If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage.
If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer, run the installer, open Chrome, and set it as the default browser. So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage.
Chrome is the only browser with a business model that makes sense to do this. Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default. Firefox makes no money at all, and makes 95% of its revenue from Google's payments to be the default search engine. Safari isn't even available on Windows, and even then, 99% of Safari's revenue is from Google.
(Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)
Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Chrome: 65.55%
Edge: 13.9%
Safari: 8.69%
Firefox: 6.36%
Opera: 2.9%
The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.
How could Chrome make its owner any money at all if Chrome couldn't accept money from Google to be the default search engine? How could Chrome possibly do what Firefox and Safari can't?
Maybe 10 years ago, but which ones do it now? thinkpads and HP machines, at least, ship with Edge as the default. Dell or something?
Windows is also _hyper_ aggressive about pushing Edge now too. Like it's nuts how hard it pushes it, to the point that it embarrasses people who do actually prefer Edge. "Recommending" at every turn that you not switch, having the edge browser itself warn against downloading Chrome, pushing edge into various OS-level browser launches even if it's not your default, and, of course, randomly resetting the browser default on various updates.
edit: at least from this page, it's edge by default on at least some dell machines too, but I haven't owned one in so long I won't say that for sure: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000128257/how-to-ch...
It doesn't seem to be a default on PCs.
This is ancedotal sure but it's several hundred datapoints from the cheapest student focused budget laptops(running windows not chrome os) to business grade laptops from the big 3 (HP/Dell/Lenovo). Apple ships Safari by default and every linux distro I have used ships firefox or a spinoff of firefox by default.
So in my experience Chrome is actively installed by the local it help (me, things are just plain broken for some use cases on non-chrome). I personally do not use Chrome, that doesn't mean I won't make it the default for every PC I touch for an enduser purely because I get less calls for support when users are using chrome.
It's no secret that I feel like other search engines are worse that Google even though Google's results are nearly unusable.
Google built a mote by having a better product, nobody else tried to compete and now it's become nearly impossible to compete. I actively avoid Chromium based browsers personally but even then I need to have one installed because even in Firefox and Safari derived browsers things are broken or website just plain don't work (https//f1.tv actively does not work on firefox as an example, unless they have since backtracked)
Agree as well - I still end up mostly using Google search, tho half the time when I don't get any decent results I realize it wasn't that important anyways. Interesting side effect of poor search results.
Give Kagi a go - the usability thing is superb, as you can down rank common awful sites so they never appear in the results and they aren't stuffing ads into the results either
I find the results excellent 99% of the time and for those odd cases I'm not convinced it found the best results I pop back to Google. I tend to find that I do that most with subtle image searches (which are kind of rare but you are usually after something very specific where Kagi occasionally struggles with on the image side)
Also, there was the time where Google pays antivirus companies like then-Avast to shove Chrome. Unsure if it is still happens, but this points out to how Chrome can pay through the marketshare.
for really small amounts of "extremely"
(outside US K-12 they are hardly a thing)
That's an understatement. Microsoft Edge is, in fact, a more privacy invasive browser than Chrome. And that was a pretty high bar.
In the EU, straight from the get-go, Edge presents users with the IAB interstitial, informing them that Edge is going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. Note that Chrome doesn't do this, as Google only wants you to share data with them, and it's not the browser that asks for consent. Edge's IAB interstitial is filled with dark patterns as well, such as legitimate interests being unlawfully declared.
Edge is also filled with Microsoft's telemetry, which you can't turn off. Every browser instance, of course, comes with a unique ID that's reported to Bing Ads. Using Edge without Bing is fairly difficult. And end-to-end encryption for its synchronization feature isn't supported.
I entirely understand why people want to degoogleify, but picking Bing in that process is fairly stupid.
Firefox compliance is another story, but very mild compared to IE. Chrome also had to deal with compatibility issues when Firefox was the leader, but Mozilla relinquished their leadership position because it was very important to them to fire their CEO / original writer of Javascript for ideological reasons - he had given $1000 to an anti-abortion NGO, which is an unacceptable thoughtcrime. Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.
Sounds like the history of browsers is just made of strategic mistakes.
That's not what he did. He donated for California's Prop 8, which opposed same-sex marriage, in 2008. I'm personally not judging, as many US progressives have forgotten that during those days, even Obama opposed same-sex marriage. But it's important to get the facts straight, even when being sarcastic.
---
> Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.
Mozilla's management certainly is guilty of blunders, but I'm pretty sure the developers who have worked on Mozilla don't feel like they've spent time “politicking”.
The failure of Firefox in the marketplace starts from the fact that it's pretty hard to compete with a browser that's funded with more than 1 billion $ per year. And people may not remember much about the launch of Chrome, but it was literally years ahead of its competition. Have a look at its famous comic book, with which it was announced, describing its design and philosophy, and count the years it took for the competition to catch up (across the board, including Safari): https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
I mean, sure, you can blame that on politics, but I don't think anyone was able to stop the decline and when Brendan Eich resigned, people were already talking about Chrome's hegemony and Firefox dying.
And remember -- the original browser engine that Chrome (+ Safari) came from was KHTML + KJS from the KDE folks, which was doing pretty good at the time considering the development resources available to it
One day the wokists will be trialled like the Nazis.
My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser? In the article it said that they'd need approval for any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads.
It makes no mention of web browsers.
I'm not a lawyer, and didn't read the verdict, but your query is very Hacker News. Justice is not code. If Google is forced to divest from Chrome, it of course means it can't turn around and make the Google Dhrome browser. If Google did, they'd be sued for ignoring the verdict.
The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.
Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.
I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.
Of course, this doesn't appear that related to the DOJ's reasoning.
It's easy to say "just sell it" without thinking about the actual implications, but you're basically talking about destroying it. Maybe that's the point, but we should at least be honest about it.
If (say) Meta bought Edge, then they'd get the userbase and the trademark, but the product seems pointless. Why would Meta want a browser whose killer features are integrations with Bing and Office 365? If Meta wanted a browser, they'd make a "Meta-flavored Chromium."
I don't see why divesting it necessarily means selling it to another company. Google could create a non-profit like Mozilla, or a for profit and float it as its own business.
There are a lot of seemingly simple "solutions" to this problem that just don't hold up under a modicum of scrutiny.
Any NGO receiving Chrome would be extremely vulnerable to spying, because of the immense power of having software installed on a billion computers.
Have you used a Windows PC lately? It seems like once a week I have to ignore/decline prompts to change my default browser to Edge.
I’m not sure PC makers have any say/control over this behavior.
The main reason even Microsoft gave up and rebased their browser on top of Chrome is because of the breakneck speed at which Google introduces new standards and features to the ecosystem. Having them be forced to slow down might be a good thing for browser diversity and the future of the Internet.
The only viable business model ... while the incumbent (IE, now Chrome) is allowed to give the product away for free in service of some other predatory agenda.
Hell, MS makes it super hard to even install Chrome now, including numerous irritating nag messages and ‘are you sure?!?’
