The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.
I'm all for competition and increasing consumer choices, but the government is really not making a case that this is supposed to help consumers.
The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
> The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers. And if the DOJ has their way, they want to crack open Google's vault of customer data and propagate it across the internet.
Not only does this sound extremely bad for consumers, the DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money. Regardless of how you feel about Google, this seems like a far overreach from the DOJ on finding and fixing market manipulation.
There's really no rational reason for third-party cookies to still exist. The only reason they're still around is because an advertising company's browser has like 97% market share.
> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
It’s not, other than Google has a way larger market share (especially if you count Edge/Opera/Brave/etc.) and has been (ab)using that position to push web standards in a direction that favors their business and that other browser vendors have to follow to keep up.
If Safari had Chrome’s market share and was throwing their weight around like Google does and Microsoft did with IE, it’d be the same argument and I’d also personally support forcing them to divest it.
2) consumers cannot use products like Safari as their exclusive web browser. The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting and the world needs to keep Chrome at-the-ready for when the alternative browser eventually breaks.
For example, Chrome has replaced IE as the corporate browser, due to the integrations with Workspace accounts and Authentication mechanisms. In order to use the fingerID on my/employer's macbook pro, I have to give my employer root/sync access to Google Chrome.
"The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting…"
That only tells me that governments can no longer leave technical aspects of the internet (standards/APIs, etc.) to market forces. There are many historical precedents for such action such as flight/aircraft, RF spectrum management, road and maritime regulations, health/food standards, etc. There's a myriad of them.
Regulations would enforce interoperability and uniformity. To say this would stifle innovation is nonsense, it would be like saying that road rules and maritime law have stifled the development of motor vehicles and shipbuilding.
re: 1) logging into a Google domain in a chrome browser, logs the browser into the Google account [auto-profile-login] [gSignin], and by default, syncs browser history to the cloud, cloud-readable [gSync]. Google's own docs describe that you can add a passphrase "so Google can't read it". While Google can read it, they have an arguable duty to shareholders to read it.
> Keep your info private with a passphrase
With a passphrase, you can use Google's cloud to store and sync your Chrome data without letting Google read it.
Thank you appealing to reasonable expectations, but Google, as their own docs make clear, ties uses together quite aggressively^W conveniently.
2) Whatabout Apple and Safari? Apple doesn't offer an email service supported in part by scanning email content for ads.
Apple has gone to some lengths to engineer a system where they can credibly(-ish) claim to "protect your privacy when you browse the web in Safari," [Apple private relay].
For years people have complained "ugh Google is selling your data, how awful" and here is the government seeking to mandate that Google sell your data! There's no way that this is the right remedy.
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out. It is unfair competition. And you say there are many other well working options out there but that is simply not true. Googles web applications work best on Chrome and often break on non Chrome browsers. Mostly because of changes to those web applications and not because of random browser bugs. This is how you win people over and complete your browser world domination.
Realistically nothing is going to happen. The incoming admin has made clear their distaste for Lina Khan. In other words, this is just an attempt at a swan song by the Biden White House.
Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Very few companies would be able to manage a gigantic project like Chromium.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.
Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
There would be few incentives to try and pull off something like that if nobody had any faith in the product every becoming extremely profitable though.
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.
No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.
We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.
You don't HAVE to login unless you want to share your passwords, history, bookmarks etc. between your devices. Simpler = not having those features (which most users seemingly find useful).
probably not going to be a popular take on this forum, but to me it looks like anti trust and securities laws are enforced almost randomly. Is Google a monopoly using its control to limit competition - yes but so is pretty much all of FANG and many successful businesses for that matter.
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
> Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
If Google were forced to divest itself of Chrome and there were no takers then Chromium would take on an altogether different perspective. That Chromium exists shows there's already an existing infrastructure that would make transitioning to it relatively straightforward.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome, only Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers.
Yeah, but if Google were forced to divest Chrome then parts of its proprietary code would have to be open-sourced and integrated into Chromium to minimize disruption to users. Alternatively, Google would have to make its services more interoperable.
If this actually happens, I think it would turn perception of Nadella from good CEO that got lucky with OpenAI to a certified shadow master that's playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
MS owns bing. Which isn’t anywhere near as popular but still exists and is large. And effectively owns the profits from ChatGPT’s growing foray into search. Basically every Google competitor uses the bing index under the hood.
MS owns an ad network that brings in ~$10Bn a year. Much smaller than Google, but certainly nothing to ignore.
MS owns outlook/hotmail which is wildly popular.
Does Microsoft own “half the internet”? No but neither did Google. Microsoft does own Windows which is a (already sued) monopoly touch point similar to Android. They own a browser. They own a cloud platform that profits from a growing internet. They own plenty of consumer facing properties and should not be written off in monopoly or antitrust discussions.
Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the idea of spinning off Chrome (but I know Googlers so I may be biased), but I understand the appeal on paper.
A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.
There’s an argument to be made that a high pace of new feature additions effectively functions as a moat that ensures that new competitive web engines cannot be developed as a result of not being able to ever catch up.
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Presumably Google, Bing etc. would still be bidding to be the default search engine?
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
That seems to work for Mozilla. It would be nice to see other revenue models, but that exists and having the most used browser as a search client should pay at least as good as whatever deal Mozilla and Apple get.
Sort of? Mozilla is not doing well. Further, the only reason Google is paying Mozilla is to keep a notional third-party competitor alive; search traffic from a sub-3% browser is not worth that much. If the Chrome deal goes through, there's really no business reason for Google to keep paying them.
> you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Mozilla has ~700 employees just to keep an ailing browser on life support. Brave has ~250 employees, but they're building largely on Google's core engine, so they're getting a ton of engineering for free.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.
Firefox gets along... with money from Google. And I think a good portion of the $$ that Google pays Mozilla, in their mind, isn't to be the default search engine... it's to keep competition alive in order to avoid this situation.
It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
I desperately wish they'd give me the option to pay for Firefox Sync. I would, genuinely, pay for that every month. I get a massive amount of value from being able to throw tabs from my laptop to my phone and vice versa, and have everything synchronized, in a way I trust.
I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google.
Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem.
Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one? Would someone else take over Chromium? Who would have the resources to do such a thing other than say Microsoft who currently uses a Chromium browser?
Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
> Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one?
I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.
It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.
As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.
So we'd end up with even less competition? As flawed as Edge is it still somewhat new/innovative/different features that Chrome doesn't because MS has to try and compete with Google.
Interesting idea. I'm not against forcing Google to choose either all the user platforms they run or Adsense. If they sold off Google Drive, Suite, YouTube, Google Play, etc they might improve faster. At the very least it would drive more alternatives. That seems so unlikely though.
Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.
I'm worried about what happens to the Chrome extension store. If Google sells Chrome, then does that also mean the Chrome store? I guess it would have to. So not only does someone need to buy Chrome, they also have to operate the Chrome store too. I'm not sure this is going to work out well.
So I understand trying to break up monopolistic companies to provide better competition in the market which is generally better for the consumer as a whole. This strategy of saying Chrome should be sold off seems strange to me because unlike other monopolies Google's monopoly with Chrome is fundamentally different.
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.
Microsoft wouldn't have a the kind of vertically integrated monopoly where they control both the internet properties and the browser used to access them.
People gravitate towards Chrome in part because of Google’s heavy marketing of it. Whenever I sign into Gmail in Safari I get a pop up about a “better experience” awaiting me.
That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser. Which is chromium at its core but the experience it provides is not as good as Chrome even with all of Chrome's downsides.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
You're correct Microsoft ruined their own reputation with Internet explorer but does that mean when a company utterly fails with one of their products to the point that a competitor can come in and dominate the marketplace we should somehow automatically reward the one who failed.
If it's really anti-competitive practices then I would agree but if it's just market forces then we should not reward those who've already mismanage their ability and their dominant market position to lose out in such a short period of time.
Google also turns every link tap in their iOS apps into an opportunity to upsell Chrome for iOS when it should just open the link with the user’s default browser.
I’m not surprised, though. They’re not exactly on the most solid ground with them preventing any engines other than their own WebKit for third-party browsers or even apps.
How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Safari and Messages etcetera link to within the closed Apple ecosystem - just like Windows. It can be between difficult to impossible to send an email or create a calendar item unless you use the iOS apps.
I'm definitely no Google fanboi but every answer being "Google are arseholes" feels dishonest.
The Chromium developer team absolutely kick arse and being open source is a true gift. Mozilla is badly failing to compete. Microsoft failed to compete with their first Edge rewrite, and now ironicalky MS "competes" using Chromium open source.
And why did Chromium have to split from WebKit? As an outsider it just looked like "because Apple don't want to play nice".
The story is always simplified to Google greedy arseholes. A typical response: you can never ever ever satisfy open source proponents... The stereotype that every open source user greedily wants more.
iOS has an option to set your default browser and mail client, and it works fine. There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps. Google is in fact being an asshole by prompting every time if you want to ignore the default app and use chrome in the hopes that you'll finally accidentally hit it.
> How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Like everybody else. If the user wants Chrome on iOS, they can install it and set it as their default browser. To link to other Google apps, Google can use Universal Links[0] to directly open Calendar, Sheets, etc or open the corresponding App Store page if they haven’t been installed yet.
Google forked WebKit because they wanted to take it in a direction that was fundamentally incompatible with the direction Apple wanted to go: Google wanted more core functionality (process management, etc) to be written as part of the browser (likely to serve as a moat) while Apple wanted all that to live within the engine itself so third party devs could take advantage of it without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
Chrome is definitely a better experience than Safari, and not by a little bit. In many ways Safari is the worst browser out there right now. Most of its market share comes from the fact that Apple still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have installed. I think the DOJ should go after Apple harder on that than they are on Google, because nobody is forcing anyone to use Chrome the same way Apple is forcing their users to use Safari.
Desktop Safari’s ~15% market share, which exceeds Firefox’s ~7%, suggests otherwise. Mac users can freely switch and yet many don’t.
There are likely several reasons for this but I think the two biggest ones are its differences in philosophy: first, that browsers should be just one utility among many on a desktop OS and not try to set itself apart and second, to actively combat the internet’s hostilities on behalf of the user.
Chrome will never do either. It tries to be a distinct brand and platform instead of meshing with your desktop nicely and it’s not going to do anything that will negatively impact Google’s many ad businesses.
I agree that the DOJ should enforce browser choice in iOS much like the EU has but in this scenario it feels besides the point. No matter how better or worse anyone might think Safari is it’s my right to choose which browser I access a site with, and I’d rather not be harassed to change.
Apple forces you to use Safari because it's the least capable mobile browser, which pushes developers to develop iOS apps to use the device APIs that other browsers allow but Safari won't implement - this drives people to the 30% cash grab Apple gets from their app store, instead of using web applications that are possible on other browsers on other platforms. It's awful what Apple is doing with forcing Safari on iOS. To make it worse, there are plenty of Apple-only proprietary things about Safari that make buying their hardware a necessity to debug problems that only appear on Safari. Web developers hate Safari, it's now known as "the new IE" because it's so bad.
