Comment by Ameo

6 days ago

My primary worry here is that this would hurt the open web - whether or not splitting out Chrome into a separate business would be good for consumers in and of itself.

It's true that Google adds a lot of things to Chrome or their own benefit or even the potential detriment of others like Mozilla.

That being said, they also do a tremendous amount of work to push the state of the web forward and, most importantly, they release Chromium 100% free and open source. That's not to mention the other incredibly impactful free projects that have stemmed from it like V8/NodeJS, Electron, Puppeteer, Chrome Devtools, etc.

On the flip side, it's been argued that Google's control over web standards is too strong and they can essentially strong-arm other browser vendors into implementing whatever they want. It's also been argued that Google pushes too fast and makes it impossible for other vendors to keep up, leading people to use Chrome if they want the latest + greatest web features.

But when we look at the other browser vendors, I personally feel like Google seems like a much better alternative. Mozilla feels like a dried up husk of the company it apparently once was and Apple pushes a buggy, closed-source, locked-down browser which has been purposely held back from critical features in the past (I think they did that to try to keep users off web apps and keep them paying Apple huge app store fees).

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Anyway, I certainly have very mixed feelings on this one. My main hope is that this doesn't spell the beginning of the end for Chromium because I truly believe it's a piece of software that has provided immense public benefit.

4 comments

Ameo

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chucke1992  6 days ago

Google has to be dismantled in parts one way or another - too much control over search and Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.

  • ikeashark  2 days ago

    > Youtube to the point where they are able to enforce Chrome standards that prevent adblocks from working.

    Youtube needs to profitable somehow, and advertisers are the best way to do this. If Youtube couldn't generate the revenue through advertising, what else can they do?

    It's insanely expensive to do video streaming, hence why Google invests a lot in the new compression formats today, WEBP, Brotli, AV1.

    Do you just expect them to just do all of this for free?

    • chucke1992  2 days ago

      No, but with big market share comes big responsibility.

      Video streaming is extremely unprofitable sure, but in its care it tries to leverage its market share with Chrome browser to benefit. And you are not allowed to do that when your market share is big.