Comment by Keyframe
This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?
I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
> If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course.
They were amazing marketers. They made television, bus stop, billboard, and other real life advertisements that you couldn't miss walking down the street. Firefox did... uhhhhh an online certificate[1] that only people who were devs or chronically online would know or care about.
Marketing and sales has long been the Achilles' heel of computer software. Mozilla and all these Firefox forks screwed up and continue to screw up to this day by only marketing their products (not just code anymore - think of it as an actual product or good) to internet niches and not at all in real life. The majority of the planet does log off sometime and touch grass, so that's where the sales pitch has to happen.
[1] https://notaniche.com/firefox-3-new-logo-weave/660/