https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 ("Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome (wsj.com)"—115 comments)
https://abc.xyz/assets/34/fa/ee06f3de4338b99acffc5c229d9f/20...
It's the same sort of confusion many people have about Google paying Apple. It's not just for the default position, it's a revenue-share for the ads seen by Apple users on Google's properties. Nobody has the same potential.
Second, web apps would work just fine on browsers like Firefox, Safari, and even IExplorer.
Thinking that someone would develop a browser so that their webapps work well is missing the point entirely. If the user trusts you enough to download your application and your engineers can write code that interfaces with the OS, you would just develop an native application. Writing a browser to write your webapps would just be incredibly inefficient, and as a side effect it would help your competitors.
Google developed a javascript engine to parse webpages with javascript, then they realized they basically had a browser so voila, and that they could slap search on the search bar, so voila they published a browser.
Can google sell, then have Alphabet Holding create Chrome2 based on Chromium, ripping off Perplexity?
Makes me sad, we could have been on Mars by now if we had decided that spaceflight was more important than social media.
Google has already seen most users [0] directly use AI search instead of clicking into a website.
It is fairly straightforward for an organization to start pushing recommended sites from an AI-driven search, and with even less pushback as most users simply assume the AI search is always true [0].
This also would mean Perplexity could differentiate from OpenAI or Anthropic as a business by being able to build a strong B2C play whereas the former have concentrated on Enterprise B2B.
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-us...
".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"
"I understand your concern, I really do. But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!
Consider a gorilla. The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it. breathes heavily
The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.
We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.
Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson. bows "
---
Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news
"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"
"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
The browser itself is technically competitive with anything else out there.
Sure, if your definition of "security" doesn't include "giving users control over who the browsers are talking to".
Lol it's more like a death grip since nobody can compete with their ad business model. There is almost no innovation in the browser space outside of more and more tracking ...
So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?
There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.
Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?
Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.
More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.
Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.
Edit: > churning out more or less useful Web API implementations
Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...
> if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it
Ever heard of native applications? Those could always do the thing, there is not only no reason for web browsers to implement "web apis", but every one of those is actively harmful.
When "web developers" can finally implement a page where focus does not jump around and layouts do not shift around we can start talking about being allowed access to more than plain html.
Before you roll your eyes and label me a millennial who's not seen anything but the absolutely appalling Web applications of yesteryear, fresh off inexperienced hands of developers who think they invented caching and what not -- I started off with x86 assembler and C then C++ in early 90's, and I hold genuine interest in everything we learned since before Intel made 8088 -- but I am simply describing the reality I see, not necessarily reality I want.
You're drawing a border on water -- there's no need to "separate" the Web from native. The Web is an application platform developed from a hypertext network (the old Web I re-label for comparison's sake), and the platform has tremendous value. You need to have tunnel vision to want to put genie back into the bottle, but again -- I absolutely hear and understand your argument. Do you have realistic suggestions?
Drew DeVault suggested another protocol, Gemini, a while back, having become frustrated with much the same observation you did. Just text mark-up served with efficient text-based protocol -- essentially a regression back to HTTP and HTML anno 1995 (possibly with more semantic elements). I think it's not only a fantasy but also a poor idea -- not because it's a bad idea in itself but because it assumes there's no possibility to do any of it with today's Web, but there is -- it's just that everyone's reaching for the fancy and the flashy once they start coding. What you were referring to with "focus jump around" and "shifting layout". We're sacks of flesh driven by hormones -- that's the best reason I can give you why the same platform that allows you to slap [a HTML that's worth reading](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/), possibly [with a simple stylesheet that does the bare minimum to improve user's experience](http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com) -- is _not enough_ for authors. I'd call it "author's prerogative" -- the person who pays for the domain and the hosting, wants to exercise their authoring power and gets carried away with all the bells and whistles they slap on their pages. Users pull their hair out, in silence (or mostly ignored because "do I paint the walls in your house?").
Anyway, this is getting long -- the gist of my argument is that technically the Web is capable of supporting all the static HTML without an ounce of "shitty" scripting that makes everything border on "unconsumable". You're making a "dictatorship" argument along "if you can't make good readable sites, we're going to neuter the platform". But the platform _is_ what drives adoption of the Web, I say, albeit now nearing some cancerous growth from a skeptic's perspective. And yet: fix the _content_, not the _platform_. "Native" is just a word -- there's no native, everything is translated or compiled one way or another, including JavaScript (which _I_ consider a relatively bad general purpose programming language, even under ECMA oversight which fixed a lot of its warts, admittedly). Unless you're one of those ["real programmers"](https://xkcd.com/378/).
The last time I used Chrome there were ads all over the place because the ad blockers don't work properly anymore (I'm guessing because of manifest v3)
Speed and bugs. My Firefox crashes on some sites, like 9gag.
And it's very slow to load websites. The latest version of Chrome loads websites instantly! Firefox takes a few seconds!
Haven’t ran into breaking bugs with FF (that I can remember), and I don’t notice a meaningful performance difference.
Have been using FF for probably 10-15 years now.
No undue burden on the system either, unlike Chrome which gets sluggish and will crash before ff.
