I agree, and I always figured that's why they built Chrome. They needed the other browsers to step up their game, especially js performance so they could offer the kinds of web applications they wanted to.
The reason they built Chrome isn't just that - google pays/paid other browser vendors __hundreds of millions of dollars__ to be the default search providers ($300M to Mozilla per year for a while). Owning the web browser gives them tremendous power and saves them money.
I remember reading that they spent $100m on advertising chrome in one quarter, just in the UK. So I don't think $300m/yr really matters that much. I think with Chrome they were far more concerned about the risk of losing the default position for searches in Firefox (correctly, as it turned out!)
>>They needed the other browsers to step up their game, especially js performance so they could offer the kinds of web applications they wanted to.
The actual reason is they have to pay browser vendors like Firefox hundreds of millions of dollars for having Google search as their default search plugin. Plus, they are at the mercy of other companies if they decide to change the default search plugin. All this plus the mobile game, if you have a browser and that has a major market share you can be rest assured to send the traffic to your sites.
Same with android, as long as you have your stuff(OS, Browser) installed on other people devices, getting traffic from their is easier. Which is why they give it away for free. Have a big market share and you win by default.
Quite the contrary. The other browsers did greatly improve their game. However, Google got spoiled with their ability to add a new feature to the browser whenever a Google product would benefit.
The cynical take on this is that Google just wanted to increase lock-in to its own browser; however, I think it's more a case that Chrome is a runtime environment for Google products as much as it is a web browser.
Hmm, if this is true, then we should be able to expect similar changes in Chrome like the changes made in Acrobat Reader when Adobe thought they had complete lock-in in the PDF reader space.
Yes they did. Firefox, Safari, IE all stepped up their game. Mozilla is building Servo. Microsoft is building project spartan. The browser is incredibly competitive.