Like I said, I agree with you on all that. I develop mobile web sites, I’m very familiar with all this. I still choose to use Safari on my Mac, it should be my choice to make.
I find Safari to be a fantastic product overall both on desktop and mobile but I have stuck to Chrome to keep my options open in future in case I want to use non-Apple hardware
But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
If Chrome was not owned by an ad company, the owners of chrome would push for instead of against privacy protections (see: firefox, safari).
The browser monopoly, which Chrome sells at a loss, enables the ad company. This is the problem.
Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google. So anything against ads does not get upstreamed to Chromium.
Chrome also is a major browser vendor, whereas kiwibrowser and opera are not, which means the standards boards listen to them more. If those seats were not owned by an ad company, standards would likely be different.
> What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?
Google keeps proposing specifications like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, Web Serial, etc., and both Mozilla and Apple keep shooting them down on privacy and security grounds. Meanwhile Google ignores the problems and builds them into Chrome anyway, and guess what happens? They start getting used to fingerprint and track people.
Who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence that all of these technologies that advertisers can use to fingerprint and track people keep making their way into the browser owned by one of the world’s largest ad companies.
How would you use WebUSB or Web Bluetooth for device fingerprinting?
HID, mass storage devices etc. are required to be filtered by implementations, and why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
The prompts are pretty scary/disruptive, and I've never seen any website actually try (unlike for e.g. web push notifications, which are fairly private but can be super annoying).
> why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
Part of the problem is that a vast number of users neither understand nor care about these prompts. They just click to make them go away.
There’s a few long discussions on the unsuitability of these specifications in the Mozilla standards positions repo:
The monopoly the DoJ is trying to break up isn't Chrome, it's Search. From TFA:
> Antitrust enforcers want the judge to order Google to sell off Chrome — the most widely used browser worldwide — because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine, said the people.
Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
The whole reason for "privacy sandbox" is to still do user tracking, but do it in an anonymous way that they hope legislators won't go after. It's Google seeing the writing on the wall that legislation will soon ban third-party cookie tracking and fingerprinting and the like, so they need to be proactive and protect the ad tracking business.
A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".
The root problem here is that users don't want any of these tracking alternatives. All of the other browsers have said "no thanks" to any of the alternatives, and already moved forward with blocking third-party cookies (the main vector for tracking). Chrome hasn't moved forward with this because their ability to still track you thanks you being logged into Google means that disadvantaging every ad provider paints a massive target on their backs for antitrust law (even more so than they already have). Hence their attempt to fix it by creating new vectors of tracking so they can get the privacy "win" of blocking third-party cookies.
I genuinely have no idea what "missing features" or incompatibilities keep people on Chrome compared to the benefits of uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.
Why would you want all this stuff synced? The only thing I want out of that is passwords, but 1Password works just fine for that. In fact, I don't trust a browser to store my passwords securely.
You can either use Mozilla accounts to do that for free and as easy as it is with Google accounts. Or if you are a power user and would like an adventure, you can selfhost sync and accounts servers yourself. Does chrome provide that ability?
Right, I was confused by this comment. I actually don't think it's that hard to switch, tools to import your stuff across browsers have existed for a long time. It might be that Firefox isn't particularly polished on this front but I don't think it's outside the realm of achievable and I don't think the difficulty of switching is by any means a deal breaker.
I use FF full-time but have to use Chromium for WebEx and Teams calls to avoid massive jank.
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
However, recently there was a healthy thread about the massive trackers found in mobile apps[1] which wouldn't be a problem with PWAs since they live in the same sandbox as the browser (meaning no exfiltrating all the shit) but yet can one-click launch from the normal app mechanisms and (AFAIK) can be the subject of Intent handlers just like apps
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine for me on Chrome.
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
It works fine for now. As soon as Manifest V2 is officially gone you will certainly see an increase in ads. What ad company wouldn't take advantage of more limited ad blocking capabilities in the most popular web browser?
One difference between lite and the full version is CNAME cloaking protection. The enforcement of Manifest V3 in Chrome opens up a gap in the ecosystem where analytics and advertising providers will increasingly use CNAME cloaking, since it can't be blocked from the world's most popular browser. And this is the world in which using Firefox with its support for Manifest V2 suddenly becomes quite a bit more attractive.
If CNAME cloaking takes off in a big way, then yes at that point I agree I could see people moving to Firefox. But for now that's not happening.
Also, if that actually led significant numbers of people to leave Chrome, isn't that where we'd see "Manifest V3.1" or whatever that allows matching against CNAMEs?
Chrome is pretty central to Google's strategy. If we assume that people who want to block ads will (by switching to Firefox when necessary), then it's in Google's interests for Chrome to support ad blocking. If they're not going to get ad revenue anyways, they'd still rather it be happening on Chrome.
Also see a recent comment by a member of the Chrome team on why Manifest V3 was for performance reasons, not to cripple adblocking (I don't know if it's true, but it seems worth considering): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815861
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
> It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because
....
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
I think it's a combination of both. There was absolutely a period where Chrome was faster, and Chrome still has a better security design. But Google also pushed Chrome incredibly hard, including bundling it with other software as a checked-by-default box, and used all the tactics to get it made the default browser and make it hard to switch, and advertised it on Google services for free, and made some features of Google products require it.
Chrome makes enormous sums of money through ads. Also, these companies pay fortunes for default settings like search engines and other backroom deals. Someone could buy Chrome and ask Microsoft for 30% of Bing's search revenue to be the default search engine and Microsoft would agree.
Google makes money from ads by having control of Chrome. I don't see how that would continue if it's spun out. I'm not aware of any ads in Chrome itself (but I've been using FF for years, so what do I know). And Chrome controlling the default search engine is exactly why they want it spun out from Google, so if the result was simply that it makes money by defaulting to a different search engine, that would be an absurd, pointless result.
Imagine if Google isn't allowed to pay Chrome Inc for traffic acquisition so Chrome changes the default search engine to Bing and now Bing is a monopoly because 90% of browsers default to Bing.
This makes sense, but it is made even more nonsensical by the fact that the DOJ is also separately saying traffic aquisition deals are anticompetitive as well.
This is good guess unfortunately. However, there are second order effects as we've seen with X that will drive people to Firefox so this could end up being a good thing.
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!
In this scenario I’d much rather that heaping grant goes to a newly independent Chromium nonprofit org. Browser engine diversity is a good thing and worth trying to preserve.
With those rulings come conditions. Corporations under a judgement under monopoly practices can't do anything they want wily-nily. AT&T, for example, was forbidden from selling computers in 1956.
What kind of continuity can be expected when the head of the DoJ is a political appointee by the president, and we're getting a new president in 2 months with radically different ideas compared to our current one?
Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.
Thinking this through, it’s hard to even imagine how such a selloff and transfer could happen.
Chrome, which is built downstream from the open-source Chromium, is a behemoth project with development spanning nearly every domain — rendering, GPU ops, WASM, AI, js engines, web standards, and much more.
Sure, Google doesn’t always prioritize developments that don’t align with its ad monopoly. Still, Chrome remains a polished & widely used product.
As far as I can see, it would be best to establish a "Chromium Foundation," akin to the Linux Foundation, with emphasis on advancing web standards, unencumbered by corporate priorities.
That said, the more entrenched monopoly Google maintains lies in its "Search Experience," integrated with complementary products like Maps, YouTube, Android, and others.
I don't see any other viable alternative that serves the needs of most users across the board.
Bing doesn’t come close, and while private search engines cater to power users, the average web user rarely switches search engines.
For many, Google Search has become the de facto entry point to the internet and their view of the Web.
Not to be dramatic, but from a security perspective, it feels a little like the scene in Ghost Busters where the EPA inspector orders a Con Ed worker to shut down the containment system.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it, or at least the ones with most experience working on it, maybe even give them a tiny part of the shares of whatever company gets to own it, or perhaps with a contract for at least for a couple of years (and then could return to Google or whatever), and if possible include some incentives to make them focus on working on security bugs over new features, which tbh I think there is just too many every year.
> Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it
The 13th Amendment to the US constitution makes the sale of people illegal.
Seriously though - how would this ever work? Google cannot negociate on behalf of their employees or promise they will work somewhere if Google stops employing them.
I don't like it either, but it doesn't seem unprecedented. Companies sell units to each other (complete with staff) all the time.
I'm pretty sure everyone who worked at Universal Studios still worked there after Comcast bought them. I don't recall any staff being included when Google sold Domains to Squarespace, but they very well could have been.
Hell, if you've ever temped in tech, sometimes you wake up and find out you work for a different agency. "Yesterday you worked at Magnit. Today you work at TechPro."
Or it could be something in between - the buyer offers you a new contract and the seller says you'll be laid off if you don't take it.
Companies regularly buy and sell parts of themselves. I think the standard approach would be for Chrome employees to be given golden handcuffs of some sort.
Being owner of even a tiny bit of a brand new company that owns Chrome would be very attractive to engineers already working on Chrome, and it wouldn't be wise for any parent company to piss them off as they know the software better than anyone.
The revenue and profitability of "the Chrome Company" is going to be far less than Google, since Google's rising tide is what lifted that particular boat.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
Isn't firefox mostly making its money from Google? They'll be struggling too if Google gets out of the browser business and no longer feels the pressure to sustain them
Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.
You can look up details of the lawsuit, but the idea is that Google paying Apple to be the default search engine prevents other search engines from competing with Google search. The default search selection has been shown to be quite important. Anti-trust law is built around the idea of maintaining competition - “monopolies” aren’t inherently illegal.
A single attempt to separate google and chrome (with all its products) would make the eco-system pointless and swipe away google entirely from the global market.
why not to give Youtube instead tho? (even if the revenue/monetization of every single channel would be heavily impacted)
Android and chrome are necessary for google to live, so Youtube or something else would be better
The point is not to do what is good for Google. The point is to do what is good for users and the market. Separating Chrome from Google's despotic plans such as AMP and blocking ad-blockers so that the browser is independent from their attempts to further control the web would be a good thing.
A much better decision would have been to require them to fund some amount of the various open source competitors so there can be alternatives. Makes as much sense as forcing them to sell a thing that has no market.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
Stuff like this. It feels like there's less of a case here than with Microsoft. In the 90s, Windows nearly became _the_ OS, especially had Apple folded like it nearly did. There really wasn't an alternative in the emerging home computer space as well as the OEM shenanigans among other things. Threatening to pull office for Mac if Apple failed to include IE.
I'm struggling to see how Google is truly behaving monopolistic here. Chrome is available for compile, and is part of other browsers like edge. It's like suggesting linux has a monopoly because almost all web servers run on it.
