Google just wants browsers to become more powerful cuz then more people will use Chromebooks. since everything can be done on a browser.

Why do you think PWA's are being pushed so hard by google? So people can build PWA's that also run on Chromebooks. No need for native apps

I think PWA's were pushed because the google cannot crawl native applications for its search engine.

With a few tweaks to a native app, they can https://firebase.google.com/docs/app-indexing

On Android they already crawl your app with various devices when you upload it to Google play and let you know about any crashes or accessibility issues. Nothing to stop them capturing the content too if they wanted.

It's not any one of these reasons, it's likely all of them.

I think chromebooks kind of pivoted and now cater to the school markets and mass deployments rather than individuals. They must have realized they're not gonna blow proprietary drivers and native x86 based archs out of water and offered the low cost wholesale devices to education. It's probably a good strategy when you get them vertically integrated with G Suite for edut (which is free) and just lure all the students in US Schools to get used to Google products instead of all schools teaching using MS Office. Long way to go before they can actually replace MS Windows, macOS for games, photo editing, video editing, coding (althought that's close) or such.

Google doesn't care that much about Chromebooks, and certainly not anymore.

They care about people using Google - Chrome, Gmail, Android, etc, but Chromebooks are not some sort of "endgame".

> Google just wants browsers to become more powerful cuz then more people will use Chromebooks.

This has little to do with Chromebooks. Google just want to be the single purveyor of the web, period. They already have the most popular browser. Firefox and Safari fought them on quite a few fronts [1]. Then Edge became Chrome. Now Mozilla basically laid off everyone. Safari only exists on MacOS and iPhones (a large market, yes, but small in the grand scheme of things).

Chrome will only accelerate its blatant disregard of anyone and push more and more internally developed barely tested crap.

[1] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/ scroll down to harmful. Of course, many of those considered harmful are already implemented in Chrome. WebUSB, enabled by default in Chrome 61. Signed HTTP Exchanges, enabled by default in Chrome 73. Media Feeds, enabled by default in Chrome 85. And so on

It's the other way round. Google wants people to use chromebooks so that no other company controls the distribution. This is still about the search engine. Google doesn't want people to search some kind of app store, they want people to search the web - with google of course.

I'm thinking more like WebUSB, where there's a prompt before access to devices is given.

But what is that prompt? an ip and a port?, a local (m)DNS name? is it stored? what happens if the network changes? Do most people even know the names/ip of things on their network?

That sounds like basic security to me. Apps and extensions are already "verified as ok" by the user (whether fully informed or not) vs random websites. Not doing so sounds like a gross deficiency in access control.

For god's sake, if a website has to ask for permissions the browser is the "gatekeeper" I guess, and if the browser is made by google then in some sense google is the "gatekeeper", in the same sense in which google is the "gatekeeper" for desktop notifactions. Does this really justify the term "gatekeeping" or speculations about any dark plans of world conquest on google's part? Proposing an API, for which the website will have to ask the user for permission?