employees' off-hours.
Of course Google pays people to work on Chromium. But do they pay people to decide what makes it into Chromium?
If so, that's a very bad look for a FOSS project. One of the central points of having a separate standalone community-driven FOSS project in the first place (rather than a corporate "source-available and we accept PRs if you assign us the IP" project), is taking steering of the project away from the corporation that created the code, and placing it instead in the hands of the community. If Google employees serve in their capacity as Google employees as directors for the Chromium Project — and so Google can tell its employee-maintainers to reject a PR from Chromium because it's not good for Chrome — then how could a browser vendor producing a competitor to Chrome based on Chromium, trust the direction of Chromium to do what's best for all Chromium-based projects, rather than just Chrome?
I assume this is not the case; that Google employees not only don't direct the Chromium Project with backroom Google-internal decision-making, but are restricted legally from so doing. Though I can't find anything on the Chromium Project site to support that assumption...
I'm not sure I understand why you think Chromium is supposed to be community driven. Chromium is an open-source project that has a lot of Google and non-Google contributors (for example, Microsoft), but all of the main decision-makers are working on Chromium on behalf of their companies, and the majority of decision-makers are employed by Google.
I don't think Chromium is that kind of open source project. It doesn't seem that having the FOSS community leading the direction of dev is something they do. If you read some of the docs it seems that Googlers have special privileges and it's quite intertwined.
> If so, that's a very bad look for a FOSS project.
As much as I don't like to see Google having so much control over the dominant Web engine out there, being "community-driven" is completely orthogonal to FOSS, and Chromium is very clearly a Google project. You even have to sign a CLA before you can contribute to it: https://www.chromium.org/developers/contributing-code/extern...
Besides html rendering is only a portion of what makes a browser. considering today's Chromium codebase as a whole, I would guess probably >80% of it was written by Google engineers (and certainly not in their off hours). Still I would consider it a successful open source project as now it has quite diverse contributors, (Non Google contributors now amount to ~30% [2], biggest are Microsoft, Igalia, Intel etc.).
[1] Slides from 2013 https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...
[2] BlinkOn 14 keynote: https://youtu.be/VrEP7SPfQVM?t=408