They had these alleged resources for almost two decades now. Did they manage to force Apple? Or do they give them two digit billions dollars for Google to be the default search engine on safari?
Again, no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores.
The DOJ is after monopoly in search space (and how Google is using chrome position to strengthen the search monopoly) not the browser space itself (Which is another monopoly but to less extend). People don't look into one product and DOJ are not naive to fall into this trap.
As you might know. DOJ is not able to pass laws for obvious reasons. They do enforce the current laws. Google is free to lobby for such law as they do with other things.
> no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores
For the same reason proprietary cables aren't generally a monopoly problem: Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly. Google has [1].
This is the strangest decision I've ever seen. Chrome isn't the default anywhere except Pixel branded devices (most or all of the Android OEMs have their own browsers) and you need to actually seek out and download Chrome from Google.com. So how will Google selling Chrome lead to less traffic towards Google? It seems the DOJ has cause and effect completely backwards.
IF Google is a monopoly that abuses search and ads, IMO it would make much more sense to split it like this:
- Google Search
- Ads
- Consumer facing everything, so Chrome, Android, Pixel devices, Nest, etc... all together
- YouTube
This kind of split would prevent Google dominating search, abusing their dominance of ads while also enabling their device division to become a proper competitor to Apple and Samsung.
Simply splitting off Chrome is weird, kills Chrome for absolutely no reason, does nothing to help consumers and most importantly doesn't prevent Google from dominated search and ads which is the whole point of the suit in the first place...
It's also strange that the DOJ is letting Apple, MS and Meta off the hook when those businesses clearly engage in anti-competitive practices.
Not sure how this works but if some party purchased chrome, isn't the best business for it to sell advertising back to google? And then sell the default search engine back to google?
I don’t really understand how this would work and the article doesn’t really give me enough detail to know. But for me, Google abandoning their plans to disable third party cookies tells me everything I need to know: their ad business calls the shots and an ad company having monopoly over the browser market is an unequivocally bad thing.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
Google as Microsoft did years ago will stall until a new administration is in office and reach a settlement for what is effectively a slap on the wrist.
It is mostly better advertising compared to what Mozilla was pulling of, the initial edge in performance (at least that’s what people said), integration with google for the android users (Firefox was late to this) as well as some issues if garbage websites didn’t test on Firefox.
Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.
Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.
It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).
Maybe force of habit from years ago when Mozilla was the dominant non-default browser and chrome rolled in and ate their lunch by feeling so much faster.
Maybe this will lead to Chromium finally getting proper vertical tabs which Google clearly otherwise block due to it eating up horizontal real estate that would otherwise be used for ads.
Spin off, maybe. Make it something more akin to The Linux Foundation where a consortium of vested interests donate time and resources. This should also include public funds as part of civic infrastructure and national defense funding. BTW, Mozilla really should be in such a bin too.
Chrome data may be feeding Search Results based on how long people stay at different pages and where they go. Thus removing Chrome may remove a substantial data advantage for search.
They could spin it off and then set up the same kind of pay-for-default-search deal that Mozilla has. This might put just enough distance between the two orgs to satisfy the DOJ without actually changing much.
I have no idea how this would work either, but I feel like the election makes this more likely to happen, not less, after the amount of rhetoric that Google needs taking down a peg.
It's very weird to see that same point brought up multiple times in this thread. It makes me worried that this all was cooked up my M$ all along (A company which doesn't have any antitrust litigation being brought against them despite putting ads in their latest operating system)
Chrome can't really be sold unless it'd mean Google is not allowed to maintain a fork of Chromium.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
I think this would be a very unfair action to perform so late in the administration.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
My understanding is that google lets anyone freely use chromium, and chrome is just their flavour of chromium with google services integrated ontop of it. Microsoft took chromium and sprinkled ai-enhanced microsoft flavours on top to make edge, which doesn't look like a monopoly. Presumably, microsoft is able to use windows to push edge, and use edge to push bing. If chrome was sold and had the google integration removed I would switch to a vanilla chromium.
I see some argument for google paying firefox to be the default search engine, but is that worse than firefox not existing at all?
In terms of search engines, I think there's just a lack of good competition. The search engines I'm aware of are:
Google: Just works. The only problem is you need to add "reddit" to most searches to get actual real, human-written non-seospam text, but I doubt that's unique to just google.
Bing: I'm greeted with an uncomfortably flashy layout shift, a page full of american news and some popup about AI. They also cover up and censor for the CCP.
Kagi: Their website is literally broken right now and I can't even see the pricing or other pages. I tried safari, chrome, firefox and edge, the hamburger menu doesn't open. Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
Yandex: Good for the reverse image searching, but otherwise probably not good to use.
Most of this article is ads, and it's paywalled so I can only read the first couple sentences, so if this is addressed in it I apologise.
How likely will Trump DOJ drop this? Consumers have choice, albeit just a handful of credible options. Nobody is forced to use Chrome (unlike MSFT pushing IE back in the day)
Right now a healthy web ecosystem is Google's existential hedge, against all the closed platforms of the world coming to devour the web and Google's business.
Getting rid of Google as a patron for the web would be one of the most harmful damaging & awful things the DOJ could do this world. Strongly opposed, what a godforsaken heinous crime against humanity to consider leaving no one funding the web at scale.
If the work you're doing isn't valuable then eventually economic reality will hit, the money will run out and the businesses from China that are actually disciplined and productive will take your market share.
Weird that this is so doom and gloom, the world's most popular browser decoupled from the ad machine. What's not to love? People champion Firefox and Brave constantly and they're independent browsers.
Brave is not an independent browser, the majority of development comes for free through Chromium, funded by… Google. Firefox by Mozilla Corp survives on loads of cash from… Google.
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
Facepalm. So I guess this weak cookie cutter approach is what we get for the high water mark of opposition before the imminent corporate coup against constitutionally limited government.
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
That really does not come as a surprise and that was totally expected. [0] As soon as Chrome started to become more of a platform (for their extension API) with many other companies using it in their own browsers, it tells you why they had >90% of the search market for years.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
https://archive.ph/PPGGV
This absolutely needs to happen.
The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.
I'm all for competition and increasing consumer choices, but the government is really not making a case that this is supposed to help consumers.
The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together. There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free. Breaking out Chrome from Google will not in any way benefit me as a consumer.
> The agency and the states have settled on recommending that Google be required to license the results and data from its popular search engine
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers. And if the DOJ has their way, they want to crack open Google's vault of customer data and propagate it across the internet.
Not only does this sound extremely bad for consumers, the DOJ is trying to completely change Google's business model and dictate how they are supposed to make money. Regardless of how you feel about Google, this seems like a far overreach from the DOJ on finding and fixing market manipulation.
> only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together
This is the point. Google's products integrate with Chrome better than non-Google products. Including its ad platform.
But where is the consumer benefit?
Much better privacy protection and ad blocking.
There's really no rational reason for third-party cookies to still exist. The only reason they're still around is because an advertising company's browser has like 97% market share.
>Much better privacy protection and ad blocking.
The order doesn't mandate that. It mandates google SELL the data it has collected on people to third parties.
There are also privacy focussed, ad blocking focussed alternatives trivially available on the market....and people are not choosing them.
Any company which buys Chrome (Microsoft?) will have just as strong an incentive as Google to track people and run ads.
FWIW, Chrome has a 66% market share: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
======
Disliking a company doesn't justify any arbitrary policy against that company
The same cookies that Google tried to eliminate but couldn't get traction from anyone else?
Which in itself shows 3rd party Cookies will only marginally make the internet more privacy friendly.
That would have been nice in 2014 but in 2024 the big ad industry is ready.
The only ones who will hurt the most are the ones without tie ins to authentication systems like Google auth or FB auth or apple ID etc.
Although I'm sure theres plenty of mega databases which don't need overt auths to ID a user. And contextual ads work just fine.
consumer benefit is not the end all of antitrust.
1) does it though? It seems like the Google-specific parts of it are pretty ancillary to the whole experience
2) how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
It’s not, other than Google has a way larger market share (especially if you count Edge/Opera/Brave/etc.) and has been (ab)using that position to push web standards in a direction that favors their business and that other browser vendors have to follow to keep up.
If Safari had Chrome’s market share and was throwing their weight around like Google does and Microsoft did with IE, it’d be the same argument and I’d also personally support forcing them to divest it.
Safari is the #2 browser behind Chrome. It's about 55% to 30%, so while Chrome has a larger market share, it's not an order of magnitude larger.
Really the main difference is that Apple has a captive audience on iOS and no incentives to improve so they don't do anything with it.
18.5 for Safari 65% for chrome + 5% for edge = 70%
It is a magnitude higher.
> how is it different to Apples integration with Safari?
Apple hasn't been found to have a monopoly like Google has [1].
[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-antitrust-search-engine-ve...
Found to be is doing far too much work given the DOJ lawsuit that it has a monopoly (2546 points, 8 months ago, 2623 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39778999
Google is a convicted monopolist.
Right. DoJ sued Google and a judge agreed. That's a big difference.
2) consumers cannot use products like Safari as their exclusive web browser. The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting and the world needs to keep Chrome at-the-ready for when the alternative browser eventually breaks.
For example, Chrome has replaced IE as the corporate browser, due to the integrations with Workspace accounts and Authentication mechanisms. In order to use the fingerID on my/employer's macbook pro, I have to give my employer root/sync access to Google Chrome.
"The web has decided that Chrome is the only browser worth supporting…"
That only tells me that governments can no longer leave technical aspects of the internet (standards/APIs, etc.) to market forces. There are many historical precedents for such action such as flight/aircraft, RF spectrum management, road and maritime regulations, health/food standards, etc. There's a myriad of them.
Regulations would enforce interoperability and uniformity. To say this would stifle innovation is nonsense, it would be like saying that road rules and maritime law have stifled the development of motor vehicles and shipbuilding.
I use Safari as my exclusive web browser without issue.
re: 1) logging into a Google domain in a chrome browser, logs the browser into the Google account [auto-profile-login] [gSignin], and by default, syncs browser history to the cloud, cloud-readable [gSync]. Google's own docs describe that you can add a passphrase "so Google can't read it". While Google can read it, they have an arguable duty to shareholders to read it.
- [auto-profile-login]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200298
- [gSignin]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277
- [gSync]: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/165139?hl=en
> Keep your info private with a passphrase With a passphrase, you can use Google's cloud to store and sync your Chrome data without letting Google read it.
Thank you appealing to reasonable expectations, but Google, as their own docs make clear, ties uses together quite aggressively^W conveniently.
2) Whatabout Apple and Safari? Apple doesn't offer an email service supported in part by scanning email content for ads.
Apple has gone to some lengths to engineer a system where they can credibly(-ish) claim to "protect your privacy when you browse the web in Safari," [Apple private relay].
