[bluGill]

What is the incentives for the owner of google docs?

If it i make google docs great/dominate, then firefox, and safari are critical. You would ask hard questions and have deep discussions around dropping support for internet explorer. If someone suggested khtml (picking something old and poorly maintained) would work with just a little effort you would have a serious discussion around just how much effort that takes.

If the incentive is to make google great then things are different. Losing a few Firefox users might well be worth it if you can convert a few others from firefox to chrome. You might even go so far as to needlessly break firefox once in a while to drive your incentive.

I don't know how google is setup. I've seen companies setup both ways. There are downsides to both.

[pluma]

Google is not a product company. It shelves and sunsets too many apps for that angle to make sense.

Google is an advertising company. The goal of every Google product is to provide the company with more data, to make users give the company more of their data so that data can be mined for more data.

Controlling the browser or OS means having the ultimate access to the users the ads will be shown to. So if a Google app doesn't help harvesting data, it must be used to push the OS or browser. Google allows for a lot of indirection but ultimately if a product neither harvests interesting data nor helps push users to using Google products that do, there's no reason to keep it around.