Comment by TeMPOraL

The way I see it, both of these can be (and most likely are) true. Intentions of the company aren't usually the same as intentions of individual contributors (or even whole teams). The Web is Google's business - the more stuff happens on the Web, the more money they can eventually make of it. Advertising is how they make most of that money, so this is what they're protecting. But beyond that, Chrome answered a real need and a lot of hard-working people made it into a best-in-class browser.