- [Apple private relay]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102602
Google re-engineers their browser to prevent ad-blockers from working.
For years people have complained "ugh Google is selling your data, how awful" and here is the government seeking to mandate that Google sell your data! There's no way that this is the right remedy.
How so?
It would be great for consumers. Google would be forced to make their products work just as well with other browsers as it does with their own.
I only use Chrome to interact with Google properties. I'd love to use Firefox for everything.
> There are many other better options out there otherwise, and they are all free.
For how long, though?
The trajectory for Firefox doesn’t look good at all (and it’s completely dependent on Google too).
Apple are doing their share of anticompetitive shenanigans with Safari on iOS, although the other way around.
Everything else is based on Chromium and therefore not contributing to any heterogeneity of implementations.
Can anyone think of a hero to save us?
> The only reason I still use Chrome is because I already use other Google products and they integrate well together.
And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out. It is unfair competition. And you say there are many other well working options out there but that is simply not true. Googles web applications work best on Chrome and often break on non Chrome browsers. Mostly because of changes to those web applications and not because of random browser bugs. This is how you win people over and complete your browser world domination.
"And that is exactly why Chrome should be broken up/out."
Exactly, we saw this with MS's IE 2—3 decades ago. That governments didn't learn from this and let it repeat with Chrome is so damn annoying.
Ah three decades ago, a year before Internet Explorer was released[0], and 7 months after Netscape was released[1], easy to correct in hindsight.
Two decades ago IE6 was already 3yo, Safari 1 was 1yo, and it would take 4 years for Chrome to drop[2].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome
> It sounds like the end goal of this is to enrich other companies, not customers.
In this case, the "customers" are other companies.
Antitrust markets can be defined broadly or narrowly. In this case, the market was "general web search advertising" (among others).
Who are the consumers in this market? People and companies that want their ads placed where (and to who) it matters.
Exactly. Everybody thinks they're the consumer, but often times consumers are other companies.
By that same logic, Safari is the #1 browser on mobile in the US and should also be spun off.
Realistically nothing is going to happen. The incoming admin has made clear their distaste for Lina Khan. In other words, this is just an attempt at a swan song by the Biden White House.
This Trump admin lawsuit began this lawsuit, and Trump previously expressed distaste for Google. Things may change but they may not
Who would possibly buy Chrome? Letting any of the large tech companies purchase it (the only possible buyers) would just give someone else monopolistic power.
Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile.
Very few companies would be able to manage a gigantic project like Chromium.
I happen to be poking around the Chromium codebase the last few days. The size of the codebase itself is at the same level as all of our company's code. Something as important and critical as GPU rendering is only a small part of the entire project. You also have v8, ChromeOS, ANGLE etc to worry about, all requiring experts in those areas. Not to mention things like Widevine and other proprietary technology surrounding Chrome.
I'll do it, if they agree to sell it to me, I'll run it.
I have a few hundred bucks that I'm willing to put into the pie, but based on the financials, it's probably going to go bankrupt pretty quick.
> based on the financials, it's probably going to go bankrupt pretty quick.
Stage 1: Buy Chrome from Google, with its 65% browser market share.
Stage 2: Tell Google you'll keep them as default search provider for $5 billion per year.
Stage 3: Profit
Yeah, probably not worth the money
In the most chaotic alternate reality possible: Mozilla
In that same alternate reality: WPEngine is given control of Automattic/WordPress as a result of the lawsuits.
Firefox is sponsored primary by Google. WPEngine is not. It would be like Automattic giving control to Wordpress foundation.
With Mozilla becoming so hostile to their power users in recent years (or any user who just wants to customize the interface or core functionality), I'm not sure it would make much difference.
They'll do what their benefactor (Goog) wants whether they own chrome or not.
Interestingly if I recall correctly a lot of the original talent for Chrome/Chromium originally worked at Mozilla and were poached by Google. [1]
[1] https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html...
Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense, especially if that foundation was then immediately funded by a variety of companies rather than just one big advertising company.
The obvious test for whether the browser is actually independent: what is the response to "let's add an ad-blocker by default".
> Having it owned by a non-profit foundation would make a huge amount of sense,...
OpenAI joined the chat...
There would be few incentives to try and pull off something like that if nobody had any faith in the product every becoming extremely profitable though.
na... Oracle.
How would they even sell it, chrome is based off of chromium. What is there to sell exactly? You can already fork chromium
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
> What is there to sell exactly?
The user base
Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.
> Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins
Third-party sign in with Google [1].
[1] https://www.google.com/account/about/sign-in-with-google/
No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.
This is how it should work anyway.
We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.
You don't HAVE to login unless you want to share your passwords, history, bookmarks etc. between your devices. Simpler = not having those features (which most users seemingly find useful).
Except if you logon to gmail it automatically logs you in the browser.
And what do I, the new owner of this user base, do with it?
1. make your search engine the default
2. make your website the default
3. make it easier to access your suite of web services
Eg. imagine instead of defaulting to google everything you typed in the search bar defaulted to chatgpt. Imagine open AI could buy that at a discount
So basically invite the DOJ to immediately take it away again?
probably not going to be a popular take on this forum, but to me it looks like anti trust and securities laws are enforced almost randomly. Is Google a monopoly using its control to limit competition - yes but so is pretty much all of FANG and many successful businesses for that matter.
Anti trust activities are not about any one act (such as routing browsers to your site), it's more about whether the fates choose your company to end up in the DOJs roulette wheel.
Or the triumphant return of Yahoo!? (hypothetical, not interrobang)
Be careful. Asking these kind of obvious questions might make you ineligible to be hired as a government bureaucrat.
> What is there to sell exactly?
widevine and all the other DRMy bits.
Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)
"Who would possibly buy Chrome?"
This is illustrates the extent and magnitude of the problem to fix the internet. That regulators failed to give enough oversight of the internet and to regulate its monopolistic players several decades ago when these problems first became obvious has meant that they are now almost insurmountable.
Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
For those who'd argue that Chrome would have no funding to further develop I'd respond by saying that it already works well as a browser and from observation that Google is channeling most of Chrome's development funds into anti-features that are hostile to users.
As an open source project that level of funding would be no longer necessary and its future development could progress at a slower pace.
> Ideally, Google would be forced to divest itself of Chrome and that Chrome would become an open source project a la Linux. Clearly, that's very unlikely to happen.
Chrome's upstream (Chromium) is already open source. If Google is forbidden from sponsoring Chromium's development, and that of its proprietary downstream distribution (Chrome) who's going to fund Chromium's development? Even if forced to divest, Google will always have an outsized sway on any open source browser due to the engineer-hours they can spend on contributions. If they are blocked from even that, then the whole exercise would be anti-consumer IMO.
If Google were forced to divest itself of Chrome and there were no takers then Chromium would take on an altogether different perspective. That Chromium exists shows there's already an existing infrastructure that would make transitioning to it relatively straightforward.
Incidentally, I don't use Chrome, only Chromium-based and Firefox-based browsers.
may as well just discontinue it then and let Chromium take its place
Yeah, but if Google were forced to divest Chrome then parts of its proprietary code would have to be open-sourced and integrated into Chromium to minimize disruption to users. Alternatively, Google would have to make its services more interoperable.
The full circle of course is MS will end up acquiring it.
This is surely the only real possibility, and puts Edge's shift to Chromium in a new light; could MS have predicted/lobbied for this push?
If this actually happens, I think it would turn perception of Nadella from good CEO that got lucky with OpenAI to a certified shadow master that's playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.
Then MS is such a giant that it will have to sell it after some time
Nah, MS doesn't own search, ads, email and half the rest of the internet.
MS owns bing. Which isn’t anywhere near as popular but still exists and is large. And effectively owns the profits from ChatGPT’s growing foray into search. Basically every Google competitor uses the bing index under the hood.
MS owns an ad network that brings in ~$10Bn a year. Much smaller than Google, but certainly nothing to ignore.
MS owns outlook/hotmail which is wildly popular.
Does Microsoft own “half the internet”? No but neither did Google. Microsoft does own Windows which is a (already sued) monopoly touch point similar to Android. They own a browser. They own a cloud platform that profits from a growing internet. They own plenty of consumer facing properties and should not be written off in monopoly or antitrust discussions.
Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the idea of spinning off Chrome (but I know Googlers so I may be biased), but I understand the appeal on paper.
A consortium of various tech companies, plus non-profits? Instead of it being in one corporate hand. One can dream of the EFF and Mozilla plus a bunch of other stakeholders owning it.
Is Chrome being run so bad that we need even more committees, councils and bureaucrats to implement every single feature ?
Microsoft is already using the Chromium and changing the default search engine to Bing and shipping it as Edge. What else is needed?
This DOJ looks like they just want to pad their resumes with some grandiose case which might be bad for everyone else.
Chrome isn't being run bad because of committee, it's being run bad because it's used by Google as part of their web advertising empire.
Chrome is not run badly at all. But in its current state it gives Google the ability to singlehandedly dictate webstandards. Thats an issue.
That doesn't go away with not Google. It's the result of having a browser with such big market share.
I think the point is to stop adding more features. The web is feature complete, everything Google is adding is just stuff to make them more money through ads and lock in.
That's not true, plenty of great stuff is shipping every year. Take your pick: https://web.dev/series/baseline-newly-available https://web.dev/blog/baseline2023
This is what Microsoft thought when they released IE6, and is why we ended up still supporting IE6 into the 2010s
There’s nothing wrong at all with adding features as long as more than one browser/engine actually adopts them.
There’s an argument to be made that a high pace of new feature additions effectively functions as a moat that ensures that new competitive web engines cannot be developed as a result of not being able to ever catch up.
Exactly: The part after "as long as" is both critical and hard to ensure.
is that based on feelings or facts?
Oh come on, I for one am excited about the upcoming WebKmem API that allows random websites direct access to kernel memory..
How else are web devs supposed to write kernel modules?
> and Mozilla
So the market/consumers decided (due to whatever reasons) that they don't want to use Mozilla's browser. Lets reward them for that failure by giving them control over someone else's browser?
> They are also prepared to seek a requirement that Google share more information with advertisers and give them more control over where their ads appear.
Seems like the DOJ is angling that Chrome should be spun off as an advertising platform of some kind.
Seems so, so much worse.
No one should. It should get an IPO. Chrome will make a lot of money from Google, Bing, ChatGPT, etc by selling default search.
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Presumably Google, Bing etc. would still be bidding to be the default search engine?
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
Google paying to be the default search engine was ruled anti competitive.
Was it? Or are they just being investigated over it?
It was. The article's 2nd sentence mentioned the ruling and linked to more information.
That seems to work for Mozilla. It would be nice to see other revenue models, but that exists and having the most used browser as a search client should pay at least as good as whatever deal Mozilla and Apple get.
