Google has a walled garden too?

We often blame Apple for having such a high wall around their ecosystem that anyone trying to leave it has to loose everything. But did you notice that Google has a walled garden too? Not around their hardware products, but actually their browser. Look around, every other browser that you see, is either Chrome or a chromium based browser. Where did Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and others go and how did Google achieve this monopoly?

Back in the early days when internet was just getting popular, a browser called the Netscape Navigator was gaining a lot of attention. Because, well it was very good. Microsoft however did not like this because they had a majority share in the PC market and some software company was just making profits running on their system. And the notorious Internet Explorer was born. (Trust me, it was good enough back then) The only problem was that Microsoft didn't exactly play by the rules. They pre-installed Internet Explorer in every Windows software sold and went on to block installing Netscape in Windows. This unfortunately led to the downfall of Netscape and they had to quit.

Internet Explorer continued to rule the browser world on PCs until Google decided to step in. Chrome was a brainchild of Sundar Pichai and he rose through the ranks with it. He argued that Google needed a browser of its own to hold the search engine product and it was an instant hit. Chrome was fast, secure, developer friendly, used modern standards, and had support for extensions. It even works on all platforms! No wonder Internet Explorer was left behind. Microsoft decided, that to beat the best you need to be the best. So they made Internet Explorer with Chromium and named it Edge. So Google's biggest competitor is itself? Yeah that's called monopoly.

Just like Chrome is based on Chromium, Apple has its own layout engine called WebKit and ALL browsers that exist on iOS has to work on WebKit. So every browser on an iPhone is just Safari with a mask on. That is called achieving monopoly with cheating.

But I did feel bad about Netscape. It was destroyed only because of the greed of giant corporations. And I want them to be the underdog in this story about the browser wars. Guess who Netscape gave responsibility of their code to when they went down?

Thats right! Mozilla Firefox went on to became the enthusiast's favorite and Open source community's most loved browser. It is truly the last one standing among the giants and I am deeply rooting for it to stay alive and be better.