In the short-term. But google is training a whole generation that everything they touch is shit. I know a lot of engineers who won't touch chrome if they aren't testing something. I have the same feeling about android games.
They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
Shareware at one point was really try before you buy without restrictions--even if mostly people never bought before software really didn't have trial periods etc.
"Free to play" is really awful in general though. But I guess people won't in general pay up-front for a lot of things.
Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background manufacturing Google hate.
Chrome is amazingly well engineered and the Chromium team seems to have avoided the worst shittification. Having watched other products dive into the cesspit of advertising I'm not quite sure how the team does it. Somehow Chrome seems to add useful features (while being hated for that). Maybe I'm the fool in the room.
And the code is open source. A gift to humanity yet so strongly hated. So open source that most of the competition uses it! There's some magic going on somehow.
I just don't understand how anyone that calls themselves an engineer could hate Chrome that much. Firefox doesn't feel well engineered, and Mozilla has a strong taint of scuzzy executive vampires. Safari has its good points but when I was developing for it, it consistently had major flaws. Safari certainly has some amazing engineering. But Chromium mostly has better engineering from what I could tell as a JavaScript developer.
Engineers are just as vulnerable to branding and anti-branding as everyone else.
Microsoft, Google, Apple. Try to order them by evilness.
> Conspiracy theory: one or more companies are background manufacturing Google hate
Personally, I believe that Google's issues are just a general issue of tech debt and creeping complexity that is common in all organizations.
That said, Amazon was a victim of a strategy similar to your conspiracy theory
In 2019, the WSJ [0] exposed how Walmart, Oracle and Simon Property Group were funding and astroturfing anti-Amazon groups.
[0] - https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-grassroots-campaign-to-take-d...
You are amazed by Chrome, but it's still not good for your privacy. Firefox is way better.
> They've toxified their own markets for short-term gains.
Both Google and Apple. If you go to the App Store all games are ad ridden to the point where you can't play more than a minute without interruption or constant nagging to buy. Where are the apps where you pay a sum agreed from the start and use the damn app without restrictions? Some games will even trick people into buying $20/week subscriptions. I can only trust Apple Arcade for my kid. What a wasteland, probably no more than 1000 decent apps in millions. And they have the nerve to pretend App Store is some curated collection of software we can trust. It's no better than "shareware" before 2000's.