> Though I do not like monopolies, how did Google reach this position? Is there any kind of abuse going on? Or it is just a better product?
tl;dr REST, competition, the shift to devices, and explosion in "web apps". The market for webapps in the 90s/00s was tiny compared to today.
A brief history of web browsing from the 90s to now:
NCSA Mosaic came along. It was alright. Then Netscape Navigator came along and it ended up a bloated mess.
In the meantime, AOL appeared, and home computer users started connecting to the internet for the first time.
Then IE6 became an awful entrenched thing, and it was "ok". It gave us XMLHttpRequest [1] which gave us REST, but apart from that, it was barely updated apart from security fixes because of 'reasons', not limited to: "part of the OS", enterprise paying customers encourage MS to make it stay the same otherwise breaking poorly written web apps. Search 'box model'.
In the meantime, Firefox appeared and was progressing, but made little headway against IE. It was faster than NN, but not exceptionally so.
Vista came along, then Windows 7, along with IE 7. And Apple with Safari. Finally, there's some competition - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE. Things like JQuery, CSS Zen Garden appeared along with w3c compliance scoring, and finally IE started dropping market share. Legacy "this site works best in IE6" apps and sites started becoming irrelevant to most people other than enterprise companies.
Newer sites and web apps started appearing and flipped it "we don't support IE any more", or in some cases showed a degraded site (IIRC there were ecommerce companies that actively charged you more if you surfed to their site using IE in the User-Agent string).
Chrome in 2010 was a far faster, better browser than IE bundled with Windows.
Chrome on Android, obviously now accounts for a huge percentage of online browsing.
I figured. My first draft of that comment was "you probably meant", but decided it would be better to do it without making inferences about your state of mind ;)
tl;dr REST, competition, the shift to devices, and explosion in "web apps". The market for webapps in the 90s/00s was tiny compared to today.
A brief history of web browsing from the 90s to now:
NCSA Mosaic came along. It was alright. Then Netscape Navigator came along and it ended up a bloated mess.
In the meantime, AOL appeared, and home computer users started connecting to the internet for the first time.
Then IE6 became an awful entrenched thing, and it was "ok". It gave us XMLHttpRequest [1] which gave us REST, but apart from that, it was barely updated apart from security fixes because of 'reasons', not limited to: "part of the OS", enterprise paying customers encourage MS to make it stay the same otherwise breaking poorly written web apps. Search 'box model'.
In the meantime, Firefox appeared and was progressing, but made little headway against IE. It was faster than NN, but not exceptionally so.
Vista came along, then Windows 7, along with IE 7. And Apple with Safari. Finally, there's some competition - Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and IE. Things like JQuery, CSS Zen Garden appeared along with w3c compliance scoring, and finally IE started dropping market share. Legacy "this site works best in IE6" apps and sites started becoming irrelevant to most people other than enterprise companies.
Newer sites and web apps started appearing and flipped it "we don't support IE any more", or in some cases showed a degraded site (IIRC there were ecommerce companies that actively charged you more if you surfed to their site using IE in the User-Agent string).
Chrome in 2010 was a far faster, better browser than IE bundled with Windows.
Chrome on Android, obviously now accounts for a huge percentage of online browsing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History