In general, I'm in agreement with you on this. But it probably should be noted that Chrome itself is distributed free of charge to users, so Google doesn't directly make any money from it. There are indirect financial reasons for Google to do Chrome; their own exposure, competition with Microsoft both in the search engine (where the real money comes from) and web applications/cloud computing markets (where pushing browser development to make browsers in general more suited for such), etc. I also think, but am not sure and am too lazy to check : -), that the Chrome code is at leastly mostly open source and thus freely available to anyone to use.