Sort of? Mozilla is not doing well. Further, the only reason Google is paying Mozilla is to keep a notional third-party competitor alive; search traffic from a sub-3% browser is not worth that much. If the Chrome deal goes through, there's really no business reason for Google to keep paying them.
> you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Mozilla has ~700 employees just to keep an ailing browser on life support. Brave has ~250 employees, but they're building largely on Google's core engine, so they're getting a ton of engineering for free.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.
firefox gets along fine
how it could exist without getting money for setting the default search engine is certainly a question though
Firefox gets along... with money from Google. And I think a good portion of the $$ that Google pays Mozilla, in their mind, isn't to be the default search engine... it's to keep competition alive in order to avoid this situation.
IBM? Amazon (that sounds worse)
What about X (the everything app)?
Could happen under Trump...
ByteDance, or another Chinese company.
It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.
The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.
Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.
TLDR just be like Mozilla
What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.
Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?
The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.
To the users who use chrome, it will matter. Not clear to me how strong Chromium will be if the Google efforts for Chrome go away.
> TLDR just be like Mozilla
Mozilla is rapidly deciding they want to be an advertising and AI company at the expense of their primary product.
So, tl;dr: be like Mozilla used to be, not like they are now.
I don't like Mozilla's advertising strategy either. But their primary product can't sustain itself.
I desperately wish they'd give me the option to pay for Firefox Sync. I would, genuinely, pay for that every month. I get a massive amount of value from being able to throw tabs from my laptop to my phone and vice versa, and have everything synchronized, in a way I trust.
I'm very confused. Chrome is just Chromium with Google's own Telemetry. Chromium is open and maintained primarily by Google.
Sure, there's a userbase, but you need a business model to take advantage of it in the first place because the benefit was the Telemetry (Google's) and Google's Ecosystem.
Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one? Would someone else take over Chromium? Who would have the resources to do such a thing other than say Microsoft who currently uses a Chromium browser?
Why not just go for the jugular and separate Adsense from the rest of Alphabet? It's the main driving force in all their dark patterns for all other platforms (Youtube, Android, Chrome, Search...)
> Also, the article specifically mentions Chrome, NOT Chromium (which again, is open), so what incentive would Google have to maintaining the project without their own version of it? Would they be bared from starting a new one?
I wonder similarly if they are only selling the brand and the existing installation base. I do not see what is stopping them from just creating a chrome clone called Manganese and continuing.
It would be an interesting experiment though to see if the google version will regain the same market share or if chrome will maintain its current market share under the new stewardship.
As much as I dislike thinking it, out of the realistic possibilities for who could buy it, Microsoft is probably among the more preferable. Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least. Most other big players would be even more likely to continue with Google's direction of killing ad blockers. MS, to their credit, has never shown interest in doing that.
> Their primary income isn't from advertising, at least
Surely they wouldn't auto-default Chrome to Bing and try to become an ad company.
It's not like they're selling ads in the Start menu or anything...
> Microsoft
So we'd end up with even less competition? As flawed as Edge is it still somewhat new/innovative/different features that Chrome doesn't because MS has to try and compete with Google.
MS gaining control of Chrome would be the worst timeline
Interesting idea. I'm not against forcing Google to choose either all the user platforms they run or Adsense. If they sold off Google Drive, Suite, YouTube, Google Play, etc they might improve faster. At the very least it would drive more alternatives. That seems so unlikely though.
Google kills all their other projects often enough that I don't think they are contributing to many spaces anymore so giving the technical assets to other companies would be interesting.
Forcing Google to sell their ad business would be the death of that company. After all, it's mostly an ad company...
They would just have to go back to their original business model before they became an ad company when they ran third-party ads on Google search.
Granted, that may not get them enough income at their current scale. They would definitely have to scale back hard for that.
I'm worried about what happens to the Chrome extension store. If Google sells Chrome, then does that also mean the Chrome store? I guess it would have to. So not only does someone need to buy Chrome, they also have to operate the Chrome store too. I'm not sure this is going to work out well.
So I understand trying to break up monopolistic companies to provide better competition in the market which is generally better for the consumer as a whole. This strategy of saying Chrome should be sold off seems strange to me because unlike other monopolies Google's monopoly with Chrome is fundamentally different.
Since Chrome at its core is the open source chromium browser engine the ability for your competition to leverage what you do is already there. The dynamic here is fundamentally different than many other monopolies of the past due to this fact. It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because they feel there is no other viable option to offer a similar experience or is it because they choose that because it feels to them to be the best choice to make in a free market.
In the context of Google's ad business the fact that chrome is open source has little bearing. Chrome is both massively popular and also a loss leader designed to further entrench Google's ad monopoly. If Chrome were broken off then a competitor in the ads space like Meta could purchase the search traffic instead which would force Google's ad business to be more competitive.
Is Meta or Microsoft buying Chrome a good outcome?
My ideal outcome would be something like:
1) Chrome is spun out as a standalone entity. Google would originally have full ownership but be forced to sell down over time.
2) Google buys the Chrome traffic at a fair price
3) Apple sells their traffic to someone else, potentially an AI search player (Meta??)
4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source
> 4) MSFT makes a new browser in response to Chrome going closed source
Why would they? They can just continue why Chromium/Edge. Presumably the new standalone entity be able to invest as much into Google or even MS.
IMHO Microsoft yes, Meta no.
Microsoft wouldn't have a the kind of vertically integrated monopoly where they control both the internet properties and the browser used to access them.
Not really. If Chrome is forked they kill third party cookies and search ads remain king.
Only search has high propensity to buy right there from the interaction. Third party and even meta don't have that.
People gravitate towards Chrome in part because of Google’s heavy marketing of it. Whenever I sign into Gmail in Safari I get a pop up about a “better experience” awaiting me.
That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser. Which is chromium at its core but the experience it provides is not as good as Chrome even with all of Chrome's downsides.
So while I don't have the specific answer I think there is a much bigger question here of is it free market choice that is gravitated everyone here or is it monopolistic pressure that is squeezed out the competition. Microsoft is no small player in this space they're just the suckier player as they lost their crown with Internet explorer when they effectively owned the market too.
> That is true in a valid point but install Windows sometimes and see how much it pushes you toward the edge browser.
The difference here is that Microsoft's reputation is beyond ruined in this product category due to Internet Explorer.
You're correct Microsoft ruined their own reputation with Internet explorer but does that mean when a company utterly fails with one of their products to the point that a competitor can come in and dominate the marketplace we should somehow automatically reward the one who failed.
If it's really anti-competitive practices then I would agree but if it's just market forces then we should not reward those who've already mismanage their ability and their dominant market position to lose out in such a short period of time.
It is not. Plenty of newcomers and old boomers won't even notice if you switch edge for chrome.
Google also turns every link tap in their iOS apps into an opportunity to upsell Chrome for iOS when it should just open the link with the user’s default browser.
I'm shocked that Apple hasn't cracked down on this process through App store reviews. It's such an awful experience.
I’m not surprised, though. They’re not exactly on the most solid ground with them preventing any engines other than their own WebKit for third-party browsers or even apps.
How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Safari and Messages etcetera link to within the closed Apple ecosystem - just like Windows. It can be between difficult to impossible to send an email or create a calendar item unless you use the iOS apps.
I'm definitely no Google fanboi but every answer being "Google are arseholes" feels dishonest.
The Chromium developer team absolutely kick arse and being open source is a true gift. Mozilla is badly failing to compete. Microsoft failed to compete with their first Edge rewrite, and now ironicalky MS "competes" using Chromium open source.
And why did Chromium have to split from WebKit? As an outsider it just looked like "because Apple don't want to play nice".
The story is always simplified to Google greedy arseholes. A typical response: you can never ever ever satisfy open source proponents... The stereotype that every open source user greedily wants more.
iOS has an option to set your default browser and mail client, and it works fine. There is nothing even vaguely difficult about sending an email or creating a calendar item without using the Apple apps. Google is in fact being an asshole by prompting every time if you want to ignore the default app and use chrome in the hopes that you'll finally accidentally hit it.
> How else is Google supposed to "integrate" within iOS?
Like everybody else. If the user wants Chrome on iOS, they can install it and set it as their default browser. To link to other Google apps, Google can use Universal Links[0] to directly open Calendar, Sheets, etc or open the corresponding App Store page if they haven’t been installed yet.
Google forked WebKit because they wanted to take it in a direction that was fundamentally incompatible with the direction Apple wanted to go: Google wanted more core functionality (process management, etc) to be written as part of the browser (likely to serve as a moat) while Apple wanted all that to live within the engine itself so third party devs could take advantage of it without having to fork a whole browser (just drop WebKit into your app and go).
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/allowing-app...
Chrome is definitely a better experience than Safari, and not by a little bit. In many ways Safari is the worst browser out there right now. Most of its market share comes from the fact that Apple still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have installed. I think the DOJ should go after Apple harder on that than they are on Google, because nobody is forcing anyone to use Chrome the same way Apple is forcing their users to use Safari.
Desktop Safari’s ~15% market share, which exceeds Firefox’s ~7%, suggests otherwise. Mac users can freely switch and yet many don’t.
There are likely several reasons for this but I think the two biggest ones are its differences in philosophy: first, that browsers should be just one utility among many on a desktop OS and not try to set itself apart and second, to actively combat the internet’s hostilities on behalf of the user.
Chrome will never do either. It tries to be a distinct brand and platform instead of meshing with your desktop nicely and it’s not going to do anything that will negatively impact Google’s many ad businesses.
I agree that the DOJ should enforce browser choice in iOS much like the EU has but in this scenario it feels besides the point. No matter how better or worse anyone might think Safari is it’s my right to choose which browser I access a site with, and I’d rather not be harassed to change.
Apple forces you to use Safari because it's the least capable mobile browser, which pushes developers to develop iOS apps to use the device APIs that other browsers allow but Safari won't implement - this drives people to the 30% cash grab Apple gets from their app store, instead of using web applications that are possible on other browsers on other platforms. It's awful what Apple is doing with forcing Safari on iOS. To make it worse, there are plenty of Apple-only proprietary things about Safari that make buying their hardware a necessity to debug problems that only appear on Safari. Web developers hate Safari, it's now known as "the new IE" because it's so bad.
Like I said, I agree with you on all that. I develop mobile web sites, I’m very familiar with all this. I still choose to use Safari on my Mac, it should be my choice to make.
> still forces Safari to be used on iOS no matter what browser you think you have inst
What's the difference whether Chrome is using WebKit or Blink from the perspective of most users? How would they notice that and why would they care?
I find Safari to be a fantastic product overall both on desktop and mobile but I have stuck to Chrome to keep my options open in future in case I want to use non-Apple hardware
I think the real issue is Google is able to use Chrome to push web standards in any direction they want.
Isn’t Google refusing to make changes that boost online privacy because it’ll tank their ad revenue?
