Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
Not to be dramatic, but from a security perspective, it feels a little like the scene in Ghost Busters where the EPA inspector orders a Con Ed worker to shut down the containment system.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it, or at least the ones with most experience working on it, maybe even give them a tiny part of the shares of whatever company gets to own it, or perhaps with a contract for at least for a couple of years (and then could return to Google or whatever), and if possible include some incentives to make them focus on working on security bugs over new features, which tbh I think there is just too many every year.
> Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it
The 13th Amendment to the US constitution makes the sale of people illegal.
Seriously though - how would this ever work? Google cannot negociate on behalf of their employees or promise they will work somewhere if Google stops employing them.
Companies regularly buy and sell parts of themselves. I think the standard approach would be for Chrome employees to be given golden handcuffs of some sort.
I don't like it either, but it doesn't seem unprecedented. Companies sell units to each other (complete with staff) all the time.
I'm pretty sure everyone who worked at Universal Studios still worked there after Comcast bought them. I don't recall any staff being included when Google sold Domains to Squarespace, but they very well could have been.
Hell, if you've ever temped in tech, sometimes you wake up and find out you work for a different agency. "Yesterday you worked at Magnit. Today you work at TechPro."
Or it could be something in between - the buyer offers you a new contract and the seller says you'll be laid off if you don't take it.
Being owner of even a tiny bit of a brand new company that owns Chrome would be very attractive to engineers already working on Chrome, and it wouldn't be wise for any parent company to piss them off as they know the software better than anyone.
The revenue and profitability of "the Chrome Company" is going to be far less than Google, since Google's rising tide is what lifted that particular boat.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
Isn't firefox mostly making its money from Google? They'll be struggling too if Google gets out of the browser business and no longer feels the pressure to sustain them
That really does not come as a surprise and that was totally expected. [0] As soon as Chrome started to become more of a platform (for their extension API) with many other companies using it in their own browsers, it tells you why they had >90% of the search market for years.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
There would be few incentives to try and pull off something like that if nobody had any faith in the product every becoming extremely profitable though.
With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.
Very few companies would be able to manage a gigantic project like Chromium.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
I'm pretty sure they can, and do. The vast majority of Mozillas revenues come from Google for being the default search provider. The fact that Google pays Mozilla, Apple and Samsung (among others) to be the default search provider has been an issue with regulators, but as far as I know there has been no rulings on it (yet?).
It's 95% of an operating system. In a way it is it's own OS. Chromium has ~ 500+ distinct APIs and features such as web APIs, extension APIs, DOM, JavaScript APIs, and platform-specific features.
Given the current political climate, this is incredibly unlikely. Reference the situation with TikTok and the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" which became US law earlier this year.
Firefox gets along... with money from Google. And I think a good portion of the $$ that Google pays Mozilla, in their mind, isn't to be the default search engine... it's to keep competition alive in order to avoid this situation.
probably not going to be a popular take on this forum, but to me it looks like anti trust and securities laws are enforced almost randomly. Is Google a monopoly using its control to limit competition - yes but so is pretty much all of FANG and many successful businesses for that matter.
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
This is a bad/uninformed take. The OP is about one particular anti-trust trial that ended already (with Google losing), and is in the remedies phase. The DOJ and FTC have been suing a lot of other companies over anti-trust, including the other big tech companies. Some of those are still ongoing, some haven't started yet, some have already ended.
But the DOJ wouldn't take it away. The parent comment describes exactly what the DOJ's desired outcome looks like. That's what will happen if the DOJ gets their way. It's the only possible outcome. The people praising the DOJ's decision don't understand just how stupid it is.
I think the distinction is that the new Chrome company wouldn't be a "monopolist". If Chrome was a separate company and did exactly the same as Google is doing currently, there might be no problem. It's when a company "abuses" its market position to enter/capture/distort another market (or maintain the original market) is when in theory regulators have an issue. For example, free software is allowed, but when Microsoft used its dominance in the OS market to push a free browser on the world at the detriment to Netscape, regulators took issue.
The issue is that Google's dominance of the search/ad business is distorting the browser market.
This is my take, anyways (I'm not a lawyer or American).
Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.
We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.
You don't HAVE to login unless you want to share your passwords, history, bookmarks etc. between your devices. Simpler = not having those features (which most users seemingly find useful).
Presumably yes. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
> and just back up my own bookmarks
Nothing wrong about that. But again.. most people don't find that to be very convenient (I'd actually bet money that that there are is magnitude or a few times more people using Safari/Chrome/etc. to sync their data automatically instead of doing it manually).
I think presuming people want this is like presuming they want 3rd party tracking cookies or that they want their online footprint profiled by the likes of data brokers and palantir and so on. Uninformed consent is not the same as support. Adult humans are mostly smart enough to change their preferences away from convenience when they understand it has bad consequences.
No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.
There is no value to logging into chrome with a Google account that couldn't be replicated easily with some standalone service. The fact they added google logins to Chrome still bugs me.
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Good question. Chrome itself isn't a standalone business, the money generated through Chrome still primarily comes from Ads. The hardware tied to Chromebooks generates some revenue, but even ChromeOS is essentially free. They generate a tiny amount of revenue selling ChromeOS management tools in Workspace. Why not spin off an actual revenue driver like YouTube?
A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.
There’s an argument to be made that a high pace of new feature additions effectively functions as a moat that ensures that new competitive web engines cannot be developed as a result of not being able to ever catch up.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
If this actually happens, I think it would turn perception of Nadella from good CEO that got lucky with OpenAI to a certified shadow master that's playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
I'm pretty sure M$ just shifted to edge because they didn't want to invest the money into catching up with chromium, since explorer was a pile of shit and was losing anyway
"Opera or somethings" tend to be too small. E.g. Google paid 20 billion just to be the default search in Safari, i.e. for a default seat in a significantly less popular browser. Opera's total assets are ~1 billion.
But say it was forced to sell for peanuts because any large company proposal was denied by antitrust review itself, a forced sale of a US company's business to a non-US company under ownership by Chinese investors would likely not be allowed go through in the current environment either. Maybe some other "or something" at this point but it feels a bit like asking for a wildcard play from a very methodical and slow process.
Interesting, I didn't know that Opera was Chinese-investor-funded.
There are a few American companies that could pull it off though; Oracle comes to mind? I know that they don't really work in the browser space, but they have plenty of money, and they work in pretty much every other part of tech.
MS owns bing. Which isn’t anywhere near as popular but still exists and is large. And effectively owns the profits from ChatGPT’s growing foray into search. Basically every Google competitor uses the bing index under the hood.