The problem is that Google owns both sides of the internet - the browser on your computer and the search engine to find everything.
As a result, they control your perception of the internet.
If a site doesn’t work, you as the user thinks the site doesn’t work. You don’t think oh, my browser is broken. Also, if you don’t find a site on Google the. To you, it doesn’t exist.
As a result, you have to bend your website to satisfy both Google search and Google chrome.
That’s why this is an issue. Because of those two things, Google effectively controls the internet, and you as a user or you as a website owner have essentially zero recourse when Google does something that harms you.
As a Firefox user, I also don't love the implications of forcing Google to end its default search engine deal with Firefox. If they changed course on that, then a similar deal with the hypothetical non-Google Chrome could be a viable way to maintain something like Chrome's current financial model without giving Google too much control over the web.
On the other hand, one might argue that Google's search business and that sector as a whole are already at a high enough risk right now without the courts throwing another wildcard into the mix. I'm not staking out a position on this one way or another, but I hope whatever decisions they land on are very carefully considered.
What do you mean "find a site"? Are you saying the user has a website in mind they've visited before? Or are you saying the user doesn't have a website in mind, and is looking for "any website about XYZ?"
I don't think your claim is valid. At what point does the user conclude something "doesn't exist"? Users never reach such a conclusion, in part because Google results tell us "bro, your search returned 480 million results."
Why bother having a discussion when you use “zero recourse” here. It comes off as totally absurd.
There’s also a clear conflict of interest having the advertising company own the user-agent.
Notably - it doesn't advertise chrome there? or maybe she just didn't see those. Most of her internet experience is through either the facebook app or the google app now
They are gray cardinals of web standards which they bloated to the point of zero viable competition. And their only opponent lives on their couch.
As far as I know Chrome is the only thing that has been advertised on Googles famously clean "front page" before making a search.
That tells me something about how important it has been for them to push it.
There's also the way they've used deceptive ads ("download a better browser") to me and many other Firefox users over the years. (No, a browser that leaks my browsing habits to the worlds biggest advertising company while not supporting vertical tabs a decade after it entered the market certainly isn't best for me.)
I can set Kagi as the default search engine on iOS?
Because last I checked, Apple hardcoded their list of options.
Of course since one of the options in Safari is DuckDuckGo, you can also use its extensive list of !bang operators.
Check again: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-for-safari/id1622835804
Works perfectly.
The edge situation is a mess for sure, and Microsoft seems to have such a perfect understanding of the current judiciary climate that they can't dance around the lines without any consequences.
More like they have their hands in creating the current judiciary climate. Kind of hard to file suit against someone who is intertwined with the agencies that would investigate them.
If you wanted to de-google your phone _that_ much it probably requires a custom firmware blob that's shipped with a different browser... if that's even possible / reasonable.
It's well known that Google requires manufacturers to install their apps and requires it to be uninstallable. This includes Gmail, Google, and others.
I thought I knew better, because the webview implementation can be changed in the system preferences, but (of course) the list of package names that can appear there is hardcoded:
https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/androi...
I have a Samsung Galaxy S23 and it came with both Chrome and "Internet" which I guess is the Samsung one. I don't remember which was default or if it asked the first time something tried to open a webpage, but I didn't even notice the Samsung one was on here and I'd guess the Chrome brand name wins out for most people if it asks...
Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month.
Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?
I worry as part of Google, chrome is just an open source project with profit as a secondary motive, while as it’s own company they’ll probably try to make it more profitable and it’ll become worse and closed down.
And its flawed in the same way - first its not fully open source (IIRC Crhome has some proprietary bits that are not in Chromium, same with Android+Google Play services vs AOSP) but good luck maintaining your fork for any length of time!
Google is in full control of both Android and Chromium with all decisions happening behind closed doors with zero leverage for anyone from the outside to influence those decisions. So as with Manifest v3 now and many similarly bad decisions for Android, once Google selects a course, it will be harder and harder over time to keep your changes if you still want the end result to look like what the users will see as Chrome/Android.
And I would say with a browser the pressure to update would be even greater & thus its even harder to keep any signifficant custom changes.
On the other hand you worry that Chrome can't go on without Google, as it currently doesn't bring enough money and needs to be a market abuse tool to justify the costs.
In a very real way, I think if the situation is unsolvable letting Chrome die and be born again could be the only long term solution. It would be painful, but we're already bleeding.
I think it’s good for the market that some players are fully independent, and others are part of massive conglomerates.
Across their entire buffet of products, many of which are free at point of use like Chrome is, they advertise Chrome. That the internet is better with Chrome. That their products are better with Chrome. Do you really believe this is genuinely just because they also make Chrome, and are jazzed about that fact?
The fact that they're working so hard to keep it tells me it's an even better idea to make them sell it.
If your goal is nothing deeper than to hurt Google, sure. Otherwise, this logic is far from complete.
https://open.substack.com/pub/bitecode/p/web-browsers-and-ou...
Nobody can get it except chrome.
ChromeOS is not popular by any means outside of the US education market. Chrome being the default on just Android is hardly a strong case when Android usage in the US is only 56%.
Most of that advantage comes from an unfair practice, of Google making consumers think that their choice of browser was in someway inferior (which could be true) and thus they should prefer Chrome (which is not true). If Chrome won market dominance using this method, then it becomes an unfair practice. Same thing with Microsoft Edge, Apple's App Store, etc. You can't use your market power in one market to influence another.
Are you sure that the advantage came from marketing? In my mind the advantage was that Chrome really was faster for example due to V8. Also can you explain why the "thus they should prefer Chrome" reasoning is flawed?
Personally, I haven't seen Google act in a way that prevents competition in the browser space (ie. being anticompetitive). If anything, Windows is more anticompetitive because it is closed source, making it much more difficult to create a competing product. All the web specifications are completely free. And Apple is the only vendor that prevents browser competition on their platform, although Windows does give you a popup telling you not install Chrome.[0]
The Google search agreements between Apple and Google seem more likely to be anticompetitive.
[0] Searching for Google Chrome with the default Bing search engine with the default Edge browser gives you this result:
>Promoted by Microsoft
>There's no need to download a new web browser. Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Edge for a fast, secure, and modern web experience that can help save you time and money.
See also Every trick Microsoft pulled to make you browse Edge instead of Chrome - https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...
There were feature differences for sure, but the marketing did a massive amount of work in this case. If people switched for features, all that spending for years wouldn't be necessary.
If the answer to any of those is no, it’s more than simple advertising.
I feel like it should be illegal to use your profits in one industry to run a loss leader in a totally separate industry.
There’s nothing wrong with running a loss leader, only with squeezing everybody else out.
I'm curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space?
How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?
What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome extensions?
As much as I dislike Google behavior, I don't see this as being a good thing.
Google uses a complex anonymization/privacy framework to collect some aggregate signals from website visits, but they don't use it directly.
Regulators don't understand this, and technologists who do tend to distrust Google anyway and think they might secretly be using it.
