More than you think. They are also actively seeking ways to make that leverage effect more people.

They are defining web standards. They control chrome and chromium. So all of the alternative browsers that aren't safari and Firefox are using Google's web engine. Even Firefox and safari are beholden to Google as they fund both these web browsers through their default search deals.

Google after many failed messaging apps has taken on RCS messaging. They provide most of the supporting infrastructure through their Jibe servers. They don't allow anyone but themselves and Samsung to make an RCS app on android. They also had a campaign to pressure apple to use RCS. It's likely apple's RCS will be following Google's Jibe service closely, as they've already said their will work with Google on this. Google successfully got most RCS messages going through their servers, with apple on board with RCS itll see most SMS messages defaulting to RCS and most of those going through Google.

They also have deep hooks into education market with their OneDrive/Google docs products and Chromebooks.

Most privacy focused android alternatives recommend Google hardware.

You have more faith in people’s giveashit than I do.

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That's the iq it takes yeah. :)

Not saying anything bad about your son, hopefully you understand what I mean.

can you invite 5 year old to fediverse when older

What do you mean by not an alternative browser?
Are you trying to say something about the word choice or...?
Chrome is an alternative browser to Firefox too.

Of course it's the alternative. Has always been, even before it was called Firefox: Netscape Navigator is the alternative to Mosaic. Fun fact: Internet Explorer was a fork of Mosaic. All of Chrome, Edge and Safari are descendants of KHTML.

They can do it if a competitor has forked Chromium but not bothered to provide their own addon store. For example, Edge supports its own store plus Google, Vivaldi only supports Google

We have prescribed terminals in our classrooms that are wiped between classes and only have chrome included. It's a fuckin' pain to have to load uBlock in each class in each section every day, because for some reason, our uni's IT department only supports chrome.

It's still an ongoing war, but with Manifest V3, Google will have an advantage over adblockers because they will be in full control over the frequency of extension updates, how many ad blocking rulesets they'll allow, and perhaps when no one is looking, prevents those rulesets from targeting their own domains. The latter is the nuclear option that'll instantly piss off the whole tech world if implemented now, but perhaps slow boiled frogs won't notice it once the heat is high enough.

They regularly try to add things to break it, and uBlock's devs update it as fast as possible. They'll probably slow down on these breaking changes as it falls out of the spotlight and people slowly forget about it.

you can have refurbished thinkpad for the same price and you don't have to deal with some chrome-crap.

honestly, the fact that people have to be reminded there are alternatives to chrome is the most mindblowing fact from the article.

You can run the android version or use the Linux VM. Neither are great but are workable. Unless they've changed it recently, you can also dual boot them and run Linux off an external drive.

I'd honestly say skip the Chromebook, get an older used laptop that is known to be fully supported by Linux, install a lightweight distro, and off you go if all Grandma needs is a web browser. Older used laptops are usually far better powered than a cheap Chromebook for the same price anyways. Plus it fights e-waste.

A further option is to do adblocking at the router or through the computer's own networking system or something like a Pihole. These all come with their own pros and cons.

If all you need is a cheap laptop, there's thousands of deals on refurbished or used ones. You don't need this year's model to browse the web and send email.

Throw Ubuntu or something on it and you can go even cheaper hardware wise.

I've installed the Android version of Firefox on my wife's Chromebook via the Google Play store. There's also a way to enable Linux within ChromeOS and install the more full fledged version of FF.

See: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/chromebook/

If she'd allow you, you could always put a little pihole ($10-20) on her network (with the bare minimum lists so that it doesn't break things too often). Wouldn't change anything about her computer.