Are you guys kidding me? Chromium devs retire? LOL. The biggest contributor to AOSP is Huawei. Don't tell me Google the one maintaining/adding all the new features in Chromium. It's most likely some gigantic Chinese company using Chromium as their backbone who's advancing the source code for everyone else to use...
It's all thanks to Chromium Open Source, I no longer need the likes of Edge/FireFox (Chromium version) etc. to browse the web. They all dial back home your personal data/make a profile of you. These days I'm using Deepin browser built into Deepin OS. Based on the same open source as Edge/Firefox but without the spying features...
Well, IE has been dead for years for most users. The time to put it out of its misery was past due, anyway. Chrome devs will retire, others will take their place, maybe other browsers will surface. You might be right regarding the shortage of skilled people, but many software products with potential failed for marketing reasons, not because the devs were not good enough.
Do you really think that IE was "a high-quality, polished product" the way it was yesterday, a year ago, or five years ago? Cross-platform bookmark sync? Built-in newsreader, email client, advanced tab and bookmark management? What was so high-quality and polished about it? Not trying to pick a fight here, I am just trying to understand your stance better.
"Finally"? What exactly are you celebrating here? The point in history when a $1T corporation FAILED to source the talent to maintain their in-house browser technology - and simply started distributing Google Chrome instead?.. What happens when Chrome devs eventually retire? Huh? Listen, there's a huge shortage of skilled people in software right now. And just because everyone and their mother CLAIM to be "software engineers", that doesn't make em so. We're in deep, deep doody. Things are not looking good. And we've just pushed another high-quality, polished product into garbage bin - simply cause it looks like alien tech to us. This is degeneration. So wipe that stupid grin off your face.
Today, Microsoft has stopped providing support for its once-dominant web browser. However, this is not surprising since the 27-year-old Internet Explorer has been in control of less than one percent of the browser market for a while and its replacement, namely Microsoft Edge, has been around for 7 years already.