MS owns an ad network that brings in ~$10Bn a year. Much smaller than Google, but certainly nothing to ignore.
MS owns outlook/hotmail which is wildly popular.
Does Microsoft own “half the internet”? No but neither did Google. Microsoft does own Windows which is a (already sued) monopoly touch point similar to Android. They own a browser. They own a cloud platform that profits from a growing internet. They own plenty of consumer facing properties and should not be written off in monopoly or antitrust discussions.
Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the idea of spinning off Chrome (but I know Googlers so I may be biased), but I understand the appeal on paper.
Google's adware is all over nearly every site on the internet.
I don't even know what the real-world equivalent would be: maybe if you had to drive to the NYSE in an NYSE-provided vehicle (that could track your behavior to judge how much money you were likely to spend) in order to buy shares from the NYSE who sat on the other side of every trade in addition to running the market.
It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
I desperately wish they'd give me the option to pay for Firefox Sync. I would, genuinely, pay for that every month. I get a massive amount of value from being able to throw tabs from my laptop to my phone and vice versa, and have everything synchronized, in a way I trust.
What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
Yes, Google can be forced to sign a consent decree saying it will not engage in browser building or distribution for a set length of time and the DOJ can set up offices inside of Google and staff them with DOJ employees who make sure Google follows that agreement.
It seems like you have no familiarity with any of this. If so, happy to help educate you. If I'm wrong and you're just trolling, it was hard to tell.
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
> you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Mozilla has ~700 employees just to keep an ailing browser on life support. Brave has ~250 employees, but they're building largely on Google's core engine, so they're getting a ton of engineering for free.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.
That seems to work for Mozilla. It would be nice to see other revenue models, but that exists and having the most used browser as a search client should pay at least as good as whatever deal Mozilla and Apple get.
Sort of? Mozilla is not doing well. Further, the only reason Google is paying Mozilla is to keep a notional third-party competitor alive; search traffic from a sub-3% browser is not worth that much. If the Chrome deal goes through, there's really no business reason for Google to keep paying them.
Presumably Google, Bing etc. would still be bidding to be the default search engine?
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
Yes technically, but the appeal process will likely drag on for years and the outcome isn't clear (now that Republicans are in charge they might just drop it before that happens anyway).
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
Yeah, but if Google were forced to divest Chrome then parts of its proprietary code would have to be open-sourced and integrated into Chromium to minimize disruption to users. Alternatively, Google would have to make its services more interoperable.
> Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
If Google were forced to divest itself of Chrome and there were no takers then Chromium would take on an altogether different perspective. That Chromium exists shows there's already an existing infrastructure that would make transitioning to it relatively straightforward.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome, only Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers.
> That Chromium exists shows there's already an existing infrastructure that would make transitioning to it relatively straightforward.
I think there’s a very very substantial underlying infrastructure maintained and funded by google that would disappear. This isn’t a GitHub project where you can clone and make install.
The fundamental core problem with the internet is that users have an innate feeling that they have a right to view content without being charged for it.
Google's entire existence is predicated on the ad-model internet existing, and internet users have overwhelmingly voted for this model of internet over the last 30 years.
People hate ads, but they hate opening their wallet even more.
Much as many are loathe to admit it decommercialization of huge swathes of the internet is, in fact, possible. People can make and share things without a financial incentive, and if that means that we have to reckon with the dysfunctional nature of the status quo - millions of livelihoods dependent on the grace of a few megacorporations - maybe that's a good thing (in the long run). Or, I guess we can just let the Attention-Industrial complex swallow everything without a fight.
It’s an open source project that can be forked - especially when google is not behind it to protect the market share, with users that don’t expect to pay and microsoft also involved with their own version.
Currently it’s probably worth bilingual because Google owns it. I expect it to rapidly lose value should that change.
Probably MicroFocus, they seem to buy everything and not do anything with it.
There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.
Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.
If the pool they're looking at is "talented people" looking to run a company, it'll be someone who's currently the CEO of 7 other companies and successfully driven each of them into the ground for short term profits, unfortunately.
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
Mozilla exist standalone, even if technically it depends on Googles money. They do the same, push Chrome to a separate Company, independent of Google, but getting money from who ever pays them the most for integrations and search engine-placments. It would need some additional constraints, but could position it on a more fair situation where there is not this harmful lock-in to google-services, but instead support for all services & companies equally.
Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.
The argument that something is untouchable because it can't continue as a going concern without continuing user-hostile behaviours is unconvincing. It's not our fault Google chose this business model, just as it's not a coincidence Google made it difficult to break up and just distinct enough to be (supposedly, formerly) legally sound.
Facepalm. So I guess this weak cookie cutter approach is what we get for the high water mark of opposition before the imminent corporate coup against constitutionally limited government.
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!
In this scenario I’d much rather that heaping grant goes to a newly independent Chromium nonprofit org. Browser engine diversity is a good thing and worth trying to preserve.
So I understand trying to break up monopolistic companies to provide better competition in the market which is generally better for the consumer as a whole. This strategy of saying Chrome should be sold off seems strange to me because unlike other monopolies Google's monopoly with Chrome is fundamentally different.
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
If Chrome was not owned by an ad company, the owners of chrome would push for instead of against privacy protections (see: firefox, safari).
The browser monopoly, which Chrome sells at a loss, enables the ad company. This is the problem.
Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google. So anything against ads does not get upstreamed to Chromium.
Chrome also is a major browser vendor, whereas kiwibrowser and opera are not, which means the standards boards listen to them more. If those seats were not owned by an ad company, standards would likely be different.
> What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?
Google keeps proposing specifications like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, Web Serial, etc., and both Mozilla and Apple keep shooting them down on privacy and security grounds. Meanwhile Google ignores the problems and builds them into Chrome anyway, and guess what happens? They start getting used to fingerprint and track people.
Who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence that all of these technologies that advertisers can use to fingerprint and track people keep making their way into the browser owned by one of the world’s largest ad companies.
How would you use WebUSB or Web Bluetooth for device fingerprinting?
HID, mass storage devices etc. are required to be filtered by implementations, and why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
The prompts are pretty scary/disruptive, and I've never seen any website actually try (unlike for e.g. web push notifications, which are fairly private but can be super annoying).
> why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
Part of the problem is that a vast number of users neither understand nor care about these prompts. They just click to make them go away.
There’s a few long discussions on the unsuitability of these specifications in the Mozilla standards positions repo:
Or things like Web USB start getting used to provide useful features without needing to install whole apps, like mouse/keyboard dongle pairing, phone OS flashing, etc.
