Comment by mabbo

These aren't mutually exclusive things. The people working on Chrome were and are highly motivated, intelligent and passionate people, some of whom I call friends, who want to see the web become a better place. In that regard they have succeeded massively.

But by this point, Google has dropped billions of dollars on salaries for those developers to build Chrome (call it >500 devs, >$200k salaries, >10 years). Google is not a charity. They didn't build Chrome with the intent to lose money on it. Everything else Google made that wasn't profitable is gone now, and yet here Chrome stands. Because it is an indirect profit center.

And you've pointed out the real issue: Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser. 'Was'. But it did that! So what is it about now? Why would Google continue to pour money into it if they didn't expect to extract more money out of it in the future?

You can make the world better and make money while doing it. Ideally, that's what we all are doing.