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.

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.

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.