There are all sort so other sketchy things, like what Edge does injecting itself into websites so Microsoft collects affiliate revenue.
There are countries where this wouldn't be allowed, but Google is largely self regulating in its biggest market.
All this would lose Chrome some market share but they are starting from a very dominant position, and for the general public it wouldnt be a big deal - people are already convinced that iOS and android devices are listening to them at all times for ad targeting!
Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?
As much as I loved Chrome when it first came out, I’ve also been well aware that Google’s backing of Chrome (and Chromium) has given it undue advantages in the browser market by effectively making everyone else compete with a loss leader. If Chrome itself cannot sustain its pace of development or even stay alive without the unlimited funding by Google, then I think that is a good thing and proof that it acting as a monopoly. Forcing Chrome to balance product velocity with revenue constraints evens the field amongst all browsers.
(edit: If Google killing competition by injecting unlimited funding into a project without needing to make a profit sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve done this for a long time. The often cited example being Google Reader.)
There is no such business model. Chromium development is almost entirely funded by Google. Other Chromium based browser rely on this humonguous investment of development resources; they would not have a "business model" without this "free handout", except perhaps Microsoft and Edge, who might be able to fund it by doing basically what Google is doing.
- pushing for web ecosystem features that would help their own products (ex: Gmail, docs, etc)
- pushing for web enhancements that back SEO metrics that matter to them (ex: core web vitals)
I don’t think it’s as simple as - no more Chrome == no more investment into Chromium because Chrome/Chromium has been their strongest lever for getting web features that Google wants standardized. Stopping investment in that area cedes control of the web to other players who may have opposing goals to Google.
Does the concept of an interoperable world wide web fade into obscurity? In other words, does separating Chrome from Google make the web better, or is Google's investment in the web holding back the death of the web?
What would this business model be like, if, say, Google Chrome is eliminated?
As a reference, in China, very few people use Chrome because Google services are blocked. There are tons of third-party or vendor preinstalled browsers that bundles with bloatwares, put ads/clickbaits on every new tab, and spy on users. I'm pretty sure they are more sustainable than Firefox, former Opera, etc. But that's certainly a privacy dystopia :)
But, it also goes back to browsers being built by the operating system, that was also a no-no, e.g. MSFT / IE.
Browsers then shouldn't be a profit center, but ironically google starting chrome made it one and then defined web standards. IE afaik wasn't a profit center, and MSFT hedged outsourcing all dev costs to practically google and forking it offically to Edge, lol.
what you say is nice in theory but you already have the Microsoft backed Edge and Apple backed Safari that are not hamppered by the "need to find a support model" and "not be a loss leader"
And I am not looking forward again to a world where Microsoft disctates web development because for all privacy problems peaople have or think to have with Google, Microsoft ha proven that does way worse and doesn't even care for the image.
All in All Chrome being a loss leader backed by Google has been a good thing for all involved. Developers, Users and 3-rd parties. without it you woudn't have all those 3rd party chrome based browsers.
If we just keep selling the browser market to the next trillion dollar company that's not going to fix anything
Get real, the DOJ forcing Google to get rid of Chrome is one of the best tech news in years!
1. funding from Google (Firefox)
2. engineering from Google (Chromium)
3. tech giant bundling (Safari, Edge)
I think they used to have their own engine but like everyone else found it unprofitable to maintain.
Let’s do a thought experiment - If Google truly felt that Chromium has no benefit, then smaller players will drive the project and, as others have pointed out, new feature proposals/implementations will slow down. That isn’t a bad thing in my opinion because it allows other engines to not be stuck in catchup mode. The field will start to even out and innovations will start to come from alternative engines. With an even playing field, what was once an unprofitable endeavor can become a differentiator in the browser ecosystem.
The real question is what happens when Google stops paying Mozilla and Apple unthinkable amounts of money for Google search to be the default on their browsers?
It seems clear that Mozilla intends to just become an ad company themselves and who knows what Apple's response will be, I doubt it's going to be to increase the amount of development on Safari vs where they currently are.
So if Google has to effectively divest from Chromium but still supports it's development but now isn't paying the only two current competitors what is the expected outcome there? Whoever now owns Chromium becomes even more of a monopoly, and Google doesn't even need to pay them to make Google the default for it to be implied they are to be the default or the developers go away.
Maybe in the actual long term we will see an improvement from this decision, but all I see in the short - midterm is more invasive user tracking in all current browsers that isn't Safari, which you can only use on Apple devices anyway.
Ladybird might be onto something with the sponsorship model, but we’ll have to see how it goes in the next couple of years.
So what will sustain the development of browsers like Chrome or Firefox? Well that's the big question... Maybe they will downsize and become a non-profit similar to the Linux Foundation, and receive funding similar to how they do? I can see this have the affect of greatly slowing down the development of various web standards, but would that be such a bad thing?
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare on the SEM clicks themselves?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acquiring the Browser Company would make a lot of sense.
Chrome's non-iOS market share is probably larger than Safari's market share, so any monopoly considerations about Safari apply equally to Chrome.
Google gets other value with this besides being the default search engine. Keeping Firefox alive makes it so that Chrome is less of a monopoly.
> and an aggressive fork at some point
Maintaining a browser engine is a lot of work. With no clear upside, no one would invest the work in maintaining a fork. Related to this, Microsoft gave up maintaining a (partially) separate browser engine for Edge, and now just uses Chromium
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acq
Actually, this is hardly healthy. Firefox feel this single source of can be deprived anytime that they tried many other alternative -- like VPN, partnership with pockets, some sponsor ad on tab selection, and even selling some data
Other browsers go even further..
I'm thinking 500M/year is enough to pay for a lot more developers than they currently have. Even half that should be enough to do more than they are. Where is all this money going?
No it wasn't? They itemized some budget items worth less than a million dollars in total, and then, for each entity getting part of that money they admitted they had no idea who they were or what they did for Mozilla (but one of them had abortion rights mentioned on their blog!)
Incredibly lazy "expose" trying to be a twitter files.
whether that's directly as paid software, or indirectly as part of purchasing a device that has the software installed on it.
Also we already have browsers pre-installed. Safari and IE(or what ever it's called these days)
There's no call to advance these though. Chrome has profiles. That alone makes it a winner for my use case.
Who do you think should pay for it? What is the value to them? Do their incentives align well with yours?
Even though getting it free (as I do right now) is nice, $36/year seems justifiable.
Separate Search + Google Ads platform as company A, Android + Chrome + Gmail as company B.
It will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!
Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, licensed by HW vendors. Like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point.
Does Google have undue influence now? Sure. But I’m not so sanguine about the alternatives either.
I'd argue that the main problem was not too much competition, but effective anti-competitive behavior (and simple laziness) from Microsoft in particular. The frustrating experience was primarily caused by Internet Explorer.
Imagine buying a browser
So, like, let's pick a set of criteria where web standards are considered complete, and move towards that. And when we do reach it, just stop.
They also already charge to be an extension developer and could easily charge much more.