I see no reason to abandon ff at this point.
its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
It quickly eats up much of the power usage and a number of websites (especially MS Office/365 related sites) don't render or work correctly.
The former is a FF issue, but the latter is most likely a website to website issue, as most web devs tend to optimize for the Chromium experience.
Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals.
You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge.
It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome.
And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops.
Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone.
The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find)
this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles.
- can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one)
- you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain (my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN).
there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
You choose to do it so I assume it works for you. What benefit does this give you over the more traditional bookmarking, etc?
The benefit is that I went from thousands of bookmarks, which were difficult and time-consuming to organize and navigate, to contextual pages each filling specific roles and containing ephemeral links to what I need. It works very well for my ADHD and allows me to basically have a messy desk across several domains and contexts, while still having file cabinets for things I do want organized and stashed away.
This has let me vastly simplify my bookmarks, which I typically arrange as unlabeled favicons ordered by color on my bookmarks toolbar, with some others stashed away in a folder.
I keep what I really need, and I'm always ready to drop things I don't need, and it helps me keep a better long-term working memory of ongoing tasks, interests and hobbies.
I don't see how - it's a more than serviceable browser. The only issues I've ever had were because a webapp detected I wasn't using a browser of choice and blocked me specifically, which isn't really firefox's fault.
I guess I prefer chromium dev tools over firefox's but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I only was able to use the firefox ones.
but they can hire about 12 engineers for 10 years, instead of the same cost to have a single [CEO during that time period](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker).
And i think 12 good engineers (at $150k/yr) for 10 years will have produced an excellent product (such as making firefox competitive with chrome...)
Of course, google, who pays mozilla the vast majority of their revemue, will have something to say about that.
Chrome: eavesdrops on everything? This is fine.
I have no issues with them continuing to participate, but not with the level of control they have at the moment.
Would end their unfair monopolistic control over the web, search, and digital advertising.
The DOJ or the FTC need to force this dismantlement.
Not to mention what does that mean for ChromeOS?
The impact is in removing Google's control of the customer base, not in a copy of the code.
As far as Chrome itself, every single desktop OS user except for those forced to use ChromeOS went out of their way to willingly download Chrome.
Google made the first ad for its front page for Chrome. This is not in itself a problem, but Google has a monopoly in search and ads. They cannot be allowed to also have a monopoly in browsers. That’s the whole point of American monopoly laws. Once you have a monopoly, you can’t do everything you want. There are limits. Owning a browser is too much power in one monopolistic giant.
Google does not have a monopoly on ads. Billions are spent on ads on Facebook properties, Amazon, Apple (app store), TikTok. People choose to use Google for search and can go to any other search engine if they choose.
In 2025, Google search is so bad more and more people are using LLM based search tools.
When you visit Google Search or Gmail on your default browser, you get at least one but sometimes as many as three separate popups telling you to install Chrome for "faster" ability to search/email.
Today many product vendors incorrectly claim that their website or service will only work on Chrome, and refuse to provide support unless you switch to it.
Oh, and my personal favorite: If you aren't the admin of a PC, Chrome malware-installs in the user profile folder so you can circumvent your IT department!
Google's power to force Chrome on people is insane, and as the government has now determined, illegally anticompetitive.
I have a Mac, don’t use Chrome or a Chromium based browser and haven’t had an issue.
And you are forced to install Chrome on Windows? Besides wouldn’t you want your applications to install without requiring admin access?
I have never in 30 years across 10 companies including one BigTech company not been trusted with admin access to my computer.
However, admins have been able to lock down computers to not allow them to install software at least since Windows NT.
I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth…
Every blue badge employee at Amazon as far as I know has the ability to get Admin access by clicking on a button on the home built app.
You also might be surprised that in the last 8 years since working with AWS technology, I’ve never worked at a company where I didn’t have Admin access to an AWS account. At AWS we could create as many sandbox accounts as we wanted to with Admin access and every client I have worked with for thd pass five+ years I’ve asked for a none production account with the “PowerUser” policy + iam::* permissions - which is admin in all but name.
What you're telling me is that they do not. And that every mom and pop shop IT outfit is more qualified to secure a server than Amazon is.
If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.
And oh, I'm sure Amazon folks would have some high buzzwordy reasons to suggest this is okay in their environment. Everyone bad at security does it.
I would be shocked if most BigTech developers don’t have admin access to their computers and some type of MDM software that automatically disable disallowed apps.
When was the last time you heard about an exploit to AWS’s or GCPs internal systems based on employee installed software? It might shock you, that it started at Google with the zero trust initiative. But AWS was rapidly moving away from requiring VPNs to gain access to any of their internal systems.
People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they can’t shout open-source and it no longer applies. Google could probably keep spending engineer hours working on Chromium, but wouldn’t be allowed to offer it bundled with its products, and have it on their own website.
Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue?
The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.
As far as ads, there are three trillion+ market cap companies with a thriving ad business - Google, Amazon and Meta.
There's a lot of reason big corps were trying to get Harris to agree to fire Lina Khan in exchange for support: The only way they get out of this is a bribe. And we've already seen Trump is both happy to take the bribe... and still punish you anyways.
#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
mywacaday•5mo ago