281–290 of 718 posts
At this point, tech's major competitors are overseas. Never thought I'd be making this argument, but does breaking up the search monopoly help America or up and comers?
Regardless of what happens to Chrome per se it's who is involved with pushing for major controversial changes in Chromium that matters. Manifest v3 and Web Integrity API are prominent examples of Google's team shaping how all Chromium based browsers will be, regardless of pushback (though they relented with the latter for now).
Can’t any motivated group of developers fork chromium and push their own agenda ?
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If a Chinese company has a monopoly you get All those things, minus the US jobs. It seems like you are comparing small companies vs large companies, rather than US vs Chinese.
Cue the uncountable number of Chinese jobs generated by overseas companies / the US monopolies, indirectly or directly....
So they sell Chrome today and create Ghrome tomorrow? I can't see Chrome surviving as a standalone product - where is the revenue? I am sure someone will buy it and try to create some "premium" version, but ultimately it will wither and die I expect.
Who would even buy Chrome? No one's building new browsers, and MS even walked away from the browser game. Mozilla and Firefox haven't been relevant for a decade. The only buyer I can see is private equity, and that's sort of the big boy version of buying an abandoned browser plugin so it can track you and show more ads.
Ladybird, servo, and Flow are new browsers currently being built. These new browsers are not derived from any of the big three browser engines: Google Chromium, Apple WebKit, and Mozilla Gecko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
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It will hurt but it won’t be their death. They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does . My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar…
They can start by reducing their CEO salary from check notes $6.9 million in 2022. It increased by millions in just a decade while their market share declined and they layed off hundreds.
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For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.
To try to stem the tide of "Trump will just make this go away because ${corruption}", I want to remind everyone of a few things: * This is not a Biden-admin lawsuit. It was launched by the first Trump admin. * Of the 14 co-plaintiffs, only 1 (CA) is a state that didn't vote for Trump in 2024. The Colorado Plaintiff States include another 16 red states, for a total of 29 red states represented. As much as it's trendy…
First I don't believe this is an effective remedy to break up a Google monopoly, but I have no influence on the DOJ. I'm curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space? How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development? What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome…
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Microsoft has a customized version of Chrome. Don't they already pay for it?
Yeah, I could imagine Microsoft making a bid. To people who don't follow tech product ownership, "Windows comes with Chrome instead of Edge" would be good PR and it could basically be Edge minus the rebranding.
I don't see a real need for Chrome. The stuff they've done to break Adblocking makes it pretty much a dead project today. Web browser development should be open source and not for profit. There is a fair argument that it has been because of Google's funding. There's a strong argument that Chrome has existed to further Google's business and at a minimum protect it's business and ensure third parties didn't hijack all of their PPC revenue in the early days.
It is easy to foresee an outcome here where someone politically connected gets a hold of Chrome and does a lot of crap they shouldn't. The worst case outcome is unrelated to any of this, and something where we end up with government mandated garbage in a web browser. It is very possible that DRM and biometric age verification, and who the fuck knows what else thanks to AI, could be required either by the US or EU, and kill the open source web browser. That's worse than anything Google did.
Regardless of what happens to Chrome per se it's who is involved with pushing for major controversial changes in Chromium that matters. Manifest v3 and Web Integrity API are prominent examples of Google's team shaping how all Chromium based browsers will be, regardless of pushback (though they relented with the latter for now).
Manifest v3 is not even breaking any standards. This is like saying Google should not make any changes to their browser as any forks will not be able to maintain any divergence. All forks are free to keep manifest v2. Off course maintaining a browser is expensive, but that doesn't mean Google has to foot the bill for everyone and everything.
In theory, yes. In reality, the more diverged forks become from mainstream the more expensive they become to maintain, until eventually it becomes entirely unsustainable. With the sheer number of Chrome patches Google churns out, the level of divergence where maintainence becomes overwhelming is actually pretty low. It’s like trying to handle Niagara Falls with a Solo cup.
So in effect, what Google says goes.