Chrome supported/promoted its extensibility early on because it was seen as a competitive feature when compared to IE and Firefox at the time. At the time, FF supported a huge library of extensions, and Chrome's job was to eat FF's market share (and IE's). Thus, extensions were an obvious thing for them.
Now, extensions present pretty much nothing but problems for Google:
* Features that compete with Android
* Features that compete with their own offerings, like Pushbullet
* Features that actively harm their offerings, like adblockers
* Features that actively harm their enterprise customers, like anti-paywalls
There's NO upside now for Chrome to support extensions, and ALL downside. They certainly don't need them in order to keep browser share. Too many people use it now.
By the way that description is one aspect of a monopoly (no, I don't want to start that discussion. Just pointing out that that behavior isn't possible in a competitive environment).
Chrome supported/promoted its extensibility early on because it was seen as a competitive feature when compared to IE and Firefox at the time. At the time, FF supported a huge library of extensions, and Chrome's job was to eat FF's market share (and IE's). Thus, extensions were an obvious thing for them.
Now, extensions present pretty much nothing but problems for Google:
* Features that compete with Android * Features that compete with their own offerings, like Pushbullet * Features that actively harm their offerings, like adblockers * Features that actively harm their enterprise customers, like anti-paywalls
There's NO upside now for Chrome to support extensions, and ALL downside. They certainly don't need them in order to keep browser share. Too many people use it now.
By the way that description is one aspect of a monopoly (no, I don't want to start that discussion. Just pointing out that that behavior isn't possible in a competitive environment).