No, it's not. It's open source and can be modified from Google's baseline to be free of their restrictions by anyone who cares to put in the work, like Brave and Vivaldi.

[–] buzzbald@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are people able to make meaningful contributions to the project upstream to steer the direction of the web as an open platform?

[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

In every way Linux has the potential to in a world where 99% of people would rather just use Windows, sure.

Most people are just going to use Chrome and don't give a shit. If you're developing/using a different browser then yeah you probably have the ability to significantly impact the way web browsing happens going forward. As any fork of chromium is it's own thing and has the ability to become the new standard.