If you want to switch your search engine for Safari on iOS, you open Settings, tap Safari, tap Search Engine, and tap your preferred search engine. Not many users do this, and the conclusion is that the default has an unfair advantage.

If you want to make Chrome your desktop browser, you open the default browser, search for Chrome, click the correct result, download the installer, run the installer, open Chrome, and set it as the default browser. So many users do this that people conclude Chrome has an unfair advantage.

Chrome is the only browser with a business model that makes sense to do this. Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default. Firefox makes no money at all, and makes 95% of its revenue from Google's payments to be the default search engine. Safari isn't even available on Windows, and even then, 99% of Safari's revenue is from Google.

(Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)

Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

    Chrome: 65.55%
    Edge: 13.9%
    Safari: 8.69%
    Firefox: 6.36%
    Opera: 2.9%

The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.

How could Chrome make its owner any money at all if Chrome couldn't accept money from Google to be the default search engine? How could Chrome possibly do what Firefox and Safari can't?

Maybe 10 years ago, but which ones do it now? thinkpads and HP machines, at least, ship with Edge as the default. Dell or something?

Windows is also _hyper_ aggressive about pushing Edge now too. Like it's nuts how hard it pushes it, to the point that it embarrasses people who do actually prefer Edge. "Recommending" at every turn that you not switch, having the edge browser itself warn against downloading Chrome, pushing edge into various OS-level browser launches even if it's not your default, and, of course, randomly resetting the browser default on various updates.

edit: at least from this page, it's edge by default on at least some dell machines too, but I haven't owned one in so long I won't say that for sure: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000128257/how-to-ch...

It doesn't seem to be a default on PCs.

This is ancedotal sure but it's several hundred datapoints from the cheapest student focused budget laptops(running windows not chrome os) to business grade laptops from the big 3 (HP/Dell/Lenovo). Apple ships Safari by default and every linux distro I have used ships firefox or a spinoff of firefox by default.

So in my experience Chrome is actively installed by the local it help (me, things are just plain broken for some use cases on non-chrome). I personally do not use Chrome, that doesn't mean I won't make it the default for every PC I touch for an enduser purely because I get less calls for support when users are using chrome.

It's no secret that I feel like other search engines are worse that Google even though Google's results are nearly unusable.

Google built a mote by having a better product, nobody else tried to compete and now it's become nearly impossible to compete. I actively avoid Chromium based browsers personally but even then I need to have one installed because even in Firefox and Safari derived browsers things are broken or website just plain don't work (https//f1.tv actively does not work on firefox as an example, unless they have since backtracked)

Give Kagi a go - the usability thing is superb, as you can down rank common awful sites so they never appear in the results and they aren't stuffing ads into the results either

I find the results excellent 99% of the time and for those odd cases I'm not convinced it found the best results I pop back to Google. I tend to find that I do that most with subtle image searches (which are kind of rare but you are usually after something very specific where Kagi occasionally struggles with on the image side)

Agree as well - I still end up mostly using Google search, tho half the time when I don't get any decent results I realize it wasn't that important anyways. Interesting side effect of poor search results.

Also, there was the time where Google pays antivirus companies like then-Avast to shove Chrome. Unsure if it is still happens, but this points out to how Chrome can pay through the marketshare.

for really small amounts of "extremely"

(outside US K-12 they are hardly a thing)

I have lots of criticisms of Chrome OS, but the fact is that the year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived. You buy one of these machines, and out of the box you can have Linux apps (and a terminal) running within 15 minutes of switching the machine on.

Schools I know are using Windows laptops or iPads.

That's an understatement. Microsoft Edge is, in fact, a more privacy invasive browser than Chrome. And that was a pretty high bar.

In the EU, straight from the get-go, Edge presents users with the IAB interstitial, informing them that Edge is going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. Note that Chrome doesn't do this, as Google only wants you to share data with them, and it's not the browser that asks for consent. Edge's IAB interstitial is filled with dark patterns as well, such as legitimate interests being unlawfully declared.

Edge is also filled with Microsoft's telemetry, which you can't turn off. Every browser instance, of course, comes with a unique ID that's reported to Bing Ads. Using Edge without Bing is fairly difficult. And end-to-end encryption for its synchronization feature isn't supported.

