How so? Chromium is the single most important reason Linux is now a viable desktop option, with even all of the M$ Office apps, Outlook etc. working as PWAs. Not to speak of i.e. Discord, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams ...

The Web is the reason why Linux desktop doesn't matter at all, as proven by ChromeOS. Android and WebOS.

Whatever kernel is running under the browser is meaningless to userspace.

Hence why many just get whatever Electron apps one throws at them.

2% market share. The end user doesn't care.

Arent they all available using firefox? Ffox/ linux Is my daily driver and I never find it too cumbersome to use those sites

Not necessarily. Any monopoly-like situation is unhealthy, no matter who controls the market (remember when Firefox was the king? The apparance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air). What we need is real diversity and power balance.

I agree! Having more than one (or two, if we include WebKit - but Blink is a fork of it, so ...) relevant browser engines would be great. But as it stands right now, the fact that I can build apps that have all capabilities that the end user would expect (push notifications, background sync, "Add to homescreen", offline capabilities) in the most popular browser out there and the fact that the latter is FLOSS (Chromium - obviously Chrome is not) means that IMHO we are in a much better place than a few years ago when web dev meant JQuery and IE8 polyfills. And that shows - I can now use only a browser, independent of the host OS, to do all of my days work (using Theia/VSCode in the browser is a joy) and even entertainment (remember when a proprietary OS and a proprietary native app was required to stream video?) completely from a free/libre and open source software. If that means that I have to accept a libre browser monopoly for now than that's much better than having to accept a proprietary host OS IMHO.

Firefox was never “the king”, you clearly live in a bubble. I don’t think it ever even reached 40% of the market, businesses were still eating whatever Microsoft told them they should eat.

> The appearance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air

Not really. The appearance of Safari was a game changer, and only because Apple was basically forced to give WebKit/KHTML back to the community thanks to the LGPL. Webkit triggered the wave of embedding that made its engine a de-facto standard in development circlets, so that it was the obvious choice by the time Google had to pick one for strategic reasons.

There is an alternative timeline where KDE just used BSD, Apple just took their code and kept it closed, and Chrome never happened.