But I don't see how that equates to a monopoly. They certainly have the ability to direct their development of their product in the way that they want. Since the core foundation of their product is open and available to every other competing browser they could implement better privacy protections while still leveraging all of the other benefits of Chrome.
If the edge browser was so much better and much better privacy wise or the kiwi browser or any of the others the internet can move fairly quickly from one choice to another when that choice is better. For all the downsides that Chrome has I don't see anything that fits the term better for my use case. I'm also guessing that most other users also haven't found anything "better"
It’s horizontal tying.
If Chrome was not owned by an ad company, the owners of chrome would push for instead of against privacy protections (see: firefox, safari).
The browser monopoly, which Chrome sells at a loss, enables the ad company. This is the problem.
Chromium does not get features Chrome does not need from Google. So anything against ads does not get upstreamed to Chromium.
Chrome also is a major browser vendor, whereas kiwibrowser and opera are not, which means the standards boards listen to them more. If those seats were not owned by an ad company, standards would likely be different.
As much as I find Chrome’s ownership and market share problematic, that doesn’t seem fair.
What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?
(Except if you mean that any new and initially exclusive feature bolsters Chrome’s dominance further, in which case I’d somewhat agree.)
> What exactly do things like WebUSB and Web Bluetooth contribute to Google’s ad business?
Google keeps proposing specifications like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, Web Serial, etc., and both Mozilla and Apple keep shooting them down on privacy and security grounds. Meanwhile Google ignores the problems and builds them into Chrome anyway, and guess what happens? They start getting used to fingerprint and track people.
Who knows, maybe it’s just a coincidence that all of these technologies that advertisers can use to fingerprint and track people keep making their way into the browser owned by one of the world’s largest ad companies.
How would you use WebUSB or Web Bluetooth for device fingerprinting?
HID, mass storage devices etc. are required to be filtered by implementations, and why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
The prompts are pretty scary/disruptive, and I've never seen any website actually try (unlike for e.g. web push notifications, which are fairly private but can be super annoying).
> why would I grant a random news or social media site access to my MiniDisc player, Arduino board, Bluetooth thermometer/hygrometer etc. when it asks for it?
Part of the problem is that a vast number of users neither understand nor care about these prompts. They just click to make them go away.
There’s a few long discussions on the unsuitability of these specifications in the Mozilla standards positions repo:
Web Bluetooth: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/95
Web USB: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/100
Web MIDI: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58
Web Serial: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/336
Here’s some Hacker News discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23679063
The monopoly the DoJ is trying to break up isn't Chrome, it's Search. From TFA:
> Antitrust enforcers want the judge to order Google to sell off Chrome — the most widely used browser worldwide — because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine, said the people.
> I don't see how that equates to a monopoly
The monopoly is in ads. Google uses its control of Chrome to act uncompetitively in advertising.
Isn't it even worse than that? Didn't they make changes via Manifest v3, which will not allow me to follow the FBI's advisory about using ad blockers, to make sure their ad revenue does not decline?
I do realize you can still use uBlock, but my understanding is that updates will be slow rolled, correct? Doesn't this open the window to malicious people to serve me mal-ads?
Quite the opposite, Google is the key sponsor of Privacy Sandbox: https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/
Working out why they're doing this is left as an exercise to the reader.
The whole reason for "privacy sandbox" is to still do user tracking, but do it in an anonymous way that they hope legislators won't go after. It's Google seeing the writing on the wall that legislation will soon ban third-party cookie tracking and fingerprinting and the like, so they need to be proactive and protect the ad tracking business.
A better name for it would have been something like "anonymous user tracking / data collection", but "privacy sandbox" is probably a good marketing term to fuzz what it's really doing. To a normal user it makes it sounds like Google is doing something good and protecting them, while it's really just "please opt in to our new more anonymized tracking technology while still allowing us to track you".
The entire point of Privacy Sandbox is to get away from tracking individuals and allow ad targeting of anonymous cohorts (interest groups) instead.
https://developers.google.com/privacy-sandbox/private-advert...
The root problem here is that users don't want any of these tracking alternatives. All of the other browsers have said "no thanks" to any of the alternatives, and already moved forward with blocking third-party cookies (the main vector for tracking). Chrome hasn't moved forward with this because their ability to still track you thanks you being logged into Google means that disadvantaging every ad provider paints a massive target on their backs for antitrust law (even more so than they already have). Hence their attempt to fix it by creating new vectors of tracking so they can get the privacy "win" of blocking third-party cookies.
Everyone else's ad revenue. The UK computing regulator is the main player here.
The DOJ has renounced the consumer welfare standard [https://prospect.org/justice/2024-08-09-will-googles-monopol...].
I genuinely have no idea what "missing features" or incompatibilities keep people on Chrome compared to the benefits of uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
Bookmarks, passwords, payment information, recent tabs, extensions... all synced with your Google account in Chrome. Firefox can't sync to your Google account. All that information is synced across the entire Google account system, to your Android phone, other Chrome browser instances and so on. Yes I know you could export your data from Google and pull it into Firefox's sync system, but that's a hurdle.
Why would you want all this stuff synced? The only thing I want out of that is passwords, but 1Password works just fine for that. In fact, I don't trust a browser to store my passwords securely.
It is a hurdle to switch, yes.
But everything you listed (apart from integrating with Google's servers) can be done with Firefox.
You can either use Mozilla accounts to do that for free and as easy as it is with Google accounts. Or if you are a power user and would like an adventure, you can selfhost sync and accounts servers yourself. Does chrome provide that ability?
Right, I was confused by this comment. I actually don't think it's that hard to switch, tools to import your stuff across browsers have existed for a long time. It might be that Firefox isn't particularly polished on this front but I don't think it's outside the realm of achievable and I don't think the difficulty of switching is by any means a deal breaker.
This would be a relevant list, except no one I know who compulsively uses Chrome...uses any of that stuff at all.
Google Meet is particularly Firefox hostile with camera/audio support, but I'm not sure how common it actually is.
I use FF full-time but have to use Chromium for WebEx and Teams calls to avoid massive jank.
I bought Ozlo Sleep buds recently. Really cool hardware that does exactly what they say they do. However, the device I read with at night runs Android 11 which is too old for their app (requires Android 12). I can configure and update the sleep buds through a browser with WebUSB...but only with Chrome.
PWAs being entirely unsupported by Firefox for instance.
This is the last big thing keeping me on Vivaldi (based on chromium). I do use those, and would most likely fully switch to Firefox when implemented.
What things are only available as PWAs that are worth it? Like I know they exist, but I've never installed or used one.
"Only?" probably none
However, recently there was a healthy thread about the massive trackers found in mobile apps[1] which wouldn't be a problem with PWAs since they live in the same sandbox as the browser (meaning no exfiltrating all the shit) but yet can one-click launch from the normal app mechanisms and (AFAIK) can be the subject of Intent handlers just like apps
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923931
uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly fine for me on Chrome.
Maybe there's some 0.01% of ads that would get blocked in the Firefox version that aren't in Chrome. But I don't see any regular users switching because they're noticing ads not getting blocked now.
It works fine for now. As soon as Manifest V2 is officially gone you will certainly see an increase in ads. What ad company wouldn't take advantage of more limited ad blocking capabilities in the most popular web browser?
One difference between lite and the full version is CNAME cloaking protection. The enforcement of Manifest V3 in Chrome opens up a gap in the ecosystem where analytics and advertising providers will increasingly use CNAME cloaking, since it can't be blocked from the world's most popular browser. And this is the world in which using Firefox with its support for Manifest V2 suddenly becomes quite a bit more attractive.
If CNAME cloaking takes off in a big way, then yes at that point I agree I could see people moving to Firefox. But for now that's not happening.
Also, if that actually led significant numbers of people to leave Chrome, isn't that where we'd see "Manifest V3.1" or whatever that allows matching against CNAMEs?
Chrome is pretty central to Google's strategy. If we assume that people who want to block ads will (by switching to Firefox when necessary), then it's in Google's interests for Chrome to support ad blocking. If they're not going to get ad revenue anyways, they'd still rather it be happening on Chrome.
Also see a recent comment by a member of the Chrome team on why Manifest V3 was for performance reasons, not to cripple adblocking (I don't know if it's true, but it seems worth considering): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41815861
That's just Google boiling the frog slowly.
Firefox still lacks webgpu support.
> uBlock just plain working better on Firefox.
In what way does uBlock work better on Firefox? I don't see any ads in Chrome. Ad block is more important to me than any browse. I use Kiwi on Android instead of Chrome, and would switch immediately on desktop if I saw ads.
This wiki page on uBlock origin repository is a direct answer to your question.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
> It must be asked are people gravitating toward Chrome because ....
It's because Chrome used to be shoved down everyone's throat up until few years ago. Once stable base of users was made (by force and deception) the market took momentum
Nah, it was faster, lighter and better.
I say this as someone who has been back on Firefox for years at this point.
> it was faster, lighter and better
And more stable
It also used to be distributed like an adware, bundled with along other softwares during installation.
I do think you're rewriting history a bit here. Of course a Google advertised to their product but people didn't move to Chrome simply because of the advertisements. Chrome took hold because literally every other choice sucked and sucked hard. When you only have sucky choices you have to deal with them and they made something massively better than anything else at the time. Companies with buckets of money like Microsoft didn't innovate in this space and even when they saw what Google was doing with Chrome their ability to compete with it was laughable. Even when they finally switch to their edge browser because the Internet explorer name was so tainted with bad experiences they still suck in this space. Even with Bing and the billions of dollars they can throw at it they still suck in this space.
I think it's a combination of both. There was absolutely a period where Chrome was faster, and Chrome still has a better security design. But Google also pushed Chrome incredibly hard, including bundling it with other software as a checked-by-default box, and used all the tactics to get it made the default browser and make it hard to switch, and advertised it on Google services for free, and made some features of Google products require it.
It took hold because it was a part of almost every popular piece of software installer back in the day, and enabled by default
What would that even mean? Chrome doesn't make money. Who would buy it, except maybe someone who plans to do something even more nefarious?
Chrome makes enormous sums of money through ads. Also, these companies pay fortunes for default settings like search engines and other backroom deals. Someone could buy Chrome and ask Microsoft for 30% of Bing's search revenue to be the default search engine and Microsoft would agree.
What ads does Chrome make money from?
Google makes money from ads by having control of Chrome. I don't see how that would continue if it's spun out. I'm not aware of any ads in Chrome itself (but I've been using FF for years, so what do I know). And Chrome controlling the default search engine is exactly why they want it spun out from Google, so if the result was simply that it makes money by defaulting to a different search engine, that would be an absurd, pointless result.
Imagine if Google isn't allowed to pay Chrome Inc for traffic acquisition so Chrome changes the default search engine to Bing and now Bing is a monopoly because 90% of browsers default to Bing.