I entirely understand why people want to degoogleify, but picking Bing in that process is fairly stupid.

That's not what he did. He donated for California's Prop 8, which opposed same-sex marriage, in 2008. I'm personally not judging, as many US progressives have forgotten that during those days, even Obama opposed same-sex marriage. But it's important to get the facts straight, even when being sarcastic.

---

> Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.

Mozilla's management certainly is guilty of blunders, but I'm pretty sure the developers who have worked on Mozilla don't feel like they've spent time “politicking”.

The failure of Firefox in the marketplace starts from the fact that it's pretty hard to compete with a browser that's funded with more than 1 billion $ per year. And people may not remember much about the launch of Chrome, but it was literally years ahead of its competition. Have a look at its famous comic book, with which it was announced, describing its design and philosophy, and count the years it took for the competition to catch up (across the board, including Safari): https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

I mean, sure, you can blame that on politics, but I don't think anyone was able to stop the decline and when Brendan Eich resigned, people were already talking about Chrome's hegemony and Firefox dying.

And remember -- the original browser engine that Chrome (+ Safari) came from was KHTML + KJS from the KDE folks, which was doing pretty good at the time considering the development resources available to it

My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser? In the article it said that they'd need approval for any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads.

It makes no mention of web browsers.

I'm not a lawyer, and didn't read the verdict, but your query is very Hacker News. Justice is not code. If Google is forced to divest from Chrome, it of course means it can't turn around and make the Google Dhrome browser. If Google did, they'd be sued for ignoring the verdict.

The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.

Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.

I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.

Of course, this doesn't appear that related to the DOJ's reasoning.

It's easy to say "just sell it" without thinking about the actual implications, but you're basically talking about destroying it. Maybe that's the point, but we should at least be honest about it.

Browsers are one of the most critical pieces of modern software infrastructure, both from a security-footprint perspective and as a vehicle for (mis-)information delivery, so maybe they're too important for ANY commercial entity to use them as a bludgeon to for their agenda.

If they no longer control the core project, then Google (or Microsoft) have a much harder job doing self-serving stuff. They could nuke Manifest v2 in THEIR Chromium derivative, but core Chromium isn't going to give it up-- the Operas and Vivaldis of the world don't have to spend their limited resources trying to unwind the change to keep a desired feature.

If (say) Meta bought Edge, then they'd get the userbase and the trademark, but the product seems pointless. Why would Meta want a browser whose killer features are integrations with Bing and Office 365? If Meta wanted a browser, they'd make a "Meta-flavored Chromium."

I don't see why divesting it necessarily means selling it to another company. Google could create a non-profit like Mozilla, or a for profit and float it as its own business.

There are a lot of seemingly simple "solutions" to this problem that just don't hold up under a modicum of scrutiny.

Any NGO receiving Chrome would be extremely vulnerable to spying, because of the immense power of having software installed on a billion computers.

I think it must have been bundled with iTunes as I remember family members having Safari installed on Windows computers at the time.

But I think it being available for Windows right when Firefox and then later Chrome started to become popular didn't help - it was just some other browser that no one was recommending.

Have you used a Windows PC lately? It seems like once a week I have to ignore/decline prompts to change my default browser to Edge.

I’m not sure PC makers have any say/control over this behavior.

https://i.imgur.com/u2Nby1b.png

Not only is this not true for lots of manufacturers, but the minute you click on a web link anywhere in windows (help, start menu, etc) it opens in Edge, and Edge cannot be uninstalled on a windows machine.

>> The only viable business model for a web browser is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default.

Mostly, it's just that giving away browsers for free as a source of garnering search traffic distorts the market.

Why would they pay the manufactures when they can just add annoying reminders and make it hard to switch in the OS they ship it with?

The main reason even Microsoft gave up and rebased their browser on top of Chrome is because of the breakneck speed at which Google introduces new standards and features to the ecosystem. Having them be forced to slow down might be a good thing for browser diversity and the future of the Internet.

If Mozilla would fork Chromium now and base Firefox on their fork I would switch from Brave. The engine simply technically superior.

The only viable business model ... while the incumbent (IE, now Chrome) is allowed to give the product away for free in service of some other predatory agenda.

Unless you have a source for that, that's flat-out wrong. I've never heard of that, I've never seen that, and I can't find any supporting evidence of that.

> Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.

That's not what that graph shows. It doesn't show anything about defaults.

People go out of their way to install Chrome because it's better than the competition. Just like they used to do for Firefox, back when Firefox was a better browser than the competition.

Hell, MS makes it super hard to even install Chrome now, including numerous irritating nag messages and ‘are you sure?!?’

Every time I visit my parents, I need to de-bing them again

The problem is that Google owns both sides of the internet - the browser on your computer and the search engine to find everything.

As a result, they control your perception of the internet.

If a site doesn’t work, you as the user thinks the site doesn’t work. You don’t think oh, my browser is broken. Also, if you don’t find a site on Google the. To you, it doesn’t exist.

As a result, you have to bend your website to satisfy both Google search and Google chrome.

That’s why this is an issue. Because of those two things, Google effectively controls the internet, and you as a user or you as a website owner have essentially zero recourse when Google does something that harms you.

As a Firefox user, I also don't love the implications of forcing Google to end its default search engine deal with Firefox. If they changed course on that, then a similar deal with the hypothetical non-Google Chrome could be a viable way to maintain something like Chrome's current financial model without giving Google too much control over the web.

On the other hand, one might argue that Google's search business and that sector as a whole are already at a high enough risk right now without the courts throwing another wildcard into the mix. I'm not staking out a position on this one way or another, but I hope whatever decisions they land on are very carefully considered.

Does that make sense?

Why bother having a discussion when you use “zero recourse” here. It comes off as totally absurd.

There’s also a clear conflict of interest having the advertising company own the user-agent.

Chrome is not enough at all; Google also needs to sell off Android.

Then Apple should need to sell ios.

General purpose computing devices are so ubiquitous in society that accepting that private companies have total control over how they are used should be considered a democratic issue.

Notably - it doesn't advertise chrome there? or maybe she just didn't see those. Most of her internet experience is through either the facebook app or the google app now

They are gray cardinals of web standards which they bloated to the point of zero viable competition. And their only opponent lives on their couch.

As far as I know Chrome is the only thing that has been advertised on Googles famously clean "front page" before making a search.

That tells me something about how important it has been for them to push it.

There's also the way they've used deceptive ads ("download a better browser") to me and many other Firefox users over the years. (No, a browser that leaks my browsing habits to the worlds biggest advertising company while not supporting vertical tabs a decade after it entered the market certainly isn't best for me.)

I can set Kagi as the default search engine on iOS?

Because last I checked, Apple hardcoded their list of options.

Of course since one of the options in Safari is DuckDuckGo, you can also use its extensive list of !bang operators.

The edge situation is a mess for sure, and Microsoft seems to have such a perfect understanding of the current judiciary climate that they can't dance around the lines without any consequences.

More like they have their hands in creating the current judiciary climate. Kind of hard to file suit against someone who is intertwined with the agencies that would investigate them.

If you wanted to de-google your phone _that_ much it probably requires a custom firmware blob that's shipped with a different browser... if that's even possible / reasonable.

It's well known that Google requires manufacturers to install their apps and requires it to be uninstallable. This includes Gmail, Google, and others.

I thought I knew better, because the webview implementation can be changed in the system preferences, but (of course) the list of package names that can appear there is hardcoded:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/androi...

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/GeckoView

I have a Samsung Galaxy S23 and it came with both Chrome and "Internet" which I guess is the Samsung one. I don't remember which was default or if it asked the first time something tried to open a webpage, but I didn't even notice the Samsung one was on here and I'd guess the Chrome brand name wins out for most people if it asks...

Look at what Google does with Chrome and how it harms the internet, they literally just disabled an ad blocker and then offered a new tier of ad free Youtube for $8 a month.

Then think about the power it gives them for tracking, remember they tried to replace tracking cookies with their own standard?

I worry as part of Google, chrome is just an open source project with profit as a secondary motive, while as it’s own company they’ll probably try to make it more profitable and it’ll become worse and closed down.

And its flawed in the same way - first its not fully open source (IIRC Crhome has some proprietary bits that are not in Chromium, same with Android+Google Play services vs AOSP) but good luck maintaining your fork for any length of time!

