541–550 of 718 posts
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The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome. Bare in mind that 99% of Chrome is the free Chromium open source project, so you're not buying any sort of technological asset. You're just buying a big pre-existing user base, which would be extremely difficult to monetize without making the product much worse, although I'm sure Microsoft or Facebook would be happy to give that a go.…
> The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome I don't see why divesting it necessarily means selling it to another company. Google could create a non-profit like Mozilla, or a for profit and float it as its own business.
Any NGO receiving Chrome would be extremely vulnerable to spying, because of the immense power of having software installed on a billion computers.
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.
> Who would even buy Chrome? You mean.. who would want to buy an app that has 65% marketshare? I just imagine some shady company (shadier than google at least) buying it to slap ads all over inside the browser itself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome. Bare in mind that 99% of Chrome is the free Chromium open source project, so you're not buying any sort of technological asset. You're just buying a big pre-existing user base, which would be extremely difficult to monetize without making the product much worse, although I'm sure Microsoft or Facebook would be happy to give that a go.…
I suppose then we could treat as some kind of public good and fund its development directly from our tax dollars?
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> Keep Google Chrome. Separate search. Sell it to private equity. This. If Search + Google Ads is independent from Android + Chrome + Gmail, it will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines! Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually…
The doubleclick network would still belong to google. Only search would be kept separate.
What Google loses is everything client (user) side: Chrome, Android, Gmail and other personal cloud services. Lets call it Foogle :)
Foogle can charge Samsung et al. for its Android and personal cloud services it is running. And use it in its own Pixel devices too. And may elect to make it hard for Google to sniff it, like droppung doobleclick cookies in Foogle Chrome, provide "Foogle Private Relay", et cetera.
Here's something I don't understand. If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage. If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer,…
It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser. Chrome is the only browser with a business model that makes sense to do this. Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default. Firefox makes no money at all, and makes 95% of its revenue from Google's payments to be the default…
Hell, MS makes it super hard to even install Chrome now, including numerous irritating nag messages and ‘are you sure?!?’
Crazy to think that most users never change a single setting. They live in default mode. Which is the issue with how most software works. Even how browsers will try to get set as default.