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?

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.

There’s also a clear conflict of interest having the advertising company own the user-agent.

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.

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?

https://open.substack.com/pub/bitecode/p/web-browsers-and-ou...

Nobody can get it except chrome.

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.

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.)

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.

- 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

whether that's directly as paid software, or indirectly as part of purchasing a device that has the software installed on it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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?

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

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

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.

- 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.

It’s because people don’t have a choice.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Most Arguments in both directions are basically unprovable and amount to propaganda at this point. Degrees matter. Saying “people voted for this”, which both sides say with different directionality, is mostly away to convince people to either support or fight against the administration. Everyone voted for their interpretation of thing X, but will oppose it if implementation Y causes impact Z which they perceive as bad.

Yes and no.

Lots of quick sweeping local changes were promised to specific states during trump’s rallies in those states only for him to go silent on them post election.

I don’t think flip flopping on tariffs was part of his platform either.

But generally, yes, this is what was voted for.

He takes the gish gallop approach to governing, so it’s hard to make any large statements like this without being a little incorrect.

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.

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.

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?

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.

This is when antitrust is needed most, by design. There's a bit of understanding you need to do, but not only is it not dumb, what you said about nobody wanting to buy chrome is actually part of the proof of why google needs to be broken up and why chrome is an ideal target for doing so. The browser market needs to be made competitive again.

It 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.

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".