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Comment by richwater | Hacker News Reader

Running a browser without an ecosystem behind it is a money pit and would be worth almost 0.

Doesn’t matter, as consumers, we’re absolutely ducked from all sides as long as our “window into the web” is fully controlled by a single corp.

And if Chrome were to be divested it would have just gotten swallowed up by a different corp, most likely to end up in worse hands imo.

Can you name any other company that if they owned Chrome it would've been better for the users and the web?

The issue is that Google is both the browser, the web standards, the ads, the mail, the search, the phone, the AI, the maps… not a chance to compete with any of that as long as it’s all in one. The only other barely approaching this level is Apple, and we know they have their own anticompetitive aspects. Allowing corps to grow so much should never have been a thing.

>Can you name any other company that if they owned Chrome it would've been better for the users and the web?

Mozilla? Red Hat? Valve?

Mozilla already owns a browser, and gets free money from Google to do that. Yet, they have been mismanaging the whole time.

What makes you think they'll suddenly do a good job when the funding goes away, and they have to now support a large userbase which pays $0 to use the product.

> Mozilla?

Already has a browser. With debatable success.

> Red Hat?

Would probably rather end up under the Linux Foundation and not RH. How development would then continue is up for debate.

> Valve?

They already use CEF for their Steam client IIRC, but I don't think they are too much interested in owning an entire browser. Especially considering Valve itself is a relatively small company emplyee wise.

Mozilla would immediately go bankrupt because Google wouldn't have to sponsor them anymore.

Red Hat has been acquired and is already well underway on the enshitification road.

Browsers are way too far from Valve's core business.

In that case people (some of them at least) would switch to a different browser. Reducing Chrome market share would be healthy for the web too.

Or we'll just get a duopoly where Microsoft and Apple control the web, both of which don't really have business incentives to improve it.

You mean, like it is now?

Yes, but with companies that have even less incentive to actually make the web decent.

I don't see how it can be worse than now.

Google has done a ton for PWAs. If apple didn't have the monopoly they have on the ios ecosystem and actually granted PWAs the same accesses they get on android, you'd likely see them taking off.

They're essentially apps that don't have to go through the app store.

If 10% of intel could be "sold" to the government maybe Chrome should be too? And the there could be 20 year ban written into law on selling it back to private.

Is it? I use Firefox. Can’t you just not use chrome, no legal interventions required?

Tell that to billions of normies who followed Google's (illegal) ads of Chrome.

Firefox is only financially sustainable because of the massive payments Google makes to Mozilla to set Google as the default search service.

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