> that would be an absurd, pointless result.
Not saying it couldn't happen.
This makes sense, but it is made even more nonsensical by the fact that the DOJ is also separately saying traffic aquisition deals are anticompetitive as well.
> Who would buy it
If the decision drags on into the new administration, then the answer is probably Elon Musk.
This is good guess unfortunately. However, there are second order effects as we've seen with X that will drive people to Firefox so this could end up being a good thing.
"make" Mozilla buy it, give em a heaping grant from the Library of Congress to keep the open web open, and be the engine behind every browser keeping things fair... sounds good to me!
In this scenario I’d much rather that heaping grant goes to a newly independent Chromium nonprofit org. Browser engine diversity is a good thing and worth trying to preserve.
Seriously the chromium project needs an endowment to sustain operations. Especially when you consider chromium OS too.
Are they being forced to sell Chromium? How would that work?
That’s what the article for this thread is about…
No the article is about Chrome, not Chromium
What is the actual asset to buy precisely? The code is already mostly open. You'd be paying for a user base who could leave at any moment?
If that hadn't forked WebKit DOJ would have to prove collusion instead.
Plot Twist:
Google sells Chrome, then immediately forks Chromium and starts a new “completely unrelated” browser with all the same features called “Magnesium”
With those rulings come conditions. Corporations under a judgement under monopoly practices can't do anything they want wily-nily. AT&T, for example, was forbidden from selling computers in 1956.
https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/how_antitrust...
Google Matte. chrome is out of fashion now.
I'd be so excited if the did this and named it "Ultron".
What kind of continuity can be expected when the head of the DoJ is a political appointee by the president, and we're getting a new president in 2 months with radically different ideas compared to our current one?
I’m not sure, but per the article it’s a continuation of it’s beginning:
> The case was filed under the first Trump administration and continued under President Joe Biden.
None, lol.
Maybe one of the big spyware players will buy chrome
Microsoft?
Dang it, I think we missed a chance for it to be bought by the Onion
Looking at this case and the recent case against SpaceX (which is required to only hire US permanent residents and citizens) for not hiring asylees, makes me think DOJ which has the bandwidth to only work on few very important cases isn't doing a good job overall.
Thinking this through, it’s hard to even imagine how such a selloff and transfer could happen. Chrome, which is built downstream from the open-source Chromium, is a behemoth project with development spanning nearly every domain — rendering, GPU ops, WASM, AI, js engines, web standards, and much more.
Sure, Google doesn’t always prioritize developments that don’t align with its ad monopoly. Still, Chrome remains a polished & widely used product.
As far as I can see, it would be best to establish a "Chromium Foundation," akin to the Linux Foundation, with emphasis on advancing web standards, unencumbered by corporate priorities.
That said, the more entrenched monopoly Google maintains lies in its "Search Experience," integrated with complementary products like Maps, YouTube, Android, and others.
I don't see any other viable alternative that serves the needs of most users across the board. Bing doesn’t come close, and while private search engines cater to power users, the average web user rarely switches search engines. For many, Google Search has become the de facto entry point to the internet and their view of the Web.
This...doesn't seem like a good idea.
Not to be dramatic, but from a security perspective, it feels a little like the scene in Ghost Busters where the EPA inspector orders a Con Ed worker to shut down the containment system.
I'm trying to imagine all the operational implications and this particular suggestion feels hasty.
I'm open to hearing different opinions.
Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it, or at least the ones with most experience working on it, maybe even give them a tiny part of the shares of whatever company gets to own it, or perhaps with a contract for at least for a couple of years (and then could return to Google or whatever), and if possible include some incentives to make them focus on working on security bugs over new features, which tbh I think there is just too many every year.
> Buying the browser should come with most of the engineers that actively work on it
The 13th Amendment to the US constitution makes the sale of people illegal.
Seriously though - how would this ever work? Google cannot negociate on behalf of their employees or promise they will work somewhere if Google stops employing them.
I don't like it either, but it doesn't seem unprecedented. Companies sell units to each other (complete with staff) all the time.
I'm pretty sure everyone who worked at Universal Studios still worked there after Comcast bought them. I don't recall any staff being included when Google sold Domains to Squarespace, but they very well could have been.
Hell, if you've ever temped in tech, sometimes you wake up and find out you work for a different agency. "Yesterday you worked at Magnit. Today you work at TechPro."
Or it could be something in between - the buyer offers you a new contract and the seller says you'll be laid off if you don't take it.
Companies regularly buy and sell parts of themselves. I think the standard approach would be for Chrome employees to be given golden handcuffs of some sort.
> Google cannot negociate on behalf of their employees or promise they will work somewhere if Google stops employing them
Of course they can. Read your employment contract. It almost certainly can be assigned.
I can promise someone that you will give me $100 too. But it doesn't create obligations on your end.
My employment contract says nothing about me needing to work at any company that Google decides I should work for.
> My employment contract says nothing about me needing to work at any company that Google decides I should work for
It probably also lets you quit with short notice.
Being owner of even a tiny bit of a brand new company that owns Chrome would be very attractive to engineers already working on Chrome, and it wouldn't be wise for any parent company to piss them off as they know the software better than anyone.
The revenue and profitability of "the Chrome Company" is going to be far less than Google, since Google's rising tide is what lifted that particular boat.
How would the Chrome Company deal with this?
Would they do closed source development going forward, no more free lunch for other browsers or shells using Chrome as an engine?
How much of a hit does this mean for employees salaries? They are currently making Google money, and now they're about to make Microsoft money.
How many would just be flat out laid off due to a lack of revenue, at least in the short term? Would it be a 50% lay off? Into a job market that's already bad?
Firefox makes hundred of millions of dollars in revenue per year. If you assume the same revenue per user and apply it to Chrome's market size (about 30x that of firefox) then you have a top 20(?) tech company in revenue terms.
They will have more money than they know what to do with. But yes, going closed source does seem more likely.
Isn't firefox mostly making its money from Google? They'll be struggling too if Google gets out of the browser business and no longer feels the pressure to sustain them
Why would it be a bad idea?
Yeah, especially if this breaks Chrome Remote Desktop in any way, seems like that capability would be tied into the Google ecosystem... I wonder how long we will have to say goodbye to the simplest remote desktop that has ever existed.
If getting more open protocols/APIs for that kind of thing is a consequence of this then I’ll take it.
Next please make Apple open up all the secret integration between iOS and Watch so that Fitbit and others can more fairly compete.
Browsers are complicated enough that I don’t see how a company could do the right thing without it being subsidized by a larger business. I feel like this is paving the ground for a Chinese startup to come take its place.
This feels like a feel good headline for DoJ that doesn't materially impact the Search/Ads ecosystem nor improve things for the end consumer.
Chromium exists - literally as a baseline for several other corporations to build a browser.
If you wanted to do something meaningful - you must separate search and ads, everything else is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
This seems like the best case scenario for them.....losing Android would have been a far bigger problem
I'm reading this on a non Chrome browser and I can search for it on a non Google search engine. I don't understand where the monopoly is.
You can look up details of the lawsuit, but the idea is that Google paying Apple to be the default search engine prevents other search engines from competing with Google search. The default search selection has been shown to be quite important. Anti-trust law is built around the idea of maintaining competition - “monopolies” aren’t inherently illegal.
Every company does this though. They pay to be the exclusive or official XYZ of some company or event.
For example, Bud Light being the official drink of the NFL.
Or Coca-Cola being the exclusive drink that can be sold at the Olympics and many other sporting venues.
Bud Light has a 9.7% market share.
Chrome has a 67% market share. You also missed the entire point of defaults being important.
A single attempt to separate google and chrome (with all its products) would make the eco-system pointless and swipe away google entirely from the global market.
why not to give Youtube instead tho? (even if the revenue/monetization of every single channel would be heavily impacted)
Android and chrome are necessary for google to live, so Youtube or something else would be better
The point is not to do what is good for Google. The point is to do what is good for users and the market. Separating Chrome from Google's despotic plans such as AMP and blocking ad-blockers so that the browser is independent from their attempts to further control the web would be a good thing.
A much better decision would have been to require them to fund some amount of the various open source competitors so there can be alternatives. Makes as much sense as forcing them to sell a thing that has no market.
"Selling" off chrome is probably not even really possible in any reasonable business way.
Stuff like this. It feels like there's less of a case here than with Microsoft. In the 90s, Windows nearly became _the_ OS, especially had Apple folded like it nearly did. There really wasn't an alternative in the emerging home computer space as well as the OEM shenanigans among other things. Threatening to pull office for Mac if Apple failed to include IE.
I'm struggling to see how Google is truly behaving monopolistic here. Chrome is available for compile, and is part of other browsers like edge. It's like suggesting linux has a monopoly because almost all web servers run on it.
It would be a shame if the DOJ forced this. Google has the resources to continue to pressure Apple to allow non-nerfed Chrome on iOS.
That said, this might be my favorite of the DOJ remedies I've heard because it would probably do the least harm.
They had these alleged resources for almost two decades now. Did they manage to force Apple? Or do they give them two digit billions dollars for Google to be the default search engine on safari?
Again, no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores.
The DOJ is after monopoly in search space (and how Google is using chrome position to strengthen the search monopoly) not the browser space itself (Which is another monopoly but to less extend). People don't look into one product and DOJ are not naive to fall into this trap.
Then pass a law that says all browsers must give a choice of search engine.
I'm not sure your right though.
As you might know. DOJ is not able to pass laws for obvious reasons. They do enforce the current laws. Google is free to lobby for such law as they do with other things.
^This. Apple's lock on the mobile market is far worse for consumers. Break off the App Store from Apple, a company that would actually be valuable.
> no idea how Google's supposed monopoly of web browsers is worse for the consumer than Apple's actual monopoly on iPhone browsers (they're all Safari under the hood) and on App stores
For the same reason proprietary cables aren't generally a monopoly problem: Apple hasn't been declared a monopoly. Google has [1].
[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-search-antitrust-case-5911...
This is the strangest decision I've ever seen. Chrome isn't the default anywhere except Pixel branded devices (most or all of the Android OEMs have their own browsers) and you need to actually seek out and download Chrome from Google.com. So how will Google selling Chrome lead to less traffic towards Google? It seems the DOJ has cause and effect completely backwards.
IF Google is a monopoly that abuses search and ads, IMO it would make much more sense to split it like this: - Google Search - Ads - Consumer facing everything, so Chrome, Android, Pixel devices, Nest, etc... all together - YouTube
This kind of split would prevent Google dominating search, abusing their dominance of ads while also enabling their device division to become a proper competitor to Apple and Samsung.
Simply splitting off Chrome is weird, kills Chrome for absolutely no reason, does nothing to help consumers and most importantly doesn't prevent Google from dominated search and ads which is the whole point of the suit in the first place...