As far as fingerprinting/tracking goes, I have never seen a random site prompt for these features, only apps where it makes sense.
The monopoly the DoJ is trying to break up isn't Chrome, it's Search. From TFA:
> Antitrust enforcers want the judge to order Google to sell off Chrome — the most widely used browser worldwide — because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine, said the people.
Monopolies aren't bad per se. Monopolies are bad because they allow you to abuse the market and consumers. If you can be similarly abusive without a full monopoly that's equally bad.
>Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
With what funding? Chrome loses money. Edge loses money. Safari loses money. Firefox loses Google's money. Brave loses VC money.
Without some endless source of money, funding you for an ulterior motive, you can't compete with them. Which is why:
>For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case.
The anti-competitive practices ensure there can't be effective competition.
Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
The whole reason for "privacy sandbox" is to still do user tracking, but do it in an anonymous way that they hope legislators won't go after. It's Google seeing the writing on the wall that legislation will soon ban third-party cookie tracking and fingerprinting and the like, so they need to be proactive and protect the ad tracking business.
A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".
The root problem here is that users don't want any of these tracking alternatives. All of the other browsers have said "no thanks" to any of the alternatives, and already moved forward with blocking third-party cookies (the main vector for tracking). Chrome hasn't moved forward with this because their ability to still track you thanks you being logged into Google means that disadvantaging every ad provider paints a massive target on their backs for antitrust law (even more so than they already have). Hence their attempt to fix it by creating new vectors of tracking so they can get the privacy "win" of blocking third-party cookies.
Blocking third-party cookies is a big privacy win. Getting untargeted ads is not something 99.9% of people care about and getting rid of actual real spying opportunities is great.
We all know this is going to push tracking server side but at least that makes it expensive and dangerous for companies that run it. Cloud costs for the hardware, and having to run third party code on your servers, built by known creeps.
No. They're not doing those changes because regulators like the DOJ[0] threatened them with anti-trust action if they did. That's the same DOJ that's now asking for Chrome to be divested.
Uh. That was not my understanding of that situation.
Blocking third party cookies this way still leaves Google’s tools which people voluntarily install with access to data that now nobody else has access to.
> It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because
....
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
I think it's a combination of both. There was absolutely a period where Chrome was faster, and Chrome still has a better security design. But Google also pushed Chrome incredibly hard, including bundling it with other software as a checked-by-default box, and used all the tactics to get it made the default browser and make it hard to switch, and advertised it on Google services for free, and made some features of Google products require it.
To fight the Microsoft monopoly. And we are lucky that browsers (Firefox&Chrome&SafariMobile) won on the back of DOJ action against IE. We could all be using Windows applications and a few lucky rich have a Compaq iPaq phones: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+ipaq&iar=images&iax=images
Without Chrome would we have got Safari on the iPhone? I also remember WAP (uggggh) pages before HTML. In the alternative universe DOJ is fighting their 10th lost cause against Microsoft (who keeps getting away with their evil ways).
People gravitate towards Chrome in part because of Google’s heavy marketing of it. Whenever I sign into Gmail in Safari I get a pop up about a “better experience” awaiting me.
Google also turns every link tap in their iOS apps into an opportunity to upsell Chrome for iOS when it should just open the link with the user’s default browser.
I’m not surprised, though. They’re not exactly on the most solid ground with them preventing any engines other than their own WebKit for third-party browsers or even apps.
How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Safari and Messages etcetera link to within the closed Apple ecosystem - just like Windows. It can be between difficult to impossible to send an email or create a calendar item unless you use the iOS apps.
I'm definitely no Google fanboi but every answer being "Google are arseholes" feels dishonest.
The Chromium developer team absolutely kick arse and being open source is a true gift. Mozilla is badly failing to compete. Microsoft failed to compete with their first Edge rewrite, and now ironicalky MS "competes" using Chromium open source.
And why did Chromium have to split from WebKit? As an outsider it just looked like "because Apple don't want to play nice".
The story is always simplified to Google greedy arseholes. A typical response: you can never ever ever satisfy open source proponents... The stereotype that every open source user greedily wants more.
> How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Like everybody else. If the user wants Chrome on iOS, they can install it and set it as their default browser. To link to other Google apps, Google can use Universal Links[0] to directly open Calendar, Sheets, etc or open the corresponding App Store page if they haven’t been installed yet.
Google forked WebKit because they wanted to take it in a direction that was fundamentally incompatible with the direction Apple wanted to go: Google wanted more core functionality (process management, etc) to be written as part of the browser (likely to serve as a moat) while Apple wanted all that to live within the engine itself so third party devs could take advantage of it without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
Yes - working code that everybody uses now including a major competitor - Microsoft. Where's the alternative timeline with a WebKit browser on Windows? Oh, Apple killed v5.1.7 Safari on Windows in 2010 - their choice. Windows Safari had its issues but it was a great browser when it was released. Virtually nobody has chosen to base their browser on WebKit - and they choose not to for good reasons. Similarly why nobody forked Gecko - they didn't want that code.
> without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
But Apple failed at that goal - saying that WebKit works better as an engine is just not what happened in reality. WebKit was certainly a worse choice for open source engine on Windows back when Windows really mattered. Nobody used it.
> likely to serve as a moat
That is just making shit up. If Google wanted a moat then they could have built a moat. History has shown that the multiprocess design of Chromium was no moat. You might argue there are other moats - and that is what the DOJ seems to be arguing.
WebKit never took off on Windows, true, but saying that it was a failure is a stretch. It’s served Mac and iOS devs well in the past 22 years, both as a full-featured embeddable multiprocess webview and as the core of alternative browsers (OmniWeb in the past, Orion today).
The reason I believe that moving functionality out of the engine into the browser serves as a moat is because it gives Google more power to exert its will on Chromium forks.
If Blink were fully independent, third parties wouldn’t be beholden to forking Chrome; they could just drop Blink into their bespoke UI. Google’s decisions in Chrome would be entirely irrelevant to these third party devs. As things are now, forking Chrome is for practical purposes required if you want to use Blink, and diverging from mainline presents a risk — the more divergent forks become, the more effort and developers it takes to keep up with patches. Few organizations have the kind of manpower required to move at the Chrome team's pace while also maintaining their own large sets of patches.
This means that every decision in Chrome that forks disagree with adds more maintanence overhead, limiting the bulk of changes to those that are skin deep.
