Well its not the same boss again. Sure Chrome has a massive market share. But even Today's MS Edge is not open. I used to work for the Edge team and the directors never really gave Open Source a serious thought. It was too tied to windows. I am glad Edge doesn't have the market share that Chrome has.
Chrome works on every platform. It hogs memory but its fast. Chromium & v8 are open. This is the kind of things that gave us Electron, nodejs and everything that is built on top of it. I appreciate Google for working on it.
Regarding privacy, I totally agree. Would be nice if the most popular web browser wasn't developed by the world's biggest ad company. I still think they do a descent job of isolating the two orgs. I can technically install extensions that stop much of the ad invasions.
But they are tracking and spying on their users and using strong arming tactics to keep the "Chrome" branding. Firefox has been faster and uses less resources for a good while now and Opera is at least offering Mobile mode to say power while on battery (Even though it's powered by the Blink engine).
An what Chrome is giving out is "Tier1" search results only fed to their browser (Thus search results are more accurate using Chrome.... and now Google Earth is "Chrome Only" which uses WebGL and the latest tests show Firefox is still over 3x as fast with WebGL content then Chrome.
Electron is HORRIBLE, enabling people to write apps in Javascript while using all your PC"s resources is insane. "Etcher" a program written in electron who's sole purpose is simply an "ISO USB Writer" comes with a payload of 180mb's on disk and over 200MB's of RAM and runs like an old dog with cancer... along with the other electron apps. This could have been written with something we had for decades with little overhead and small payload, it's called Python...
Some developers don't have python in their toolbox/skill set. The alternatives in many cases are Electron or nothing (due to higher development costs etc). The right tool for the job is not always that which gives you the best product, but what gives you A product in the shortest time.
Except anything MIPS-based. Or Power. Or in fact anything that isn't x86 or ARM.
And it's not just a matter of compiling it for those platforms. There's a bunch of architecture-specific porting that would have to be done (e.g. you _have_ to implement a V8 backend; there is no platform-independent way to run V8 just with a C++ compiler).
