Comment by dehrmann
1 year ago
Who would even buy Chrome? No one's building new browsers, and MS even walked away from the browser game. Mozilla and Firefox haven't been relevant for a decade. The only buyer I can see is private equity, and that's sort of the big boy version of buying an abandoned browser plugin so it can track you and show more ads.
No one's building new browsers
Ladybird, servo, and Flow are new browsers currently being built. These new browsers are not derived from any of the big three browser engines: Google Chromium, Apple WebKit, and Mozilla Gecko. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
Sure, but their standards, and what they support aren't even something you can look up. As a JS dev these are the stuff of nightmares.
Learn to write native applications instead.
15 replies →
No one.
It will be a be new Chrome entity I guess, spun off the Google mothership. However, how does it make money is very unclear to me, like how? Selling the search bar to highest bidder, a.k.a Google still?
> Who would even buy Chrome?
You mean.. who would want to buy an app that has 65% marketshare?
I just imagine some shady company (shadier than google at least) buying it to slap ads all over inside the browser itself.
Re shady company: the possibility of some shady foreign governmental agency getting control of Chrome, through layers of shell companies, is terrifying to think about. This possibility hasn't been discussed much in this thread, perhaps surprisingly. The value of collecting data from or inserting backdoors into Chrome seems so massive that I find it hard to trust any but the existing large tech companies to have the skills and infrastructure to keep it safe (keeping the pager bombs story in mind)
I can see a billionaire like Musk wasting some of their net worth to play some stupid political theatre.
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