Google may not have intended this effect from the outset but it’s certainly realized the leverage it gives them in the time since.
iOS has an option to set your default browser and mail client, and it works fine. There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps. Google is in fact being an asshole by prompting every time if you want to ignore the default app and use chrome in the hopes that you'll finally accidentally hit it.
> There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email [] without using the Apple apps.
While offline, I can attach a photo to an email with the Apple mail app and Q it to send later. However Gmail pauses or fails if slow connection. I've always assumed (perhaps unfairly) that was due to an iOS API issue - but perhaps the Gmail app is buggy?
> or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong then - I don't even have the Apple calendar app installed and somehow I hit problems.
I guess I default to blaming Apple - over the last year I have found my iPhone to be unreasonably buggy. Or I could be emanating anti-tech radiation.
> While offline, I can attach a photo to an email with the Apple mail app and Q it to send later. However Gmail pauses or fails if slow connection. I've always assumed (perhaps unfairly) that was due to an iOS API issue - but perhaps the Gmail app is buggy?
This is most likely a Gmail issue. How apps behave on an unreliable connection is entirely up to the developer.
That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser. Which is chromium at its core but the experience it provides is not as good as Chrome even with all of Chrome's downsides.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
You're correct Microsoft ruined their own reputation with Internet explorer but does that mean when a company utterly fails with one of their products to the point that a competitor can come in and dominate the marketplace we should somehow automatically reward the one who failed.
If it's really anti-competitive practices then I would agree but if it's just market forces then we should not reward those who've already mismanage their ability and their dominant market position to lose out in such a short period of time.
Chrome is definitely a better experience than Safari, and not by a little bit. In many ways Safari is the worst browser out there right now. Most of its market share comes from the fact that Apple still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have installed. I think the DOJ should go after Apple harder on that than they are on Google, because nobody is forcing anyone to use Chrome the same way Apple is forcing their users to use Safari.
I agree that the DOJ should enforce browser choice in iOS much like the EU has but in this scenario it feels besides the point. No matter how better or worse anyone might think Safari is it’s my right to choose which browser I access a site with, and I’d rather not be harassed to change.
Apple forces you to use Safari because it's the least capable mobile browser, which pushes developers to develop iOS apps to use the device APIs that other browsers allow but Safari won't implement - this drives people to the 30% cash grab Apple gets from their app store, instead of using web applications that are possible on other browsers on other platforms. It's awful what Apple is doing with forcing Safari on iOS. To make it worse, there are plenty of Apple-only proprietary things about Safari that make buying their hardware a necessity to debug problems that only appear on Safari. Web developers hate Safari, it's now known as "the new IE" because it's so bad.
Like I said, I agree with you on all that. I develop mobile web sites, I’m very familiar with all this. I still choose to use Safari on my Mac, it should be my choice to make.
Desktop Safari’s ~15% market share, which exceeds Firefox’s ~7%, suggests otherwise. Mac users can freely switch and yet many don’t.
There are likely several reasons for this but I think the two biggest ones are its differences in philosophy: first, that browsers should be just one utility among many on a desktop OS and not try to set itself apart and second, to actively combat the internet’s hostilities on behalf of the user.
Chrome will never do either. It tries to be a distinct brand and platform instead of meshing with your desktop nicely and it’s not going to do anything that will negatively impact Google’s many ad businesses.
Apple users tend to be people that don't value customization as much as users on other platforms and mostly stick with the defaults or whatever Apple solution is already provided.
That makes it so Safari has a huge advantage over Firefox which is only the default on Linux, which has a tiny Desktop/Mobile install base compared to iOS and MacOS.
I find Safari to be a fantastic product overall both on desktop and mobile but I have stuck to Chrome to keep my options open in future in case I want to use non-Apple hardware
I genuinely have no idea what "missing features" or incompatibilities keep people on Chrome compared to the benefits of uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
However, recently there was a healthy thread about the massive trackers found in mobile apps[1] which wouldn't be a problem with PWAs since they live in the same sandbox as the browser (meaning no exfiltrating all the shit) but yet can one-click launch from the normal app mechanisms and (AFAIK) can be the subject of Intent handlers just like apps
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine for me on Chrome.
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
One difference between lite and the full version is CNAME cloaking protection. The enforcement of Manifest V3 in Chrome opens up a gap in the ecosystem where analytics and advertising providers will increasingly use CNAME cloaking, since it can't be blocked from the world's most popular browser. And this is the world in which using Firefox with its support for Manifest V2 suddenly becomes quite a bit more attractive.
If CNAME cloaking takes off in a big way, then yes at that point I agree I could see people moving to Firefox. But for now that's not happening.
Also, if that actually led significant numbers of people to leave Chrome, isn't that where we'd see "Manifest V3.1" or whatever that allows matching against CNAMEs?
Chrome is pretty central to Google's strategy. If we assume that people who want to block ads will (by switching to Firefox when necessary), then it's in Google's interests for Chrome to support ad blocking. If they're not going to get ad revenue anyways, they'd still rather it be happening on Chrome.
Also see a recent comment by a member of the Chrome team on why Manifest V3 was for performance reasons, not to cripple adblocking (I don't know if it's true, but it seems worth considering): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815861
It works fine for now. As soon as Manifest V2 is officially gone you will certainly see an increase in ads. What ad company wouldn't take advantage of more limited ad blocking capabilities in the most popular web browser?
Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.
You can either use Mozilla accounts to do that for free and as easy as it is with Google accounts. Or if you are a power user and would like an adventure, you can selfhost sync and accounts servers yourself. Does chrome provide that ability?
Right, I was confused by this comment. I actually don't think it's that hard to switch, tools to import your stuff across browsers have existed for a long time. It might be that Firefox isn't particularly polished on this front but I don't think it's outside the realm of achievable and I don't think the difficulty of switching is by any means a deal breaker.
Why would you want all this stuff synced? The only thing I want out of that is passwords, but 1Password works just fine for that. In fact, I don't trust a browser to store my passwords securely.
Would any answer satisfy you? People want bookmarks synced because they use the same bookmarks on different devices. Many trust Google to transmit their passwords securely and store their email securely. Why not store their passwords securely?
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
I use FF full-time but have to use Chromium for WebEx and Teams calls to avoid massive jank.
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
The only reason I keep a Chrome installation is for when I want seemless in-page translation. Firefox just added a version of this feature but, for some reason, didn't include the most important language for nerds: Japanese.
In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.
Microsoft wouldn't have a the kind of vertically integrated monopoly where they control both the internet properties and the browser used to access them.
If Apple, Mozilla, and a stand alone Chrome sell search traffic at the fair market price and Google pays the highest price (because they have the best monetization) we're back where we started.
