> ! Chrome was meant as a hedge against IE and lesser so against Firefox. IE was steadily loosing ground to Firefox years before Chrome came around. You want t

> ! Chrome was meant as a hedge against IE and lesser so against Firefox. IE was steadily loosing ground to Firefox years before Chrome came around. You want to claim that Google feared the half starved stepchild that was IE more than the add blocking enabled Firefox that was eating up market share left and right? > Microsoft owned the desktop with Windows and could easily shut Google out. How would building your own browser help with that? If Microsoft managed to build its walled garden (which it tried) it could have just shut Chrome out. Chrome is already entering its planed end game: Adblock APIs are crippled and third party cookies get the boot while all Google properties get an additional x-client-data identifier to uniquely identify its user.