"Chrome was entirely built to be leveraged to force people to use Google Search" That grossly simplifies the origin and existence of Chrome. While it's true th

"Chrome was entirely built to be leveraged to force people to use Google Search" That grossly simplifies the origin and existence of Chrome. While it's true that Google is the default omnibox search (I'd argue that "people don't change their default search engine" is a really weak way to "force" people to use a browser---too weak to justify building a whole browser by itself), you have to remember the ecosystem of browsers that were on the market when Chrome hit the scene. Flash was all over the place, and memory protection between open windows / tabs was nonexistent; a misbehaving browser plugin (and there were a lot of them at the time, including Flash) or a bug in JavaScript could cripple your entire session in IE, Safari, and Firefox. Google's business model is very much centered on the web (not just search, but ads and office productivity applications); strategically, it was risky of Google to be in the position of being, essentially, application developers for platforms they didn't have any controlling stake in. They needed to be in a position where they could---for example---improve process isolation, rendering engines, and JavaScript engines instead of delaying projects until the three dominant browsers got around to making the technological features Google saw as important a priority. I assume "And it defaults to the Google search engine" is in there too, but that's a bit like saying General Motors makes cars so they can get their stereos into people's hands.