Is there any company with the funds to buy this that would not become also a monopoly?
They should make it open source
Well, it mostly already is. The Chromium project is essentially everything Chrome already has, except Chrome contains a few proprietary components (IIRC the tracking is proprietary)
to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful
Why not both!
good point, I guess one worry here is about the way in which this will affect Firefox (note Firefox here, not the Mozilla Fdn who have managed to Elon their own thing without help, seemingly)
I’m worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
Chrome, brought to you by Palantir, heck, what if Musk bought it?
They would have to be more scummy and also at least similarly competent… Google can’t innovate for crap, but they’re pretty good at maintaining projects (when they don’t randomly kill them off)
If they stop work on chromium, or belief in the stewardship of chromium wanes, it’ll fragment the ecosystem again. Which is sorely needed at this point - we need to get back to standards and away from centralized control
Imagine Twitter/musk acquires them. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big companies directly or indirectly rely on a chain now controlled by a group known for mismanagement - are they going to wait and see, or are they going to diversify?
Is there any company more scummy than Google?
Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I’d say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there’s probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.
Id actually say Meta is the scummiest tech company thinking about it now.
The next day, the Chrome division is sold off to a new company “Bloogle” and we’re back to square dumb.
And before you think about applying for a job there, know that the new company is still demanding mandatory 5 days in the office
Why does it need to be sold to another big company, why can’t they just break Google up so chrome becomes its own business?
Chrome by itself would likely cost 100 billion dollars to sell, and then more to maintain, without any clear revenue except selling user data. Chrome is not a profitable product on its own. Not many companies can afford that.
Well shucks, I guess it should just be made fully open source, the code distributed, and the business dissolved. Womp wooomp.
The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.
Given all of the major browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.
This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.
The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.
Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.
Safari has roots in chromium? I thought it was WebKit or something else for it’s engine.
Safari is using WebKit. WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE and has since been further developed by KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia and others. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome, under the name Blink. Source: Wikipedia
so its been awhile since they have been together.
