Comment by wesselbindt

coughs in Nvidia

I should ask a doctor about that, it keeps happening.

in general, I find a little bit distasteful that the only way to build a browser is as a loss leading project for the largest advertising company on the planet

No wonder nobody can compete, loss leaders tend to kill competition as they can be maintained without direct business revenue at all.

The same issue plagues domesticated cats, they don’t need to hunt for food since they have an abundance at home so instead without risk of starvation they are free to hunt all birds in the territory for fun.

There are no browsers left except the artificial ecosystem of Safari. Firefox is not a blip on the radar.

So, everything is chrome and chrome is the web standard. Having a single private company in charge of what is and what is not web standards is a little bit scary, as, like the cat, they don’t really need to see and serve the needs of the environment. They are fed at home.

> If they do, what incentive does Google have to keep maintaining Chromium?

I agree, this is a problem, but there should be a trivial solution: Users of the browser should pay a small amount of "money" for the product they use all day every day. This money should go into paying to maintain it.

Anything else is perpetuating the Trash Web as it's come to be.

The only reason a "web browser" is "free" (as in beer) is because Microsoft in the 90s was (belatedly) very worried about a world where Netscape held a lot of power, and realized making and giving away a slightly better browser would neutralize this upstart. Everything flowed from that one tactical decision by a couple of execs at MS.

I'd argue that a browser should be a part of the OS or be a paid product, but funding it with ad money from under the same corporate umbrella is a gross practice which promotes things like... Google nerfing adblocker plugins, and Google trying to kill cookies in favor of something only they control. (Although on that last one, by some miracle their hand was stayed and they backed down.)

Of course the DOJ can't ban the idea of a browser funded by ad money (and most are) but separating it from the other side of the business which should have zero say in how it's implemented, that's common sense to me.

If no one can maintain Chromium, well, that's a pity. On the other hand other projects can catch up then, and maybe the web as a whole can take a breather, without Google pushing more and more "standards". That's actually a good reason to do this. I really couldn't care less about Google's ad business. It is a burden on society.

I think it cannot get much worse than it currently is, with one company dictating the web's future and raking in the money from that. So while there are significant unknowns, probably the result will be something at least a little bit better. I am a little worried about Chrome being only fake sold, to some company that is indirectly controlled by Google again.

> What company has the resources to maintain Chrome's massive codebase? What profit incentive is there in maintaining Chrome without Google's ad business?

As an aside, maybe this is part of the issue. We have been privileged to enjoy some of the most advanced and complex software created for free since basically their inception. Nobody every paid for a web browser.

But then look around the software industry and every software of even remotely similar complexity need to be paid for, or are a kept free due to a convergence of interest of people who can make money out of it (most notably: Linux).

Now, a web browser could be seen exactly the same way Linux is: Many, many, (many!) company makes ton of profit from people have access to a web browser, therefor, they should be fine with paying people to develop it. And in some way, considering that chromium and firefox are open-source, this is what could happen. But it does not really happen. Google is bankrolling both FF and Chromium, and they have basically total control over Chromium development. Who else is even giving remotely even money for 1 FTE for FF or Chromium ? Thing is, no company would do it for Chromium because it is seen as a Google product, so why pay them for something they will do in any case. Company could have financed Firefox, but now that it is the underdog (and that the Mozilla Foundation makes questionable decision), it doesn't seem like a very good investment.

This is in many way crazy to me that almost every tech company heavily really on people having free access to a web browser, yet nobody is really trying to finance one. But I do think it is a political issue, and that, maybe just maybe, separating Chromium from Google would actually give incentive to the rest of the industry to finance the development of a browser that is not directly own by neither of them. Again, some what just like Linux.

There's an implicit assumption embedded in this comment that the Chromium project is indispensable, whereas I'm unconvinced it's even a net positive at all.

Anyone who follows standards discourse would probably appreciate the prospect of this open source codebase having independent stewards much more than any fears over maintenance resources.

Sounds like a Google problem.

The web existed before Chrome, and will continue to exist afterward.

> There's just a lot of significant unknowns surrounding this.

That's what happen when you let anomalies like this become the norm. Antitrust actions should have been taken against Google 15 years ago, and at that point it wouldn't have undermined the whole web because back then didn't yet control the entire web (but the trend was clear and that's why action should have been taken).

