Don't make Google sell Chrome

https://world.hey.com/dhh/don-t-make-google-sell-chrome-93cefbc6

18•Tomte•9mo ago

Comments

cruzcampo•9mo ago

DHH with the worst possible take, as is tradition.

jay_kyburz•9mo ago

Really, I agree with almost everything. It's crazy to force google to sell Chrome?

I assume they are also going to be somehow prevented from just forking it and creating a new browser?

Should just force them to sell the Advertising arm.

gibbitz•9mo ago

100% this a search engine selling ads on the web is more of an advantage than making a browser. It leads to market advantage due to deeper knowledge of properties than other engines get based on ad placement and passive access to authenticated pages. And it's monetized. The browser isn't.

cruzcampo•9mo ago

The browser is what allowed them to kill effective adblocking with Manifest V3.

Both the ad business and the browser should be split off. Google should really be dozens of businesses.

beardyw•9mo ago

> The browser is what allowed them to kill effective adblocking with Manifest V3.

There are loads of browsers which block ads without extensions. Use one of those. Or is it that you like the golden eggs but want to kill the goose anyway.

cruzcampo•9mo ago

I use Zen Browser.

Nonetheless, the market dominance of Chrome means that the ad blocking industry has been negatively impacted by their monopolist behavior.

jay_kyburz•9mo ago

I've been using chrome with ublock lite on my linux laptop where Firefox is really slow, and I've not seen any difference. I know the advanced features are missing, but most of the ads are still gone.

JohnFen•9mo ago

> There are loads of browsers which block ads without extensions.

But few (none?) that do it well enough for my comfort.

dfabulich•9mo ago

We're about to see the funding for all four major web browsers collapse before our eyes.

As of today, the only way to make money developing a web browser is to accept payment from a search engine.

That's how Firefox makes 95% of its revenue. That's also how Safari makes all of its money; the Safari team's dev budget is ~$14B, almost exactly the same as the amount Google pays Apple to be the primary search engine. Edge is a fork of Chrome that only exists to make Bing its primary search engine.

If Google is forced to divest Chrome and is no longer able to do those search-engine deals, 95% of the funding for all four web browsers will just go away.

Firefox will die immediately. And whoever bought Chrome would have no way to make money from it.

It's gonna be real, real bad out there.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos•9mo ago

Good. I hope mozilla does die. I hope chrome, safari, and edge all die. I hate mozilla for steadily ruining firefox over the past 15 years and I hate chrome for being the cause.

gorjusborg•9mo ago

My first reaction to this was horror. Then I remembered what life was like before 'the internet / world wide web' and thought that it might actually be beneficial to revert.

One thing is for sure, it would make things unstable in the near term.

tiffanyh•9mo ago

I don’t think enough people grasp this point.

Google is the only major tech company who wants an Open Web.

Meta (FB, IG, WA), Apple (App Store), etc would love a world where it is just a walled garden.

mvid•9mo ago

Well that’s a farce. Google wants an “open web” as long as the definition for “open” doesn’t infringe in any way on their data collection. If they could redefine SSL to give them access, they would

fouc•9mo ago

What's with the assumption that web browsers need funding? That web browsers need active development beyond what most open source development does?

latexr•9mo ago

> First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet.

Ah, yes, because as we all know, tech illiterate users (i.e. the majority) care deeply about which web browser they’re running, and after rigorous testing settled on Chrome. It had nothing to do with Google pushing Chrome on users every chance they got, using every trick in the book to get everyone to install their browser and degrading their popular services on alternative browsers. No sire, no foul play and trickery there, Google played fair and square. No one has ever known Google to be more than a fair and honest champion for users. What was their motto again? “Don’t be evil”? Well, I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything that they stopped using that.

To not fall victim to Poe’s law: Yes, that was heavy sarcasm.

EbNar•9mo ago

I don't agree. Firefox once had almost 30% market share. A lot of people explicitly downloaded and installed it, when IE was dominant and Linux almost non-existent. What happened? Those people suddenly became stupid or tech illiterate? Take into account that or has lost not only in market share, but also in absolute number of users. Mozilla has its fair share of blame here.

dismalaf•9mo ago

Edge literally makes itself the default on updates, yet Chrome is more popular.

Oh, the #1 query on Bing is "Google".

tiffanyh•9mo ago

> “Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet”

I’m a bit surprised by DHH take on this.

Maybe a lot of people have forgotten but how Chrome won the browser war was by Google annoying its users with a barrage of popups saying “to have a better viewing experience, download Chrome”.

The only way to have those messages go away from any Google property was to use Chrome.

reginald78•9mo ago

Don't forget bundling it with the installers of popular downloads like Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Reader, lots of antivirus software, etc. If you weren't paying attention during all of those installers you'd end up with Chrome installed.

I often wonder how necessary these moves even were though. Google's brand was at an all time high during this era.

techpineapple•9mo ago

I have a question, which is why not have google spin off their ad division? It's the thing that's a monopoly right? All the other products could either survive on their own, or be customers of the new company.