People who've been around for a while have been arguing for years that Chrome is doing exactly what Microsoft did with IE back in the day and a browser market dominated by Chrome and Chrome-a-likes is not healthy.

Sadly, too many people haven't been around for long enough to have seen it all before, and they fall for the new shiny every time. Then we get a few years of bad results where one product dominates and that part of the industry only evolves in the directions that suit the business controlling that one product, until eventually sufficient opposition has built up that a viable competitor is produced and we start to move forward again.

I agree, which is why I referred to it as "google-chrome-ing" (very awkward term) in my original post.

The Chrome teams (the ones that deal with standards, improving chrome, etc) are certainly filled with good people trying to improve the web, but there is such a conflict of interest there with a more open web or a web with certain features. Those employees are obligated to be on the wrong side of those discussions in really insidious/subtle ways sometimes, and those at the level at which strategy is conducted have a clearer view but have an even stronger incentive.

I don't see how this is related to what Chrome is doing. What Web APIs have been implemented in Chrome that are available as proprietary closed source only? Looking at Google's wiki, I do not see any APIs that are omitted from Chromium:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

DRM is a thorny issue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941