Firefox is massively profitable at a fraction of Chrome's marketshare.

I use Brave which is based off of Chromium just like Chrome, and the experience is great. I’d say I’ve had to go to chrome maybe 3 times in the last year, and it was always for some super complicated SPA.

Whatever decrease we see to our browsing experience will be worth the gains I expect to see from dealing a blow to a monopoly like Google.

The question of who would likely buy it is just as important. I can't help but think that MS would love to have the dominant browser again.

If there's no market for that it will die, simple as.

keeping chrome alive isn't the goal, keeping the web not being at whims of a single company is.

They are not paying $0. They are manipulated into believing they are paying $0. If people were offered the google suite for 'free','you just have to let us siphon 4 liters of blood from you every year', would people still claim the price was 'zero dollars'. Just because you extract the price from your users in a different denomination/method than ordinary dollars, doesn't mean it's 'free'. Precisely because they are not asking for dollars, indicates they are actually extracting value from their users. They are not giving, they are taking, and it is also clear they are taking more than they are giving, given their revenue and profits.

I could see a similar argument being made by plantation owners in the past "we are lodging these guests from africa for FREE", they don't even have to PAY to live in the houses we offer them! There is only the small detail of the activities they will have to do in OUR fields, which will kill them off in 10-15 years, but that is another matter which should not be confused".

"Deals" of the kind google and facebook offer are not to the consumer's advantage. Insisting on not having a facebook account is akin to choosing not to use the paved asphalt roads the society makes available to you. I could "choose" not to have a facebook account, but it would lock me out of effectively both my friends group and my family's daily communication.

This has the same energy as arguing that gathering your private data to give you more accurate ads does not hurt consumers, it's in fact helping them!

Google has been the one pushing for getting rid of the v2 manifest for browsers extensions, which just so happens to seriously nerf ad blockers. Because so many browsers are forks of Chromium v2 will disappear from a majority of browsers. Meanwhile if you try to use a non-Chrome browser like Firefox a lot of websites are buggy and outright don't work. Opening images in issues broke in GitHub for firefox a year ago and they still haven't fixed it.

You are being *very* naive if you think that Google having this sort of monopolistic power over the web does not hurt consumers.

Your implication that google services are free is untrue. You are paying with your privacy and data. And the price is such that, if I ever made a better mail service than gmail that openly asked to sell and privately use all your data, nobody would subscribe. You are paying by seeing ads. You are paying by being coerced into a certain ecosystem. You are paying by having one company chose what standards are the de facto web standards of tomorrow. And their main business is selling your data. You are paying by losing access to your data if a company feels like it. etc.

It's very similar to the situation in the nineties where Microsoft used their OS monopoly to push Internet Explorer "for free". You could make the same argument there "now consumers have free access to an internet browser, how is that bad?".

It was bad because it effectively ended innovation in the browser space for decades by pushing Netscape out of business (and discouraging others from entering that space).

Similarly, many consumers are unaware of alternative search engines, if Chrome pushes Google as the default. This kills innovation and puts more power in Google's hands as to what parts of the web get promoted.

Many a business owner can tell you that when Google changes their search ranking it can have an effect on the bottom line. This is also bad for consumers, as only bigger businesses which have the dough to pay for many Google ads get returned in a search.

> Do you imagine Microsoft or Apple would've created better search, email, news, etc., or that the mom & pop shop down the store would've done that?

Yes, enthusiastically yes. With the exception of maybe search, products like gmail, docs, and sheets are basic projects tossed out into the ecosystem for free to suck up all the oxygen for minimal dev cost. How is an upstart supposed to compete with a better mail/doc/spreadsheet app if the basic use case is covered for free by some loss leader funded from a different vertical?

Most of these classes of apps have been stagnant for decades.

The most obvious example is malvertising.

Chrome is pushing ManifestV3 with extreme prejudice and Youtube pushes ever more malvertising by the day. Why can Google do this?

Because there is no competition.

you seems too afraid to lose your big tech salary

What if this browser killed lots of other viable browsers because it was "free" (yet supported by and supporting a monopoly)?

You never get to compare the products that never got to exist.

related, I think google supported firefox to have a "viable" competitor to chrome and prevent monopoly scrutiny.

This exactly. An independent Chrome’s best path toward financial sustainability is closing down the source code and selling everyone’s browsing data to the highest bidder.

