> That was always the plan with Chrome
No. The original plan for Chrome was to save money on "traffic acquisition cost" (The cash they give to Mozilla and Apple to be the default search engine) by moving users away those company's browsers.
Buuuuut, once Chrome turned out to dominate the browser market, the temptation to abuse that dominance was too much.
Just goes to show that no one with power can be relied on to self-regulate the use of that power. Power being any ability to nudge another human being toward actions that are not purely in their own self interest.