There are some cross-cutting server side features for context aware access for google workspace and google cloud, which were inherited from beyondcorp enterprise, so those would presumably stay with the real google of course.
But at the same time maintaining Chromium is a pretty thankless endeavor and I don't see any entity with that capability. It's much bigger than Linux, and the developers are employees, not volunteers.
The best possible outcome I can imagine is if Google is required to spin off Chromium into a nonprofit that would be independent but they are required to fund it for many years. The nonprofit would need some kind of oversight from adversarial companies to avoid collusion with Google or any other company.
Manifest v3 and Web Integrity API are prominent examples of Google's team shaping how all Chromium based browsers will be, regardless of pushback (though they relented with the latter for now).
In theory, yes. In reality, the more diverged forks become from mainstream the more expensive they become to maintain, until eventually it becomes entirely unsustainable. With the sheer number of Chrome patches Google churns out, the level of divergence where maintainence becomes overwhelming is actually pretty low. It’s like trying to handle Niagara Falls with a Solo cup.
So in effect, what Google says goes.
This problem really needs to be fixed, though I have no idea how...
If the concern is that people will start using Baidu search, then the solution should be to ban Baidu search. It shouldn't be to let some monopolies run rampant with the hopes that other countries will never be able to compete, while forgetting that free market economy is what made America
That sounds smart, but is it actually true? How many of the things enabling the existence of this website are inventions made in the research institute of the Bell Telecom company.
On top of my head, there are transistors, C, Unix and a fair bit of cryptographical work. I'm sure others can add a lot more to the list.
Hell, this website recently carried an article that mentioned that the very financial concepts that enable companies like Y-combinator to exist were invented by a researcher at Bell labs.[1]
For the average American, both the efficient parts of monopolies (reduced redundancy which means fewer well-paying jobs) as well as the inefficient parts (reduced competition, higher prices, reduced standards of living) are net negatives. The political influence inherent to monopolies are also a negative effect on democracy, whereas foreign monopolies tend to have a harder time maintaining political influence.
WeChat, for example, is the end all be all megaplatform in China but never took off with any Western consumers simply because they’re uninterested.
It isn't insular, it's just it was the only local solution - same for Line having a lock on Japan and Thailand but not much of asia, and kakaotalk for Korea.
I don't think it overtook qq until like 8 yrs ago? At which point AIM was already discontinued, and 10 years past any kind of popularity.
The bottom 90% is owning an ever smaller share of the economy, while the real economy doesn't seem to grow that much.
It seems like you are comparing small companies vs large companies, rather than US vs Chinese.
Big companies tend to calcify. We can see that in FAMANG's products. Big companies can also remove any direct competition in multiple ways that smaller companies can't:
1. Bankrupt them through frivolous litigation.
2. Buy them.
3. Lower their prices so new competitors who don't have economies of scale can't be price competitive.
4. Propose legislative regulation that they can afford but smaller competitors can't.
5. Pay for negative news articles to be written against their competition (FUD).
6. Poach their talent.
But doesn't that make room for someone else to come in and be abusive? Yes and we have the tools to prevent that, if necessary.
The problem is the anti-competitive behavior. Businesses are generally rational actors, so clearly our system isn't working. It's unclear what the boundaries are until years in court, and even then it only applies to a single company.
Google's product isn't its software, it's the attention of its users. Having this large and this dominant of a software/data platform attached to a company that sells attention is anti-competitive in the attention market.
Incidentally, this sort of proves the point that Google's ownership of platforms where ads are displayed puts them at an advantage compared to competitors, who have to go to people like MS for space.
Maybe our difference in viewpoint is that I see this fact and wonder why it's seemingly impossible for anyone to build a financially viable alternative, and I'm at least open to the idea that it's very difficult to compete with Google when they can leverage their successful ads business to subsidize the investment into their browser.
Yes the alternatives are worse, but is that because Google is inherently smarter, or because the newcomers have a tiny fraction of the investment and usually fizzle out within a year or two? Google doesn't have to be actively trying to kill the competitors for it to have an anti-competitive effect in the market.
Why is an ads company owning a browser any different than a phone company (Apple) or an operating system vendor?
It's already bad enough they are removing ad block functionality and then a day later rolling out new ad-free plans for YouTube, what a cawinky dink
It is when Google compromises the privacy/security of Chrome because of their Ads/OS business.
For example, allowing first party cookies to be a maximum of 400 days versus Safari and Firefox where it is 7 days. These cookies are required by ads retargeting which is critical to effective ecommerce campaigns.
It also supports browser fingerprinting by advertisers which means that every random API Chrome adds (and they add a lot) directly improves their Ads revenue.
Ladybird, servo, and Flow are new browsers currently being built. These new browsers are not derived from any of the big three browser engines: Google Chromium, Apple WebKit, and Mozilla Gecko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
Step 2: Wonder why you don't have more users.
The more applications stay confined inside a browser tab, the better.
The right answer to "download our app!" is "no, stay in your browser tab".
> try looking at existing sandbox solutions.
I have, quite extensively; virtualization and sandboxing are things I have a great deal of expertise in. The best available application sandboxing solution that provides useful comprehensive APIs is the web. The next best solutions are mobile platforms, but that doesn't help laptops/desktops (no, iOS apps on macOS don't count), and aren't designed to let the user do things like block ads.
If an application is open, then sure, there are plenty of other options. If an application isn't open, I want it contained in a sandbox not of its own making, that it can't escape, that provides sufficiently comprehensive APIs such that interesting applications get built for it, and that keeps the user in control.
It will be a be new Chrome entity I guess, spun off the Google mothership. However, how does it make money is very unclear to me, like how? Selling the search bar to highest bidder, a.k.a Google still?
You mean.. who would want to buy an app that has 65% marketshare?
I just imagine some shady company (shadier than google at least) buying it to slap ads all over inside the browser itself.
Google could divest the Chrome product and keep contributing to Chromium, but the value proposition is really unclear when that OSS investment doesn’t buy you billions of dollars of browser lock-in value.
It doesn't sound like this would solve the issue..
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-annou...
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/supporters-of-chromium-based...
Doesn't read like a takeover attempt to me...
Those teams can keep working on Chrome, they'll just have to fall under some new kind of separate Chrome Inc. structure instead of under Google Inc., and Google will have to sell most of its shares of Chrome Inc. to third parties.
Splitting off Chrome really isn't the problem. Making the new Chrome Inc. profitable without accepting bribes from big tech, on the other hand...
I don't see a real need for Chrome. The stuff they've done to break Adblocking makes it pretty much a dead project today. Web browser development should be open source and not for profit. There is a fair argument that it has been because of Google's funding. There's a strong argument that Chrome has existed to further Google's business and at a minimum protect it's business and ensure third parties didn't hijack all of their PPC revenue in the early days.
It is easy to foresee an outcome here where someone politically connected gets a hold of Chrome and does a lot of crap they shouldn't. The worst case outcome is unrelated to any of this, and something where we end up with government mandated garbage in a web browser. It is very possible that DRM and biometric age verification, and who the fuck knows what else thanks to AI, could be required either by the US or EU, and kill the open source web browser. That's worse than anything Google did.
