Besides that, at which point does the dominant search and advertising company of the internet get an antitrust case for this? People think google is trustworthy yet they do nothing to earn that trust.
Chrome doesn't have that problem.
Google's new security flaw is that they are going to moderate ad-blocking, become responsible for it, and then depend on their inhuman machine to ignore all of your complaints. No different to how you can't find a human connect when you get screwed out of Gmail or Google Wallet because of their mathematics.
As a total thought experiment on where I'm coming from with this: in Star Trek TNG, Data (the Android) spends seven years with us exploring the human equation. Strip out the narrative imbalance and do you think the current automation of help and support is anywhere near aligned to the ideals of that 30 year old TV show that didn't know better? Or is the algorithm an overfitting to Google's commercial needs?
It's tangential to this thread but for some reason it felt worth writing out.
That ship has sailed.
HTML itself emerged from such a consolidation (from SGML) and went through this process a few times. There are numerous other examples of technical recapitulation.
At least that's the justification I generally see. See the Criticism section of the Wikipedia article:
HTML5 breaks soft. It's easier to write, which is what drives content. A parser for which there is no content becomes moot.
(I'd prefer far more rigorous document specification. That's not the Universe I inhabit.)
And Google is currently the funding source for Mozilla, giving them a more or less complete monopoly on the future of the web.
Google has worked very hard over the years to make itself into an organization with deeply baked-in incentives to do the opposite. It'd take a decade of sustained effort working counter to powerful incentives to fix that.
This is distinct from making a capable well-performing browser, which Google has done. So has Mozilla.
It's not a product-making sale point for the vast majority of people.
It's not a completely ethereal concept like privacy, democratic freedom, etc.
Chrome without adblock is essentially ie6, with tabs.
It managed to get to around 20% marketshare[1] before Chrome surpassed it[2] and then also surpassed IE.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#W3...
Pound for pound, chrome is ridiculously far ahead of internet explorer mid-2000's. IDK what the hell someone is going to have to do to upend chrome and its rendering components but is going to have to be great.
I mean, who knows. Never say never, but they are going to be tough competition. Not to mention that browsers are becoming so advanced it will be tough for a small team to match the engineering prowess of a company like google.