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Comment by fidotron

5 days ago

One of the hidden costs of Chrome on society is it supports radically ramping up the complexity of web specifications in order to extend the moat around it. It is one of the most extraordinary software engineering projects ever done, with multiple components each of which are game changers. (ANGLE, v8 and libwebrtc immediately come to mind). It is no accident Rust spun out of an effort to compete with this complexity explosion without having infinite financial resources.

Personally I would prioritize spinning off Android though, and partly pragmatically since at least that would have a clear revenue stream. Maybe the Chrome App Store will experience a sudden surge in importance. A degoogled Chrome OS could almost start to look better than the direction Windows is going in.