These aren't mutually exclusive things. The people working on Chrome were and are highly motivated, intelligent and passionate people, some of whom I call friends, who want to see the web become a better place. In that regard they have succeeded massively.

But by this point, Google has dropped billions of dollars on salaries for those developers to build Chrome (call it >500 devs, >$200k salaries, >10 years). Google is not a charity. They didn't build Chrome with the intent to lose money on it. Everything else Google made that wasn't profitable is gone now, and yet here Chrome stands. Because it is an indirect profit center.

And you've pointed out the real issue: Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser. 'Was'. But it did that! So what is it about now? Why would Google continue to pour money into it if they didn't expect to extract more money out of it in the future?

You can make the world better and make money while doing it. Ideally, that's what we all are doing.

It wasn’t some noble mission to free the world. Chrome was always about Google controlling the client side of the web to guarantee their advertising access to web users. The ability to extract additional data from the user was a nice bonus.

The way I see it, both of these can be (and most likely are) true. Intentions of the company aren't usually the same as intentions of individual contributors (or even whole teams). The Web is Google's business - the more stuff happens on the Web, the more money they can eventually make of it. Advertising is how they make most of that money, so this is what they're protecting. But beyond that, Chrome answered a real need and a lot of hard-working people made it into a best-in-class browser.

"Chrome was about freeing the world of a truly terrible web browser "

Chrome is about establishing more control over the web to further the business objectives of Google and Alphabet.

The problem with this belief of Google as some kind of 'benevolent actor' is a function of the new kind of branding they helped introduce, something that an entire generation of particularly young people are being duped by.

'Brand' used to be the image that companies presented - it was a decision, a marketing tactic, usually invented by agencies. Google was one of the first to change that, to effectively 'internalize' the brand so that they (staff, even leaders) really kind of believed their own kool-aid. There's an incredible aura of 'authenticity' to this; when leaders really believe their own schtick, it rings more powerfully. (This is an issue for another thread.)

But Google has proven that in the long run, they're just a regular company. I don't think they are bad actors, and in the big picture, they're better than most. But, they're just a self-interested entity: they will do whatever is in their power and which is also legal, to leverage their incumbency and stymie competition.

> The problem with this belief of Google as some kind of 'benevolent actor'

You put 'benevolent actor' in quotes as if the comment you are replying to contained that. It didn't.

Stress quotes. That is just one of the possible devices to achieve that.

I see a lot of that here, people misunderstanding basic speech/writing conventions. Maybe giving the op the benefit of doubt, assuming s/he knows what s/he is doing, can help avoid some of those.