When you build a product, the purpose is to get customers / users, as many as possible. And when you win a majority market share, then that will make your product a de facto standard.
Google could have introduced a lot of proprietary, non-standard extensions to Chrome (not Chromium, but Chrome itself, aka the proprietary version), screwing everybody else in the process. Think Microsoft's ActiveX or XAML.
And while there are some glaring exceptions — like Chrome being responsible for the standardization of DRM, which is now keeping smaller open source Chromium forks out of the market, Google has been playing nice with web standards organizations, being major contributors, alongside Mozilla. And sure, they are in a position to impose pretty much anything they want, but they are fairly conservative in picking their battles, PNaCL versus WebAssembly comes to mind.
Google might be guilty of anti-competitive practices, but in my opinion it is the software developers themselves that are to blame for a Chrome-optimized web. This is because they (we?) continue to use Chrome for optimizing and testing web interfaces, while neglecting Firefox and Safari.
When you build a product, the purpose is to get customers / users, as many as possible. And when you win a majority market share, then that will make your product a de facto standard.
Google could have introduced a lot of proprietary, non-standard extensions to Chrome (not Chromium, but Chrome itself, aka the proprietary version), screwing everybody else in the process. Think Microsoft's ActiveX or XAML.
And while there are some glaring exceptions — like Chrome being responsible for the standardization of DRM, which is now keeping smaller open source Chromium forks out of the market, Google has been playing nice with web standards organizations, being major contributors, alongside Mozilla. And sure, they are in a position to impose pretty much anything they want, but they are fairly conservative in picking their battles, PNaCL versus WebAssembly comes to mind.
Google might be guilty of anti-competitive practices, but in my opinion it is the software developers themselves that are to blame for a Chrome-optimized web. This is because they (we?) continue to use Chrome for optimizing and testing web interfaces, while neglecting Firefox and Safari.