Why would either of those two be allowed to buy Chrome. Meta is just as much an ad business and quasi-monopoly as Google is. Microsoft has already been in legal trouble over browsers and is actively trying to recreate Google ad empire.
Governments are kinda stupid in these cases, but I think Google would be able to argue, if forced to sell, that neither of those two companies would improve the market situation.
Sell it to Opera, except they're Chinese now. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera and CEO of Vivaldi, should buy it, that would be a hilarious outcome.
I disagree. We get things in Chrome that is not in the consumer's interest simply because Google wants to get more data from its users and display more ads.
If Chrome were to be separated from the Ad business, it would be beneficial for privacy.
Chrome makes enormous sums of money through ads. Also, these companies pay fortunes for default settings like search engines and other backroom deals. Someone could buy Chrome and ask Microsoft for 30% of Bing's search revenue to be the default search engine and Microsoft would agree.
This makes sense, but it is made even more nonsensical by the fact that the DOJ is also separately saying traffic aquisition deals are anticompetitive as well.
Google makes money from ads by having control of Chrome. I don't see how that would continue if it's spun out. I'm not aware of any ads in Chrome itself (but I've been using FF for years, so what do I know). And Chrome controlling the default search engine is exactly why they want it spun out from Google, so if the result was simply that it makes money by defaulting to a different search engine, that would be an absurd, pointless result.
Imagine if Google isn't allowed to pay Chrome Inc for traffic acquisition so Chrome changes the default search engine to Bing and now Bing is a monopoly because 90% of browsers default to Bing.
This is good guess unfortunately. However, there are second order effects as we've seen with X that will drive people to Firefox so this could end up being a good thing.
But as many have said repeatedly here, people use Chrome BECAUSE it has Google's integrations. They choose to use Chrome because of Google. So why would anyone buy Chrome that is devoid of anything Google?
Further more, why would Google pay money to Chrome's buyer if they can simply spin up another browser used open source Chromium (which Google maintains), and start marketing that?
Basically, I think you're making more stuff up to substitute for the lack of argument in the previous stuff you've made up, which isn't related to the main point.
So, no, of course you guessed wrong again in your 1-4
How would you provide an argument with such a level of comprehension? There are 3 identical questions you ignored, if you can't comprehend the third one you could fall back to the first two, which are phrased a bit simpler.
But that's enough of your trolling for me, goodbye
The trademarks, the team, and the infrastructure. Mozilla spun out of Netscape exactly like that, with the trademarks, part of the team and part of the infra.
The monetization is up to the spinoff or acquirer to figure out.
If the work you're doing isn't valuable then eventually economic reality will hit, the money will run out and the businesses from China that are actually disciplined and productive will take your market share.
> number of brilliant people being paid for doing nothing at google is what slows US down compared to china
Ever read the Transformer paper? Or AlphaGo? You know that two of this year's nobel laureates are from Google? A few years ago the Turing award was won by a Googler?
Weird that this is so doom and gloom, the world's most popular browser decoupled from the ad machine. What's not to love? People champion Firefox and Brave constantly and they're independent browsers.
Brave is not an independent browser, the majority of development comes for free through Chromium, funded by… Google. Firefox by Mozilla Corp survives on loads of cash from… Google.
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
I think there's an implicit assumption here that Google isn't milking the browser for all it's worth. It isn't as if Google is footing the bill for all those ongoing costs for nothing. I think the argument that Chrome avoids some general badness because Google gets value from a purely strategic interest isn't without merit but even that value is captured eventually. Sure they'll probably sell their default search placement to Google for a pretty penny to sustain development just like Firefox but I consider that a strict improvement over the status quo because Google has less direct power over the new company.
Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.
Browsers simply require paying a few hundred very in demand engineers, and that's hardly impossible if Mozilla's been doing it for 20 years as a non-profit. How many software shops out there have 500 engineers? I'm guessing literal hundreds US companies have that today and wouldn't be surprised if someone could build something that scale in a couple years with the proper budget and leadership.
But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)
Mozilla does it by getting Google to pay them a bunch of money, which itself is the subject of anti-trust investigations. That money could dry up if Google is forced to no longer fund Mozilla, and if that happens, they’re screwed. It’ll also mean others likely won’t be able to pay either, which only leaves either buying software (who will pay for a browser?) or ads.
Also note that Mozilla has been doing this a long time, and yet they’re effectively irrelevant in market share now. So they’ve done a terrible job.
Browsers are a specialized technology and skill set that isn’t easily found, nor can you just throw any old SWE at the problem.
A much better decision would have been to require them to fund some amount of the various open source competitors so there can be alternatives. Makes as much sense as forcing them to sell a thing that has no market.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
I don’t really understand how this would work and the article doesn’t really give me enough detail to know. But for me, Google abandoning their plans to disable third party cookies tells me everything I need to know: their ad business calls the shots and an ad company having monopoly over the browser market is an unequivocally bad thing.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
It is not clear to me how Chrome having a majority share in the browser market is a monopoly. Is it somehow constraining other browsers to not be developed? On the contrary Google maintains the Chromium project, and funds Mozilla directly. I don't think that's what monopolies do, i.e., monopolies don't actively cultivate competitors.
If people aren't choosing to use Firefox, Brave, Edge, etc. even though many of the competitors get the benefit of free Google engg labor on Chromium and are not connected to the so-called ad machine, maybe they don't want like the alternatives.
Chrome can't really be sold unless it'd mean Google is not allowed to maintain a fork of Chromium.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
I think this would be a very unfair action to perform so late in the administration.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
With those rulings come conditions. Corporations under a judgement under monopoly practices can't do anything they want wily-nily. AT&T, for example, was forbidden from selling computers in 1956.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 691 ms ] threadNext please make Apple open up all the secret integration between iOS and Watch so that Fitbit and others can more fairly compete.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
I'm open to hearing different opinions.
The 13th Amendment to the US constitution makes the sale of people illegal.
Seriously though - how would this ever work? Google cannot negociate on behalf of their employees or promise they will work somewhere if Google stops employing them.
I'm pretty sure everyone who worked at Universal Studios still worked there after Comcast bought them. I don't recall any staff being included when Google sold Domains to Squarespace, but they very well could have been.
Hell, if you've ever temped in tech, sometimes you wake up and find out you work for a different agency. "Yesterday you worked at Magnit. Today you work at TechPro."
Or it could be something in between - the buyer offers you a new contract and the seller says you'll be laid off if you don't take it.
Of course they can. Read your employment contract. It almost certainly can be assigned.
