Great question and one that I hope people would put more thought into. Here are two possible reasons off the top of my head:

- pushing for web ecosystem features that would help their own products (ex: Gmail, docs, etc)

- pushing for web enhancements that back SEO metrics that matter to them (ex: core web vitals)

I don’t think it’s as simple as - no more Chrome == no more investment into Chromium because Chrome/Chromium has been their strongest lever for getting web features that Google wants standardized. Stopping investment in that area cedes control of the web to other players who may have opposing goals to Google.

When google hit 51%+ of market share in search/mail (back in like 2005) they began to just fund "internet access" in general. They assumed that new users would put more money into googles pockets than other peoples pockets. Virtuous revenue circle.

Nowadays (post Omni-bar), one could argue that "the internet" is really a captive portal from g-browser, g-omnibar, g-search results, g-renderer with "content" being significantly funded by g-ads (of which a significant portion of _that_ is returned to google for search placement).

Take away "any browser at all" and does google then ship "Google Electron, powered by Google" that strips the Omni-bar and is a desktop client / portal into g-search, g-docs, etc... and then close off access to Google apps unless through the Google client?

You can't book uber without the uber client, why are you able to use Google without the google client?

Provide a read-only HTML4.0 version to plebes with lots of popovers and banners saying: "for the best experience..."

It's an interesting thought experiment, letting "the internet" lie fallow as each proprietary database attempts to accrue more content...