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Comment by vermilingua

6 days ago

This is surely the only real possibility, and puts Edge's shift to Chromium in a new light; could MS have predicted/lobbied for this push?

If this actually happens, I think it would turn perception of Nadella from good CEO that got lucky with OpenAI to a certified shadow master that's playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers.

I'm pretty sure M$ just shifted to edge because they didn't want to invest the money into catching up with chromium, since explorer was a pile of shit and was losing anyway

How is this the only possibility? What about Opera or something?

  • "Opera or somethings" tend to be too small. E.g. Google paid 20 billion just to be the default search in Safari, i.e. for a default seat in a significantly less popular browser. Opera's total assets are ~1 billion.

    But say it was forced to sell for peanuts because any large company proposal was denied by antitrust review itself, a forced sale of a US company's business to a non-US company under ownership by Chinese investors would likely not be allowed go through in the current environment either. Maybe some other "or something" at this point but it feels a bit like asking for a wildcard play from a very methodical and slow process.

    • Interesting, I didn't know that Opera was Chinese-investor-funded.

      There are a few American companies that could pull it off though; Oracle comes to mind? I know that they don't really work in the browser space, but they have plenty of money, and they work in pretty much every other part of tech.