For the users, via the Chrome brand, and via being pre-installed on Chromebooks and Android. By far most users run Chrome, not Chromium forks, and this would continue after a competent acquisition.
Whoever owns Chrome decides exactly what software most users run for web browsing, decides future web standards in practice, decides which kinds of extensions most users can use, decides the limits and carve-outs of adblockers, codecs and web features, has all the telemetry, and in future decides what AI-driven "presentational" modifications to web pages will be done, and what semantic scraping and uploading will happen automatically in the browser.
If Google loses Chrome though, it will no longer be pre-installed on Chromebooks and Android. They will just fork Chromium, call it something else, and pre-install that. Sure they might lose some Windows users who miss the news reports and don't install the replacement and keep using Chrome, until their bookmark sync stops working since that relies on proprietary Google account integration.
> If Google loses Chrome though, it will no longer be pre-installed on Chromebooks and Android
That would depend on the contract.
For $34.5B, I would expect the contract to say Google agrees to continue pre-installing Chrome on Chromebooks and Android for many years, with financial penalties if they don't.
Whoever owns Chrome decides exactly what software most users run for web browsing, decides future web standards in practice, decides which kinds of extensions most users can use, decides the limits and carve-outs of adblockers, codecs and web features, has all the telemetry, and in future decides what AI-driven "presentational" modifications to web pages will be done, and what semantic scraping and uploading will happen automatically in the browser.