We all like to have a high minded ideal of some kind of wonderful fully independent for-the-good-of-society entity stewarding Chrome, but history has shown us that’s not what will happen.

The product is never free, it’s just you’re not the one paying for it. This setup prevents new entrants from competing just the same.

[edit] the same way zero rating certain data traffic is still a net neutrality violation.

> Pushing for something that will clearly in not too distant future kill the split product is not helpful.

They’re not considering this because of Chrome’s market share, but because of Google’s power in the search engine market. Indirectly killing Chrome may be acceptable if it makes the market for search engines more competitive.

Having said that, I don’t think it will matter much as long as Apple and, in particular (because they also have a search engine) Microsoft can ship browsers with preconfigured search engines with their OSes, but we will see.

I think there are 2 products. Google Chrome and Chromium. For one of them: Good riddance! For the other: Well, actually you cannot really kill that, because anyone can fork it or contribute patches, so if the world thinks some change is needed, the world can make it happen. There is no need to be worried about the project. We could also put it under a copyleft license that obligates anyone to contribute modifications and we will be fine, if some company decides to fork it.

Chrome is like a service not a product it is effectively Google installing a window so you can see it's fresh baked goods. It isn't something they should break up because it isn't something that inherently makes money and nor should it.

Three hours a year of nagging window in rich countries will provide all the financing chrome, the web browser, will ever need.

We are talking about the most advertised, most installed most used program. Asking users to pay will do more good than harm

So you‘re saying Chrome can only survive because it feeds Alpahabet‘s ad service?

Seems like a good reason for a product to die.

Most of Google is "free" products that feed into its surveillance advertising platform. That's the problem. How are you supposed to break that sort of thing up without destroying most of the products? They were never designed to work independently from the network.

It follows from a few premises. The point of creating/allowing private companies to compete in a market and profit from doing so is to encourage them to innovate via competitive pressure. If you just wanted to produce well-understood goods or infrastructure then the most efficient way to do that is to pool resources and have the State do it, because they don't need to make a profit and, if not totally dysfunctional, are accountable to the people. If you let private companies consolidate power and influence then they largely escape competitive pressure and can streamline operations to maximize profits. That is, they benefit from the same efficiency the State does, but capture more of the value and remain unaccountable to the people, existing only to enrich their owners.

Free products are not the consequence of megacorps existence. Free products exist, because you are the product. Big companies also doesn't necessarily mean monopolies.

And if they sold off Youtube, we'd have 500 comments saying, "This is a bad idea. They can't make a profit. They should divest from Chrome."

Splitting Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc up all at once and into multiple separate pieces each would be great for consumers. But that's a huge undertaking, and the bigger the changes required, the less likely they are to happen. Taking it one step at a time, with the first step being Chrome and Google search (two products that strongly push users of one to use the other) being split up, is better than no progress at all.

At the very least, the biggest force in killing adblockers (Google gradually gutting them in Chrome) will have fewer means to kill them in browsers. That's a win for consumers.

Firefox is massively profitable. Why couldn't Chrome be?

Goggle would compete with other search engines for being the default search. So this would have knock on effects on search as well.

It's a balance but IMO there should be no realistic concept of "winning the market". If it gets to that point then sure the company is probably making a lot of money but they also have the power to squeeze as much as they can. The irony of posting this on a forum originating from VC culture does not escape me.

Not sure if this is an innocent comment or not but I'll answer earnestly.

They're not, technically. They're hegemons, which doesn't make them much better. In fact, I'd argue the situation is worse.

Chrome predominantly owns the web at this point. There are few contenders, and making a new browser is a lot of work (see the Verso browser). Google has the arguably unearned luxury of dictating what APIs and protocols the nebulous "web" should use, can throw a bunch of money at adding them quickly, and leave competitors struggling to keep up, effectively buying chrome's guaranteed superiority.

"But there are standards committees!" Yes, but it really doesn't matter when Chrome either uses its own APIs privately on its sites[0] or just adds new APIs without any committee consideration for people to use and fall in love with and demand that other vendors add them (or something similar, such as proposing a great idea at the committee, it's accepted, and the other vendors lagging for months or even years - see WebGPU as an example).

