Have my upvote.

But don't forget that they used their - for all intents and relevant purposes - unlimited budget to bundle it everywhere.

They were also advertising it on the front page of their search engine - a spot no one else has been able to reach AFAIK. I guess there's a lot more.

If this isn't monopoly abuse I have a hard time seing what is.

I think we give ourselves more credit than it's due. Average users get Chrome shoved down their throats. Plenty of users are happy to use Edge or even IE until they update Adobe Reader and find Chrome is now their default browser.

Or how when I signed into a Google account once for five minutes on my iPhone in a private Safari window and immediately got an email from Google inviting me to set up Chrome on my new iPhone...

Chrome on iphone is just Safari with a Google logo iirc.

Kindasorta. Chrome on iOS is using Safari's rendering engine, yes. But it's still collecting data on you to send to your Google account, just like Chrome proper.

That, and the fact that Google would get it bundled along with stuff like Adobe Flash and AVG Antivirus, so that it would be installed and set as your default browser if you weren't paying attention.

I thought it was because Google Captcha punishes you SEVERELY if you're not using Chrome.