from Hacker News

OpenAI would buy Google's Chrome, exec testifies at trial

by gostsamo on 4/22/25, 6:57 PM with 16 comments

  • by rvz on 4/22/25, 9:19 PM

    Anyone but OpenAI.

    History would repeat itself and we'll be just switching the web from one behemoth (Microsoft IE) to another (Google Chrome) and yet another (OpenAI) [0].

    Would be the worst outcome.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32145561

  • by huslage on 4/22/25, 7:22 PM

    Why is an OpenAI exec testifying at a Google trial? Did I miss something?

  • by dagmx on 4/23/25, 7:13 AM

    Would OpenAI have the culture to maintain Blink well? They feel like they prefer closing down their ecosystem.

    More than Chrome, I think the future of Blink as it pertains to Edge etc will be most interesting. Though I suppose Edge could migrate to WebKit if necessary or if they didn’t want to maintain/fork Blink themselves.

  • by AStonesThrow on 4/23/25, 7:41 AM

    Do they really mean "Chrome" or do they mean "Chromium"? Because the latter is a really important and influential codebase, and the former is a proprietary, branded "distro" of that codebase.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Differe...

    So it would be weird if Google sold off Chrome, which specifically belongs to Google, and the main thing that makes Chrome Chrome is that it is Google's Chrome on top of the open-source Chromium codebase.

    And if Google "owns" Chromium enough to "sell it off" then that new owner will enjoy leverage over even Microsoft themselves, as Edge is also Chromium-based. Not to mention, the Opera browser and many, many mainstream Linux distributions use Chromium directly, so ... that's kind of a big deal!

  • by 9283409232 on 4/22/25, 10:17 PM

    I said in a different thread that if Google was forced to sell Chrome, Elon Musk would buy it to force xAI on everyone. I was in the ballpark apparently as OpenAI is the AI company that would buy it to force ChatGPT on everyone.

  • by 7bit on 4/22/25, 7:00 PM

    So instead of ads the new cancer becomes AI

  • by lysace on 4/22/25, 6:58 PM

  • by airstrike on 4/22/25, 7:02 PM

    monkey's paw curls