My employment contract says nothing about me needing to work at any company that Google decides I should work for.
It probably also lets you quit with short notice.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
Google also pays Apple for the same reason.
Now it would probably be paying the Chrome company as well.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116034
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/technology/google-search-...
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
OpenAI joined the chat...
I meant incompetence at the company governance level, not technical.
There's massive technical competence in non-profits.
This brilliance is just wasted by leaders who sacrifice business acumen over the mission.
[1] https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html...
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
I have a few hundred bucks that I'm willing to put into the pie, but based on the financials, it's probably going to go bankrupt pretty quick.
Stage 1: Buy Chrome from Google, with its 65% browser market share.
Stage 2: Tell Google you'll keep them as default search provider for $5 billion per year.
Stage 3: Profit
The DOJ is working to ban search deals too, you wouldn't receive a single penny. The DOJ is incomprehensibly incompetent compared to the EU DMA/DSA.
how it could exist without getting money for setting the default search engine is certainly a question though
The user base
2. make your website the default
3. make it easier to access your suite of web services
Eg. imagine instead of defaulting to google everything you typed in the search bar defaulted to chatgpt. Imagine open AI could buy that at a discount
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
The issue is that Google's dominance of the search/ad business is distorting the browser market.
This is my take, anyways (I'm not a lawyer or American).
>2. make your website the default
>3. make it easier to access your suite of web services
Chrome is not a search engine. Chrome doesn't have a "suite of web services."
That's Alphabet/Google.
Chrome is just the browser.
Third-party sign in with Google [1].
[1] https://www.google.com/account/about/sign-in-with-google/
Do they? I would rather not have a "browser account" and just back up my own bookmarks like I was doing 20 years ago.
Presumably yes. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.
> and just back up my own bookmarks
Nothing wrong about that. But again.. most people don't find that to be very convenient (I'd actually bet money that that there are is magnitude or a few times more people using Safari/Chrome/etc. to sync their data automatically instead of doing it manually).
I think presuming people want this is like presuming they want 3rd party tracking cookies or that they want their online footprint profiled by the likes of data brokers and palantir and so on. Uninformed consent is not the same as support. Adult humans are mostly smart enough to change their preferences away from convenience when they understand it has bad consequences.
This is how it should work anyway.
widevine and all the other DRMy bits.
Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)
Microsoft is already using the Chromium and changing the default search engine to Bing and shipping it as Edge. What else is needed?
This DOJ looks like they just want to pad their resumes with some grandiose case which might be bad for everyone else.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
But say it was forced to sell for peanuts because any large company proposal was denied by antitrust review itself, a forced sale of a US company's business to a non-US company under ownership by Chinese investors would likely not be allowed go through in the current environment either. Maybe some other "or something" at this point but it feels a bit like asking for a wildcard play from a very methodical and slow process.
There are a few American companies that could pull it off though; Oracle comes to mind? I know that they don't really work in the browser space, but they have plenty of money, and they work in pretty much every other part of tech.
MS owns an ad network that brings in ~$10Bn a year. Much smaller than Google, but certainly nothing to ignore.
MS owns outlook/hotmail which is wildly popular.
Does Microsoft own “half the internet”? No but neither did Google. Microsoft does own Windows which is a (already sued) monopoly touch point similar to Android. They own a browser. They own a cloud platform that profits from a growing internet. They own plenty of consumer facing properties and should not be written off in monopoly or antitrust discussions.
Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the idea of spinning off Chrome (but I know Googlers so I may be biased), but I understand the appeal on paper.
"Google Analytics is used by 82.5% of all the websites whose traffic analysis tool we know." https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ta-googleanalytics
Google's adware is all over nearly every site on the internet.
I don't even know what the real-world equivalent would be: maybe if you had to drive to the NYSE in an NYSE-provided vehicle (that could track your behavior to judge how much money you were likely to spend) in order to buy shares from the NYSE who sat on the other side of every trade in addition to running the market.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
TLDR just be like Mozilla
Mozilla is rapidly deciding they want to be an advertising and AI company at the expense of their primary product.
So, tl;dr: be like Mozilla used to be, not like they are now.
You can give money to Mozilla Corporation by paying for Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, or Pocket Premium.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
It seems like you have no familiarity with any of this. If so, happy to help educate you. If I'm wrong and you're just trolling, it was hard to tell.
Please don't.
Do we really want incompetent management going into ad business? Declining market share, while raising management salaries and firing developers?
Could happen under Trump...
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
Seems so, so much worse.
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome, only Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers.
I think there’s a very very substantial underlying infrastructure maintained and funded by google that would disappear. This isn’t a GitHub project where you can clone and make install.
Google's entire existence is predicated on the ad-model internet existing, and internet users have overwhelmingly voted for this model of internet over the last 30 years.
People hate ads, but they hate opening their wallet even more.
How is that even a question. It's worth billions. User data, ability to inject ads, ability to drive the future of web and web-based apps.
Currently it’s probably worth bilingual because Google owns it. I expect it to rapidly lose value should that change.
There is no potential buyers for Chrome that are serious and trustworthy. Chrome is not a profit center. Mozilla can't make money on Firefox and seems to be losing interest in the project, probably for the same reason. There's no reason to think that anyone would buy Chrome, keep it freely available and make money on the product.
Worst case is that some one will buy it, slap ads on it or turn it into a subscription service. Still I don't see that being enough to fund the Chromium/Blink development. While I do think the adding of features to the web could do with a slowdown, we're talking Internet Explorer 6 levels of stagnation if Chrome is sold of to the wrong entity.
There’s probably a number of talented people out there who would love to drive that truck.
ehm... jokes aside. I think a more reasonable way is to setup a foundation, composed of biggest players in tech, also companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Mozilla Foundation, Linux Foundation, Apple and EFF. The foundation should steer the further development of Chrome. In that way Chrome will be owned by community just like e.g. Linux Kernel or standards like C++ lang spec.
If Chrome would be bought by a private entity, that entity would probably start milking the current user base straight away. Expect adds in bookmarks bar, more address bar spyware (e.g. sending all phrases to the cloud) and paid extensions web store.
The most used and advanced browser that we have today must stay open source. It is more than a program, it is part of global internet infrastructure. We should not destroy it by a foolish political decision.
They were the first company I thought of.
Just reducing the direct influence from one company would already be beneficial for the market. And maybe Mozilla and other browser will get something out of it too.
Somehow I think that if they will decide to stay in their niche, Cloudflare might be a good fit for Chrome
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
* Android
* Search
* Advertising
* YouTube
Smash it into tiny pieces. Then the same for Apple and Facebook.