Make it make sense
Selling user browser data obviously won't fly (and note that Google has never explicitly nor directly sold user's browsing data as far as I know, but they do have a huge ad network that utilises cookies...), so what's the plan? Put ads in the browser? "Premium" features?
The only thing I can think of is highjacking links to Amazon et al to insert referral codes en masse, or selling links/ads on new tab pages.
The details could be worked out. The idea is to make big corporations pay while keeping it free for users.
Why not sell premium features?
Why not add affiliate codes to links?
Why not sell ads on new tab pages?
All of these are fine examples of how a not-Google Chrome could make money. They could even get paid by Microsoft or some other not-Google search for that traffic.
This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard to convince us all we should just give up and let Google continue running our online lives through monopolization.
Sounds to me that taking chrome away from Google will be a net-negative for the users.
> Why not sell premium features?
> Why not add affiliate codes to links?
> Why not sell ads on new tab pages?
Ah yes, would love more of all this in my browser.
To be fair, Google could reassign them to something else. Firing everybody will be Google's decision that wasn't forced on them.
What exactly are "best qualifications?" More simply are you assuming that myself and Google share a definition of "best qualified?" I genuinely don't believe that we do.
> And then who would replace them?
People working for a different company. Is your case that without Google no one would make web browsers?
“When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox.”
They change their ToS in an unfavorable way and yes I think it’s criticism they need to hear.
However, has Chrome, Brave (I don’t look favorably on their cryptocurrency initiatives) Edge , Safari etc. been held to the same, in practice? Why isn’t Chrome barraged with negative sentiment the same way? It has far worse ToS policies (which doesn’t make Firefox “right” or “just”)
Because if that is upsetting then using Chrome should be outright enraging, yet people hardly mention it’s consistent anti user behavior as often as people jump on Mozilla and a Firefox for anything they do that is seen as unfavorable
Explain why when they changed their stance me holding them to a standard I hold all other browsers is now an issue.
“You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice. It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.”
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/188271/trump-profit-presiden...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-b...
Separately, why is having tech giants a pure advantage? These companies got big by innovating, but the innovation slows down when they are big. Sounds to me that we should be regularly clearing old growth to let new ideas break through
Also, it’s harder for international companies to buy, say, Google, than a browser-only company, just through the amount of capital needed to put up a credible offer.
These trillion-dollar companies only focus on billion-dollar markets and kill their own products that are deemed unable to scale at a planetary level
Global tech companies do not compete in China, the market is brutal for non Chinese companies with level of espionage, theft, sabotage that is allowed.
It is really small world for big tech, the same 5-10 companies dominate most of the world in most frequently used consumer products, and using that dominance to crowd out competitors in every new product category
(1) which is banned in few major markets like India already even if the US reverses the ban
This is absolutely not true. Most phones in Africa are Chinese now. Chinese internet companies are all over Asia outside of Japan/SK. Chinese cars (EVs, which arguably are tech), are now world-wide.
Every company is a tech company, if you want to be broad in your definition, they have to use tech to compete .
Actions on Chinese EV cars are either being seriously considered or already in effect in most major car markets.
All phones have been always more or less Chinese made forever including Apple, even Chinese badging is how it been for low/mid range for 10 years now, maybe Samsung does some local manufacturing in SK but no one else major does.
Budget phones or budget EVs with razor thin margins is not big tech and no DoJ action to break up Google is going to affect the way they are becoming Chinese or already are .
There is reason TikTok is the most valuable Chinese company and not a phone company, big tech have big margins and strong market effect on their own and not as a group (I.e. it would be hard to beat Chinese companies in a space , but no individual one (say byd) is irreplaceable by another Chinese company
Chinese tech giants like Alibaba or Tencent or Baidu are just as good as western ones .
Their inability to go global has little do with just their technical ability to build products.
It is about whether other countries will be comfortable having what they perceive as CCP control in their markets particularly when their(ie foreign )companies do not have a level playing field in China
It is relatively easy for a country to ban a Chinese tech company or EV maker (1)because China doesn’t buy much or allow foreign companies to thrive to retaliate .
America being the biggest market and importer is the contributor to their soft power. This is what Trump is (ab)using today.
The tariffs that Trump announced recently on China is not getting a lot of attention as North American ones. The last trump administration also slapped some tariffs (not reversed by Biden) while few industries felt the pain of the reciprocal tariffs most of American industry did and will do just fine because America does not export as much to China, the people pay more of course and suffer inflation, but industry will come out broadly fine on Chinese tariffs. It is different for North America particularly Mexico due to deep integrated supply chain.
Western markets is most important not because of social cultural norms it is because it is the wealthiest today. Perhaps the global south will restore the balance this century but for next few decades that is the reality whether we like it not .
PS. My background as an Indian (or India’s complicated relationship with China) has little do with merits of this discussion, the world is not just bipolar, I am well aware that our media is just as propagandized as American or Chinese ones for that matter, but that is whole different topic .
(1) unless the country are not dependent on Chinese loans or on raw material export to China which is most of western / wealthier market
From 90% to 80%. Maybe even 70%. I don’t see it falling below that. Does DOJ think that hypothetical market shares could be 40% Google, 30% Bing, 20-30% rest. I don’t think this is possible short of banning Google or making it extremely cumbersome to access Google (for example, making it impossible to set Google as default). Which makes this whole exercise seem pointless.
Then we also come to the realm of justice. Google built Chrome (no easy task), fair and square. Chrome is a better browser engine than that of most competitors, so much so that its competitors use the same browser engine (Firefox and Safari Exempted). (Chromium is also open source). Why should Google be forced to sell Chrome? Is the assumption here that by the default the government owns everything you make, and the fact that you get to keep something you made is because of the benevolence of the government? This doesn’t seem like a good precedent. The government can’t even justify this as some big harm to society like it’s an addictive drug. What’s the consumer harm here? Is it that Google has monopoly pricing on serving ads to users, so if any company wants to do digital marketing, they have to pay whatever price Google sets?
In the end, this just seems like a big unnecessary mess. The govt surely must have better things to do.
It's been long enough now that there are significant differences, but Chrome started from the same base as Safari. The teams had different perspectives, so Chrome forked Safari's internals and called the result Blink.
DOJ asks for judgement requiring Google to divest Chrome [pdf] (31 points 30 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296045
I can't see Chrome surviving as a standalone product - where is the revenue? I am sure someone will buy it and try to create some "premium" version, but ultimately it will wither and die I expect.
Is this about breaking Google from a popular browser, or just about punishing Google for offering services people find useful?
It feels to me that it is more about punishing Google than about chrome. Apple and Microsoft seem to be able to get away with wat worse with their browsers - literally every time i use my win11 laptop it is nagging me to use edge or warn me that I should change my default browser to use edge or whatever. Apple won't even let you use another browser at all. But that is somehow fine and allowed?
- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.
- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?
This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.
Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.
