Comment by winterbloom
3 months ago
How would they even sell it, chrome is based off of chromium. What is there to sell exactly? You can already fork chromium
3 months ago
How would they even sell it, chrome is based off of chromium. What is there to sell exactly? You can already fork chromium
The userbase and trademark are both very valuable. I'm guessing it would also come with some controlling positions in the chromium open source project, since those are mostly held by google by being the biggest developer and user of the project.
Good question. Chrome itself isn't a standalone business, the money generated through Chrome still primarily comes from Ads. The hardware tied to Chromebooks generates some revenue, but even ChromeOS is essentially free. They generate a tiny amount of revenue selling ChromeOS management tools in Workspace. Why not spin off an actual revenue driver like YouTube?
> What is there to sell exactly?
The user base
Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins. The mind boggles at the complexity of trying to somehow separate Chrome identities from Google identities, much less explain that to the general populace for whom "Google", "Chrome" and "browse the Internet" are largely interchangeable.
No boggling required. If you want to sync your browser state or settings across computers, make a Chrome account. If you don’t, don’t. If you want to use Google, make a Google account.
This is how it should work anyway.
2 replies →
> Logged-in Chrome users are tied to Google logins
Third-party sign in with Google [1].
[1] https://www.google.com/account/about/sign-in-with-google/
We had this for ~20 years. It wasn't mind-boggling complex. On the contrary, it was much simpler: you didn't have to "log in" to a piece of software that ran on a computer you owned under a user account you already logged into.
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There is no value to logging into chrome with a Google account that couldn't be replicated easily with some standalone service. The fact they added google logins to Chrome still bugs me.
And what do I, the new owner of this user base, do with it?
1. make your search engine the default
2. make your website the default
3. make it easier to access your suite of web services
Eg. imagine instead of defaulting to google everything you typed in the search bar defaulted to chatgpt. Imagine open AI could buy that at a discount
8 replies →
Be careful. Asking these kind of obvious questions might make you ineligible to be hired as a government bureaucrat.
1 reply →
> What is there to sell exactly?
widevine and all the other DRMy bits.
Or, better yet, deprecate and disable all the DRMy bits. (One can wish)