Example: Android platform with their own Maps application will kill phone in minutes.

Maps continually will ask to enable location, which is not needed just to look at maps and search, every few seconds after selecting no previously. Only way around is by checking don't ask again. Bam, infinite loop of software asking with policy refereeing answer. Google Maps kills a phone's battery with-in minutes.

I'd make the argument that the parent should not be down voted because Google, perhaps in a small way, allows degraded experiences on other platforms for one reason or another.

I don't think you can do that anymore, though. But I haven't tried it in a while.

A huge problem I see with the web is that it's is missing concessions for "advanced" users. I get that we're a smaller market, but come on.

I would also say money wasted on providing support for those users but I'm still not sure if such thing exists.

Oh course the "desktop" (not really) Hangouts app also only opens links in Chrome.

Don't worry though, Hangouts will soon be discontinued and we'll have to complain about some Google chat app.

On other operating systems you can set the default browser to be Firefox, Chrome, or whatever else you want, and different browser engines are allowed.

Chrome on Wayland, with GNOME 3 in particular, pretty much always pins a core too, but not for Gmail-related reasons.

Only Webkit based browsers support that. If you make the mistake of testing/developing primarily in Safari + Chrome, you'll never discover the error.

They might have also used 'keep-all' which isn't supported in Edge, but is supported everywhere else, and have a fallback rule of break-all leading the behavior seen.

tl;dr:

There's actually no universal way of setting word-breaks for textarea's or pseudo-textarea, so I can't imagine if that writing a rich text input field is easy considering you have no foundations to work on.

If random startups can test all common browsers and ensure good experiences, I can’t see any reasonable justification why Google can’t.