Revenue seems incredibly strong. My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase.
The problem isn't within Google. They aren't doing anything substantial to lock users into Chrome. The problem is unforced errors on the part of both Apple and Mozilla creating awful web browsers that aren't worth using.
I feel this is meant to trigger people into reacting and causing a flame war.
Google has been making its own web properties work well on Google Chrome while making them perform poorer or make them break on other browsers. Google Chrome optimizes for Google, not the web, and certainly not “the open web”.
[0]: https://xcancel.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018
[1]: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
https://support.google.com/My-Ad-Center-Help/answer/12155451...
And Apple provides end to end encryption of browsing history so it can’t decrypt your browsing history
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2021/03/25/whats-in...
> What’s interesting about the Apple decision is that it appears to explicitly separate browsing history and bookmarks, rather than lumping them into a single take-it-or-leave-it package. Apple doesn’t claim to provide any end-to-end encryption guarantees whatsoever for bookmarks: presumably someone who resets your iCloud account password can get those. But your browsing history is protected in a way that even Apple won’t be able to access, in case the FBI show up with a subpoena.
Many new versions and updates of FF that I've tried have claimed to be much smoother and more efficient, only for the exact same shit to start happening across the years and multiple laptops used.
I went back to Firefox about 5 years ago and not even once missed Chrome since.
The only time I've had to touch about:config in the last several years was due to some smartcard related bug caused by an external library, that forced me to tweak firefox's behaviour. Once that bug was resolved, I switched it back.
Firefox being slow is well into the self-perpetuating FUD territory.
This feels like quite an exaggeration. I’ve used Chromium-derived browsers only sparingly in the past decade, with Safari and Firefox instead getting the bulk of my usage depending on the platform.
Generally if something doesn’t work under those browsers, the top two causes are unnecessary user agent sniffing with the site working fine once I pretend to be Chrome or the dev simply not testing against anything but Chrome. It’s been vanishingly rare that the browsers themselves were the cause of an issue.
But I have to admit extensions are really lacking, both the infrastructure for installing them and which extensions are available.
I now use Orion which is based on Safari but has native vertical tabs (although not native vertical hierarchical tabs, or support for dumping them as markdown).
Feels like Apple doesn't really care about it
What's disappointing to Google is that all of their kowtowing to the Biden administration's "content shaping" ended up worth nothing in the end. Harris would have rewarded them for that help, but Trump of course hates them for it because it was largely directed at him.
There's an arguable point if Google doesn't give up Chromebooks anyways, the DOJ should force them to.
My children basically are required by government to use Google products in school unless I want to pay for private school, which is kinda insane on its face.
RIP Firefox?
Welp. They had a chance to be default alive and they fucked it by trying to spend the money on new initiatives instead of just spending the interest payments from an endowment.
The truth is that browsers are a very complicated, very quickly moving, and very security sensitive piece of software. They spent all that money on Firefox rather than saving it because if they didn't Firefox would have fallen behind Chrome and Safari and it wouldn't be worth using today.
It makes no good goddamned sense that money that was given in order to be featured in a web browser cannot be spent primarily on that web browser, and can only be spent on anything except that web browser.
I know they cut back a little but maybe they’ve sobered up since? Haven’t had the heart to look again.
They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does .
My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar or close to what Google pays. The traffic is worth a lot. Bing attested to click flow as the reason they cannot make a better product in their testimony in this trial.
Also Google will either be allowed to continue the contract till its current end (I believe 1-2 more years ) or will pay fully and release Mozilla from their obligations (Mozilla is not party to the case so early termination without compensation would be penalty on them for no reason ).
Mozilla will need to make some significant cuts and layoffs no doubt will be hard on the team, but the product will survive.
--
For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.
Or are you suggesting that none of these CEOs should be compensated at current rates? If so, hate the game and not the player my friend.
At that point I think Firefox lost a vision of a better future
I suspect chrome will get far less consumer friendly than chrome currently is if it is sold.
https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-202...
I don't love the CEO bonuses, but they are objectively less than half a percent of Mozilla's budget. Google search on the other hand is 85% of their revenue.
People complain about whataboutism, but the Apple versus almost any other 'monopoly' is insane. You can switch browsers within the next 30s, you can't install an app from a third party vendor ever on iOS. [1]
[1] Yes I know you can pay $100 a year, and then compile your own/open source apps weekly and move them to your device. No this is not a reasonable solution.
(Note that SetApp already enables subscribers to use iOS apps.)
let's permit the firefighters to leave the firehouse even though they can't tend to all the fires simultaneously
For Google search, the quality has gone down enormously and yet it has lost approximately 0 market share. It is still utterly dominant. This was used to push people to Chrome, and still is. It was used to dominate the web ads market. And so on: market power used to increase market power in other markets. Classic anticompetitive behaviour.
Apple doesn't have anything like a monopoly in any market. Even in the US, where their position is strongest relative to Android, it still isnt even close to a monopoly.
iOS isn't a monopoly so there is nothing wrong with it being locked down. It doesn't pressure "teens" into anything. Teenagers will pick up on anything they can to create peer pressure themselves. They would just say "lol nice loser android phone" when they saw the phone in person anyway lol.
It was dumb when they battled with microsoft's IE, and it's especially dumb when they battle Google's Chrome.
Chrome isn't just another google product, it is central to its search engine, they did an ofshoot into a browser because they found they needes to effectively develop a headless browser to scrape some js and mixed media websites.
Maybe we'll soon have Apache Chrome!
From a security standpoint, I'm sure it's more complicated, but UBO and warning dialog boxes about downloading files to your device, logging into services without 2FA would probably solve a lot of those problems. Does a billion dollar corp have to be involved considering how much has gone into Linux from people's pro bono efforts?
There doesn't need to be. Google can keep building it just with regulators out of sight.
IBM and lots of other companies "donate" software for similar reasons.
Meanwhile only a vanishingly small fraction of projects remains at the center of public attention for an extended period of time. People develop a skewed perspective because we interact with many of the most popular projects on a daily basis.
https://rocket9labs.com/post/its-time-to-let-go-apache-softw...
And start charging for everything else out there like maps, street view, and browser. And buy cloudflare while at it. Push themselves into everything related to connectivity and internet properties.
The search business is the cash flow that is being a thorn in the side of Google. And it doesn’t even make sense in its vision anymore.
But it does solve an important problem: Who in their right mind would buy Chrome? It's not a profitable business to be in, without the surrounding ad business, and in turn the insane amount of traffic from Google Search.
Almost by definition, anyone who would be interested in buying Chrome and turning it into a commercial product shouldn't be allowed to buy it. The only buyer I can imaging is OpenText.
This. If Search + Google Ads is independent from Android + Chrome + Gmail, it will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!
Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point. No need to feed Google Ads with data anymore!
Yeah, dreaming.
What Google loses is everything client (user) side: Chrome, Android, Gmail and other personal cloud services. Lets call it Foogle :)
Foogle can charge Samsung et al. for its Android and personal cloud services it is running. And use it in its own Pixel devices too. And may elect to make it hard for Google to sniff it, like droppung doobleclick cookies in Foogle Chrome, provide "Foogle Private Relay", et cetera.
