Lots of comments mentioning that "Chrome is open source and on mobile phones" when even the little blurb shared on the Slashdot article mentions explicitly that they measured desktop browser usage AND not even mentioning that the "open source" part of Chrome is the Chromium project, which is *NOT* Chrome, and doesn't count here.
Brave, Vivaldi, Edge, and Opera are all Chromium-based browsers. Safari and Firefox are not. So the stats aren't skewed to Chrome because of the pervasiveness of Chromium usage. They're explicit stats to Google's Chrome browser.
Now, with that out of the way, there are many reasons that Chrome itself is the default, Part of that is Chrome drove much of the innovation in the browser space, not only on web standards, and driving everyone to Javascript instead of plugins; but also because of profiles, profile syncing, and deep integration into all things Google (SSO support for the browser and all Google apps, etc.)
But none of this was because of "Don't be evil", but a rather pure financially-driven effort on Google's part. From a developer perspective, it wrestled web development back out of the hands of designers/artists and back into the hands of programmers with deep javascript integration. Simultaneously, having provided the highest javascript performance on the client side, with the ease-of-use of Javascript over most other programming languages, and the extreme security issues of earlier approaches to dynamic code execution on the client side (untethered Java Plugins, Flash plugins, etc.), it did make a lot of sense to leverage that tool versus the other approaches that existed before.
One thing I do find funny from the earlier days is both Chrome and IE used a one-process-per-tab model and lots of early Firefox users (around the 3.6 era) constantly nitpicked over how many processes were spawned and Firefox was "cleaner" for having a single process in task manager. It turned out that the separate process model was significantly more secure and scalable.
At any rate, though, none of this was out of the goodness of Google's heart, contributing back to the open web, or whatever nonsense people filled their heads with back in those days. It was all a purpose-built, financial-driven effort to "light-touch" lock you into Google's services. "Hey look at all these shiny toys we are giving you in a web browser, don't you want them? You do don't you? Yeah look at this 1GB mailbox over the 25MB you used to get. Yeah you like that don't you?"
These days, the standardization part doesn't matter as much anymore. Javascript won the client side browser wars, even though we see as frequent if not more so Chrome security updates as we saw in Adobe Flash or Java back in the day (people hated monthly updates of both of these applications, and it was a massive driver to get off of them and into Chrome--only for Chrome to basically do the same thing but the only difference is it's generally [but not always, especially if you work in IT] more behind the scenes.) The security issues with Flash were so common that Microsoft ended up making Adobe Flash Player part of Windows Update just to get it out there more consistently.
Google has now cemented their monopoly position, however, because of instead of an open web, they've created a Google web. When Microsoft was trying to get the Windows Phone off the ground, Google explicitly and extremely purposefully did not make any software for the Windows Phone, and when Microsoft invested effort into building an in-house Youtube application, Google went through great lengths to prevent it from working. To be fair, this wasn't the only thing that killed Windows Phone, but it was a massive contributor by not giving people access to common applications at the time (Youtube, G-Mail, etc.) This act was deeply anti-competitive behavior and should have resulted in Chrome being split off from Google proper and into a separate entity (and to be honest, splitting up of all of these projects).
Google is effectively more evil today than Microsoft had ever been in the early Windows days, and if viewed under the same lens that gave us the Microsoft monopoly lawsuit efforts, would immediately result in Google being poofed into like 5 different companies at least. Microsoft's "We will only bundle our browser with Windows" effort seems childish in comparison to the platform and vendor wars that exist today between Google, Apple, and the rest of the industry.
