If someone was previously using Chrome, though, they're probably not that protective off their data. So it would seem like Firefox is a decent solution even if it is selling your data. Google was probably selling your data too...
Maybe but it doesn't affect the ad-blocking abilities of Firefox and uBlock Origin. It is a legal document, not a technical document.
If you want to go with ethics and trust, I am not particular fond of Brave practice of replacing ads for some shady cryptocurrency (BAT). You don't have to do that, you can just use it as an adblocking browser, but if you don't care about these things, the news of Firefox updating some privacy policy shouldn't affect you too much either.
Anyways, both Firefox and Brave/Chromium are open source, you can see what data is being sent out, and there are forks.
And to make things clear, I am not really a fan of Mozilla direction, I just switched because Firefox became better and Chrome worse in the last years.
The point of switching to Firefox is not "Google bad, Mozilla good". The point is to chip away at the chromium browser monopoly. If you have another non-chromium browser to recommend, please share as an alternative.
Mozilla has not proven themselves to be trustworthy, but I think most would still consider them to be less untrustworthy than Google. Firefox offers similar levels of support, feature parity, and performance to Chrome, which makes it an easy alternative to recommend. There are certainly other non-chromium options worth considering, but Firefox is still by far the most accessible.
No PWA support out of the box last time I looked. And Firefox (understandably but annoyingly) doesn't support some of the non-standardised Chrome APIs such as the File System Access API.
I use Wipr in Safari on both, iOS and Mac. Small one time purchase each. And i enable only passive filters, not the active one, that requires page access.
You are being downvoted, but people surely realize this is 100% true, right? Not only is it 100% true, it is inevitably going to be the outcome. Google will not have to divest Chrome.
Sundar just has to pay the $5M to have dinner at Mara Lago and the next day Trump will be talking about how unfairly Google has been treated, probably blaming China or Canada or something for this DOJ action, and the DOJ will drop the remedy. Probably will fire some employees for daring to pursue this while they're at it.
Whichever oligarch or ruling class ultra-rich whispers in Trump's ear last gets the full force of government for their cause.
Like, surely everyone knows this is absolutely how your banana-republic, profoundly corrupt government works now, right? At least be honest about it.
I don't care that Google, Apple or Microsoft have their own browser.
Especially not when there are other third party browsers. Wouldn't say no to a government funded one that was secure and tested with government services.
There are some issues with the big tech giants that is likely harmful to consumers and the industry, and I'd welcome anti-trust investigations into all of them, but I feel like minor issues like browsers is an attempt to pretend like meaningful regulation and government control has been applied, while the real problems are ignored.
> Especially not when there are other third party browsers. Wouldn't say no to a government funded one that was secure and tested with government services.
Which government, though? The US is mired in corruption at the moment, and the UK is taking an extended dump on privacy, Russia is … Russia and China doesn't really believe in privacy or freedom of speech, among other things.
The same government services that require things like recaptcha to work? The situation in the US is far worse than just "I need to use a BigTech browser to access government services".
Regardless of what happens to Chrome per se it's who is involved with pushing for major controversial changes in Chromium that matters.
Manifest v3 and Web Integrity API are prominent examples of Google's team shaping how all Chromium based browsers will be, regardless of pushback (though they relented with the latter for now).
That's not relevant. Chrome has the most market share, so its decisions become de facto standards. What happens in some fork by a 2 men crew doesn't matter.
No motivated group has the experts to maintain a modern rendering engine (tens of millions of lines of regularly evolving code) and Google can reject any upstream changes that group wants to make because Google engineers are the gatekeepers for 97.498% of Chromium code. So, if your agenda has anything to do with web content, you take what Google hands you. Of course, if you just want to diddle in the browser UI, sure fork it, that's the Brave and Opera approach, but hardly meaningful in scale.
The big players have made the web so complicated that it's impossible to maintain one's own standards compliant browser without millions of investment, and you don't get a business model because everyone else is giving their out for "free".
This problem really needs to be fixed, though I have no idea how...
Web technologies enable server-client apps that can rival desktop apps, and Browsers are almost as complex as Operating Systems. What you describe isn't a problem, it's made like this because they're very useful and complex technology stacks
Why does a browser need to be 10,000,0000 lines though? It's that the minimum number of lines to capture the complexity of a modern browser? I don't it.
And even if there are 10mil lines they shouldn't be a monolith
Manifest v3 is not even breaking any standards. This is like saying Google should not make any changes to their browser as any forks will not be able to maintain any divergence. All forks are free to keep manifest v2. Off course maintaining a browser is expensive, but that doesn't mean Google has to foot the bill for everyone and everything.
In theory, yes. In reality, the more diverged forks become from mainstream the more expensive they become to maintain, until eventually it becomes entirely unsustainable. With the sheer number of Chrome patches Google churns out, the level of divergence where maintainence becomes overwhelming is actually pretty low. It’s like trying to handle Niagara Falls with a Solo cup.
By that logic google can not make any changes to their browser unless all forks agree to it, as the forks will definitely not be able to continue maintenance for long. By this logic it makes more and more sense to not open source anything and keep your product as tightly closed as possible (what Apple/MSFT have been doing).
It’s explicitly changes that are a net negative for users and privacy (e.g. manifest v3) or try to circumvent the web standards process (e.g. WebUSB) that are problematic and would be of interest to forks. Most changes are fine.
Of course, we should ask why the web is in a place where building a browser is so massively complex and expensive that Google and Apple are the only entities in the world who can afford to do it.
To try to stem the tide of "Trump will just make this go away because ${corruption}", I want to remind everyone of a few things:
* This is not a Biden-admin lawsuit. It was launched by the first Trump admin.
* Of the 14 co-plaintiffs, only 1 (CA) is a state that didn't vote for Trump in 2024. The Colorado Plaintiff States include another 16 red states, for a total of 29 red states represented.
As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled, it's actually been doing exactly what it said it would do to satisfy its base. This lawsuit was started by them in the first place and if the list of Attorneys General is anything to go by has overwhelming support from the base that Trump is acting to satisfy. Google's not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now, it's far too late for that.
The TikTok ban was overwhelmingly unpopular among several important demographics and undoing the ban formed a part of Trump's 2024 campaign. His decisions with TikTok this year were a reversal from 2020 but entirely expected based on his 2024 campaign, so that's not a valid comparison.
What about all the other times Trump has done something like that?
Trump's MO seems to be to take something away, then give it back and declare himself the savior of it. Just look at all the chaos with tariffs recently
Essentially what you're saying is Google need to tell their users they will lose a lot if chrome is sold, and Google needs to say a few nice things about trump to get the same treatment.
At the risk of smoting from the Google Gods ( I should be careful, I make a product that depends on their browser ), I think the best thing that should happen to Chrome, if it's going to be sold off - is it becomes a "public utility" and basically is a model for actually publicly stewarded open development. Like maybe what the Mozilla Foundation should have been, like what many actual C-based open source OS projects seems to be (tho I'm no expert).
Why? Because it's essentially the defacto way/portal/thing to access to the biggest source of information humanity has: the web.
It's too big and important for any 1 company - tho saying that, I'm okay with Windows being owned by Microsoft which is (was) basically the same thing in a way.
My unsolicited advice to Google: sacrifice it, focus on AI. To all the people on the Chrome team? They should be financially taken care of, and should be part of the foundation that develops it if they want. The foundation should not be controlled by Alphabet, but should be truly public.
This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea.
> I'm okay with Windows being owned by Microsoft which is (was) basically the same thing in a way
Windows is much worse by most metrics. I can't fork Windowsium and build (and sell) my own fully-compatible, 99.999999% R&D paid for by Microsoft, OS.
> This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea
It is a bit vague :) In that: who pays for it? Who decides what features are in or out? Public utilities are generally what we make things when they're feature complete and the only challenge is rolling it out as cheaply as possible. But it feels like web browsers have a way to go yet. There's nothing stopping the US government (or any government) from bulding their own browser off Chromium right now. Nothing needs selling or splitting.
I think you’d have had zero problems having engineers on the GS scale prior to November 6th, 2024. No, they wouldn’t get rich but it’s a space full of interesting technical and usability challenges and you’d be able to work on incredibly high-impact open source projects. Like if you simply make it easier for someone older/disabled/etc. to fill out forms, make good security decisions, find information, etc. literally millions of people benefit from that a couple of weeks later.
It’d be neat if the EU picked up the torch here but with any government it seems like it’d be better to have a non-profit get a block grant so you avoid things like those salary issues or other challenges: for example, if the EU decided they didn’t want to depend on the U.S. for critical infrastructure, funding a back-to-its-roots Mozilla.org would make it easier for, say, Canada or India to join in without the issues you’d have trying to directly pay government employee salaries.
> I think the control should be in the hands of the public. Stewarded by a public organization with government funds. What do you think?
I don't know. I think today the EU could set up EUBrowser, a fork of Chromium, and start work. Almost all the hard work has been done by OSS contributions. Google engineers, and Google-funded things such as Firefox. They could live off that comfortably while providing a more locked-down browser if they liked.
A more meaningful, less parasitic option would take longer: the EU (or whomoever) writes a browser from scratch. Then they could decide exactly what goes into it, and have independent input into standards etc.
>This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea.
Forgive me for being blunt, but what idea? If the question is who is supposed to fund Chromium and Firefox going forward then you haven't actually offered any ideas.
Governments are unreliable (e.g. USAID or recently disappeared government datasets) and have even more conflicts of interest than Google itself (e.g. debates around encryption). Many people don't trust their government.
Commercial funding is not necessarily more reliable in general. Google keeps shutting down stuff all the time. But in this particular case, the commercial interest is so strong that funding is secure.
In my opinion, governments should focus on natural monopolies (taxation, violence, justice, transport infrastructure, water, etc) and on areas where there is broad consensus for a public option (health, schools, etc).
Where governments fund random stuff that few people understand the importance of, there is a big risk of the whole thing getting DOGEd or starved to stagnation. The government would never put up a fight against Apple relegating the web platform to the status of a glorified document viewer.
In my opinion, the status quo is flawed but the alternatives are worse.
If the court decides that Google must "divest" Chrome, they will have to say what that means for an open source project. If it basically comes down to Google being banned from controlling the default search engine setting in any web browser, then their main incentive for funding Chrome would be gone.
If that happens, the only solution I see is a joint "Chrome Foundation" effort funded by a number of corporations with a less direct interest in the viability of the web, i.e the Linux model. But this would be very disruptive. I fear that browser development would be aimless and start to stagnate. Other oligopolists would quickly take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum.
This is well thought out but possibly too much afraid of change. Its ubiquitous utility makes it very likely it will be safe. "OpenChrome: the open browser for the open web" is a helluva tagline. The right org structure is possible.
so every 4 years a new group can shift the priorities completely and what should be a technical challenge becomes a political one, dominated by those with money. I'm sure before long you would be required to input your government ID to use it. I am not sure a worse idea is even possible.
> I'm sure before long you would be required to input your government ID to use it.
The government does not need to maintain a browser to enforce this rule. It would simply tell people that logging into the internet requires government ID now, and the ISPs would make it so or be shut down.
The government could however, if it maintained a browser, guarantee that the internet would be accessible without a government ID, just by not putting that feature in their browser. A government browser would be subject to the constitution, debate, public comment, and legislation; rather than having to sue companies to get anything done.
Google, Apple, and Mozilla are not protecting you from the government. They're intimately financially interconnected with each other, and can decide what the entire world is going to have to tolerate on the web on a group chat. Without government intervention (even if just to collect bribes), they'd all just probably merge and enslave the planet.
Catastrophizing is possible from any starting point, but it doesn't mean much. People change their minds on new information - democracy. Stability is possible with diversification but ubiquitous utility is its own security. Is that ok?
The first Trump admin was positively benign and adult compared to the current one. The first Trump admin had significant checks and balances on its behaviours.
And of course almost everyone who served in that first Trump admin campaigned against/warned about Trump this time, which should be telling. Or maybe they're just "RINOs" or something.
"As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled"
This administration is extraordinarily unprincipled and self-serving. The DOJ as a tool for use at the leisure and to the benefit of the president/king is blatantly in the open[1].
"Google's not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now"
I would bet real money they absolutely will get out from this. Not only that they will get out from it, they'll get the public "treated unfairly" speech as well.
[1] - There is a major plot point in the 1993 movie The Pelican Brief where the simple insinuation that the president influenced the DOJ in any way would be so politically devastating that it would destroy his administration. This is so quaint now. How far the country has fallen.
“ As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled, it's actually been doing exactly what it said it would do to satisfy its base.”
Most Arguments in both directions are basically unprovable and amount to propaganda at this point. Degrees matter. Saying “people voted for this”, which both sides say with different directionality, is mostly away to convince people to either support or fight against the administration. Everyone voted for their interpretation of thing X, but will oppose it if implementation Y causes impact Z which they perceive as bad.
> it's actually been doing exactly what it said it would do to satisfy its base
Yes and no.
Lots of quick sweeping local changes were promised to specific states during trump’s rallies in those states only for him to go silent on them post election.
I don’t think flip flopping on tariffs was part of his platform either.
But generally, yes, this is what was voted for.
He takes the gish gallop approach to governing, so it’s hard to make any large statements like this without being a little incorrect.
Yeah, I don't think Trump has any sympathy for Google whatsoever, given how censorious (and proud of it) it was on both Google Search and on YouTube in the 2020 election cycle. Good luck, Google, you're gonna need it.
That said, Chrome is not really viable on its own, and it's the wrong "split" to enforce. The correct split is "down the middle" right through the money-making businesses - create two Googles, with their own search and search/web ads and ensure (through antitrust oversight) that they compete with each other instead of rubbing each other's back. Spin out Cloud and Android/Play Store into separate companies. Separate all four from Alphabet. The rest of the money-losing properties (including Chrome) can be distributed arbitrarily, it doesn't really matter.