Chrome has just been a better product for the last 10 to 15 years.
Every other company has just failed to make a good browser because they lack the incentives to do so (have gone back and forth as a Firefox user).
The only competitive browsers are those already built on chrome or safari.
I'm not personally a big fan of Safari but it's bigger issue is that it is only available on one platform whereas the web is naturally cross platform.
Almost by definition Safari can't be the "winning" browser.
This feels like ruling that the iPhone is a monopoly in the US and that Apple needs to divest from phones.
Edit: to those replying I 100% don't agree with all the decisions chrome make, very importantly ad block.
But just survey the actual browser market in the last 10 years to understand Chrome's dominance
Easy to gain market share when one of the tent pole internet services is experiencing regular breakages.
I'm not optimistic that it'll happen, but I'd still like to see it.
The only reason it stopped being the #1 browser is that Chrome came out and was better...
Even though people had to go out of their way to download on all computers
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C...
Nowadays if it wasn't for Safari, thanks to Chrome and Electron garbage, the Web is effectively ChromeOS.
I feel like most people here wouldn't understand that to inherently indicate superior quality. I'd argue that the absolute dominance of Chrome is mostly evidence of the monopoly power that Google yields. It got on top via search, becomes the gateway to the web for people, leverages that to sell advertisement and also convince tons of people to use the browser. It's been all leverage.
I'd also disagree on it even being a better browser. Firefox has issues, but on actual usability and feeling like a user agent, it's head and shoulders above Chrome. It is more flexible, more customizable, and I find that it runs significantly better on every website that isn't owned by Google. If Chrome was a better browser, they wouldn't have had to sabotage Firefox on their sites for years (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38349357).
It's Google that can't compete, if they have to use back-channels and leverage their other powers to maintain dominance. They aren't competing with the product alone.
Doesn't want to implement useful standards which I use in my own applications (filesystem API, WebSerial, WebUSB...).
Can someone in this thread who have swapped between Firefox/Chrome explain the problems they run into ultimately driving them back to Chrome?
* This is not a Biden-admin lawsuit. It was launched by the first Trump admin.
* Of the 14 co-plaintiffs, only 1 (CA) is a state that didn't vote for Trump in 2024. The Colorado Plaintiff States include another 16 red states, for a total of 29 red states represented.
As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled, it's actually been doing exactly what it said it would do to satisfy its base. This lawsuit was started by them in the first place and if the list of Attorneys General is anything to go by has overwhelming support from the base that Trump is acting to satisfy. Google's not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now, it's far too late for that.
Why? Because it's essentially the defacto way/portal/thing to access to the biggest source of information humanity has: the web.
It's too big and important for any 1 company - tho saying that, I'm okay with Windows being owned by Microsoft which is (was) basically the same thing in a way.
My unsolicited advice to Google: sacrifice it, focus on AI. To all the people on the Chrome team? They should be financially taken care of, and should be part of the foundation that develops it if they want. The foundation should not be controlled by Alphabet, but should be truly public.
This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea.
Windows is much worse by most metrics. I can't fork Windowsium and build (and sell) my own fully-compatible, 99.999999% R&D paid for by Microsoft, OS.
> This is all probably too vague and unspecified for you lot...but it is just an idea
It is a bit vague :) In that: who pays for it? Who decides what features are in or out? Public utilities are generally what we make things when they're feature complete and the only challenge is rolling it out as cheaply as possible. But it feels like web browsers have a way to go yet. There's nothing stopping the US government (or any government) from bulding their own browser off Chromium right now. Nothing needs selling or splitting.
It’d be neat if the EU picked up the torch here but with any government it seems like it’d be better to have a non-profit get a block grant so you avoid things like those salary issues or other challenges: for example, if the EU decided they didn’t want to depend on the U.S. for critical infrastructure, funding a back-to-its-roots Mozilla.org would make it easier for, say, Canada or India to join in without the issues you’d have trying to directly pay government employee salaries.
Forgive me for being blunt, but what idea? If the question is who is supposed to fund Chromium and Firefox going forward then you haven't actually offered any ideas.
Commercial funding is not necessarily more reliable in general. Google keeps shutting down stuff all the time. But in this particular case, the commercial interest is so strong that funding is secure.
In my opinion, governments should focus on natural monopolies (taxation, violence, justice, transport infrastructure, water, etc) and on areas where there is broad consensus for a public option (health, schools, etc).
Where governments fund random stuff that few people understand the importance of, there is a big risk of the whole thing getting DOGEd or starved to stagnation. The government would never put up a fight against Apple relegating the web platform to the status of a glorified document viewer.
In my opinion, the status quo is flawed but the alternatives are worse.
If the court decides that Google must "divest" Chrome, they will have to say what that means for an open source project. If it basically comes down to Google being banned from controlling the default search engine setting in any web browser, then their main incentive for funding Chrome would be gone.
If that happens, the only solution I see is a joint "Chrome Foundation" effort funded by a number of corporations with a less direct interest in the viability of the web, i.e the Linux model. But this would be very disruptive. I fear that browser development would be aimless and start to stagnate. Other oligopolists would quickly take advantage of the ensuing power vacuum.
The government does not need to maintain a browser to enforce this rule. It would simply tell people that logging into the internet requires government ID now, and the ISPs would make it so or be shut down.
The government could however, if it maintained a browser, guarantee that the internet would be accessible without a government ID, just by not putting that feature in their browser. A government browser would be subject to the constitution, debate, public comment, and legislation; rather than having to sue companies to get anything done.
Google, Apple, and Mozilla are not protecting you from the government. They're intimately financially interconnected with each other, and can decide what the entire world is going to have to tolerate on the web on a group chat. Without government intervention (even if just to collect bribes), they'd all just probably merge and enslave the planet.
Maybeee the EU but we are talking about an American ruling.
Most Arguments in both directions are basically unprovable and amount to propaganda at this point. Degrees matter. Saying “people voted for this”, which both sides say with different directionality, is mostly away to convince people to either support or fight against the administration. Everyone voted for their interpretation of thing X, but will oppose it if implementation Y causes impact Z which they perceive as bad.
Trump's MO seems to be to take something away, then give it back and declare himself the savior of it. Just look at all the chaos with tariffs recently
Yes and no.
Lots of quick sweeping local changes were promised to specific states during trump’s rallies in those states only for him to go silent on them post election.
I don’t think flip flopping on tariffs was part of his platform either.
But generally, yes, this is what was voted for.
He takes the gish gallop approach to governing, so it’s hard to make any large statements like this without being a little incorrect.
The first Trump admin was positively benign and adult compared to the current one. The first Trump admin had significant checks and balances on its behaviours.
And of course almost everyone who served in that first Trump admin campaigned against/warned about Trump this time, which should be telling. Or maybe they're just "RINOs" or something.
