Chromium, the open-source web browser developed by Google, lays the foundation for many popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and my favorite: Arc from The Browser Company.

Developers can create their own browsers using Chromium’s codebase at no cost. So what does Google gain from doing this? In essence, the Chromium project fortifies and safeguards Google’s core business: online advertising. To accomplish this, Chromium pursues the following objectives:

  1. Making the web better
  2. Popularizing features that align with Google’s interests and limiting the adoption of unfavorable ones
  3. Increasing the demand for Google’s advertising business by… helping Chrome’s competitors

Making the web better

Chromium is fast, secure, and stable. It serves as a great foundation for developers building their own browsers.

Not only being an excellent browser, Chromium implements standards that empower developers to craft great web experiences. For example, the “content-visibility” CSS property that allows developers to control when an element is rendered on the screen, which will improve page load time. As of July 2023, Safari and Firefox have yet to support this feature.

This leads to a “chain reaction”: more Chromium-based browsers → better experience using the web → increased web usage → more searches → more ad revenue.

Additionally, Chromium comes with an abundance of tracking features by default, which helps Google gather a lot of valuable user data.

Popularizing features that align with Google’s interests and limiting the adoption of unfavorable ones

In 2022, Facebook anticipated a whopping $10 billion revenue loss due to Apple’s implementation of App Tracking Transparency. This feature requires apps to seek user permission before tracking their activities across various apps and websites. Unfortunately for Facebook, they didn’t possess a smartphone operating system, or devices as ubiquitous as iPhones, so they couldn’t prevent this event from happening.

However, Google, being the owner of the most popular web browser and having many other browsers built upon its open-source Chromium project, can avoid similar consequences.

Take, for instance, Apple’s WebKit — the rendering engine underlies Safari. According to WebKit’s Tracking Prevention Policy:

WebKit will do its best to prevent all covert tracking, and all cross-site tracking (even when it’s not covert). These goals apply to all types of tracking listed above, as well as tracking techniques currently unknown to us.

Without these tracking features, advertisers would have a harder time targeting customers, which in turn would make Google’s core business worse.

Another example is Safari’s default activation of the “Prevent Cross-Site Tracking” feature. In contrast, Chromium and Chrome have this feature disabled by default. Additionally, these Google browsers only send a request to websites, simply asking “Do not track my activity”. Whether or not these websites honor such requests is a different story.

Luckily for Google, Safari’s market share is 25% compared to Chrome’s dominant 62%, as reported by Similarweb in June 2023. Among the top five browsers, Edge and Samsung Internet Browser are both Chromium-based, further enhancing Google’s advantage.

On the other hand, Chromium itself comes bundled with an abundance of tracking features, which caused a group of privacy advocates to develop ungoogled-chromium — a Chromium-based browser stripped of such tracking capabilities. The GitHub repository for ungoogled-chromium provides a glimpse into the specific tracking features they’ve removed. At the same time, Google’s Manifest V3 — the API that developers use to build extensions for Chromium-based browsers — has been criticized for undermining the effectiveness of ad blockers.

Increasing the demand for Google’s advertising business by… helping Chrome’s competitors

A common strategy among big tech companies

Let’s first take a look at the concept of “complementary good”. From Wikipedia: A complementary good is a good whose appeal increases with the popularity of its complement. For example, if the price of petrol decreased, the demand for cars will increase.

In short, a demand of a product increase when the demand of its complements increase. One way to increase the demand of a complement is to transform it into a commodity (which would greatly reduce its price). This strategy is called commoditizing the complements.

I first encountered this concept in a blog post by Joel Spolsky, where he presented good examples:

When IBM designed the PC architecture, they used off-the-shelf parts instead of custom parts, and they carefully documented the interfaces between the parts in the (revolutionary) IBM-PC Technical Reference Manual. Why? So that other manufacturers could join the party. As long as you match the interface, you can be used in PCs. IBM’s goal was to commoditize the add-in market, which is a complement of the PC market, and they did this quite successfully. Within a short time scrillions of companies sprung up offering memory cards, hard drives, graphics cards, printers, etc. Cheap add-ins meant more demand for PCs.

When IBM licensed the operating system PC-DOS from Microsoft, Microsoft was very careful not to sell an exclusive license. This made it possible for Microsoft to license the same thing to Compaq and the other hundreds of OEMs who had legally cloned the IBM PC using IBM’s own documentation. Microsoft’s goal was to commoditize the PC market. Very soon the PC itself was basically a commodity, with ever decreasing prices, consistently increasing power, and fierce margins that make it extremely hard to make a profit. The low prices, of course, increase demand. Increased demand for PCs meant increased demand for their complement, MS-DOS [emphasis mine]. All else being equal, the greater the demand for a product, the more money it makes for you. And that’s why Bill Gates can buy Sweden and you can’t.

In essence, the more fierce the competition within a market, the greater the demand for its complements. This approach has long been employed by major tech companies, including Google.

How Google commoditizes the web browser market

Google’s advertising business consists of several layers:

  • The web itself — an improved web experience results in increased usage and higher number of ad clicks.
  • The browser that facilitates web surfing.
  • The operating system on which the browser operates.
  • The device on which the operating system runs.

It’s worth noting that Google has established a presence in each of these layers, with products such as Google Pixel, Android, Chrome & Chromium, Google Fonts, Google Maps, etc.

By introducing Chromium, Google has expanded the pool of developers capable of creating good web browsers. As a result, it’s much harder to compete on the product level alone (in contrast with leveraging distribution, as in the case of Microsoft destroying Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows). Unless a browser has a distribution advantage (e.g. Safari), achieving a dominant market share becomes a much more challenging task.

But what about Chrome? Is a commoditized browser market not enough? And does Chromium not undermine Chrome’s competitiveness?

Gaining a significant market share in a commoditized market is challenging, but not impossible. It’s even achievable if the company is behind the iPhone and MacBook. For that reason, Chrome was created as a deterrent to the dominance of companies whose goals are in conflict with Google’s.

Chromium has intensified the competition in the browser market. However, Google has the following advantages that outweigh the drawbacks:

  • A wealth of engineering talent.
  • Android and ChromeOS, which come with Chrome as the default browser.
  • Google Search (remember the popups prompting you to download Chrome?)
  • Google’s web products: Google has been making its web apps incompatible with other browsers, even Chromium-based ones.