Or something to that effect. As long as ads are split down the middle, and separated from Alphabet, that's all that really matters. Unless this happens, any "antitrust" against Google is bullshit for those who can't read its SEC filings.
I suppose a funny, ironic reason people might not know this is because of how Google has been able to algorithmically serve and reinforce results they already agree with, from profiling that it was able to develop through Chrome's dominance.
Is this really true? Something that can be supported by clear evidence? I’ve seen this trotted out many times, but it seems like there are interesting Apache projects:
It's superficially true of any large stewardship organization. After N years some significant percent of projects will be on their way out. These will continue accumulating year over year and they potentially won't be disposed of for decades (and for good reason).
Meanwhile only a vanishingly small fraction of projects remains at the center of public attention for an extended period of time. People develop a skewed perspective because we interact with many of the most popular projects on a daily basis.
There is no foundation with the budget to even maintain a web browser, let alone keep developing. If Google is not footing the bill then Safari will become the torch bearer, and Apple has no incentive to make Safari become more capable to threaten that sweet IAP revenue.
Have there been meaningful changes to the browser spec since ES2015 support was baked in? Chrome, Safari etc. are not developing their browsers for the betterment of the web. One company wants to shove ads in your face, the other wants you out of the web entirely and into their walled garden of apps and ads.
From a security standpoint, I'm sure it's more complicated, but UBO and warning dialog boxes about downloading files to your device, logging into services without 2FA would probably solve a lot of those problems. Does a billion dollar corp have to be involved considering how much has gone into Linux from people's pro bono efforts?
Linux kernel gets so so much of corporate support, and is still a much more smaller project than any web browser. People's pro bono efforts stopped being enough for linux about 2 decades ago at the very least.
Do you all forget the web pre chrome? Google and Chrome forced browser vendors to do better by standards in the first place. Google’s stewardship forced browser vendors to compete like never before.
I don't remember Google doing that. What I remember from that time is a browser war happening between the power players in mobile with iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
I would attribute the improvement in browser standards support to the finalization of the HTML5 spec by the W3C in 2009, which led to browser vendors harmonizing their feature set. We still needed jQuery to ensure cross-browser support, and floats and polyfills to get sites to work on mobile. That ended when browsers harmonized ES2015 support and built in support for flexbox and grid.
This is the absolutely dumbest thing that I have read. Who would buy Chrome and why? If you just want the codebase, you have Chromium. Chrome only monetizes because of ads.
Then what happens to Chromebooks? Can Google no longer ship a browser with Android?
Besides, unless you have an Android - which is only 30% of the US market or a Chromebook, everyone who uses Chrome went through the process of downloading it and made a purposeful choice to use it
It is dumb and the comments here are baffling. People are blaming Google for forks not being able to keep up. Like forks can be based on webkit or gecko if they don't like Google. Both Apple and MSFT are far far more closed in all their products where they have any inertia. Yet Google gets the flame mostly because of their incompetent PR and legal execution. Case in point Google got flamed here so much for dragonfly, while Bing keeps running in China and even sometimes by mistake or not applies Chinese sensors to the rest of the world. The sacred Apple also works in China following all their laws. But Google is worse than both just for attempting dragonfly.
Google lost a lot of goodwill on HN since the proposed web integrity api. HN has a strong aversion to perceived attacks on the open web.
I personally don’t think it’s fair to single Google out and leave Apple and Microsoft alone. It may be overly cynical, but I think Google is in its current situation because it has fostered political enemies on both sides.
Google gets this treatment before any talk of web integrity API so no that was not it. I don't think this is necessarily about political enemies on both sides. Just that their PR is just so so bad. Like look at Brad Smith and all the big but empty statements he keeps making for Microsoft. Google needs someone like him.
Monopolies are at their worst when they use their position to make a power play over a market (such as browsers) that isn't very profitable on it's own but can be used as a loss leader in a wider monopolistic scheme.
This is when antitrust is needed most, by design. There's a bit of understanding you need to do, but not only is it not dumb, what you said about nobody wanting to buy chrome is actually part of the proof of why google needs to be broken up and why chrome is an ideal target for doing so. The browser market needs to be made competitive again.
It's not like browsers will cease to exist though. If the proposed selling of Chrome leads to slower change in web specifications (i.e. 'fully featured' browser stuff) I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
How does that help anyone? Firefox only survives from ad revenue from Google. Apple had some motivation to keep up with Chrome to a point. But wouldn’t be motivated from competition from Firefox. Apple is much more motivated to improve its own platform.
Microsoft definitely doesn’t care about the web or even its PC operating system much.
So now, no one is pushing the web forward. But Apple, Google and Microsoft are still motivated to improve their own platforms. While I personally think the modern web is a cesspool and I am okay with that as a user, I doubt many on HN who care about the “open web” feel that way.
As a developer, I haven’t touched the clusterfuck of modern web development for over a decade.
I disliked Google ever since they started their "Do No Evil" PR campaign. For as long as I remember I was the extreme rare few on internet against them.
And I also disliked Chrome. Especially the direction of the web they are using Chrome to push forward.
And I also disliked Electron.
But I am against DOJ forcing Google to sell off Chrome. Especially when most of Chrome is open sourced. I think this is just plain wrong. Why dont we force Apple to open source macOS? Microsoft to Open Source Windows? Or Selling off Office. SpaceX to sell its Engine?
None of those exhibit the same sort of outsized influence that chrome does on global web standards. The app store duopoly might come close but still not to the same extent.
Being open source has nothing to do with it. Of course selling it off won't necessarily accomplish the desired result since at the end of the day it isn't the legal ownership per se that results in the influence.
Outsize influence combined with conflict of interest. The other branches of Google have too much to gain from being able to steer the direction of the web with Chrome, and the company as a whole benefits from writing its web apps in a way that makes them work better under Chrome, making for self-reinforcing hegemony. It’s just as bad as MS+IE, maybe worse since Chromium/Blink being open source has given them plausible deniability that MS didn’t have.
Chrome isn't bundled with Windows, but most Window users decided to install Chrome.
While I agree outsized influence that chrome does on global web standards, it is not like Apple doesn't or couldn't invent something as well. The reality is that no one has the incentive to make better web technology.
If Google sold off Chrome, who will buy it? Are Google even allowed to make another browser based on same technology? What is everyone just installed that again? Selling off Chrome doesn't make any sense at all. And as you said. Their influence on development of Blink is still, Google.
> None of those exhibit the same sort of outsized influence that chrome does on global web standards
Besides the renaissance in web interop we've been having recently under baseline and Interop, which quite a few commenters in this thread seem to have no idea about but still feel the need to share their opinion on web standards...
That has nothing to do with a search monopoly, which is what this remedy is trying to address.
Concessive openings are a common means to lend extra weight to your conclusion. By signaling you're against $THING in general, your support for $THING in a particular instance is more profound than the support of a person who always supports $THING.
Last time the DOJ declared a web browser monopoly, they lost the case on appeal, then the web browser does on its own.
The problem isn't within Google. They aren't doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome. The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren't worth using.
Can't speak for Safari, but Firefox has never been anything but a dumpster fire for me. Constant reminders about updates and a UI that slows my computer to a crawl no matter what I do. Yes, I open many tabs and don't use a turbocharged laptop, but the same applies to my Chrome use with next to no problems, so really, fuck you Firefox for not adjusting after decades, as per possible user needs. Chrome seems to manage it, so why can't the Mozilla people with their own expertise and funds?
Many new versions and updates of FF that I've tried have claimed to be much smoother and more efficient, only for the exact same shit to start happening across the years and multiple laptops used.
When was the last time you tried? I have a 2012 Mac mini that runs it like a champ and has done so for a very long time. I only have a handful of plugins but uBlock Origin is one of them.
Firefox does, though. There really aren't these wild and crazy speed issues with it at all, even with fresh out of the box defaults.
The only time I've had to touch about:config in the last several years was due to some smartcard related bug caused by an external library, that forced me to tweak firefox's behaviour. Once that bug was resolved, I switched it back.
Firefox being slow is well into the self-perpetuating FUD territory.
Capable is a interesting word choice. Capable means something meets a bare minimum for success. A and B are great. C is fantastic. D is arguably first class. E is capable. When making a free choice, I want the best one, so any lackluster review feels like one of those southern backhanded compliments, getting the message across without insulting it in polite company. Capable perfectly describes my feelings towards Firefox and Safari.
I meant browsing history. I don’t care about my search history. Even though these days I use the paid ChatGPT with the web search tool most of the time. Google is becoming more useless every month
Chrome Sync (i.e. saving your history + everything else to the cloud so it syncs to all your devices) is an optional setting. Microsoft Edge has the same thing under another name. Safari does too.
> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.
That's not Chrome's browsing history - that's an ad network, adsense, profiling you, via cookies/ip/digital fingerprinting, across every website that serves it's ads. It's like logging into facebook and saying they can see your browsing history - yes some of it, but it's because they're watching a server they own serve you requests.
The entire idea behind “privacy sandbox” is to create a profile of you for advertising based on your browsing history and the profile is created by Chrome - without being logged in and without cookies.
Interesting. So the browser knows your browsing history like every browser does, but it uses it to share some distilled data. Yeah, I definitely don't want that. Looks like I already totally disabled it though, so I'm good I guess.
Privacy and security > Ad privacy
Ad topics: Generates a list of your interests based on your browsing behavior.
Site-suggested ads: Allows advertisers to retarget you based on your interactions.
Ad measurement: Enables advertisers to assess ad performance.
Toggle each of these settings to "Off" to disable them.
But I have to admit extensions are really lacking, both the infrastructure for installing them and which extensions are available.
I now use Orion which is based on Safari but has native vertical tabs (although not native vertical hierarchical tabs, or support for dumping them as markdown).
> The problem isn't within Google. They aren't doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome.
I feel this is meant to trigger people into reacting and causing a flame war.
Google has been making its own web properties work well on Google Chrome while making them perform poorer or make them break on other browsers. Google Chrome optimizes for Google, not the web, and certainly not “the open web”.
One example of special treatment is Chrome giving *.google.com sites access to system metrics for the CPU, GPU, and RAM usage[0][1] through a default extension that isn't exposed to users.
This suit began under the last Trump administration. If there was a Google-friendly administration, it was Obama's.
What's disappointing to Google is that all of their kowtowing to the Biden administration's "content shaping" ended up worth nothing in the end. Harris would have rewarded them for that help, but Trump of course hates them for it because it was largely directed at him.
You're so close to getting it. Indeed, the problem with monopolies is they make it difficult to create effective competitors. And that's precisely why they're not allowed to do those things and why Google is in the position it's in for doing those kinds of things.
> The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren't worth using.
This feels like quite an exaggeration. I’ve used Chromium-derived browsers only sparingly in the past decade, with Safari and Firefox instead getting the bulk of my usage depending on the platform.
Generally if something doesn’t work under those browsers, the top two causes are unnecessary user agent sniffing with the site working fine once I pretend to be Chrome or the dev simply not testing against anything but Chrome. It’s been vanishingly rare that the browsers themselves were the cause of an issue.
Tauri and others allow using the system webview while still providing full native programming capabilities via rust or whatever language the particular framework uses.
There's more than just "website or electron", and things like vscode prove that they're all viable.
For all its warts, I think old IE is still a better option than Chrome because at the time of its dominance, Microsoft wasn't an ad company interested in collecting every little bit of data about you, nor did it own the dominant search engine. IE was just a browser.
I'm with you. Every time one of these arguments come up, people talk about how Chrome is superior. I've used Firefox daily for minimum five years as a daily driver, and it's been atleast 3 years since I've had to install Chrome because some website specified that it NEEDED a Chromium based browser for something specific, I believe it was a Firmware Upgrade over USB - through the browser. I split my time between Windows and Linux equally, and Firefox is the daily driver on both.
Can someone in this thread who have swapped between Firefox/Chrome explain the problems they run into ultimately driving them back to Chrome?
I've seen increasing numbers of site breakages in the past 6mos. Airline websites that won't let you book, car rental websites that won't even load, the persistent PayPal bug that requires you to enter a security code. 2fa checks everywhere. I keep a chromium installed to deal with these, but when there's a decent alternative (i.e. not brave) I'll probably drop FF as a daily driver.
Your employer is constantly adding non-standard shit to their browser so instead of making competitive browsers others have to either burn cycles on demolishing that bs, or catch up with you. You want an example? That command and commandFor bs from a couple of days ago.
> But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome's dominance
I feel like most people here wouldn't understand that to inherently indicate superior quality. I'd argue that the absolute dominance of Chrome is mostly evidence of the monopoly power that Google yields. It got on top via search, becomes the gateway to the web for people, leverages that to sell advertisement and also convince tons of people to use the browser. It's been all leverage.
I'd also disagree on it even being a better browser. Firefox has issues, but on actual usability and feeling like a user agent, it's head and shoulders above Chrome. It is more flexible, more customizable, and I find that it runs significantly better on every website that isn't owned by Google. If Chrome was a better browser, they wouldn't have had to sabotage Firefox on their sites for years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357).
It's Google that can't compete, if they have to use back-channels and leverage their other powers to maintain dominance. They aren't competing with the product alone.
> The Justice Department also kept a Biden-era proposal that seeks to ban Google from paying companies like Apple, other smartphone manufacturers and Mozilla to make its search engine the default on their phones and browsers.
Welp. They had a chance to be default alive and they fucked it by trying to spend the money on new initiatives instead of just spending the interest payments from an endowment.
Yes. And other than Firefox, Mozilla was spending money in two ways. First creating new paid products in an attempt to have revenue in case the Google money ever went away. None of them were successful enough to meet this goal, but it was a good goal. Secondly, they spent their charity donations on activism work. The way they are structured they legally could not spend that money on Firefox. They would need to restructure as a non-profit corporation (not tax deductible charity) to accept donations to spend on Firefox, like their Thunderbird subsidiary. I hope they do so now, and at least attempt to support Firefox on donations.
