However, even if they did have the best browser how many installs would they get based on the quality of the browser? Most people don't care and those who care aren't significant slice of the pie.
Platforms dictate browser distribution because the average person is happy with what he god pre-installed or what google has shown as promo on their page.
They had >$6billion so I'm sure they could have put in some marketing and distribution partners.
Ladybird will show what one/very small team of devs can do developing a browser and what amount of $ could have been used for marketing and market share.
How would it be worse? Chromium is Open Source, and anyone can fork it if Google go too far.
IE6.0 was entirely proprietary, and nobody could do absolutely anything if Microsoft went too far.
'anyone'.
The resources required to fork and then maintain would be huge, and that completely disregards the publicity needed to say just why the fork was needed and is in the consumer's best interest to use instead.
Google have already gone too far. I can only hope the EU breaks them.
They can become the next Microsoft with secure boot signing keys for the next Widget, but implemented even less kindly. Yes, one can enroll their own signing keys. Who does?
The frog may say the water is warm, I say they are being boiled
Yes but browser companies have those resources and the expertise.
Microsoft is one of the most able companies to maintain a real Chromium fork, so a Chromium based Edge with actual marketshare puts them in a much better negotiating position than EdgeHTML based Edge that no one uses.
I think a Chromium based Firefox might be better long term than the current Firefox since Mozilla is going to get less and less of a seat at the table until they can get some real marketshare again.
Forking Chromium won't help unless developers are supporting Chromium rather than Chrome. There's no reason to expect Chromium to work with websites in the future.
well Google is constantly moving too fast and they're mainly an internet company, whereas Microsoft was just the software company.
derp