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Comment by santiagobasulto | Hacker News Reader

This sounds a bit clickbaity, they could just fork Chromium and build their own version as Edge or Brave. After all, they already have the distribution (ChatGPT).

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The title is clickbait. Most of openai's comments were about their desire to have access to google's index. They also discussed how open AI is thinking about creating a chrome Fork to compete with Google Chrome. The specific part where they mentioned wanting to buy chrome was a hypothetical muse:

> According to Turley, OpenAI would throw its proverbial hat in the ring if Google had to sell. When asked if OpenAI would want Chrome, he was unequivocal. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," Turley said.

If they get chrome they can push updates to the already existing user base.

They’d be buying the user base.

but my main reason for using chrome is my google account

Is there any talk about how google account integration would change if they were forced to sell?

I guess most people use chrome because it is the default. Some people think I don't have internet because I don't have a chrome icon.

The default where? In Windows the default is Edge, in Mac is Safari and in Linux distros usually is Firefox. And somehow people prefer to download Chrome.

> The default where?

Android and ChromeOS

And it's very, very different from buying the chrome itself and getting >50% of market share overnight.

I think you’ve proved your own point: yeah they could launch the next brave, but then they’d have brave and not chrome. 99.9999% of the world haven’t heard of brave.

The Chrome brand (logos, trademarks, its "word on the street" recognition - its marketing) are the true meat and potatoes of that web browser. Forking Chromium would force them to build a new brand on that scale from scratch. That's not an easy thing to do.

They do not have the distribution, that would be the entire point of buying Chrome. ChatGPT is not a web browser, buying Chrome lets them hoover up web browsing data + billion users, which are crucial to developing an ads product, which is ultimately what this will shake out into.

Surely they'd be wanting to buy 3.5billion users, though?

I actually wonder what the price tag is for that, lol.

That's it, if Chrome goes independent and / or is opened up for purchase, it's a very attractive target for companies for data harvesting. I mean I'm sure Google does as well (and got in trouble for e.g. incognito mode not being as incognito as advertised), but they keep it under wraps and make sure to not scare people off.

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