Firefox wasn't so great back then. Google survives by the Web being great. A free, premiere browser experience means people use the Web.
> every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"
Google overflows with money, so P&L enforcement likely isn't so evident, and they might've just had some engineers saying they wanted to do it that way, and the person with approval power was probably also an engineer.
This seems entirely subjective. I prefer using Lichess to Chess.com, but I would in no way think that Chess.com, with its sponsoring of full-time players, makes the game worse. Advertising-related money goes somewhere and pays for things.
Yes but it also frequently ground to a halt trying to multitask tabs. Chrome didn't so we all switched to chrome.
If you have time to edit your comment: there’s a “not” missing (“not rhetorically”)
Worth noting that Blink is a fork of Webkit, which is a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL-licensed. The engine was always open-source, there was no Google business decision to make the engine open source.
And why they went further and made the core open source: every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"