alt Hacker NewsGoogle likely saw this path way back in 2008 when it started Chromium. Unfortunately, as an ad company, they also have more resources to create a good browser, and to also entrench themselves.
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joe_mamba • today at 9:06 PM
Weird how no anti-monopoly regulator in the world went after Google for monopolizing the browse market and forcing their own standards in order to fine them and force them to backtrack on these moves.
They threw the book at Microsoft for the Windows and Office monopoly of the 90s and 2000s, but in comparison did absolutely nothing to Google over their search and browser monopoly of the 2010s -today, especially given how influential and important the web is today compared to desktop operating systems which just became launchers for the web browser.
Much, much, earlier if you squint a little. 1998.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
"The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine"
-> "Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives"
-> "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users."
Not browser specific, but they understood the problem well.