Google is in full control of both Android and Chromium with all decisions happening behind closed doors with zero leverage for anyone from the outside to influence those decisions. So as with Manifest v3 now and many similarly bad decisions for Android, once Google selects a course, it will be harder and harder over time to keep your changes if you still want the end result to look like what the users will see as Chrome/Android.

And I would say with a browser the pressure to update would be even greater & thus its even harder to keep any signifficant custom changes.

On the other hand you worry that Chrome can't go on without Google, as it currently doesn't bring enough money and needs to be a market abuse tool to justify the costs.

In a very real way, I think if the situation is unsolvable letting Chrome die and be born again could be the only long term solution. It would be painful, but we're already bleeding.

I think it’s good for the market that some players are fully independent, and others are part of massive conglomerates.

I can see it as an opinion, but that changes the whole discussion IMHO.

Across their entire buffet of products, many of which are free at point of use like Chrome is, they advertise Chrome. That the internet is better with Chrome. That their products are better with Chrome. Do you really believe this is genuinely just because they also make Chrome, and are jazzed about that fact?

The fact that they're working so hard to keep it tells me it's an even better idea to make them sell it.

If your goal is nothing deeper than to hurt Google, sure. Otherwise, this logic is far from complete.

It's a massive cognitive dissonance that you're right -- it makes absolutely no sense. A lot of people just want to argue that Google is bad/too big/anticompetitive, and will use whatever argument is easiest to do so, even if they flat-out contradict each other.

The actual reality is that most people do change defaults quite easily when they perceive a benefit, so it's incredibly difficult to make the argument that defaults are anticompetitive. Chrome proves this. At the same time, some people aren't aware and will stick to a default, and the search market is so big that it's still worth $$$ for Google to pay Apple for the search default. The search deal proves this. On these points, there's zero anticompetitive behavior.

But if there's an anticompetitive angle regarding search, it's that in effect, Google is essentially paying Apple not to develop its own search engine. But that's basically an impossible legal argument to make. Nobody can force Apple to compete in search, and if it doesn't want to and would prefer to take Google's money, that's its free choice.

https://open.substack.com/pub/bitecode/p/web-browsers-and-ou...

Nobody can get it except chrome.

Are you sure that the advantage came from marketing? In my mind the advantage was that Chrome really was faster for example due to V8. Also can you explain why the "thus they should prefer Chrome" reasoning is flawed?

Personally, I haven't seen Google act in a way that prevents competition in the browser space (ie. being anticompetitive). If anything, Windows is more anticompetitive because it is closed source, making it much more difficult to create a competing product. All the web specifications are completely free. And Apple is the only vendor that prevents browser competition on their platform, although Windows does give you a popup telling you not install Chrome.[0]

The Google search agreements between Apple and Google seem more likely to be anticompetitive.

[0] Searching for Google Chrome with the default Bing search engine with the default Edge browser gives you this result:

>Promoted by Microsoft

>There's no need to download a new web browser. Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Edge for a fast, secure, and modern web experience that can help save you time and money.

See also Every trick Microsoft pulled to make you browse Edge instead of Chrome - https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...

There were feature differences for sure, but the marketing did a massive amount of work in this case. If people switched for features, all that spending for years wouldn't be necessary.

If the answer to any of those is no, it’s more than simple advertising.

I feel like it should be illegal to use your profits in one industry to run a loss leader in a totally separate industry.

There’s nothing wrong with running a loss leader, only with squeezing everybody else out.

ChromeOS is not popular by any means outside of the US education market. Chrome being the default on just Android is hardly a strong case when Android usage in the US is only 56%.

I'm curious though, if Google can no longer pay browsers for search engine traffic what is the business model that will sustain development and advancement in the space?

How does a non Google owned Chrome support itself and continue development?

What happens to all the applications that rely on Chrome extensions?

As much as I dislike Google behavior, I don't see this as being a good thing.

Google uses a complex anonymization/privacy framework to collect some aggregate signals from website visits, but they don't use it directly.

Regulators don't understand this, and technologists who do tend to distrust Google anyway and think they might secretly be using it.

There are all sort so other sketchy things, like what Edge does injecting itself into websites so Microsoft collects affiliate revenue.

There are countries where this wouldn't be allowed, but Google is largely self regulating in its biggest market.