The truth is that browsers are a very complicated, very quickly moving, and very security sensitive piece of software. They spent all that money on Firefox rather than saving it because if they didn't Firefox would have fallen behind Chrome and Safari and it wouldn't be worth using today.
I would put that heavily on the “excuse not reason” category. The public doesn’t understand this nuance and I hope you’re right about next steps.
It makes no good goddamned sense that money that was given in order to be featured in a web browser cannot be spent primarily on that web browser, and can only be spent on anything except that web browser.
In my opinion Firefox is better in all the ways except speed - Chrome still feels faster on old computers. And I prefer the browser market to still have some technical diversity no matter who actually runs it.
Ever try installing chrome on an old operating system like Windows 7? It doesn't work but if already installed then much faster. Wonder upto what version works with win7
Firefox had Servo, a project that among other things focused on delivering faster technologies for a web browser. They had impressive results (integrated into Firefox as Firefox Quantum) but were suddenly fired
At that point I think Firefox lost a vision of a better future
Some AI company could buy it and add some subscriptions based AI services. Or package it with optional but very popular and lucrative VPN, etc. There's a lot of potential business models apart from feeding advertising algorithms. Besides maintaining a browser is not stupendously expensive, firefox runs on about $500M in revenue.
I don't love the CEO bonuses, but they are objectively less than half a percent of Mozilla's budget. Google search on the other hand is 85% of their revenue.
Any other CEO with a similarly sized company, revenue stream, and user base in Silicon Valley would be making 2-3X what Mozilla's CEO makes when you consider total compensation.
I made that switch quite a few years ago, got sick of dealing with extensions and configuring browsers. Vivaldi gives me enough out of the box to call it good.
They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does .
My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar or close to what Google pays. The traffic is worth a lot. Bing attested to click flow as the reason they cannot make a better product in their testimony in this trial.
Also Google will either be allowed to continue the contract till its current end (I believe 1-2 more years ) or will pay fully and release Mozilla from their obligations (Mozilla is not party to the case so early termination without compensation would be penalty on them for no reason ).
Mozilla will need to make some significant cuts and layoffs no doubt will be hard on the team, but the product will survive.
They can start by reducing their CEO salary from check notes $6.9 million in 2022. It increased by millions in just a decade while their market share declined and they layed off hundreds.
Compensation is complicated and function of value added to the organization may not correlate to work put in. I have no opinion on what should be cut, just pointing out it won't the end of Mozilla without Google deal.
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For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.
Any other CEO in Silicon Valley with similar circumstances (25 years experience in tech leadership, increasing revenue dramatically despite shrinking market share, negotiating successfully with their biggest competitor, etc.) would be making $5M-$20M depending on stock compensation, which Mozilla does not offer. How does paying less than market rates for a CEO help improve Mozilla's lot?
Or are you suggesting that none of these CEOs should be compensated at current rates? If so, hate the game and not the player my friend.
If I am reading their financial statement correctly, they have about 3 years of runway.
$500M/year expenses, $65M/year revenue other than search deals, $45M/year interest on savings and $1300M assets.
Mozilla should have seen this coming and invested in their own search and ad infrastructure like Brave. They’ve had years but wasted their time on tiny features like Pocket.
They’re still getting a friendlier NLRB, lower corporate tax rates, and an economic policy that is less focused on full employment; tamping down engineering wage growth
And I still don't understand why. I expected it when I started my career, and here nearing the end it's still really rare. And it should have gotten easier in that time, what with the Internet.
Time zones and culture and language and all that, I suppose. But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture, and would work for a tenth the price.
It depends what kind of a company you work for. Something like a bank with a lot of boringly tedious stuff on top of procedures will have quite a lot of offshore contractors. They don't even have to be very smart, because truly smart ones decide to move closer towards the source of the moneys.
The answer is quite simple, they just need to make a big announcement that they will be investing a few billions into something that will 'create well paying AMERICAN jobs', keypoint is that they need to let Trump announce it.
It doesn't matter if they actually go through with it or greatly inflate the number like OpenAI, Softbank and co did.
A company owning a web browser isn't the problem. A company owning a web browser, OS and search engine shouldn't be a problem either. I don't know why the remedy can't actually address the problem, and the DOJ can't move more quickly to address antitrust across the industry. This feels like randomly cutting a baby in half, while the rest of the thieves, even those in the same family, are not deterred.
The problem is an ads company owning a web browser, OS, and search engine, and using that control over how users interact with the internet to outcompete everyone else. You left out Google's raison d'etre from your statement.
That is not what is happening. I use Android, Chrome, and Google Search because the alternatives are quite poor. All of those things work better with alternatives than any competition. Android is the most open mobile OS, Chrome is the most open and non-coercive browser, Google Search works great with all other OS's and browsers.
It doesn't matter why you use any of this software. What matters is what it does to the ads market. This is not 1999 and this is not Microsoft. Google's product isn't software. It's the attention of its users.
Google's share of my attention is negligible to the point of barely existing when compared to HN, X, YouTube(yes I know, but I see no adds because I have premium), podcasts, audiobooks and many other things. Even Facebook probably takes more attention and I barely use it.
Google measures its share of your attention different than you do. You seem to think this is "attention paid to Google ads" but it's "attention paid to Google platforms," which correlates to their ability to target an ad directly to you. You see Google ads in many places around the web (even if you have an ad blocker), and their ability to serve you a good ad depends on how much attention you give to Google platforms, not just to Google's obvious ads. Google ads are 30% of ads on the web, not including the ads on its own platforms (search and youtube).
Isn't "monopolies suppress competition" one of the classic reasons people think they should be broken up? I'm not saying you have to agree with that theory, but just observing a current lack of competition doesn't by itself seem like an argument against breakup.
Google is not suppressing competition. There are plenty of competing browsers and search engines, they all suck. On the Mobile OS side there is less but substantially more robust competition, even though I, personally, hate iOS. So breaking Google up because of a theoretical problem that is refuted by reality is nonsensible.
> There are plenty of competing browsers and search engines, they all suck.
Maybe our difference in viewpoint is that I see this fact and wonder why it's seemingly impossible for anyone to build a financially viable alternative, and I'm at least open to the idea that it's very difficult to compete with Google when they can leverage their successful ads business to subsidize the investment into their browser.
Yes the alternatives are worse, but is that because Google is inherently smarter, or because the newcomers have a tiny fraction of the investment and usually fizzle out within a year or two? Google doesn't have to be actively trying to kill the competitors for it to have an anti-competitive effect in the market.
Also because Googles is part of the web committe because of Chrome, so it gets to dictate how much complexity is in a browser and stiffle competition like that.
MS and Apple have the same thing, they're just less successful. Just a browser and an OS was previously seen as antitrust (and it looks like MS is being anti-competitive in this space still). Just a browser and a search engine can allow anti-competitive behavior. Or just a search engine and an ads platform...
The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.
MS and Apple aren't companies who sell ads. MS and Apple are companies who sell tech products. Everyone analogizing the current situation with Google to Microsoft in 1999 is missing the core of the facts here. The Apple/Epic Games antitrust suits are much more similar to MS in 1999, but Google's antitrust issues are very different.
Google's product isn't its software, it's the attention of its users. Having this large and this dominant of a software/data platform attached to a company that sells attention is anti-competitive in the attention market.
Read MS's 10k and come back and seriously tell me they are an ad company. They don't have much ad infrastructure (that's outsourced), and they make very little of their money from ads. Microsoft is a software company, and some of that software is paid for with ads. Google is an advertising company.
Incidentally, this sort of proves the point that Google's ownership of platforms where ads are displayed puts them at an advantage compared to competitors, who have to go to people like MS for space.
A few years ago, one of the bigger points from the apple earnings was that its first party ads platform 10x'ed (or wtv, can't remember the number) its revenue after apple implemented "do not track" app changes.
The US never did anything about Microsoft owning a browser. There was never a browser choice screen in the US and Microsoft was never forced to sell Windows without a browser.
And we are already seeing that people are moving to both ChatGPT and perplexity for search. No one is forced to download Chrome or use Google for search.
Why is an ads company owning a browser any different than a phone company (Apple) or an operating system vendor?
> A company owning a web browser, OS and search engine shouldn't be a problem either
It is when Google compromises the privacy/security of Chrome because of their Ads/OS business.
For example, allowing first party cookies to be a maximum of 400 days versus Safari and Firefox where it is 7 days. These cookies are required by ads retargeting which is critical to effective ecommerce campaigns.
It also supports browser fingerprinting by advertisers which means that every random API Chrome adds (and they add a lot) directly improves their Ads revenue.
Advantage where ? Chinese tech companies are not competing outside China with one notable exception of TikTok (1) .
Global tech companies do not compete in China, the market is brutal for non Chinese companies with level of espionage, theft, sabotage that is allowed.
It is really small world for big tech, the same 5-10 companies dominate most of the world in most frequently used consumer products, and using that dominance to crowd out competitors in every new product category
(1) which is banned in few major markets like India already even if the US reverses the ban
> Chinese tech companies are not competing outside China with one notable exception of TikTok (1) .
This is absolutely not true. Most phones in Africa are Chinese now. Chinese internet companies are all over Asia outside of Japan/SK. Chinese cars (EVs, which arguably are tech), are now world-wide.
Tech companies or big tech conventionally usually mean software companies.
Every company is a tech company, if you want to be broad in your definition, they have to use tech to compete .
Actions on Chinese EV cars are either being seriously considered or already in effect in most major car markets.
All phones have been always more or less Chinese made forever including Apple, even Chinese badging is how it been for low/mid range for 10 years now, maybe Samsung does some local manufacturing in SK but no one else major does.
Budget phones or budget EVs with razor thin margins is not big tech and no DoJ action to break up Google is going to affect the way they are becoming Chinese or already are .
There is reason TikTok is the most valuable Chinese company and not a phone company, big tech have big margins and strong market effect on their own and not as a group (I.e. it would be hard to beat Chinese companies in a space , but no individual one (say byd) is irreplaceable by another Chinese company
Your words made me picture a typical American tech worker:
1.Bashes China with zero facts or sources, parroting English journalists who can’t read Chinese or grasp its nuances.
2.Lacks historical knowledge and critical thinking, clinging to a Hollywood mindset—quick to label, slow to question.
3.Worships the CIA and FBI, swallowing their propaganda while ignoring the obvious: they’re the dark forces wrecking the world 24/7.
Who is bashing China here ? You misunderstood my point
Chinese tech giants like Alibaba or Tencent or Baidu are just as good as western ones .
Their inability to go global has little do with just their technical ability to build products.
It is about whether other countries will be comfortable having what they perceive as CCP control in their markets particularly when their(ie foreign )companies do not have a level playing field in China
It is relatively easy for a country to ban a Chinese tech company or EV maker (1)because China doesn’t buy much or allow foreign companies to thrive to retaliate .
America being the biggest market and importer is the contributor to their soft power. This is what Trump is (ab)using today.
The tariffs that Trump announced recently on China is not getting a lot of attention as North American ones. The last trump administration also slapped some tariffs (not reversed by Biden) while few industries felt the pain of the reciprocal tariffs most of American industry did and will do just fine because America does not export as much to China, the people pay more of course and suffer inflation, but industry will come out broadly fine on Chinese tariffs. It is different for North America particularly Mexico due to deep integrated supply chain.
Western markets is most important not because of social cultural norms it is because it is the wealthiest today. Perhaps the global south will restore the balance this century but for next few decades that is the reality whether we like it not .
PS. My background as an Indian (or India’s complicated relationship with China) has little do with merits of this discussion, the world is not just bipolar, I am well aware that our media is just as propagandized as American or Chinese ones for that matter, but that is whole different topic .
(1) unless the country are not dependent on Chinese loans or on raw material export to China which is most of western / wealthier market
There is no such thing as a global south. There are developing countries which have a lot of differences between them. And in any case China is not a developing country but a middle income country. Many of the so called global south countries actually share a lot more traits with countries labeled as northern then other so called global south
Another perspective is Google is stifling American innovation by its megalithic presence in markets. Suppressing local growth in exchange for short term profitability.
Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through
one really easy example is the AI arms race. and make no mistake, it is an arms race that matters for maintaining global American supremacy and ensuring china stays secondary. LLMs are one of the very few recent technologies where the marginal cost of a user is well above zero; they require colossal build-out of energy and compute. everyone who's done a good job with them is either a tech giant or has become one in valuation. c.f. how Google specifically has been working on TPUs for years, produced solid models with Gemini, and offers them for a tiny fraction of the cost of others. having a large team experienced with scaling stuff perhaps better than anyone else is a good thing and google keeps those people paid.
Some things can only be done at scale, or are a side effect of solving problems at scale. It’s not quite so simple as “big is bad”.
Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.
China is not a democratic country. They don't break up companies, they forcefully remove their CEOs from their positions, or put them to jail or they can put a bullet to their head for disobeying the Party.
It does but for totally dysfunctional different reasons, Emperor Xi fears any underling doing too good as a threat to his power and cracks down on entire markets. China has been regularly engaged in this sort of outright self sabotage.
I can't find information on what would happen to Chromium, would google need to hand it over too? That's probably more important than the fate of Chrome.
The only thing being specific is chrome the product launches. Selling of the pixel phone business wouldn't require also selling android for instance, so arguably its the same.
Google has to sell Chrome, a completely optional browser, and stop supporting Firefox, the best Chrome alternative, while Apple is allowed to completely lock down iOS without allowing installing alternatives to Safari, or any third party app stores. Not to mention that Apple for years exploited its dominant market position in the US by resisting messaging RCS Android compatibility, and pressuring teens into either buying into the Apple or ecosystem or risk being socially ostracized from incompatible group chats. It seems to be more that a double standard.
Google is just incompetent at PR and legal. That is how Epic won against Google and lost against Apple, even though Android is far far more open than iOS.
