Comment by Ajedi32

Correct. Chrome is not and never was a profitable venture apart from Google. It was a strategic move designed to push web technology forward to allow Google's other, more profitable businesses like Gmail, Google Drive etc. to compete with their desktop counterparts.

Before Chrome, Google had an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears that enabled functionality like LocalStorage and Service Workers since those were not standard web features at the time. Eventually they made Chrome and only then were they able to push to make those things into web standards.

Apart from Google, Chrome can't survive in its current form. It's not profitable on its own, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably result in either huge cuts to development staff or some pretty intense enshitification, or both.