Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn’t targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.

Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.

One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.

and do you think there were repercussions before?

For X? Sure, that’s why they’re leaving in the first place - by not complying to the judge’s orders, they’d surely get slapped with fines and such. As a company, it makes sense to leave and avoid being accountable, but given the influence they (sadly) still have in the media, avoiding those repercussions and letting bad actors do their thing, they’re adding gasoline to the burning world.

The fact that Whatsapp is more popular in Brazil than X is beside the point.

But it isn’t. Now people get to spread misinformation to Brazilians with no repercussions.

I don’t actually care about the drama per se at this point either. I mentioned it because, along with the fact that:

• development is not very open (in that only that one guy commits and releases stuff)
• release cadence is very erratic and often lags behind upstream chromium, which is a direct consequence of the previous point
• you mentioned about the guys absence - the first time was some time ago and he was inpatient in the hospital for (IIRC) alcohol abuse, and this absence actually coincided with the drama over the furry and the other stuff, so it took awhile for it to be addressed, which only added more fuel to the fire. The second was just this last couple of months were he was house sitting for his parents (mentioned on the release notes I linked before)

All of this paints a bleak outlook for the long term health of this project, IMO. Which is too bad , because I still think it’s one of the better forks of chromium.

Well, Thorium developer stated he intends to support Mv2 past the 2025 deadline. Whether he’ll make it, we’ll see. It’s a one man show, there was some drama involving it in the past, and there’s the question of what’s the point in maintaining Mv2 extensions support if you won’t be able to install them from the store after they’re cut off?