Epic lost their's, while ironically winning the Google one... Where you were always able to install a third party app store, they just didn't let you do it through the official store.
The iOS app store monopoly is unreal. Epic's case should have been a slam dunk, they got removed from the app store by offering a discount if people went through their processor instead of Apple's, proving harm to the consumer by simply expecting less than 30% for simply processing a payment.
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
The difference is pretty obvious, no? Google search and Chrome are genuine monopolies: they complete dominate their respective markets. Chrome decides which JS APIs and which other HTML extensions are available in all browsers. If Chrome implements it, all others follow or it is IE6-style "this only works in Chrome" for everyone. Notice that every browser's UI has followed Chrome. Every browser offers identical webextensions. Etc.
For Google search, the quality has gone down enormously and yet it has lost approximately 0 market share. It is still utterly dominant. This was used to push people to Chrome, and still is. It was used to dominate the web ads market. And so on: market power used to increase market power in other markets. Classic anticompetitive behaviour.
Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in any market. Even in the US, where their position is strongest relative to Android, it still isnt even close to a monopoly.
iOS isn't a monopoly so there is nothing wrong with it being locked down. It doesn't pressure "teens" into anything. Teenagers will pick up on anything they can to create peer pressure themselves. They would just say "lol nice loser android phone" when they saw the phone in person anyway lol.
First I don't believe this is an effective remedy to break up a Google monopoly, but I have no influence on the DOJ.
I'm curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space?
How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?
What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome extensions?
As much as I dislike Google behavior, I don't see this as being a good thing.
You call them Chrome extensions, but they're really Chromium extensions that work on Edge, Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, etc. Those teams contribute code to the Chromium open source project too. Sure, whoever takes over Chrome won't have Googles juggernaut team pushing Chromium development forward, and maybe that will lead to degradation over time, but it's not like it would cause immediate ecosystem collapse. For all my psychic prediction powers know, getting rid of the monopoly could lead to a renaissance in browser tech via stronger competition. This could go either way.
It was more than just too many competing browsers, from what I understand. It was a few competing browsers that interpreted standards completely different, and a standards body that was slow enough to be completely ineffective.
I'd argue that the main problem was not too much competition, but effective anti-competitive behavior (and simple laziness) from Microsoft in particular. The frustrating experience was primarily caused by Internet Explorer.
> How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?
Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?
As much as I loved Chrome when it first came out, I’ve also been well aware that Google’s backing of Chrome (and Chromium) has given it undue advantages in the browser market by effectively making everyone else compete with a loss leader. If Chrome itself cannot sustain its pace of development or even stay alive without the unlimited funding by Google, then I think that is a good thing and proof that it acting as a monopoly. Forcing Chrome to balance product velocity with revenue constraints evens the field amongst all browsers.
(edit: If Google killing competition by injecting unlimited funding into a project without needing to make a profit sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve done this for a long time. The often cited example being Google Reader.)
> Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?
What would this business model be like, if, say, Google Chrome is eliminated?
As a reference, in China, very few people use Chrome because Google services are blocked. There are tons of third-party or vendor preinstalled browsers that bundles with bloatwares, put ads/clickbaits on every new tab, and spy on users. I'm pretty sure they are more sustainable than Firefox, former Opera, etc. But that's certainly a privacy dystopia :)
But, it also goes back to browsers being built by the operating system, that was also a no-no, e.g. MSFT / IE.
Browsers then shouldn't be a profit center, but ironically google starting chrome made it one and then defined web standards. IE afaik wasn't a profit center, and MSFT hedged outsourcing all dev costs to practically google and forking it offically to Edge, lol.
In China, the vast majority of people are exclusively on mobile, where they use neither browsers nor even Android apps but rather manifold applets that are installed on top of a handful of nightmare spyware super-apps like WeChat.
we will end up again with edge being dominant just because it's the default one installed by Windows.
what you say is nice in theory but you already have the Microsoft backed Edge and Apple backed Safari that are not hamppered by the "need to find a support model" and "not be a loss leader"
And I am not looking forward again to a world where Microsoft disctates web development because for all privacy problems peaople have or think to have with Google, Microsoft ha proven that does way worse and doesn't even care for the image.
All in All Chrome being a loss leader backed by Google has been a good thing for all involved. Developers, Users and 3-rd parties. without it you woudn't have all those 3rd party chrome based browsers.
The point is simple: Google has a monopoly in search and has used its control of Chrome to maintain that monopoly. There is no monopoly in browsers, and the DOJ has evaluated that selling off Chrome will not adversely affect the browser market. If we go from Chrome having 66% market share to Edge having 66%, but in the interim the search market has seen more entrants competing fairly, wouldn't that be a benefit?
The DOJ logic is its going to fix the search market! Are you seriously believing that it will take a year for people to give Microsoft a monopoly position in browsers (which Google still hasn't achieved) when Google divest itself from Chrome?
Get real, the DOJ forcing Google to get rid of Chrome is one of the best tech news in years!
I’m a bit confused by this comment. I didn’t mention any of those and didn’t callout any specific business models for browsers. Just that Chrome would need to figure out how to monetize itself like how other browsers are trying to do. Diving into the different business models that other browsers are trying is a very different conversation that needs nuance. For example, how would Brave and Orion fit into your remark?
I think this viewpoint is too simplistic in that the assumption is that if Google has to divest Chrome, then there is no benefit to investing in Chromium. I think that is too black and white (see my other comment on why - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43306985).
Let’s do a thought experiment - If Google truly felt that Chromium has no benefit, then smaller players will drive the project and, as others have pointed out, new feature proposals/implementations will slow down. That isn’t a bad thing in my opinion because it allows other engines to not be stuck in catchup mode. The field will start to even out and innovations will start to come from alternative engines. With an even playing field, what was once an unprofitable endeavor can become a differentiator in the browser ecosystem.
If Google is still paying the maintainers of chromium what would change in your example?
The real question is what happens when Google stops paying Mozilla and Apple unthinkable amounts of money for Google search to be the default on their browsers?
It seems clear that Mozilla intends to just become an ad company themselves and who knows what Apple's response will be, I doubt it's going to be to increase the amount of development on Safari vs where they currently are.
So if Google has to effectively divest from Chromium but still supports it's development but now isn't paying the only two current competitors what is the expected outcome there? Whoever now owns Chromium becomes even more of a monopoly, and Google doesn't even need to pay them to make Google the default for it to be implied they are to be the default or the developers go away.
Maybe in the actual long term we will see an improvement from this decision, but all I see in the short - midterm is more invasive user tracking in all current browsers that isn't Safari, which you can only use on Apple devices anyway.
> Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?
There is no such business model. Chromium development is almost entirely funded by Google. Other Chromium based browser rely on this humonguous investment of development resources; they would not have a "business model" without this "free handout", except perhaps Microsoft and Edge, who might be able to fund it by doing basically what Google is doing.
Good? I think sucking the air out of the browser ecosystem might be a good thing so they slow their roll. The breakneck speed Chrome adds features and devs adopt them is part of what makes it so damn expensive to keep up.
I think this could be a double edged sword. Slowing down new browser feature/"standards" could allow browser competition, yes. On the other hand, people don't explicitly need a web browser in 2025 like they did in 2015 - many operate mobile-only. Let's say browser features additions fall drastically behind native mobile, and content publishers progressively limit access to native clients only. The web browser market might be more free/open/competitive, but it doesn't mean much if the market just moves beyond the web.
Does the concept of an interoperable world wide web fade into obscurity? In other words, does separating Chrome from Google make the web better, or is Google's investment in the web holding back the death of the web?
Not sure how Chromium development relates to the order of divesting *Chrome* from Google. AFAICT, Google can continue pouring resources into Chromium. Was this an unintentional mixup in your comment?
Great question and one that I hope people would put more thought into. Here are two possible reasons off the top of my head:
- pushing for web ecosystem features that would help their own products (ex: Gmail, docs, etc)
- pushing for web enhancements that back SEO metrics that matter to them (ex: core web vitals)
I don’t think it’s as simple as - no more Chrome == no more investment into Chromium because Chrome/Chromium has been their strongest lever for getting web features that Google wants standardized. Stopping investment in that area cedes control of the web to other players who may have opposing goals to Google.
When google hit 51%+ of market share in search/mail (back in like 2005) they began to just fund "internet access" in general. They assumed that new users would put more money into googles pockets than other peoples pockets. Virtuous revenue circle.
Nowadays (post Omni-bar), one could argue that "the internet" is really a captive portal from g-browser, g-omnibar, g-search results, g-renderer with "content" being significantly funded by g-ads (of which a significant portion of _that_ is returned to google for search placement).
Take away "any browser at all" and does google then ship "Google Electron, powered by Google" that strips the Omni-bar and is a desktop client / portal into g-search, g-docs, etc... and then close off access to Google apps unless through the Google client?
You can't book uber without the uber client, why are you able to use Google without the google client?
Provide a read-only HTML4.0 version to plebes with lots of popovers and banners saying: "for the best experience..."
It's an interesting thought experiment, letting "the internet" lie fallow as each proprietary database attempts to accrue more content...
At the same time though, being developed under a company which derives most of its revenue from ads seems to be a big conflict of interest to a free and open web. We have already seen this conflict of interest with Manifest V3, which takes away freedom from the users, and almost with remote web attestation before Google held off it's development due to the backlash (but I can see them trying to implement it again while Chrome is still under control of Google/Alphabet.) It also doesn't help that Chrome and the underlying browser engine powers just about every major browser other than Firefox, which is struggling.
So what will sustain the development of browsers like Chrome or Firefox? Well that's the big question... Maybe they will downsize and become a non-profit similar to the Linux Foundation, and receive funding similar to how they do? I can see this have the affect of greatly slowing down the development of various web standards, but would that be such a bad thing?
I don't want another subscription-based app, but out of all the software that brings me actual significant value on a daily basis, a web browser is very near the top of the list.
Even though getting it free (as I do right now) is nice, $36/year seems justifiable.
I loath chrome profiles. I use two accounts at the same time in the same window, different tabs. I don't want two windows. Every.F*cking.Day: "which profile do you want to load?". Neither! Leave me alone!
I'm always a little surprised how we (HN readers) are so against paying for software. If any group understands the work that goes into major software packages and the value we derive from it, it should be us.
Who do you think should pay for it? What is the value to them? Do their incentives align well with yours?
I switched to the free Chrome because it was a better browser. Just because I was paying for software doesn't mean it's a good situation for me.
>Who do you think should pay for it? [...] Do their incentives align well with yours?
Even if I (the customer) directly pay for software instead of ads indirectly paying, it still doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.
I paid $80 for a text editor but after being frustrated with bugs in the latest version, I took a serious look at the free VS Code. I realized that the editor I was paying for had really stagnated and lacking modern features. I should have quit funding them a long time ago.
Another example is Quicken home finance software. Kept paying $60+ annual renewal fee every year and yet the software keeps getting worse. Downloads of credit-card and bank transactions randomly quit working. The ledger balances on my desktop don't match the balances shown online. I had used the software for almost 30 years since the DOS floppy disk days and just finally gave up. I look at the 1-star reviews of Quicken on Amazon and browse the Quicken help forums and everybody complains about the same defects.
Often, what happens is companies don't respect their paying customers because they know they're locked in because of inertia or sunk costs. They just treat their repeat customers as ATM machines and barely improve the software. (E.g. They make superficial cosmetic changes to UI instead of fixing core engine bugs.)
I'm not convinced paying a subscription for a web browser will give me a better browser. Maybe it will. But I doubt it.
I’m convinced subscription software actively makes this problem worse: with the old model, the developer had to include enough new features and improvements to convince you to open your wallet for a large purchase. With subscription the developer has no incentive to fix anything because the product goes away if you stop paying for it.
I would argue that subscription is the only sensible model for browser (if payment is needed). For browsers you do want to keep up to date with security patches as well as new features, that is pretty critical for both usability and security.
For normal software you can buy and use some fixed version without too much issues, for browsers you probably need the updates.
Security-wise maybe something like buying a ESR version may be possible, but it will not be cheap and you may miss the new features when some webpage you visit breaks.
Get ready for having your data sold to everyone. Rather than just a few major players having access, anyone willing to pay will get the raw data rather than something obfuscated through an ads platform.
First I'd separate Google Search from everything else. Then the ad marketplace business. Then YouTube. The others are weak enough they could coexist in one organization IMO.
- Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acq
> - Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.
Actually, this is hardly healthy.
Firefox feel this single source of can be deprived anytime that they tried many other alternative -- like VPN, partnership with pockets, some sponsor ad on tab selection, and even selling some data
> Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status
I'm thinking 500M/year is enough to pay for a lot more developers than they currently have. Even half that should be enough to do more than they are. Where is all this money going?
It's going towards a lot of controversial things unrelated to Firefox development or any open source software development by any reasonable standard. Here's one attempt at breaking down their finances: https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4387539/firefox-money-invest...
No it wasn't? They itemized some budget items worth less than a million dollars in total, and then, for each entity getting part of that money they admitted they had no idea who they were or what they did for Mozilla (but one of them had abortion rights mentioned on their blog!)
Incredibly lazy "expose" trying to be a twitter files.
Why is a company that relies on donations and Google to prop them up pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on that? That's not interesting to you at all?
The non-profit owns the for-profit. The for-profit pays out profits to the non-profit. Non-profit uses that money for things they think are in line with their values. Where is the issue?
- Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare on the SEM clicks themselves?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acquiring the Browser Company would make a lot of sense.
Ok, but if Google is not allowed to pay Apple for search referrals, how exactly will it be legal for Google to pay not-Google-Chrome for search referrals?
Chrome's non-iOS market share is probably larger than Safari's market share, so any monopoly considerations about Safari apply equally to Chrome.
> Google pays Firefox ~$500M/year for 2.5% market share, 65% market share should get a healthy annual payout for default search status.
