In what possible way would Chrome make money as a standalone company without utterly alienating its userbase?
Chrome is subsidized by the rest of Google.
Chrome is subsidized by the rest of Google.
However, a Chrome-with-Google-revenue would be far more independent of Google than Chrome-the-Google-Subsidiary. Mozilla/Firefox has shown that it's still possible to advance privacy even within such an arrangement.
Also, its far from clear who would have the most power in such an arrangement. Without a popular browser of its own, Google will be forced to pay the browser vendors to stay the default, unless it wants to give a search engine competitor a chance to unseat it.
Essentially Mozilla is selling ads, but only to one advertiser (Google) which is easy to disable.
Browsers are a lot less modular than operating systems and they operate in a different market (eg. contributing to their development doesn't help the bottom line of any company particularly), so Firefox doesn't get a lot of paid for third-party developer time. Hence, Mozilla makes unfortunate compromises.
Why does a browser need a revenue model? Why can't a browser just be a piece of software that's "finished", with the occasional security patch?
Chrome is incredibly overcomplex because it attempts to be more than just a browser, and it is part of Google's strategy.
A regular browser doesn't have to be an OS in itself.
Because development isn't free.
> Why can't a browser just be a piece of software that's "finished", with the occasional security patch?
Developing security patches for the dwindling user base such a browser would have isn't free, either.
But even if such a browser existed, the browsers people would actually be using would be the ones evolving with the things people want from the web.
That may have been true 10 years ago, but now the feature set is so rich, that any new ones are really solutions in search of a problem rather than an actual user need. The average customer is pretty much using what Google dictates to get to the internet (used to be MS)
Nothing would change if the current feature set were kept constant
(except lots of HN's would be out of a job and Google might struggle to find new ways to show their ads)
Not at all. App platforms aren't standing still, and one of the goals of web browsers is to make them as capable as app platforms while retaining the safety of the web sandbox.
That includes things like VR/AR, WebAssembly and extensions to it, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), adjusting pages to match the system theming, better video formats, better authentication (Web Authentication), and a hundred other things people actually want.
Opera does this: https://www.opera.com/computer/features/ad-blocker
Would you characterize Mozilla as behaving in ways that favor Google?
I agree that without those motivations it would be hard to fund these projects without them going paid or taking donations, but I take issue with calling them "subsidized".