"As much as it's trendy in 2025 to talk about this admin as though it's entirely unprincipled"
This administration is extraordinarily unprincipled and self-serving. The DOJ as a tool for use at the leisure and to the benefit of the president/king is blatantly in the open[1].
"Google's not getting out of this from just a small amount of kowtowing now"
I would bet real money they absolutely will get out from this. Not only that they will get out from it, they'll get the public "treated unfairly" speech as well.
[1] - There is a major plot point in the 1993 movie The Pelican Brief where the simple insinuation that the president influenced the DOJ in any way would be so politically devastating that it would destroy his administration. This is so quaint now. How far the country has fallen.
That said, Chrome is not really viable on its own, and it's the wrong "split" to enforce. The correct split is "down the middle" right through the money-making businesses - create two Googles, with their own search and search/web ads and ensure (through antitrust oversight) that they compete with each other instead of rubbing each other's back. Spin out Cloud and Android/Play Store into separate companies. Separate all four from Alphabet. The rest of the money-losing properties (including Chrome) can be distributed arbitrarily, it doesn't really matter.
Or something to that effect. As long as ads are split down the middle, and separated from Alphabet, that's all that really matters. Unless this happens, any "antitrust" against Google is bullshit for those who can't read its SEC filings.
If you want to go with ethics and trust, I am not particular fond of Brave practice of replacing ads for some shady cryptocurrency (BAT). You don't have to do that, you can just use it as an adblocking browser, but if you don't care about these things, the news of Firefox updating some privacy policy shouldn't affect you too much either.
Anyways, both Firefox and Brave/Chromium are open source, you can see what data is being sent out, and there are forks.
And to make things clear, I am not really a fan of Mozilla direction, I just switched because Firefox became better and Chrome worse in the last years.
Mozilla has not proven themselves to be trustworthy, but I think most would still consider them to be less untrustworthy than Google. Firefox offers similar levels of support, feature parity, and performance to Chrome, which makes it an easy alternative to recommend. There are certainly other non-chromium options worth considering, but Firefox is still by far the most accessible.
No PWA support out of the box last time I looked. And Firefox (understandably but annoyingly) doesn't support some of the non-standardised Chrome APIs such as the File System Access API.
And I also disliked Chrome. Especially the direction of the web they are using Chrome to push forward.
And I also disliked Electron.
But I am against DOJ forcing Google to sell off Chrome. Especially when most of Chrome is open sourced. I think this is just plain wrong. Why dont we force Apple to open source macOS? Microsoft to Open Source Windows? Or Selling off Office. SpaceX to sell its Engine?
Being open source has nothing to do with it. Of course selling it off won't necessarily accomplish the desired result since at the end of the day it isn't the legal ownership per se that results in the influence.
While I agree outsized influence that chrome does on global web standards, it is not like Apple doesn't or couldn't invent something as well. The reality is that no one has the incentive to make better web technology.
If Google sold off Chrome, who will buy it? Are Google even allowed to make another browser based on same technology? What is everyone just installed that again? Selling off Chrome doesn't make any sense at all. And as you said. Their influence on development of Blink is still, Google.
Besides the renaissance in web interop we've been having recently under baseline and Interop, which quite a few commenters in this thread seem to have no idea about but still feel the need to share their opinion on web standards...
That has nothing to do with a search monopoly, which is what this remedy is trying to address.
Also why bring up disliking something as though you were ahead of the curve only to stop short of actually being in favor of taking action?
Sure, but it's exacerbating the Blink monoculture anyway.
What would be the difference between Google shoveling money at Safari and Firefox for default search and shoveling money at some “independent” Chrome?
I genuinely can't think of anyone, of any political stripe, outside of Google and its employees and investors, who thinks Google should have the power it has now. Honestly, the degree of pushback this is getting on HN is shocking to me. Google is massively anti-competitive and spends a ton of energy hurting startups to its own benefit.
I hope the DOJ gets its way on this, and I hope they aggressively pursue anti-trust actions against other organizations in similar positions - Oracle, Epic Systems, and Meta all come to mind.
Apple would prefer everyone use native apps, they run an app store. Most companies prefer apps, you can’t modify or inspect them or easily block ads within them. Apps can trap users inside embedded browsers with app-based surveillance, like when you click profile links in Instagram or TikTok.
The world without a free high quality browser is a worse one.
Is Safari low quality? Is Firefox not free?
What about Edge and all the other browsers that run based on Chromium?
More competition would be better.
Then what happens to Chromebooks? Can Google no longer ship a browser with Android?
Besides, unless you have an Android - which is only 30% of the US market or a Chromebook, everyone who uses Chrome went through the process of downloading it and made a purposeful choice to use it
I personally don’t think it’s fair to single Google out and leave Apple and Microsoft alone. It may be overly cynical, but I think Google is in its current situation because it has fostered political enemies on both sides.
This is when antitrust is needed most, by design. There's a bit of understanding you need to do, but not only is it not dumb, what you said about nobody wanting to buy chrome is actually part of the proof of why google needs to be broken up and why chrome is an ideal target for doing so. The browser market needs to be made competitive again.
Microsoft definitely doesn’t care about the web or even its PC operating system much.
So now, no one is pushing the web forward. But Apple, Google and Microsoft are still motivated to improve their own platforms. While I personally think the modern web is a cesspool and I am okay with that as a user, I doubt many on HN who care about the “open web” feel that way.
As a developer, I haven’t touched the clusterfuck of modern web development for over a decade.
Time zones and culture and language and all that, I suppose. But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture, and would work for a tenth the price.
> But the world is full of very smart people who have a decent grasp of American and European culture
Haha no. And maybe even more importantly, the Americans have zero grasp of theirs.
It doesn't matter if they actually go through with it or greatly inflate the number like OpenAI, Softbank and co did.
Sundar just has to pay the $5M to have dinner at Mara Lago and the next day Trump will be talking about how unfairly Google has been treated, probably blaming China or Canada or something for this DOJ action, and the DOJ will drop the remedy. Probably will fire some employees for daring to pursue this while they're at it.
Whichever oligarch or ruling class ultra-rich whispers in Trump's ear last gets the full force of government for their cause.
Like, surely everyone knows this is absolutely how your banana-republic, profoundly corrupt government works now, right? At least be honest about it.
Especially not when there are other third party browsers. Wouldn't say no to a government funded one that was secure and tested with government services.
There are some issues with the big tech giants that is likely harmful to consumers and the industry, and I'd welcome anti-trust investigations into all of them, but I feel like minor issues like browsers is an attempt to pretend like meaningful regulation and government control has been applied, while the real problems are ignored.
Which government, though? The US is mired in corruption at the moment, and the UK is taking an extended dump on privacy, Russia is … Russia and China doesn't really believe in privacy or freedom of speech, among other things.
Yes because the government is so well run with competent people waiting in line to join it in the era of DOGE?
Do you think that a web browser would be free of politics?
The same government services that require things like recaptcha to work? The situation in the US is far worse than just "I need to use a BigTech browser to access government services".