Google gets other value with this besides being the default search engine. Keeping Firefox alive makes it so that Chrome is less of a monopoly.
> and an aggressive fork at some point
Maintaining a browser engine is a lot of work. With no clear upside, no one would invest the work in maintaining a fork. Related to this, Microsoft gave up maintaining a (partially) separate browser engine for Edge, and now just uses Chromium
Google already monitizes Chrome with chrome enterprise (premium) and similar offerings for education where Chrome OS is used extensively. Schools and enterprises have little choice but to buy these to use chrome securely, and they could easily move even more of the management features behind these paid plans.
They also already charge to be an extension developer and could easily charge much more.
That's true but most of the features are for the chrome management panel or client side, which would all presumably be separated from workspace and inherited by the new company. They could then move features from the free tier into the premium tier to put pressure on enterprises and schools to pay.
There are some cross-cutting server side features for context aware access for google workspace and google cloud, which were inherited from beyondcorp enterprise, so those would presumably stay with the real google of course.
The same way Linux does. By being an independent nonprofit that all the big players in the web space fund because it is in all of their interests to do so. Whether such a model can work without a man like Linus Torvalds though is an open question.
Chrome could probably make a huge amount of money by doing what people assume Google does but actually doesn't - selling users browsing history.
Google uses a complex anonymization/privacy framework to collect some aggregate signals from website visits, but they don't use it directly.
Regulators don't understand this, and technologists who do tend to distrust Google anyway and think they might secretly be using it.
There are all sort so other sketchy things, like what Edge does injecting itself into websites so Microsoft collects affiliate revenue.
There are countries where this wouldn't be allowed, but Google is largely self regulating in its biggest market.
All this would lose Chrome some market share but they are starting from a very dominant position, and for the general public it wouldnt be a big deal - people are already convinced that iOS and android devices are listening to them at all times for ad targeting!
> All this would lose Chrome some market share but they are starting from a very dominant position, and for the general public it wouldnt be a big deal - people are already convinced that iOS and android devices are listening to them at all times for ad targeting!
IMO, journalists are to blame for this perception. All the journalists that pushed this false narrative should be banned from the field. This is what happens when an "anything for clicks" mentality takes over and directly harms society.
Unironically, the world be better off if the "advancement" in the space of web browsers comes to an end. This ever-expanding scope of what a web browser is "supposed" to do and be is good for no one. When it's finite, it's much easier to build a new browser engine from scratch. Which is something we should be doing much more as a society. To that end, I'm really excited about Ladybird.
So, like, let's pick a set of criteria where web standards are considered complete, and move towards that. And when we do reach it, just stop.
> what is the business model that will sustain [Chrome] development
Separate Search + Google Ads platform as company A, Android + Chrome + Gmail as company B.
It will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!
Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, licensed by HW vendors. Like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point.
> How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?
You're literally pointing out the unfair advantage. The better question is how can all of the competitors manage? The answer is they can't very well because of the unfair advantage which Chrome has. If Chrome was split from Google (and Edge from Microsoft) browsers would be on a more equal playing field.
If you look carefully at the Chromium project, it’s made up of teams that specialize in different components. The majority of the members of those teams are in turn Google employees. Presumably they have the best qualifications to be on those teams. I don’t see how a DOJ decision against Google would change any of that. Ban Google employees from participating in the project? And then who would replace them?
I am not sure why you are being downvoted. This just means existing OS monopolies of Apple and Microsoft are given entire control of their kingdoms with no web landscape to challenge them a teeny tiny bit.
But we are not discussing Chromium. Google’s browser is Chrome, and that product has search exclusivity deals that have been deemed monopolistic.
Google could divest the Chrome product and keep contributing to Chromium, but the value proposition is really unclear when that OSS investment doesn’t buy you billions of dollars of browser lock-in value.
Thus why the Linux Foundation is gunning for Chromium. (When do we rename the Linux Foundation? Only 3.2% of their revenue goes to Linux development these days...)
My question is, even if they do sell off Chrome, wouldn't Google just create another "Chrome" using the Chromium and use its monopolistic power to push it on everyone? What am I missing here?
It doesn't sound like this would solve the issue..
Are you assuming the people crafting remedies haven't thought of this? You should tell them immediately!!! LOL. of course they've thought through that and will have a "you can't just rebuild it" clause in the remedy. This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard and I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that except to side with Big Tech over consumers trying to muddy the waters and convince others it's all just too darned hard to do anything about so we should let our betters in Big Tech continue dictating our lives.
Forcing Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers to move to Manifest v3, i.e. deleting the ability from the browser to have good adblockers, is incredibly valuable to Google.
I was just forced to switch from uBO to uBO lite because of this. I can't see any difference in behavior, and now the extension doesn't need unlimited permissions.
Same way it worked in the past with monopolies like Ma Bell?
Those teams can keep working on Chrome, they'll just have to fall under some new kind of separate Chrome Inc. structure instead of under Google Inc., and Google will have to sell most of its shares of Chrome Inc. to third parties.
Splitting off Chrome really isn't the problem. Making the new Chrome Inc. profitable without accepting bribes from big tech, on the other hand...
Yes, that's sort of the problem. An independent Chrome probably wouldn't be profitable. This is essentially just forcing Google to fire the Chrome developers.
Of course they could. They could just cancel Chrome, shut the whole browser down and reassign all the staff, and the DOJ would be fine with that. Cancelling it, or selling while keeping 100% of the employees are in no way counter to the proposed remedies.
Yeah, I could imagine Microsoft making a bid. To people who don't follow tech product ownership, "Windows comes with Chrome instead of Edge" would be good PR and it could basically be Edge minus the rebranding.
Thinking about what companies have the adtech infrastructure to buy Chrome and make enough money the justify a bid high enough than Google just shutting it down: Microsoft, Meta/Facebook, Bytedance?
I don't see a real need for Chrome. The stuff they've done to break Adblocking makes it pretty much a dead project today. Web browser development should be open source and not for profit. There is a fair argument that it has been because of Google's funding. There's a strong argument that Chrome has existed to further Google's business and at a minimum protect it's business and ensure third parties didn't hijack all of their PPC revenue in the early days.
It is easy to foresee an outcome here where someone politically connected gets a hold of Chrome and does a lot of crap they shouldn't. The worst case outcome is unrelated to any of this, and something where we end up with government mandated garbage in a web browser. It is very possible that DRM and biometric age verification, and who the fuck knows what else thanks to AI, could be required either by the US or EU, and kill the open source web browser. That's worse than anything Google did.
Short term no. Langer term they would use it to leverage other things like Google does. Maybe not advertising, although they do seem to be leaning on that now with ads in software.
I love how people in this thread just unilaterally declare and accept as fact that you can't possibly turn the monopolistic browser and browser engine powering millions of devices and with billions of users into a profitable business. Aim low I guess?
So please enlighten us, how will someone make money from the free product that is free and no one pays for because it is free?
Selling user browser data obviously won't fly (and note that Google has never explicitly nor directly sold user's browsing data as far as I know, but they do have a huge ad network that utilises cookies...), so what's the plan? Put ads in the browser? "Premium" features?
The only thing I can think of is highjacking links to Amazon et al to insert referral codes en masse, or selling links/ads on new tab pages.
All of these are fine examples of how a not-Google Chrome could make money. They could even get paid by Microsoft or some other not-Google search for that traffic.
This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard to convince us all we should just give up and let Google continue running our online lives through monopolization.
Because all of that is super-shady privacy-invading and foisting ads and monetisation in places where it wasn't before. Enshitification at its most user-hostile. How is that a positive to users?
Sounds to me that taking chrome away from Google will be a net-negative for the users.
Can you change the chromium license so that rebranding/embedding/electron usage is now paid. Embedding is now a paid feature starting with 10000 installations. You can make selenium paid after certain scale.
The details could be worked out. The idea is to make big corporations pay while keeping it free for users.
> Presumably they have the best qualifications to be on those teams.
What exactly are "best qualifications?" More simply are you assuming that myself and Google share a definition of "best qualified?" I genuinely don't believe that we do.
> And then who would replace them?
People working for a different company. Is your case that without Google no one would make web browsers?
Think about difference between Brave and Chrome. Both Chromium browsers but Brave is much less intrusive and exploitative of user data. More Brave and less Chrome would allow average user greater privacy and less reliance on large corporations perhaps
“When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
How long is Firefox going to be held to a standard that none of the other vendors are realistically held to?
They change their ToS in an unfavorable way and yes I think it’s criticism they need to hear.
However, has Chrome, Brave (I don’t look favorably on their cryptocurrency initiatives) Edge , Safari etc. been held to the same, in practice? Why isn’t Chrome barraged with negative sentiment the same way? It has far worse ToS policies (which doesn’t make Firefox “right” or “just”)
Because if that is upsetting then using Chrome should be outright enraging, yet people hardly mention it’s consistent anti user behavior as often as people jump on Mozilla and a Firefox for anything they do that is seen as unfavorable
I believe that has been changed to something more like:
“You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
Keep Google Chrome. Separate search. Sell it to private equity. (I bet DoJ didn’t think about that whammy.)
And start charging for everything else out there like maps, street view, and browser. And buy cloudflare while at it. Push themselves into everything related to connectivity and internet properties.
The search business is the cash flow that is being a thorn in the side of Google. And it doesn’t even make sense in its vision anymore.
You sort of make an interesting point. Google search isn't the main product, hasn't been for a decade. Still I don't think Google Ads would do amazing without the traffic from Google Search.
But it does solve an important problem: Who in their right mind would buy Chrome? It's not a profitable business to be in, without the surrounding ad business, and in turn the insane amount of traffic from Google Search.
Almost by definition, anyone who would be interested in buying Chrome and turning it into a commercial product shouldn't be allowed to buy it. The only buyer I can imaging is OpenText.
Cloudflare has been a continual breath of fresh air compared to Google Cloud and AWS. Please oh please don’t suggest selling it to google to let it atrophy its way to the graveyard
> Keep Google Chrome. Separate search. Sell it to private equity.
This. If Search + Google Ads is independent from Android + Chrome + Gmail, it will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!
Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point. No need to feed Google Ads with data anymore!
I'm not sure what exactly Doubleclick network is, but my proposal is - Google keeps Search + all Ads related stuff, including whatever doubleclick is.
What Google loses is everything client (user) side: Chrome, Android, Gmail and other personal cloud services. Lets call it Foogle :)
Foogle can charge Samsung et al. for its Android and personal cloud services it is running. And use it in its own Pixel devices too. And may elect to make it hard for Google to sniff it, like droppung doobleclick cookies in Foogle Chrome, provide "Foogle Private Relay", et cetera.
You are proposing Chrome+ Everything Else. DOJ doesn't want the Chrome+Search entanglement. So the company getting rid of search would be an alternative idea. Search would still have the adwords revenue model. But it would be separated from the google ad network which is adsense and doubleclick. All your data on Chrome/Android would still be accessible to Doubleclick and Google for personalized ad revenue.
At this point, tech's major competitors are overseas. Never thought I'd be making this argument, but does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?
There are certainly some short term consumer gains to be made in decoupling the oppressive monopoly of android, payments, chromium, search, and ads. If Google wants to send their search experience to shit that should probably be their right to mismanage, but the ramming home of Manifest v3 and Google Play Protect in the interest of nobody is beyond the pale.
Let's not turn into game-theory bros here. Despite the nationalist, pie-dividing rhetoric the billionaires are foisting upon us, it remains favorable to grow the pie with competitive markets.
A bigger pie isn't desirable if most of the slices go to a select few. Or to use Lincoln's rising boats metaphor, a rising tide isn't great if most boats are full of holes.
Does upholding monopolies help Americans at all? Do not conflate the ballooning wealth of billionaires with any kind of improvement in your material conditions.
Ok, well in that case, sure. But the alternative to US monopoly is not automatically Chinese monopoly. No one was advocating for the destruction of Google in favor of Baidu or whatever.
The person you were responding to was explicitly comparing US vs Chinese monopolies. Maybe it is a false dichotomy, but that was the situation that the post was brining up.
It’s not clear that Chinese owned monopolies are any good at breaking out. They seem to suffer from the same problem as Japan where their market is so unique and insular that a lot of products do not carry over all that well.
WeChat, for example, is the end all be all megaplatform in China but never took off with any Western consumers simply because they’re uninterested.
It also goes bothends, there were numerous western messaging apps that come and go, wechat has been around since the AIM and blackberry messenger PIN days. Where are those two protocols/messsaging apps now?
It isn't insular, it's just it was the only local solution - same for Line having a lock on Japan and Thailand but not much of asia, and kakaotalk for Korea.
Wechat hasn't really been super popular since AIM days. ~15 years ago when I was in China I don't think it even existed, and 10 years ago there was significant numbers of people using qq still instead of WeChat (or rather not in addition to? Lot of people still use both).
I don't think it overtook qq until like 8 yrs ago? At which point AIM was already discontinued, and 10 years past any kind of popularity.
>does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?
Big companies tend to calcify. We can see that in FAMANG's products. Big companies can also remove any direct competition in multiple ways that smaller companies can't:
1. Bankrupt them through frivolous litigation.
2. Buy them.
3. Lower their prices so new competitors who don't have economies of scale can't be price competitive.
4. Propose legislative regulation that they can afford but smaller competitors can't.
5. Pay for negative news articles to be written against their competition (FUD).
6. Poach their talent.
I'm sure there's more. Anyhow, monopoly status generally leads to stagnation not innovation.
As an American there is nothing I would love to see more than Google broken up into a thousand pieces and their stock reduced to negative amounts to atone for all the damage wrought upon the web in the past two decades.
Agreed. I wouldn't feel this way if they had never had "Do No Evil" as an internal mantra. Walking away from that? Well, that was the point I removed as much Google from my life as possible. I'd be happy to remove the rest.
The main benefit of having US monopolies is the spying capabilities that it enables. No other country ever had such a global surveillance network.
