Chrome’s market share has hovered above 65% for years. That number gets cited as a monopoly concern, a competition problem, an antitrust footnote. What it actually represents is something more structural: the browser has become the primary computing environment for most people, and the operating system underneath is increasingly just a bootloader.
This didn’t happen by accident. Google built Chrome OS around the premise explicitly - that the web was the platform. What’s stranger is watching Microsoft arrive at the same conclusion through the back door.
Edge Is the Tell
Microsoft’s decision to rebuild Edge on Chromium in 2020 was framed as a pragmatic engineering choice. They weren’t wrong - maintaining a separate rendering engine was expensive and the web compatibility gap was real. But the downstream effect is that Microsoft now ships an operating system whose default browser runs on Google’s engine. Windows 11 is, at the application layer, partly a Chrome derivative.
The irony is thick. The company that spent the 1990s being sued for bundling Internet Explorer too aggressively now bundles a browser built on a competitor’s open-source project. And Microsoft seems mostly fine with this.
PWAs Made the Line Disappear
Progressive Web Apps were supposed to be a compromise - web apps that felt a little more native, installable from the browser, capable of offline use. Instead they accelerated the blurring. When you install a PWA through Edge or Chrome on Windows, you get something that sits in your taskbar, launches in its own window, and shows up in Add/Remove Programs. It looks like an app. It is, technically, a website.
Spotify, Teams, and several Microsoft 365 components all ship as web wrappers on desktop. The OS isn’t mediating these experiences in any meaningful sense. It’s providing a process sandbox and a window frame.
The Part That Should Bother People More
If the browser is the real OS, then the entity controlling the browser engine controls the platform. Right now that’s Google, whose Blink engine powers Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and Samsung Internet. Mozilla’s Gecko and Apple’s WebKit are the only significant alternatives, and WebKit is effectively iOS-only by Apple’s App Store rules.
Antitrust scrutiny has focused on Google Search and the App Store model. The rendering engine question has received far less attention, which is odd, because the stakes are arguably higher. Platform control at the browser layer is harder to see and harder to unwind than a search default or a store fee.
Microsoft didn’t lose the browser wars. They surrendered and called it a strategy.