We've been stalled for technological progress for 15+ years. Tear down the giants holding us back.
Also once they see the mess separating Google would do, theyd leave apple in tact
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
If Chrome was not owned by an ad company, the owners of chrome would push for instead of against privacy protections (see: firefox, safari).
The browser monopoly, which Chrome sells at a loss, enables the ad company. This is the problem.
Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google. So anything against ads does not get upstreamed to Chromium.
Chrome also is a major browser vendor, whereas kiwibrowser and opera are not, which means the standards boards listen to them more. If those seats were not owned by an ad company, standards would likely be different.
What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?
(Except if you mean that any new and initially exclusive feature bolsters Chrome’s dominance further, in which case I’d somewhat agree.)
Google keeps proposing specifications like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, Web Serial, etc., and both Mozilla and Apple keep shooting them down on privacy and security grounds. Meanwhile Google ignores the problems and builds them into Chrome anyway, and guess what happens? They start getting used to fingerprint and track people.
Who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence that all of these technologies that advertisers can use to fingerprint and track people keep making their way into the browser owned by one of the world’s largest ad companies.
HID, mass storage devices etc. are required to be filtered by implementations, and why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
The prompts are pretty scary/disruptive, and I've never seen any website actually try (unlike for e.g. web push notifications, which are fairly private but can be super annoying).
Part of the problem is that a vast number of users neither understand nor care about these prompts. They just click to make them go away.
There’s a few long discussions on the unsuitability of these specifications in the Mozilla standards positions repo:
Web Bluetooth: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95
Web USB: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100
Web MIDI: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58
Web Serial: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
Here’s some Hacker News discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063
As far as fingerprinting/tracking goes, I have never seen a random site prompt for these features, only apps where it makes sense.
What does this mean?
> Antitrust enforcers want the judge to order Google to sell off Chrome — the most widely used browser worldwide — because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine, said the people.
The monopoly is in ads. Google uses its control of Chrome to act uncompetitively in advertising.
With what funding? Chrome loses money. Edge loses money. Safari loses money. Firefox loses Google's money. Brave loses VC money.
Without some endless source of money, funding you for an ulterior motive, you can't compete with them. Which is why:
>For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case.
The anti-competitive practices ensure there can't be effective competition.
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
No, you can't. You can use "uBlock origin lite" which is the manifest v3 version that doesn't work correctly.
Working out why they're doing this is left as an exercise to the reader.
A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".
https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/private-advert...
But we should still make it harder on them.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/google-antitrust-doj-cookies-privac...
Blocking third party cookies this way still leaves Google’s tools which people voluntarily install with access to data that now nobody else has access to.
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
To fight the Microsoft monopoly. And we are lucky that browsers (Firefox&Chrome&SafariMobile) won on the back of DOJ action against IE. We could all be using Windows applications and a few lucky rich have a Compaq iPaq phones: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compaq+ipaq&iar=images&iax=images
Without Chrome would we have got Safari on the iPhone? I also remember WAP (uggggh) pages before HTML. In the alternative universe DOJ is fighting their 10th lost cause against Microsoft (who keeps getting away with their evil ways).
I say this as someone who has been back on Firefox for years at this point.
And more stable
Safari and Messages etcetera link to within the closed Apple ecosystem - just like Windows. It can be between difficult to impossible to send an email or create a calendar item unless you use the iOS apps.
I'm definitely no Google fanboi but every answer being "Google are arseholes" feels dishonest.
The Chromium developer team absolutely kick arse and being open source is a true gift. Mozilla is badly failing to compete. Microsoft failed to compete with their first Edge rewrite, and now ironicalky MS "competes" using Chromium open source.
And why did Chromium have to split from WebKit? As an outsider it just looked like "because Apple don't want to play nice".
The story is always simplified to Google greedy arseholes. A typical response: you can never ever ever satisfy open source proponents... The stereotype that every open source user greedily wants more.
Like everybody else. If the user wants Chrome on iOS, they can install it and set it as their default browser. To link to other Google apps, Google can use Universal Links[0] to directly open Calendar, Sheets, etc or open the corresponding App Store page if they haven’t been installed yet.
Google forked WebKit because they wanted to take it in a direction that was fundamentally incompatible with the direction Apple wanted to go: Google wanted more core functionality (process management, etc) to be written as part of the browser (likely to serve as a moat) while Apple wanted all that to live within the engine itself so third party devs could take advantage of it without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/allowing-app...
Yes - working code that everybody uses now including a major competitor - Microsoft. Where's the alternative timeline with a WebKit browser on Windows? Oh, Apple killed v5.1.7 Safari on Windows in 2010 - their choice. Windows Safari had its issues but it was a great browser when it was released. Virtually nobody has chosen to base their browser on WebKit - and they choose not to for good reasons. Similarly why nobody forked Gecko - they didn't want that code.
> without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
But Apple failed at that goal - saying that WebKit works better as an engine is just not what happened in reality. WebKit was certainly a worse choice for open source engine on Windows back when Windows really mattered. Nobody used it.
> likely to serve as a moat
That is just making shit up. If Google wanted a moat then they could have built a moat. History has shown that the multiprocess design of Chromium was no moat. You might argue there are other moats - and that is what the DOJ seems to be arguing.
Link to the reasons the Chromium team wrote: https://www.chromium.org/blink/developer-faq/
Edit: I guess I would also like to link to a great response to "you must be the product": https://danfrank.ca/most-businesses-dont-work-that-way/ and we should always refer to Spolsky's "comoditize your complement" https://gwern.net/complement
The reason I believe that moving functionality out of the engine into the browser serves as a moat is because it gives Google more power to exert its will on Chromium forks.
If Blink were fully independent, third parties wouldn’t be beholden to forking Chrome; they could just drop Blink into their bespoke UI. Google’s decisions in Chrome would be entirely irrelevant to these third party devs. As things are now, forking Chrome is for practical purposes required if you want to use Blink, and diverging from mainline presents a risk — the more divergent forks become, the more effort and developers it takes to keep up with patches. Few organizations have the kind of manpower required to move at the Chrome team's pace while also maintaining their own large sets of patches.
This means that every decision in Chrome that forks disagree with adds more maintanence overhead, limiting the bulk of changes to those that are skin deep.
Google may not have intended this effect from the outset but it’s certainly realized the leverage it gives them in the time since.
Thanks - I never discovered that - sorry.
> There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email [] without using the Apple apps.