For the average American, both the efficient parts of monopolies (reduced redundancy which means fewer well-paying jobs) as well as the inefficient parts (reduced competition, higher prices, reduced standards of living) are net negatives. The political influence inherent to monopolies are also a negative effect on democracy, whereas foreign monopolies tend to have a harder time maintaining political influence.
On the other hand, keeping all eggs in one basket, which is Google, in this case, is unlikely to make it more competent against oversea competition anyway.
Monopolies lead to no competition, leading to reduced innovation, economic stagnation, consolidation of wealth and power. That directly harms the American people and if left unchecked other countries may actually start to get ahead, especially if they maintain a fair market environment within their own country and ban American monopolies.
If the concern is that people will start using Baidu search, then the solution should be to ban Baidu search. It shouldn't be to let some monopolies run rampant with the hopes that other countries will never be able to compete, while forgetting that free market economy is what made America
> Monopolies lead to no competition, leading to reduced innovation, economic stagnation
That sounds smart, but is it actually true? How many of the things enabling the existence of this website are inventions made in the research institute of the Bell Telecom company.
On top of my head, there are transistors, C, Unix and a fair bit of cryptographical work. I'm sure others can add a lot more to the list.
Hell, this website recently carried an article that mentioned that the very financial concepts that enable companies like Y-combinator to exist were invented by a researcher at Bell labs.[1]
>"How many of the things enabling the existence of this website are inventions made in the research institute of the Bell Telecom company."
In both giving them the bankroll to research it pre-breakup, and the economic freedom to pursue it under separate ventures post-forced breakup - it was most likely equally valuable.
A lot of things that make our modern apparatus' possible came from both Bell Labs research, and Bell Labs branching out by force.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 342 ms ] threadDOJ asks for judgement requiring Google to divest Chrome [pdf] (31 points 30 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296045
If you want to go with ethics and trust, I am not particular fond of Brave practice of replacing ads for some shady cryptocurrency (BAT). You don't have to do that, you can just use it as an adblocking browser, but if you don't care about these things, the news of Firefox updating some privacy policy shouldn't affect you too much either.
Anyways, both Firefox and Brave/Chromium are open source, you can see what data is being sent out, and there are forks.
And to make things clear, I am not really a fan of Mozilla direction, I just switched because Firefox became better and Chrome worse in the last years.
Mozilla has not proven themselves to be trustworthy, but I think most would still consider them to be less untrustworthy than Google. Firefox offers similar levels of support, feature parity, and performance to Chrome, which makes it an easy alternative to recommend. There are certainly other non-chromium options worth considering, but Firefox is still by far the most accessible.
No PWA support out of the box last time I looked. And Firefox (understandably but annoyingly) doesn't support some of the non-standardised Chrome APIs such as the File System Access API.
Sundar just has to pay the $5M to have dinner at Mara Lago and the next day Trump will be talking about how unfairly Google has been treated, probably blaming China or Canada or something for this DOJ action, and the DOJ will drop the remedy. Probably will fire some employees for daring to pursue this while they're at it.
Whichever oligarch or ruling class ultra-rich whispers in Trump's ear last gets the full force of government for their cause.
Like, surely everyone knows this is absolutely how your banana-republic, profoundly corrupt government works now, right? At least be honest about it.
Especially not when there are other third party browsers. Wouldn't say no to a government funded one that was secure and tested with government services.
There are some issues with the big tech giants that is likely harmful to consumers and the industry, and I'd welcome anti-trust investigations into all of them, but I feel like minor issues like browsers is an attempt to pretend like meaningful regulation and government control has been applied, while the real problems are ignored.
Yes because the government is so well run with competent people waiting in line to join it in the era of DOGE?
Do you think that a web browser would be free of politics?
Which government, though? The US is mired in corruption at the moment, and the UK is taking an extended dump on privacy, Russia is … Russia and China doesn't really believe in privacy or freedom of speech, among other things.
The same government services that require things like recaptcha to work? The situation in the US is far worse than just "I need to use a BigTech browser to access government services".
Manifest v3 and Web Integrity API are prominent examples of Google's team shaping how all Chromium based browsers will be, regardless of pushback (though they relented with the latter for now).
Your claim that the web integrity API is only temporarily cancelled has no evidence supporting it.
This problem really needs to be fixed, though I have no idea how...
And even if there are 10mil lines they shouldn't be a monolith
In theory, yes. In reality, the more diverged forks become from mainstream the more expensive they become to maintain, until eventually it becomes entirely unsustainable. With the sheer number of Chrome patches Google churns out, the level of divergence where maintainence becomes overwhelming is actually pretty low. It’s like trying to handle Niagara Falls with a Solo cup.
So in effect, what Google says goes.
* This is not a Biden-admin lawsuit. It was launched by the first Trump admin.
* Of the 14 co-plaintiffs, only 1 (CA) is a state that didn't vote for Trump in 2024. The Colorado Plaintiff States include another 16 red states, for a total of 29 red states represented.
As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled, it's actually been doing exactly what it said it would do to satisfy its base. This lawsuit was started by them in the first place and if the list of Attorneys General is anything to go by has overwhelming support from the base that Trump is acting to satisfy. Google's not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now, it's far too late for that.
Trump's MO seems to be to take something away, then give it back and declare himself the savior of it. Just look at all the chaos with tariffs recently
Why? Because it's essentially the defacto way/portal/thing to access to the biggest source of information humanity has: the web.
It's too big and important for any 1 company - tho saying that, I'm okay with Windows being owned by Microsoft which is (was) basically the same thing in a way.
My unsolicited advice to Google: sacrifice it, focus on AI. To all the people on the Chrome team? They should be financially taken care of, and should be part of the foundation that develops it if they want. The foundation should not be controlled by Alphabet, but should be truly public.
This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea.
Windows is much worse by most metrics. I can't fork Windowsium and build (and sell) my own fully-compatible, 99.999999% R&D paid for by Microsoft, OS.
> This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea
It is a bit vague :) In that: who pays for it? Who decides what features are in or out? Public utilities are generally what we make things when they're feature complete and the only challenge is rolling it out as cheaply as possible. But it feels like web browsers have a way to go yet. There's nothing stopping the US government (or any government) from bulding their own browser off Chromium right now. Nothing needs selling or splitting.
It’d be neat if the EU picked up the torch here but with any government it seems like it’d be better to have a non-profit get a block grant so you avoid things like those salary issues or other challenges: for example, if the EU decided they didn’t want to depend on the U.S. for critical infrastructure, funding a back-to-its-roots Mozilla.org would make it easier for, say, Canada or India to join in without the issues you’d have trying to directly pay government employee salaries.
I don't know. I think today the EU could set up EUBrowser, a fork of Chromium, and start work. Almost all the hard work has been done by OSS contributions. Google engineers, and Google-funded things such as Firefox. They could live off that comfortably while providing a more locked-down browser if they liked.
A more meaningful, less parasitic option would take longer: the EU (or whomoever) writes a browser from scratch. Then they could decide exactly what goes into it, and have independent input into standards etc.
Forgive me for being blunt, but what idea? If the question is who is supposed to fund Chromium and Firefox going forward then you haven't actually offered any ideas.
Commercial funding is not necessarily more reliable in general. Google keeps shutting down stuff all the time. But in this particular case, the commercial interest is so strong that funding is secure.
In my opinion, governments should focus on natural monopolies (taxation, violence, justice, transport infrastructure, water, etc) and on areas where there is broad consensus for a public option (health, schools, etc).
Where governments fund random stuff that few people understand the importance of, there is a big risk of the whole thing getting DOGEd or starved to stagnation. The government would never put up a fight against Apple relegating the web platform to the status of a glorified document viewer.
In my opinion, the status quo is flawed but the alternatives are worse.
If the court decides that Google must "divest" Chrome, they will have to say what that means for an open source project. If it basically comes down to Google being banned from controlling the default search engine setting in any web browser, then their main incentive for funding Chrome would be gone.
If that happens, the only solution I see is a joint "Chrome Foundation" effort funded by a number of corporations with a less direct interest in the viability of the web, i.e the Linux model. But this would be very disruptive. I fear that browser development would be aimless and start to stagnate. Other oligopolists would quickly take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum.
Maybeee the EU but we are talking about an American ruling.
The government does not need to maintain a browser to enforce this rule. It would simply tell people that logging into the internet requires government ID now, and the ISPs would make it so or be shut down.
The government could however, if it maintained a browser, guarantee that the internet would be accessible without a government ID, just by not putting that feature in their browser. A government browser would be subject to the constitution, debate, public comment, and legislation; rather than having to sue companies to get anything done.
Google, Apple, and Mozilla are not protecting you from the government. They're intimately financially interconnected with each other, and can decide what the entire world is going to have to tolerate on the web on a group chat. Without government intervention (even if just to collect bribes), they'd all just probably merge and enslave the planet.
The first Trump admin was positively benign and adult compared to the current one. The first Trump admin had significant checks and balances on its behaviours.
And of course almost everyone who served in that first Trump admin campaigned against/warned about Trump this time, which should be telling. Or maybe they're just "RINOs" or something.
"As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled"
This administration is extraordinarily unprincipled and self-serving. The DOJ as a tool for use at the leisure and to the benefit of the president/king is blatantly in the open[1].
"Google's not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now"
I would bet real money they absolutely will get out from this. Not only that they will get out from it, they'll get the public "treated unfairly" speech as well.
[1] - There is a major plot point in the 1993 movie The Pelican Brief where the simple insinuation that the president influenced the DOJ in any way would be so politically devastating that it would destroy his administration. This is so quaint now. How far the country has fallen.
Most Arguments in both directions are basically unprovable and amount to propaganda at this point. Degrees matter. Saying “people voted for this”, which both sides say with different directionality, is mostly away to convince people to either support or fight against the administration. Everyone voted for their interpretation of thing X, but will oppose it if implementation Y causes impact Z which they perceive as bad.
Yes and no.
Lots of quick sweeping local changes were promised to specific states during trump’s rallies in those states only for him to go silent on them post election.
I don’t think flip flopping on tariffs was part of his platform either.
But generally, yes, this is what was voted for.
He takes the gish gallop approach to governing, so it’s hard to make any large statements like this without being a little incorrect.
That said, Chrome is not really viable on its own, and it's the wrong "split" to enforce. The correct split is "down the middle" right through the money-making businesses - create two Googles, with their own search and search/web ads and ensure (through antitrust oversight) that they compete with each other instead of rubbing each other's back. Spin out Cloud and Android/Play Store into separate companies. Separate all four from Alphabet. The rest of the money-losing properties (including Chrome) can be distributed arbitrarily, it doesn't really matter.
Or something to that effect. As long as ads are split down the middle, and separated from Alphabet, that's all that really matters. Unless this happens, any "antitrust" against Google is bullshit for those who can't read its SEC filings.
Maybe we'll soon have Apache Chrome!
https://airflow.apache.org/
https://iceberg.apache.org/
https://kafka.apache.org/
https://superset.apache.org/
Meanwhile only a vanishingly small fraction of projects remains at the center of public attention for an extended period of time. People develop a skewed perspective because we interact with many of the most popular projects on a daily basis.
https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...
From a security standpoint, I'm sure it's more complicated, but UBO and warning dialog boxes about downloading files to your device, logging into services without 2FA would probably solve a lot of those problems. Does a billion dollar corp have to be involved considering how much has gone into Linux from people's pro bono efforts?
I would attribute the improvement in browser standards support to the finalization of the HTML5 spec by the W3C in 2009, which led to browser vendors harmonizing their feature set. We still needed jQuery to ensure cross-browser support, and floats and polyfills to get sites to work on mobile. That ended when browsers harmonized ES2015 support and built in support for flexbox and grid.
They didn't
> I would attribute the improvement in browser standards support to the finalization of the HTML5 spec by the W3C in 2009
I would attribute it to IE losing market share. It was always IE... and <the rest>.
There doesn't need to be. Google can keep building it just with regulators out of sight.
IBM and lots of other companies "donate" software for similar reasons.
Then what happens to Chromebooks? Can Google no longer ship a browser with Android?
Besides, unless you have an Android - which is only 30% of the US market or a Chromebook, everyone who uses Chrome went through the process of downloading it and made a purposeful choice to use it
I personally don’t think it’s fair to single Google out and leave Apple and Microsoft alone. It may be overly cynical, but I think Google is in its current situation because it has fostered political enemies on both sides.
This is when antitrust is needed most, by design. There's a bit of understanding you need to do, but not only is it not dumb, what you said about nobody wanting to buy chrome is actually part of the proof of why google needs to be broken up and why chrome is an ideal target for doing so. The browser market needs to be made competitive again.
Microsoft definitely doesn’t care about the web or even its PC operating system much.
So now, no one is pushing the web forward. But Apple, Google and Microsoft are still motivated to improve their own platforms. While I personally think the modern web is a cesspool and I am okay with that as a user, I doubt many on HN who care about the “open web” feel that way.
As a developer, I haven’t touched the clusterfuck of modern web development for over a decade.
And I also disliked Chrome. Especially the direction of the web they are using Chrome to push forward.
And I also disliked Electron.
But I am against DOJ forcing Google to sell off Chrome. Especially when most of Chrome is open sourced. I think this is just plain wrong. Why dont we force Apple to open source macOS? Microsoft to Open Source Windows? Or Selling off Office. SpaceX to sell its Engine?
Being open source has nothing to do with it. Of course selling it off won't necessarily accomplish the desired result since at the end of the day it isn't the legal ownership per se that results in the influence.
While I agree outsized influence that chrome does on global web standards, it is not like Apple doesn't or couldn't invent something as well. The reality is that no one has the incentive to make better web technology.
If Google sold off Chrome, who will buy it? Are Google even allowed to make another browser based on same technology? What is everyone just installed that again? Selling off Chrome doesn't make any sense at all. And as you said. Their influence on development of Blink is still, Google.