One might think "it's just a browser". Yes, but browsers are -for better or for worse - the global defacto for sending and receiving almost all of our sensitive data. Even "desktop apps" like Whatsapp, Signal, and Bitwarden all either use or have used Chromium to display their contents (via Electron).

Much of the community has asserted Google owns the web at this point, and I tend to agree. It's very, very hard for smaller vendors to have much of a day these days without Google getting theirs, too.

[0] https://x.com/lcasdev/status/1810696257137959018

I think we can think in terms of market share.

Google (the search engine) has a market share of over 85% worldwide. [0]

Google therefore controls what can be found on the Internet for 85% of search engine users. Recent updates, or Core Updates, have demonstrated how easy it is for Google to put businesses out of business by removing their visibility. [1]

It seems to me that this is a problem.

Ditto for Chrome, which has +60% market share [2]. A failed or deliberate update could make a website inaccessible to 60% of the population.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share [1] https://retrododo.com/google-is-killing-retro-dodo/ [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Monopoly is probably not the right word. "Trust" (as in "anti-trust") is maybe better, but I'm not sure the last gilded age really had a perfect analogy to what's been happening in the tech services sector.

The problem is these sprawling companies who make so many interrelated services and can suppress competition in one area (browsers, e-mail, video-over-the-internet) due to extreme profits in another area (ads).

Allow me to break this down:

* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the browser market (Chrome). Apple (Safari) only exists because of vendor lock-in, and Mozilla (Firefox) is a vassal state; all "other" browsers are Chrome.

* Google shares a duopoly of the mobile OS market with Apple (Android vs. iOS).

* Google holds a monopoly of the video streaming market (Youtube).

* Google holds a monopoly of the malvertising market (Adsense, Doubleclick, et al.).

* Google effectively holds a monopoly of the web search market (Google Search).

* Google holds the vast majority of the email market (Gmail).

* Google is the absolutely dominant player in the consumer cloud market (Google Drive).

* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the cloud photo market (Google Photos vs. iCloud Photos).

* Google shares a duopoly with Microsoft in the consumer office software market (Google Docs vs. Office 365).

* Google shares a duopoly with Apple in the digital wallet market (Google Pay/Wallet vs. Apple Pay).

I can go on, but with this being said let me ask you: Why the hell should Google not be split and cut apart nine ways to Sunday?

The Web is basically ChromeOS nowadays, if we ignore iDevice for a moment.

I'm not claiming they are. But given their current market share and its trajectory, they're marching towards one. Furthermore, it's a clear mechanism for further monopolizing the search engine market (I'm more comfortable calling google a monopoly on this front). I'm a staunch capitalist and believe in the innovative power of competition, and monopolies ground that whole machine to a halt.

I would expect the monopoly referred here to be the government.

No, most user don't choose. Android doesn't provide a menaingful way to choose to the users, it pushes you to choose Google. That's a big difference. It would be a choice if, when you start android for the first time, it asks you which browser you want to use, in a list where all browsers are shown equal; not "hey you'll use chrome and you can change later any time you want". Ideally, it would provide an explnanation of each browser. That would be a better way to propose a choice.

Would it make users smarter about their choice ? Probably not. But at least, they could smell there is an actual choice.

Monopolies tends to maintain users in ignorance. This way, although they can look elsewhere, they won't feel the urge to do so.

Users must be helped to make their own choice, not guided to make the monopoly's choice. And that must be done before the choice is made.

As long as there will be monoplies, this tension will exist and people like me will continue to explain that the State is the best way to push the balance in favor of those who don't get the importance of the choice.

The problem is not that there is a dominant player. The problem is the dominant player uses ignorance and subtle strategies to make sure users saty with it.

> There is no monopoly. There are a lot of other browsers. A lot of people use them.

There is market dominance: Chrome has 65%, Safari has 18% but that’s because of iOS, and the few others have the rest. It’s false to say there are "a lot" of other browsers when nobody can enter the space anymore.

> They chose to do it. If you ask them, they think it's good.

Most people don’t choose their browser, they just take whatever comes preinstalled. Even then, Google pushes you to use their browser every time you use their services: I know a lot of non-tech people who use Chrome on iOS not because they chose to, but because they got a pop-in on Google that told them to do so.

> It is bad for you.

The current situation is indeed bad for the consumer, even if it’s not a monopoly per se.

The vast majority of people just like their free stuff and don't go on hacker news to discuss it