If that dev time could be spent on other features that will be appreciated by more people, then that is a decision you can make while still adhering to the principle of "users-first".
And as always, resources dedicated to a project are finite. The “X billion dollar company can’t do trivial Y thing” isn’t as straightforward as it seems and the argument rarely holds up to scrutiny in my opinion.
We’re missing a ton of internal context here, and to have a real discussion we’d need that context. Otherwise there are tons of valid reasons why the opportunity cost calculation might not have worked out.
You are making exactly the same argument that Microsoft proponents were making when IE was bundled into Windows trying to push off other browsers. We don't have all the context, it must be too difficult to separate browser and OS code, etc
Considering the features work fine on FF, the actual costs for testing on FF should be minimal.
This is helpfully decimating the marketshare of anything that isn’t Chrome.
Even the VLC authors documented how Google tried paying them to ship Chrome as default with their installers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWx1P93nS0c&t=48s Google even tried
It doesn't mention when though. If its around the time where MSIE was dominant, well, I (FWIW) got less of a problem with that. Because -even with its profiling- Google Chrome is objectively a far, far better browser than MSIE ever was. And the Google of 2005 or 2010 is a better Google than Microsoft was in 1998 or 2002. Check the Halloween documents on that one.
The issue I have with this is that too many are looking at percentage/share/ratio only. Yes, percentage matters. But absolute values matter just as much.
Or would you call a couple of million people "just a few"?
And nobody answer with "for Google, yes", that's completely besides the point.
Also I've heard that Google is not so good at hiring front end engineer, as they are less likely to have the "inverse a binary tree" background.