Recently, I've been following a case of judge, who can force google to sell chrome. And I have some opinions.
First of all. Chrome won the browser wars fair. No cheat codes, just good f'nig leadership. If anything, chrome is basically the cornerstone of what web is today, and for what web is shaping to be. They don't only invest in chrome but also to all the web standards and web tests (More on that later). If it wasn't for google and their team, I would argue that we would have probably half the features we have in the web today. Because just like anything else open source, if a big company is involved which actually pays people to do the job, things are going much more smoothly and quickly.
People who are a week or two in the web world, probably remember the days where Firefox and Opera were the Kings of the web. And then chrome with it's ridiculously fast V8 (Javascript) engine started to creep in the shadows. It wouldn't take long until people started to notice the speed performance and in that age that was enough to convince people to switch.
Web is a wild west. And making a good browser is no joke. Yes there are standards which make sure certain things are behaving correctly, but if you're about to make a new browser today. Good luck. Why? Because of the backwards compatibility. Site which was written in 1998 has to be displayed just as good as site written in 2024. No buts, ifs or anything else. This is why there are Web Platform Tests. These tests are used by browsers to test if their engines are compliant with the web as a whole. They're testing HTML, CSS, DOM, APIs, WebAssembly, service workers and so much more and it's DeFacto standard when it comes to testing web engines. Without chrome and google's influence, we would be nowhere near where we're now. and I mean it.
At the moment, there are really 3 types of engines the we're using. Blink paired with V8 (Chromium), Gecko & SpiderMonkey for team Firefox and Webkit w/ JavaScriptCore (a.k.a. Nitro). There is also new kid on the block but more on that maybe next time. Blink with V8 is what I would say is industry standard. As many other browsers are basically defaulting to this option. I'm not saying that Gecko & SpiderMonkey are bad, you just can't match google's manpower - as really any company to be honest (Microsoft lost the battle too and moved edge to chromium). And then there is Webkit. It's bad. People who will defend it are probably knowing Webkit from safari, but let me make things clear. Webkit in safari is heavily modified version of it from Apple. It works good only on MacOS. Try Webkit browser on linux 😉. You would be surprised and not in a good way.
So saying that google has monopoly is true, but also... not.
So the thing is that chrome, just like many other browsers are using chromium under the hood. Which give everyone an even playground. You can have the same exact browser - but with different skin. Every company is trying to build something on top of it, and yes, maybe with google you will have the most "vanilla" experience (Well actually that would be with chromium itself, but that doesn't support sync), but the thing is, google is not putting sugar on top of the engine itself. The engine, which is the thing that matter really in the browser, is there for everyone. Google can absolutely loose to other browser if some company can do a better job. (Looking with a disbelief on abandoned arc).
But the fact is that google won, purely by making a better product.
PS: What I do think is tho - that they should sell GMail. I'm not going much into the details so I'll leave the TL;DR:
Google has massive monopoly in email, which leaves many other companies in disadvantage. Everything not google is probably getting (or at least with high percentage) marked as spam, and companies cannot fight against this as GMail is closed service and thus cannot make any claims against google without solid proof. However it was proven multiple times that gmail is rate-limiting other providers emails, which are coming into the google's servers. This puts many providers into gray area as they cannot provide good services to customers just because majority of the world runs on gmail and they're making the rules.