For that I would ask — rhetorically because I don't know the answer — what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed.
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?"
> And why they went further and made the core open source
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.
> what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed
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.
> Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.
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.
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?"