windows was never dependent on internet explorer to operate. MS put a simple DLL with HTML and other web tech in the OS, making it easier to serve up help and other content. What they did (IMHO) was completely reasonable in terms of OS integration. Look at ChromeOS today- it's the same idea, taken to its logical conclusion.

People often misrepresent the MS trial.

> And Windows was dependent in Internet Explorer to operate.

I mean it was and still is dependent on MSHTML for rendering things like the help system as well as rich text in many pre-XAML apps. You don’t want the icon on your desktop, fine, but it certainly is a core part of the OSs rendering system.

Not really; chrome and Android are far more independent.

YT is integrated at every level from infrastructure on up. It depends on Google-internal libraries which are in turn integrated with other parts of the infrastructure... It would pretty much amount to a full from-scratch rewrite of almost the entire product.

Moreover, I'd question whether other providers even have the available public resource capacity to support YT.

I can't really see how. It would literally cost billions of dollars, be extremely wasteful in terms of duplicated efforts, consume millions of SRE and SWE hours, and the result would be slower and worse in many ways. Then people would complain that youtube sucked even more.