It's also strange that the DOJ is letting Apple, MS and Meta off the hook when those businesses clearly engage in anti-competitive practices.
Not sure how this works but if some party purchased chrome, isn't the best business for it to sell advertising back to google? And then sell the default search engine back to google?
I don’t really understand how this would work and the article doesn’t really give me enough detail to know. But for me, Google abandoning their plans to disable third party cookies tells me everything I need to know: their ad business calls the shots and an ad company having monopoly over the browser market is an unequivocally bad thing.
I just have no idea how we get from here to there. And let’s be real, with Trump re-elected the chance of the DOJ following through with this is very low.
Somewhere in a possible future, Trump hands Chrome to Elon and he makes X Browser.
If this comes true, I take full responsibility for causing it.
Google as Microsoft did years ago will stall until a new administration is in office and reach a settlement for what is effectively a slap on the wrist.
I can think of other ways to break up Google that don't involve selling Chrome. I'm not sure I understand how selling Chrome would weaken Google.
Slightly off-topic:
I am always baffled with the widespread use of Chrome.
On all my machines (including work) I use Firefox. Even on Android I disabled Chrome, so that the feed will have to use Firefox.
Chrome is neither faster nor more convenient than Firefox, so it is a bit of a mystery to me - I guess on Android it comes as the default.
It is mostly better advertising compared to what Mozilla was pulling of, the initial edge in performance (at least that’s what people said), integration with google for the android users (Firefox was late to this) as well as some issues if garbage websites didn’t test on Firefox.
Regarding features, things I’d miss include PWA, some APIs like WebUSB that let me flash microcontrollers in the browser and I think WebGPU is still only in Firefox nightly.
Most of those things are very specific to what I do. Most people don’t need PWAs. Most people have no need for WebUSB and most applications run on WebGL so that’s mostly an issue for developers.
It’s not like Firefox is bad but I think Google just managed to capture the market and now the userbase doesn’t have a good reason to switch to Firefox (most people don’t think about privacy if it’s not in their face. Very few people will have no passcode on their phone. But even less people will think twice before uploading the images of stranger’s kids to Google Drive because they happened to be in the background when you made a photo of your own kids even though google has no reason to respect your privacy).
Netflix was tipping point for me, at the time Chrome was only browser on Linux that let me watch Netflix.
Maybe force of habit from years ago when Mozilla was the dominant non-default browser and chrome rolled in and ate their lunch by feeling so much faster.
There are a lot of pages that work better in Chrome than Firefox. I say that as someone who always defaults to Firefox.
To the average person, all the browsers are exactly the same. I use Chrome, Edge, and Firefox at work at its all the same to me as well.
Maybe this will lead to Chromium finally getting proper vertical tabs which Google clearly otherwise block due to it eating up horizontal real estate that would otherwise be used for ads.
Spin off, maybe. Make it something more akin to The Linux Foundation where a consortium of vested interests donate time and resources. This should also include public funds as part of civic infrastructure and national defense funding. BTW, Mozilla really should be in such a bin too.
Chrome data may be feeding Search Results based on how long people stay at different pages and where they go. Thus removing Chrome may remove a substantial data advantage for search.
So what would happen to Chromebooks?
There was an article from Android Authority today that said it's being rebased on Android.
https://www.androidauthority.com/chrome-os-becoming-android-...
this is it ... chromeOS is dead
They could spin it off and then set up the same kind of pay-for-default-search deal that Mozilla has. This might put just enough distance between the two orgs to satisfy the DOJ without actually changing much.
So who would set the price in this? If Google just sets something moderately absurd then what?
That’s what they mean by “force” - if this does happen, the government will have a hand in the behind-closed-door negotiations with potential buyers.
Company forced to sell cannot simply set an absurd price to evade regulators, as that would be plainly acting in bad faith
I have no idea how this would work either, but I feel like the election makes this more likely to happen, not less, after the amount of rhetoric that Google needs taking down a peg.
This doesn't seem helpful... Yet, Microsoft owning Chrome feels better. They are less incentivized to bake in features related to advertising.
Is this sarcasm? Because Windows 11 has a ton of ads and more ads/telemetry are getting added with every update.
It's very weird to see that same point brought up multiple times in this thread. It makes me worried that this all was cooked up my M$ all along (A company which doesn't have any antitrust litigation being brought against them despite putting ads in their latest operating system)
I would much rather Google be forced to fund alternative browsers (other than Firefox)
ByteDance has lots of extra cash. I hope DOJ is prepared to stop this from completely backfiring on the public.
Chrome can't really be sold unless it'd mean Google is not allowed to maintain a fork of Chromium.
While you can sell access to the existing installations (control over the update url), if Google continues to invest development into a fork (and just drops the information about it on Google frontpage) then that new fork will become defacto Chrome.
EDIT: To clarify, the value of Chrome is not only the userbase, but also its placement in Google products and importantly, the development effort on a scale few can afford.
I think this would be a very unfair action to perform so late in the administration.
Simply because the other two dominant personal computer OS vendors, Microsoft and Apple, will be allowed to maintain their browsers. The less entrenched company and younger company is getting singled out?
If they had more time to build cases against the more entrenched Apple and MS, maybe I'd give them some benefit of the doubt. But we can't assume the next administration's antitrust policy will be consistent or even sensible.
My understanding is that google lets anyone freely use chromium, and chrome is just their flavour of chromium with google services integrated ontop of it. Microsoft took chromium and sprinkled ai-enhanced microsoft flavours on top to make edge, which doesn't look like a monopoly. Presumably, microsoft is able to use windows to push edge, and use edge to push bing. If chrome was sold and had the google integration removed I would switch to a vanilla chromium.
I see some argument for google paying firefox to be the default search engine, but is that worse than firefox not existing at all?
In terms of search engines, I think there's just a lack of good competition. The search engines I'm aware of are:
Google: Just works. The only problem is you need to add "reddit" to most searches to get actual real, human-written non-seospam text, but I doubt that's unique to just google.
Bing: I'm greeted with an uncomfortably flashy layout shift, a page full of american news and some popup about AI. They also cover up and censor for the CCP.
Kagi: Their website is literally broken right now and I can't even see the pricing or other pages. I tried safari, chrome, firefox and edge, the hamburger menu doesn't open. Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.
Yandex: Good for the reverse image searching, but otherwise probably not good to use.
Most of this article is ads, and it's paywalled so I can only read the first couple sentences, so if this is addressed in it I apologise.
Something like YouTube would have been a much better idea.
My bet is that this is just lame-duck flailing, and the case will be dropped by the incoming administration.
Alternatively, the Trump admin forces the issue, Google sells off Chrome, and Musk buys it.
Is this really going to happen in the next 62 days?
How likely will Trump DOJ drop this? Consumers have choice, albeit just a handful of credible options. Nobody is forced to use Chrome (unlike MSFT pushing IE back in the day)
Is this why Google is trying to deprecate Chrome OS and merge it into Android? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42175069
This would be outrageously bad for the web.
Right now a healthy web ecosystem is Google's existential hedge, against all the closed platforms of the world coming to devour the web and Google's business.
Getting rid of Google as a patron for the web would be one of the most harmful damaging & awful things the DOJ could do this world. Strongly opposed, what a godforsaken heinous crime against humanity to consider leaving no one funding the web at scale.
Why? What a stupid move. It’s like actively working to drive our largest corporations into the ground so China can replace it with some bullshit.
I think on the contrary, that the number of brilliant people being paid for doing nothing at google is what slows US down compared to china.
Only monopoles like google can afford to burn so much cash. And that's a clear loss for the economy.
If they're "burning" money how is that a loss for the economy? They're spending the money on something; effectively stimulating the economy.
If the work you're doing isn't valuable then eventually economic reality will hit, the money will run out and the businesses from China that are actually disciplined and productive will take your market share.
This is terrible news for the web
Why?
Weird that this is so doom and gloom, the world's most popular browser decoupled from the ad machine. What's not to love? People champion Firefox and Brave constantly and they're independent browsers.
Brave is not an independent browser, the majority of development comes for free through Chromium, funded by… Google. Firefox by Mozilla Corp survives on loads of cash from… Google.
Whoever’s going to pay for the acquisition and the shit ton of ongoing development costs will have to milk it a lot harder than Google (unless the buyer is something like Microsoft, but what’s the point then). A browser alone, especially the type people here champion, is a bad business.
Are they going to request this only for Trump to unrequest this?
Trump DOJ is gonna be very friendly to PAC donations.
100% bet, Trump gonna be easy on corporations that kiss his butt.
you hate to see it.. no wait. love it.
This is just the corporate captured government pretending to do something significant as a performative act for an ignorant public.
The DOJ knows this is pointless. The DOJ knows where Google's profits come from.
The DOJ is pretending that thr public still thinks about the internet in terms of Microsoft/Internet Explorer bundling.
Shame on you DOJ for wasting everyone's time and money.
Facepalm. So I guess this weak cookie cutter approach is what we get for the high water mark of opposition before the imminent corporate coup against constitutionally limited government.
Splitting the surveillance giants into different vertical markets makes no sense at all, and this particular division illustrates it well. We might have had a chance if government, two decades ago, had worked towards creating new specific types of regulations that reflected what competition in the digital realm actually requires - for example prohibiting this now widespread bundling of proprietary client software with hosted services, by mandating that hosted services must only be offered through published APIs. Instead we got some token opposition of "selling off" (checks notes) a web browser that's ultimately "open source".
Chrome??? Dude. THAT plus:
* Android
* Search
* Advertising
* YouTube
Smash it into tiny pieces. Then the same for Apple and Facebook.
We've been stalled for technological progress for 15+ years. Tear down the giants holding us back.
How is Google holding back android or YouTube?
Apple will never be broken. Most of these folks use Apple and see it as the good guy versus Google, plus it would impact their daily lives.
Also once they see the mess separating Google would do, theyd leave apple in tact
Do that in a simulator and see how the world starts to tear apart
I love every moment of it.
That really does not come as a surprise and that was totally expected. [0] As soon as Chrome started to become more of a platform (for their extension API) with many other companies using it in their own browsers, it tells you why they had >90% of the search market for years.
This is what the folks at Google have all feared and why they started to run away from the company, spurring up 'Google' competitors (including Microsoft & OpenAI) all bringing it down.
Google will appeal and fight back and either way will survive. But we have given Sundar enough time to turn it around and it's time for him to leave and a wartime CEO to step up.
It's possible as Sataya Nadella did this for Microsoft. Google needs to do the same.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116034
Who would buy Chrome and why would they buy it? And why would they be trusted to not do something nefarious?
Anyone with a search engine or equivalent product to sell that is not a monopoly.
I’m guessing Meta would like to buy it. Probably for nefarious data sucking reasons tho
You really like making predictions about the future
Outstanding news!