Besides the renaissance in web interop we've been having recently under baseline and Interop, which quite a few commenters in this thread seem to have no idea about but still feel the need to share their opinion on web standards...
That has nothing to do with a search monopoly, which is what this remedy is trying to address.
Also why bring up disliking something as though you were ahead of the curve only to stop short of actually being in favor of taking action?
Sure, but it's exacerbating the Blink monoculture anyway.
The problem isn't within Google. They aren't doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome. The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren't worth using.
Many new versions and updates of FF that I've tried have claimed to be much smoother and more efficient, only for the exact same shit to start happening across the years and multiple laptops used.
I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago and not even once missed Chrome since.
The only time I've had to touch about:config in the last several years was due to some smartcard related bug caused by an external library, that forced me to tweak firefox's behaviour. Once that bug was resolved, I switched it back.
Firefox being slow is well into the self-perpetuating FUD territory.
https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
And Apple provides end to end encryption of browsing history so it can’t decrypt your browsing history
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2021/03/25/whats-in...
> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.
https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/
More specifically the Topics API
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Topics_API
It’s opposed by both Mozilla and Apple and is only supported by Google/Chrome.
Privacy and security > Ad privacy
Ad topics: Generates a list of your interests based on your browsing behavior.
Site-suggested ads: Allows advertisers to retarget you based on your interactions.
Ad measurement: Enables advertisers to assess ad performance.
Toggle each of these settings to "Off" to disable them.
And I slightly misspoke. I said it was only supported by Chrome. More accurately, it is supported by Chrome and some Chromium based browsers.
But I have to admit extensions are really lacking, both the infrastructure for installing them and which extensions are available.
I now use Orion which is based on Safari but has native vertical tabs (although not native vertical hierarchical tabs, or support for dumping them as markdown).
Feels like Apple doesn't really care about it
I feel this is meant to trigger people into reacting and causing a flame war.
Google has been making its own web properties work well on Google Chrome while making them perform poorer or make them break on other browsers. Google Chrome optimizes for Google, not the web, and certainly not “the open web”.
[0]: https://xcancel.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018
[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
What's disappointing to Google is that all of their kowtowing to the Biden administration's "content shaping" ended up worth nothing in the end. Harris would have rewarded them for that help, but Trump of course hates them for it because it was largely directed at him.
This feels like quite an exaggeration. I’ve used Chromium-derived browsers only sparingly in the past decade, with Safari and Firefox instead getting the bulk of my usage depending on the platform.
Generally if something doesn’t work under those browsers, the top two causes are unnecessary user agent sniffing with the site working fine once I pretend to be Chrome or the dev simply not testing against anything but Chrome. It’s been vanishingly rare that the browsers themselves were the cause of an issue.
Chrome has just been a better product for the last 10 to 15 years.
Every other company has just failed to make a good browser because they lack the incentives to do so (have gone back and forth as a Firefox user).
The only competitive browsers are those already built on chrome or safari.
I'm not personally a big fan of Safari but it's bigger issue is that it is only available on one platform whereas the web is naturally cross platform.
Almost by definition Safari can't be the "winning" browser.
This feels like ruling that the iPhone is a monopoly in the US and that Apple needs to divest from phones.
Edit: to those replying I 100% don't agree with all the decisions chrome make, very importantly ad block.
But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome's dominance
The only reason it stopped being the #1 browser is that Chrome came out and was better...
Even though people had to go out of their way to download on all computers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C...
Nowadays if it wasn't for Safari, thanks to Chrome and Electron garbage, the Web is effectively ChromeOS.
I'm not optimistic that it'll happen, but I'd still like to see it.
There's more than just "website or electron", and things like vscode prove that they're all viable.
Microsoft back then was just a software company, they didn't care about your real life. Unfortunately, companies today are a different story.
Can someone in this thread who have swapped between Firefox/Chrome explain the problems they run into ultimately driving them back to Chrome?
Doesn't want to implement useful standards which I use in my own applications (filesystem API, WebSerial, WebUSB...).
Easy to gain market share when one of the tent pole internet services is experiencing regular breakages.
I feel like most people here wouldn't understand that to inherently indicate superior quality. I'd argue that the absolute dominance of Chrome is mostly evidence of the monopoly power that Google yields. It got on top via search, becomes the gateway to the web for people, leverages that to sell advertisement and also convince tons of people to use the browser. It's been all leverage.
I'd also disagree on it even being a better browser. Firefox has issues, but on actual usability and feeling like a user agent, it's head and shoulders above Chrome. It is more flexible, more customizable, and I find that it runs significantly better on every website that isn't owned by Google. If Chrome was a better browser, they wouldn't have had to sabotage Firefox on their sites for years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357).
It's Google that can't compete, if they have to use back-channels and leverage their other powers to maintain dominance. They aren't competing with the product alone.
RIP Firefox?
Welp. They had a chance to be default alive and they fucked it by trying to spend the money on new initiatives instead of just spending the interest payments from an endowment.
I know they cut back a little but maybe they’ve sobered up since? Haven’t had the heart to look again.
The truth is that browsers are a very complicated, very quickly moving, and very security sensitive piece of software. They spent all that money on Firefox rather than saving it because if they didn't Firefox would have fallen behind Chrome and Safari and it wouldn't be worth using today.
It makes no good goddamned sense that money that was given in order to be featured in a web browser cannot be spent primarily on that web browser, and can only be spent on anything except that web browser.
At that point I think Firefox lost a vision of a better future
I suspect chrome will get far less consumer friendly than chrome currently is if it is sold.
There are many who already do just this. What extra value would they get if they already repackage Chrome for free?
I don't love the CEO bonuses, but they are objectively less than half a percent of Mozilla's budget. Google search on the other hand is 85% of their revenue.
They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does .
My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar or close to what Google pays. The traffic is worth a lot. Bing attested to click flow as the reason they cannot make a better product in their testimony in this trial.
Also Google will either be allowed to continue the contract till its current end (I believe 1-2 more years ) or will pay fully and release Mozilla from their obligations (Mozilla is not party to the case so early termination without compensation would be penalty on them for no reason ).
Mozilla will need to make some significant cuts and layoffs no doubt will be hard on the team, but the product will survive.
--
For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.
Or are you suggesting that none of these CEOs should be compensated at current rates? If so, hate the game and not the player my friend.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
Time zones and culture and language and all that, I suppose. But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture, and would work for a tenth the price.
> But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture
Haha no. And maybe even more importantly, the Americans have zero grasp of theirs.
It doesn't matter if they actually go through with it or greatly inflate the number like OpenAI, Softbank and co did.
Maybe our difference in viewpoint is that I see this fact and wonder why it's seemingly impossible for anyone to build a financially viable alternative, and I'm at least open to the idea that it's very difficult to compete with Google when they can leverage their successful ads business to subsidize the investment into their browser.
Yes the alternatives are worse, but is that because Google is inherently smarter, or because the newcomers have a tiny fraction of the investment and usually fizzle out within a year or two? Google doesn't have to be actively trying to kill the competitors for it to have an anti-competitive effect in the market.
The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.
Google's product isn't its software, it's the attention of its users. Having this large and this dominant of a software/data platform attached to a company that sells attention is anti-competitive in the attention market.
Incidentally, this sort of proves the point that Google's ownership of platforms where ads are displayed puts them at an advantage compared to competitors, who have to go to people like MS for space.
Why is an ads company owning a browser any different than a phone company (Apple) or an operating system vendor?
It is when Google compromises the privacy/security of Chrome because of their Ads/OS business.
For example, allowing first party cookies to be a maximum of 400 days versus Safari and Firefox where it is 7 days. These cookies are required by ads retargeting which is critical to effective ecommerce campaigns.
It also supports browser fingerprinting by advertisers which means that every random API Chrome adds (and they add a lot) directly improves their Ads revenue.
It's already bad enough they are removing ad block functionality and then a day later rolling out new ad-free plans for YouTube, what a cawinky dink
Global tech companies do not compete in China, the market is brutal for non Chinese companies with level of espionage, theft, sabotage that is allowed.
It is really small world for big tech, the same 5-10 companies dominate most of the world in most frequently used consumer products, and using that dominance to crowd out competitors in every new product category
(1) which is banned in few major markets like India already even if the US reverses the ban
This is absolutely not true. Most phones in Africa are Chinese now. Chinese internet companies are all over Asia outside of Japan/SK. Chinese cars (EVs, which arguably are tech), are now world-wide.
Every company is a tech company, if you want to be broad in your definition, they have to use tech to compete .
Actions on Chinese EV cars are either being seriously considered or already in effect in most major car markets.
All phones have been always more or less Chinese made forever including Apple, even Chinese badging is how it been for low/mid range for 10 years now, maybe Samsung does some local manufacturing in SK but no one else major does.
Budget phones or budget EVs with razor thin margins is not big tech and no DoJ action to break up Google is going to affect the way they are becoming Chinese or already are .
There is reason TikTok is the most valuable Chinese company and not a phone company, big tech have big margins and strong market effect on their own and not as a group (I.e. it would be hard to beat Chinese companies in a space , but no individual one (say byd) is irreplaceable by another Chinese company
Chinese tech giants like Alibaba or Tencent or Baidu are just as good as western ones .
Their inability to go global has little do with just their technical ability to build products.
It is about whether other countries will be comfortable having what they perceive as CCP control in their markets particularly when their(ie foreign )companies do not have a level playing field in China
It is relatively easy for a country to ban a Chinese tech company or EV maker (1)because China doesn’t buy much or allow foreign companies to thrive to retaliate .
America being the biggest market and importer is the contributor to their soft power. This is what Trump is (ab)using today.
The tariffs that Trump announced recently on China is not getting a lot of attention as North American ones. The last trump administration also slapped some tariffs (not reversed by Biden) while few industries felt the pain of the reciprocal tariffs most of American industry did and will do just fine because America does not export as much to China, the people pay more of course and suffer inflation, but industry will come out broadly fine on Chinese tariffs. It is different for North America particularly Mexico due to deep integrated supply chain.
Western markets is most important not because of social cultural norms it is because it is the wealthiest today. Perhaps the global south will restore the balance this century but for next few decades that is the reality whether we like it not .
PS. My background as an Indian (or India’s complicated relationship with China) has little do with merits of this discussion, the world is not just bipolar, I am well aware that our media is just as propagandized as American or Chinese ones for that matter, but that is whole different topic .
(1) unless the country are not dependent on Chinese loans or on raw material export to China which is most of western / wealthier market
Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through
Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.
These trillion-dollar companies only focus on billion-dollar markets and kill their own products that are deemed unable to scale at a planetary level
let's permit the firefighters to leave the firehouse even though they can't tend to all the fires simultaneously
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
(Note that SetApp already enables subscribers to use iOS apps.)
For Google search, the quality has gone down enormously and yet it has lost approximately 0 market share. It is still utterly dominant. This was used to push people to Chrome, and still is. It was used to dominate the web ads market. And so on: market power used to increase market power in other markets. Classic anticompetitive behaviour.
Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in any market. Even in the US, where their position is strongest relative to Android, it still isnt even close to a monopoly.
iOS isn't a monopoly so there is nothing wrong with it being locked down. It doesn't pressure "teens" into anything. Teenagers will pick up on anything they can to create peer pressure themselves. They would just say "lol nice loser android phone" when they saw the phone in person anyway lol.
I'm curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space?
How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?
What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome extensions?
As much as I dislike Google behavior, I don't see this as being a good thing.
Does Google have undue influence now? Sure. But I’m not so sanguine about the alternatives either.
I'd argue that the main problem was not too much competition, but effective anti-competitive behavior (and simple laziness) from Microsoft in particular. The frustrating experience was primarily caused by Internet Explorer.
Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?
As much as I loved Chrome when it first came out, I’ve also been well aware that Google’s backing of Chrome (and Chromium) has given it undue advantages in the browser market by effectively making everyone else compete with a loss leader. If Chrome itself cannot sustain its pace of development or even stay alive without the unlimited funding by Google, then I think that is a good thing and proof that it acting as a monopoly. Forcing Chrome to balance product velocity with revenue constraints evens the field amongst all browsers.
(edit: If Google killing competition by injecting unlimited funding into a project without needing to make a profit sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve done this for a long time. The often cited example being Google Reader.)
What would this business model be like, if, say, Google Chrome is eliminated?
As a reference, in China, very few people use Chrome because Google services are blocked. There are tons of third-party or vendor preinstalled browsers that bundles with bloatwares, put ads/clickbaits on every new tab, and spy on users. I'm pretty sure they are more sustainable than Firefox, former Opera, etc. But that's certainly a privacy dystopia :)
But, it also goes back to browsers being built by the operating system, that was also a no-no, e.g. MSFT / IE.
Browsers then shouldn't be a profit center, but ironically google starting chrome made it one and then defined web standards. IE afaik wasn't a profit center, and MSFT hedged outsourcing all dev costs to practically google and forking it offically to Edge, lol.
WeChat itself on Android bundles a Chromium-based engine to run these mini apps.
Most people in China are using Chromium frequently, even if they don't think of it as a browser.
what you say is nice in theory but you already have the Microsoft backed Edge and Apple backed Safari that are not hamppered by the "need to find a support model" and "not be a loss leader"
And I am not looking forward again to a world where Microsoft disctates web development because for all privacy problems peaople have or think to have with Google, Microsoft ha proven that does way worse and doesn't even care for the image.
All in All Chrome being a loss leader backed by Google has been a good thing for all involved. Developers, Users and 3-rd parties. without it you woudn't have all those 3rd party chrome based browsers.
If we just keep selling the browser market to the next trillion dollar company that's not going to fix anything
Get real, the DOJ forcing Google to get rid of Chrome is one of the best tech news in years!
1. funding from Google (Firefox)
2. engineering from Google (Chromium)
3. tech giant bundling (Safari, Edge)
I think they used to have their own engine but like everyone else found it unprofitable to maintain.
