by carrotsalad on 4/29/25, 7:17 PM with 18 comments
by mmx1 on 4/29/25, 9:17 PM
Ironically, this whole saga is happening at the same time the "Google search business is under attack" is at its peak in the news media.
by AStonesThrow on 4/29/25, 10:10 PM
Firstly, Chrome without Google is Chromium. So are we considering that they sell off Chrome, or Chromium? I can't see how Google sells off Chrome and remains Google.
It seems a bit absurd for Google to sell off Chromium and then some other tech giant gets to "own a F/OSS project". I mean, yeah, you own a browser but everybody else is still downstream, including Microsoft, and contributions are open-source, so what do you really own?
If we're really talking about Google selling Chrome itself, then what good is that? Anyone else owning Chrome wouldn't make it the same. Google users rely on Chrome to use Google! Like, that's how I sign in -- through the browser -- and use Workspaces -- through the browser -- and so many other webapps, such as Photos or Contacts or Calendar. And here we've got ChromeOS and Chromebooks widely deployed. That's Chrome too. How to separate Chrome from the Goog? Are you proposing a breakup like the Baby Bells or something?
It's nearly absurd at this point to separate Google from their Chrome. It would be like telling them they can't have Android. But like, that's simply a layer in their tapestry of services. You're going to pull on that thread for what reason?
by lucasyvas on 4/29/25, 11:52 PM
That may still leave them some incentive to participate in its development since many of their web apps are optimized against Chromium, but they are not allowed the business advantage of the technology as it exists today.
The would-be acquirer, I guess, would be forbidden from duplicating the business model. The logical question is, well how would that acquirer make any money?
My hunch is that Chrome would just become a dead brand and the browser engine could live on as an embeddable technology. That still might provide value to a would-be owner, but they would make their money off of products making good use of the browser engine and not the engine itself for web browsing.
Having a world class browser engine is valuable to application development still. It has core value, just not as a vehicle for making money in a standalone way.
Maybe it’s hard to make sense of because monetizing a browser directly is, and arguably always has been, kind of… stupid.
The answer might be found looking at something like Deno Deploy. They realistically can’t monetize the language/runtime because it doesn’t make any sense. They capture commercial value by offering to run your code in a seamless way.
I don’t know. Maybe an AI company is a decent fit - they can run it as an agent/scraping service and make money that way. An automotive company could buy it and sell an optimized version for Infotainment systems for other car manufacturers as well. There’s money to be made off of selling it as a platform, but probably not as an Internet browser.
I’m sure Google itself could have thought of a billion other ways to make money off it but they were just too lazy to dream it up because it wasn’t aligned to their core business.
by zamadatix on 4/29/25, 11:17 PM
All that aside, the article doesn't really make much of an argument as to why 3 billion current users shouldn't be worth lots of money to someone wanting to try to monetize (even if the author doesn't see a good monetization opportunity). It, instead, focuses on why the Google integrations Chrome had are what made it popular. One of the biggest differences between Google selling Chrome and any old chromium fork is precisely that the "other" browsers no longer have to try to compete with Google's own browser to get users to monetize.
by wmf on 4/30/25, 12:06 AM