Comment by echelon

Such an important piece of software does not want to subject itself to the packaging and support woes of shared libraries. There are security issues, maintainability issues, and much more headache by going with that approach.

Static linking is one and done, headache gone. People have large drives these days, so it's not a problem.

There are areas where the browser will dynamically link, but those are more OS-related than image and file format codecs.