Comment by cpgxiii

> It just creates entrenched players and monopolies in domains where it should be near trivial to move (browsers are definitely trivial to jump ship)

I think this is understating the cost of jumping. Basically zero users care about the "technological" elements of their browser (e.g. the render engine, JS engine, video codecs) so long as it offers feature equivalence, but they do care a lot about comparatively "minor" UX elements (e.g. password manager, profile sync, cross-platform consistency, etc) which probably actually dominate their user interaction with the browser itself and thus understandably prove remarkably sticky ("minor" here is in terms of implementation complexity versus the rest of a browser).