Ladybird might be onto something with the sponsorship model, but we’ll have to see how it goes in the next couple of years.
Let’s do a thought experiment - If Google truly felt that Chromium has no benefit, then smaller players will drive the project and, as others have pointed out, new feature proposals/implementations will slow down. That isn’t a bad thing in my opinion because it allows other engines to not be stuck in catchup mode. The field will start to even out and innovations will start to come from alternative engines. With an even playing field, what was once an unprofitable endeavor can become a differentiator in the browser ecosystem.
The real question is what happens when Google stops paying Mozilla and Apple unthinkable amounts of money for Google search to be the default on their browsers?
It seems clear that Mozilla intends to just become an ad company themselves and who knows what Apple's response will be, I doubt it's going to be to increase the amount of development on Safari vs where they currently are.
So if Google has to effectively divest from Chromium but still supports it's development but now isn't paying the only two current competitors what is the expected outcome there? Whoever now owns Chromium becomes even more of a monopoly, and Google doesn't even need to pay them to make Google the default for it to be implied they are to be the default or the developers go away.
Maybe in the actual long term we will see an improvement from this decision, but all I see in the short - midterm is more invasive user tracking in all current browsers that isn't Safari, which you can only use on Apple devices anyway.
Who is the unsubsidized web browser?
There is no such business model. Chromium development is almost entirely funded by Google. Other Chromium based browser rely on this humonguous investment of development resources; they would not have a "business model" without this "free handout", except perhaps Microsoft and Edge, who might be able to fund it by doing basically what Google is doing.
Does the concept of an interoperable world wide web fade into obscurity? In other words, does separating Chrome from Google make the web better, or is Google's investment in the web holding back the death of the web?
- pushing for web ecosystem features that would help their own products (ex: Gmail, docs, etc)
- pushing for web enhancements that back SEO metrics that matter to them (ex: core web vitals)
I don’t think it’s as simple as - no more Chrome == no more investment into Chromium because Chrome/Chromium has been their strongest lever for getting web features that Google wants standardized. Stopping investment in that area cedes control of the web to other players who may have opposing goals to Google.
Nowadays (post Omni-bar), one could argue that "the internet" is really a captive portal from g-browser, g-omnibar, g-search results, g-renderer with "content" being significantly funded by g-ads (of which a significant portion of _that_ is returned to google for search placement).
Take away "any browser at all" and does google then ship "Google Electron, powered by Google" that strips the Omni-bar and is a desktop client / portal into g-search, g-docs, etc... and then close off access to Google apps unless through the Google client?
You can't book uber without the uber client, why are you able to use Google without the google client?
Provide a read-only HTML4.0 version to plebes with lots of popovers and banners saying: "for the best experience..."
It's an interesting thought experiment, letting "the internet" lie fallow as each proprietary database attempts to accrue more content...
So what will sustain the development of browsers like Chrome or Firefox? Well that's the big question... Maybe they will downsize and become a non-profit similar to the Linux Foundation, and receive funding similar to how they do? I can see this have the affect of greatly slowing down the development of various web standards, but would that be such a bad thing?
Imagine buying a browser
whether that's directly as paid software, or indirectly as part of purchasing a device that has the software installed on it.
Also we already have browsers pre-installed. Safari and IE(or what ever it's called these days)
There's no call to advance these though. Chrome has profiles. That alone makes it a winner for my use case.
Even though getting it free (as I do right now) is nice, $36/year seems justifiable.
Who do you think should pay for it? What is the value to them? Do their incentives align well with yours?
I talked about paying $29 for Opera for web browser software before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090235
I switched to the free Chrome because it was a better browser. Just because I was paying for software doesn't mean it's a good situation for me.
>Who do you think should pay for it? [...] Do their incentives align well with yours?
Even if I (the customer) directly pay for software instead of ads indirectly paying, it still doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.
I paid $80 for a text editor but after being frustrated with bugs in the latest version, I took a serious look at the free VS Code. I realized that the editor I was paying for had really stagnated and lacking modern features. I should have quit funding them a long time ago.
Another example is Quicken home finance software. Kept paying $60+ annual renewal fee every year and yet the software keeps getting worse. Downloads of credit-card and bank transactions randomly quit working. The ledger balances on my desktop don't match the balances shown online. I had used the software for almost 30 years since the DOS floppy disk days and just finally gave up. I look at the 1-star reviews of Quicken on Amazon and browse the Quicken help forums and everybody complains about the same defects.
Often, what happens is companies don't respect their paying customers because they know they're locked in because of inertia or sunk costs. They just treat their repeat customers as ATM machines and barely improve the software. (E.g. They make superficial cosmetic changes to UI instead of fixing core engine bugs.)
I'm not convinced paying a subscription for a web browser will give me a better browser. Maybe it will. But I doubt it.
For normal software you can buy and use some fixed version without too much issues, for browsers you probably need the updates.
Security-wise maybe something like buying a ESR version may be possible, but it will not be cheap and you may miss the new features when some webpage you visit breaks.
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acq
Actually, this is hardly healthy. Firefox feel this single source of can be deprived anytime that they tried many other alternative -- like VPN, partnership with pockets, some sponsor ad on tab selection, and even selling some data
Other browsers go even further..
I'm thinking 500M/year is enough to pay for a lot more developers than they currently have. Even half that should be enough to do more than they are. Where is all this money going?
No it wasn't? They itemized some budget items worth less than a million dollars in total, and then, for each entity getting part of that money they admitted they had no idea who they were or what they did for Mozilla (but one of them had abortion rights mentioned on their blog!)
Incredibly lazy "expose" trying to be a twitter files.
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare on the SEM clicks themselves?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acquiring the Browser Company would make a lot of sense.
Chrome's non-iOS market share is probably larger than Safari's market share, so any monopoly considerations about Safari apply equally to Chrome.
Google gets other value with this besides being the default search engine. Keeping Firefox alive makes it so that Chrome is less of a monopoly.
> and an aggressive fork at some point
Maintaining a browser engine is a lot of work. With no clear upside, no one would invest the work in maintaining a fork. Related to this, Microsoft gave up maintaining a (partially) separate browser engine for Edge, and now just uses Chromium
They also already charge to be an extension developer and could easily charge much more.
There are some cross-cutting server side features for context aware access for google workspace and google cloud, which were inherited from beyondcorp enterprise, so those would presumably stay with the real google of course.
Google uses a complex anonymization/privacy framework to collect some aggregate signals from website visits, but they don't use it directly.
Regulators don't understand this, and technologists who do tend to distrust Google anyway and think they might secretly be using it.
There are all sort so other sketchy things, like what Edge does injecting itself into websites so Microsoft collects affiliate revenue.
There are countries where this wouldn't be allowed, but Google is largely self regulating in its biggest market.
All this would lose Chrome some market share but they are starting from a very dominant position, and for the general public it wouldnt be a big deal - people are already convinced that iOS and android devices are listening to them at all times for ad targeting!
IMO, journalists are to blame for this perception. All the journalists that pushed this false narrative should be banned from the field. This is what happens when an "anything for clicks" mentality takes over and directly harms society.
Doing that would make Google lose money, not make money. It is much more useful to be sole owner of this data.
So, like, let's pick a set of criteria where web standards are considered complete, and move towards that. And when we do reach it, just stop.
Separate Search + Google Ads platform as company A, Android + Chrome + Gmail as company B.
It will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!
Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, licensed by HW vendors. Like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point.
You're literally pointing out the unfair advantage. The better question is how can all of the competitors manage? The answer is they can't very well because of the unfair advantage which Chrome has. If Chrome was split from Google (and Edge from Microsoft) browsers would be on a more equal playing field.
Google could divest the Chrome product and keep contributing to Chromium, but the value proposition is really unclear when that OSS investment doesn’t buy you billions of dollars of browser lock-in value.
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/supporters-of-chromium-based...
Doesn't read like a takeover attempt to me...
It doesn't sound like this would solve the issue..
https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBOL-home/wiki/Frequently-as...
Those teams can keep working on Chrome, they'll just have to fall under some new kind of separate Chrome Inc. structure instead of under Google Inc., and Google will have to sell most of its shares of Chrome Inc. to third parties.
Splitting off Chrome really isn't the problem. Making the new Chrome Inc. profitable without accepting bribes from big tech, on the other hand...
To be fair, Google could reassign them to something else. Firing everybody will be Google's decision that wasn't forced on them.
I don't see a real need for Chrome. The stuff they've done to break Adblocking makes it pretty much a dead project today. Web browser development should be open source and not for profit. There is a fair argument that it has been because of Google's funding. There's a strong argument that Chrome has existed to further Google's business and at a minimum protect it's business and ensure third parties didn't hijack all of their PPC revenue in the early days.
It is easy to foresee an outcome here where someone politically connected gets a hold of Chrome and does a lot of crap they shouldn't. The worst case outcome is unrelated to any of this, and something where we end up with government mandated garbage in a web browser. It is very possible that DRM and biometric age verification, and who the fuck knows what else thanks to AI, could be required either by the US or EU, and kill the open source web browser. That's worse than anything Google did.
Make it make sense
Selling user browser data obviously won't fly (and note that Google has never explicitly nor directly sold user's browsing data as far as I know, but they do have a huge ad network that utilises cookies...), so what's the plan? Put ads in the browser? "Premium" features?
The only thing I can think of is highjacking links to Amazon et al to insert referral codes en masse, or selling links/ads on new tab pages.
Why not sell premium features?
Why not add affiliate codes to links?
Why not sell ads on new tab pages?
All of these are fine examples of how a not-Google Chrome could make money. They could even get paid by Microsoft or some other not-Google search for that traffic.
This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard to convince us all we should just give up and let Google continue running our online lives through monopolization.
> Why not sell premium features?
> Why not add affiliate codes to links?
> Why not sell ads on new tab pages?
Ah yes, would love more of all this in my browser.
Sounds to me that taking chrome away from Google will be a net-negative for the users.
The details could be worked out. The idea is to make big corporations pay while keeping it free for users.
What exactly are "best qualifications?" More simply are you assuming that myself and Google share a definition of "best qualified?" I genuinely don't believe that we do.
> And then who would replace them?
People working for a different company. Is your case that without Google no one would make web browsers?
“When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
They change their ToS in an unfavorable way and yes I think it’s criticism they need to hear.
However, has Chrome, Brave (I don’t look favorably on their cryptocurrency initiatives) Edge , Safari etc. been held to the same, in practice? Why isn’t Chrome barraged with negative sentiment the same way? It has far worse ToS policies (which doesn’t make Firefox “right” or “just”)
Because if that is upsetting then using Chrome should be outright enraging, yet people hardly mention it’s consistent anti user behavior as often as people jump on Mozilla and a Firefox for anything they do that is seen as unfavorable
Explain why when they changed their stance me holding them to a standard I hold all other browsers is now an issue.
“You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
And start charging for everything else out there like maps, street view, and browser. And buy cloudflare while at it. Push themselves into everything related to connectivity and internet properties.
The search business is the cash flow that is being a thorn in the side of Google. And it doesn’t even make sense in its vision anymore.
But it does solve an important problem: Who in their right mind would buy Chrome? It's not a profitable business to be in, without the surrounding ad business, and in turn the insane amount of traffic from Google Search.
Almost by definition, anyone who would be interested in buying Chrome and turning it into a commercial product shouldn't be allowed to buy it. The only buyer I can imaging is OpenText.
This. If Search + Google Ads is independent from Android + Chrome + Gmail, it will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!
Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point. No need to feed Google Ads with data anymore!
Yeah, dreaming.
What Google loses is everything client (user) side: Chrome, Android, Gmail and other personal cloud services. Lets call it Foogle :)
Foogle can charge Samsung et al. for its Android and personal cloud services it is running. And use it in its own Pixel devices too. And may elect to make it hard for Google to sniff it, like droppung doobleclick cookies in Foogle Chrome, provide "Foogle Private Relay", et cetera.
The bottom 90% is owning an ever smaller share of the economy, while the real economy doesn't seem to grow that much.
It seems like you are comparing small companies vs large companies, rather than US vs Chinese.
WeChat, for example, is the end all be all megaplatform in China but never took off with any Western consumers simply because they’re uninterested.
It isn't insular, it's just it was the only local solution - same for Line having a lock on Japan and Thailand but not much of asia, and kakaotalk for Korea.
I don't think it overtook qq until like 8 yrs ago? At which point AIM was already discontinued, and 10 years past any kind of popularity.
Big companies tend to calcify. We can see that in FAMANG's products. Big companies can also remove any direct competition in multiple ways that smaller companies can't:
I'm sure there's more. Anyhow, monopoly status generally leads to stagnation not innovation.For the average American, both the efficient parts of monopolies (reduced redundancy which means fewer well-paying jobs) as well as the inefficient parts (reduced competition, higher prices, reduced standards of living) are net negatives. The political influence inherent to monopolies are also a negative effect on democracy, whereas foreign monopolies tend to have a harder time maintaining political influence.
But doesn't that make room for someone else to come in and be abusive? Yes and we have the tools to prevent that, if necessary.
If the concern is that people will start using Baidu search, then the solution should be to ban Baidu search. It shouldn't be to let some monopolies run rampant with the hopes that other countries will never be able to compete, while forgetting that free market economy is what made America
That sounds smart, but is it actually true? How many of the things enabling the existence of this website are inventions made in the research institute of the Bell Telecom company.
On top of my head, there are transistors, C, Unix and a fair bit of cryptographical work. I'm sure others can add a lot more to the list.
Hell, this website recently carried an article that mentioned that the very financial concepts that enable companies like Y-combinator to exist were invented by a researcher at Bell labs.[1]
[1]https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/
In both giving them the bankroll to research it pre-breakup, and the economic freedom to pursue it under separate ventures post-forced breakup - it was most likely equally valuable.
A lot of things that make our modern apparatus' possible came from both Bell Labs research, and Bell Labs branching out by force.