While offline, I can attach a photo to an email with the Apple mail app and Q it to send later. However Gmail pauses or fails if slow connection. I've always assumed (perhaps unfairly) that was due to an iOS API issue - but perhaps the Gmail app is buggy?
> or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps.
Not sure what I'm doing wrong then - I don't even have the Apple calendar app installed and somehow I hit problems.
I guess I default to blaming Apple - over the last year I have found my iPhone to be unreasonably buggy. Or I could be emanating anti-tech radiation.
This is most likely a Gmail issue. How apps behave on an unreliable connection is entirely up to the developer.
This is not really google vs apple. You are describing webmail vs old school mail client. One uploads the attachment immediately, the other does not.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
The difference here is that Microsoft's reputation is beyond ruined in this product category due to Internet Explorer.
If it's really anti-competitive practices then I would agree but if it's just market forces then we should not reward those who've already mismanage their ability and their dominant market position to lose out in such a short period of time.
There are likely several reasons for this but I think the two biggest ones are its differences in philosophy: first, that browsers should be just one utility among many on a desktop OS and not try to set itself apart and second, to actively combat the internet’s hostilities on behalf of the user.
Chrome will never do either. It tries to be a distinct brand and platform instead of meshing with your desktop nicely and it’s not going to do anything that will negatively impact Google’s many ad businesses.
That makes it so Safari has a huge advantage over Firefox which is only the default on Linux, which has a tiny Desktop/Mobile install base compared to iOS and MacOS.
What's the difference whether Chrome is using WebKit or Blink from the perspective of most users? How would they notice that and why would they care?
However, recently there was a healthy thread about the massive trackers found in mobile apps[1] which wouldn't be a problem with PWAs since they live in the same sandbox as the browser (meaning no exfiltrating all the shit) but yet can one-click launch from the normal app mechanisms and (AFAIK) can be the subject of Intent handlers just like apps
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923931
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
Also, if that actually led significant numbers of people to leave Chrome, isn't that where we'd see "Manifest V3.1" or whatever that allows matching against CNAMEs?
Chrome is pretty central to Google's strategy. If we assume that people who want to block ads will (by switching to Firefox when necessary), then it's in Google's interests for Chrome to support ad blocking. If they're not going to get ad revenue anyways, they'd still rather it be happening on Chrome.
Also see a recent comment by a member of the Chrome team on why Manifest V3 was for performance reasons, not to cripple adblocking (I don't know if it's true, but it seems worth considering): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815861
But everything you listed (apart from integrating with Google's servers) can be done with Firefox.
Google Meet is particularly Firefox hostile with camera/audio support, but I'm not sure how common it actually is.
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
Microsoft wouldn't have a the kind of vertically integrated monopoly where they control both the internet properties and the browser used to access them.
1) Chrome is spun out as a standalone entity. Google would originally have full ownership but be forced to sell down over time.
2) Google buys the Chrome traffic at a fair price
3) Apple sells their traffic to someone else, potentially an AI search player (Meta??)
4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source
Why would they? They can just continue why Chromium/Edge. Presumably the new standalone entity be able to invest as much into Google or even MS.
Really? Another one after IE, Native Edge, and Chromium Edge? I dont think they really need another one.
Call me old fashioned but I think browsers will advance faster when we don't have a chromium monopoly outside of the apple ecosystem.
Governments are kinda stupid in these cases, but I think Google would be able to argue, if forced to sell, that neither of those two companies would improve the market situation.
Sell it to Opera, except they're Chinese now. Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, the co-founder of Opera and CEO of Vivaldi, should buy it, that would be a hilarious outcome.
Only search has high propensity to buy right there from the interaction. Third party and even meta don't have that.
And, apparently, these guys[0] think that's a good thing.
[0] https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Publish_...
If Chrome were to be separated from the Ad business, it would be beneficial for privacy.
Not saying it couldn't happen.
If the decision drags on into the new administration, then the answer is probably Elon Musk.
Chrome is funded by Google search.
Why would anyone buy it without Google search?
The answer to your question is simple - because you can get funded by Google to keep its search the default
Further more, why would Google pay money to Chrome's buyer if they can simply spin up another browser used open source Chromium (which Google maintains), and start marketing that?
The other things are also simple:
Saying things repeatedly doesn't make them universally true.
You don't need to buy anything, it can continue to be free, why did you make it up???
Google would pay because they can't make another leader overnight. Also they might be banned from doing so.
1. Google must sell Chrome
2. Google must continue to pay the new buyer tens of billions for the right to be default engine
3. Google is disallowed from making a browser ever again
4. Google must abandon Chromium, and their engineers should stop contributing to Chromium because of #3
I feel sorry for Google. The Biden administration is absolutely clueless on how tech works and the Trump administration will hate Google regardless.
So, no, of course you guessed wrong again in your 1-4
I'd provide an argument if the question was more coherent.
But that's enough of your trolling for me, goodbye
Yikes.
The monetization is up to the spinoff or acquirer to figure out.
Only monopoles like google can afford to burn so much cash. And that's a clear loss for the economy.
Ever read the Transformer paper? Or AlphaGo? You know that two of this year's nobel laureates are from Google? A few years ago the Turing award was won by a Googler?
Company forced to sell cannot simply set an absurd price to evade regulators, as that would be plainly acting in bad faith
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
The DOJ knows this is pointless. The DOJ knows where Google's profits come from.
The DOJ is pretending that thr public still thinks about the internet in terms of Microsoft/Internet Explorer bundling.
Shame on you DOJ for wasting everyone's time and money.
But they won't have to build it, they'll just buy a chunk of Google's team with the Chrome trademarks and the chromium infrastructure and then scale back attempts to outpace the few other engine makers by piling on features only useful to an advertising monopoly and instead focus on the core feature set while raking in big bucks selling search and ad distribution to all the search and ad companies not named Google (and perhaps some even from Google too.)
Also note that Mozilla has been doing this a long time, and yet they’re effectively irrelevant in market share now. So they’ve done a terrible job.
Browsers are a specialized technology and skill set that isn’t easily found, nor can you just throw any old SWE at the problem.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
I wish you understood why that is funny.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
If this comes true, I take full responsibility for causing it.
If people aren't choosing to use Firefox, Brave, Edge, etc. even though many of the competitors get the benefit of free Google engg labor on Chromium and are not connected to the so-called ad machine, maybe they don't want like the alternatives.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
Google sells Chrome, then immediately forks Chromium and starts a new “completely unrelated” browser with all the same features called “Magnesium”
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/how_antitrust...
this is it ... chromeOS is dead