You also didn't have very good security from browser exploits until Chrome.
Chrome also made the web significantly faster to use.
Chrome was critical in unblocking the use of Linux on desktop.
[1] https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/commit/2c25c3e9442c69b...
Wasm and webgl/webGPU are really useful for anything performance related.
The use of USB authentication devices (FIDO2) is also interesting.
With the browser.
And most real estate sites also do have a map for example.
Something like improved forms with validations and databinding would be useful for actual easier document authoring. Built-in charts (line graphs, pie charts, etc. with baked in support for legends and axes) would also be generically useful in the way that tables were. Flexbox was useful for layouts, but otherwise we instead got pushes for more scripting performance to cover up the impact of mass surveillance and more ways to leak data about the underlying system to conduct that surveillance.
Too often.
" Map widgets also shouldn't really be a performance concern"
Have you ever build one?
I hate those stuttering ones build by suckers and enjoy those that just run smooth GPU accelerated.
Also I frequently encounter maps on various sites.
The tracking service for my package. The shop showing me the nearest stores. A map with points of niche interest ..
You can sometimes see a flash if you pan quickly and a new tile is loading in, but the embedded Google Maps on Zillow has a (much more obvious/longer) visible delay for new tiles loading in too. And actually the full, real google maps has tons of stuttering/tearing on my computer when panning, so mine seems to perform better on my computer (though to be fair theirs takes more of the screen. Mine seems to do fine when upping the page zoom level to make it bigger though). The big difference though is my (frontend portion of the) widget can be built during a lunch break, and it's easy enough to see what's going on that a high school student could figure it out with view-source.
Note that for real world use cases, it'd probably also make sense to restrict the range that the user is allowed to zoom and pan around anyway (e.g. Zillow or your delivery tracker don't need to let you scroll a world map to look at a neighborhood/get context). For something like a delivery tracker, you might not be allowed to move the map at all, in which case you're pretty much dealing with a static image where you maybe reposition a marker every minute or so. This does not require wasm or webgpu, and it's a poor use of engineering resources to add that kind of complexity.
Sure, but it was about more people using the internet in general.
The very small minority using linux desktop (hello, I am among them) could and did use the internet before chrome.
And from a technical point of view, I do love chrome dev tools. But that is besides the point.
"development of chrome on desktop Linux have any benefits for mobile Linux?"
Android is the big market, that gets prime support.
Otherwise android and linux desktop just share the kernel (and not even the same one).
So the developement of chrome on android probably makes it a bit easier to target linux desktop, but not much.
(I still don't have WebGPU on my linux desktop but since quite a while on my old android phone)