[dageshi]

I think if you look at Chrome from Google's pov originally, the last thing they wanted was someone putting out a browser where the default search engine of whatever you typed into the address bar couldn't be changed to google. A competitor could attack google by owning the browser, perhaps what they thought microsoft would do.

[daemin]

They also didn't want a small company making a browser which some other company could pay to become the default search engine.