All this would lose Chrome some market share but they are starting from a very dominant position, and for the general public it wouldnt be a big deal - people are already convinced that iOS and android devices are listening to them at all times for ad targeting!

Possibly by trying to find a business model that can support Chrome development just like all other Chromium (and non-Chromium) based browsers?

As much as I loved Chrome when it first came out, I’ve also been well aware that Google’s backing of Chrome (and Chromium) has given it undue advantages in the browser market by effectively making everyone else compete with a loss leader. If Chrome itself cannot sustain its pace of development or even stay alive without the unlimited funding by Google, then I think that is a good thing and proof that it acting as a monopoly. Forcing Chrome to balance product velocity with revenue constraints evens the field amongst all browsers.

(edit: If Google killing competition by injecting unlimited funding into a project without needing to make a profit sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve done this for a long time. The often cited example being Google Reader.)

There is no such business model. Chromium development is almost entirely funded by Google. Other Chromium based browser rely on this humonguous investment of development resources; they would not have a "business model" without this "free handout", except perhaps Microsoft and Edge, who might be able to fund it by doing basically what Google is doing.

- pushing for web ecosystem features that would help their own products (ex: Gmail, docs, etc)

- pushing for web enhancements that back SEO metrics that matter to them (ex: core web vitals)

I don’t think it’s as simple as - no more Chrome == no more investment into Chromium because Chrome/Chromium has been their strongest lever for getting web features that Google wants standardized. Stopping investment in that area cedes control of the web to other players who may have opposing goals to Google.

Nowadays (post Omni-bar), one could argue that "the internet" is really a captive portal from g-browser, g-omnibar, g-search results, g-renderer with "content" being significantly funded by g-ads (of which a significant portion of _that_ is returned to google for search placement).

Take away "any browser at all" and does google then ship "Google Electron, powered by Google" that strips the Omni-bar and is a desktop client / portal into g-search, g-docs, etc... and then close off access to Google apps unless through the Google client?

You can't book uber without the uber client, why are you able to use Google without the google client?

Provide a read-only HTML4.0 version to plebes with lots of popovers and banners saying: "for the best experience..."

It's an interesting thought experiment, letting "the internet" lie fallow as each proprietary database attempts to accrue more content...

Does the concept of an interoperable world wide web fade into obscurity? In other words, does separating Chrome from Google make the web better, or is Google's investment in the web holding back the death of the web?

What would this business model be like, if, say, Google Chrome is eliminated?

As a reference, in China, very few people use Chrome because Google services are blocked. There are tons of third-party or vendor preinstalled browsers that bundles with bloatwares, put ads/clickbaits on every new tab, and spy on users. I'm pretty sure they are more sustainable than Firefox, former Opera, etc. But that's certainly a privacy dystopia :)

But, it also goes back to browsers being built by the operating system, that was also a no-no, e.g. MSFT / IE.

Browsers then shouldn't be a profit center, but ironically google starting chrome made it one and then defined web standards. IE afaik wasn't a profit center, and MSFT hedged outsourcing all dev costs to practically google and forking it offically to Edge, lol.

WeChat itself on Android bundles a Chromium-based engine to run these mini apps.

Most people in China are using Chromium frequently, even if they don't think of it as a browser.

what you say is nice in theory but you already have the Microsoft backed Edge and Apple backed Safari that are not hamppered by the "need to find a support model" and "not be a loss leader"

And I am not looking forward again to a world where Microsoft disctates web development because for all privacy problems peaople have or think to have with Google, Microsoft ha proven that does way worse and doesn't even care for the image.

All in All Chrome being a loss leader backed by Google has been a good thing for all involved. Developers, Users and 3-rd parties. without it you woudn't have all those 3rd party chrome based browsers.

If we just keep selling the browser market to the next trillion dollar company that's not going to fix anything

Get real, the DOJ forcing Google to get rid of Chrome is one of the best tech news in years!

1. funding from Google (Firefox)

2. engineering from Google (Chromium)

3. tech giant bundling (Safari, Edge)

Who is the unsubsidized web browser?

I think they used to have their own engine but like everyone else found it unprofitable to maintain.

Ladybird might be onto something with the sponsorship model, but we’ll have to see how it goes in the next couple of years.

The real question is what happens when Google stops paying Mozilla and Apple unthinkable amounts of money for Google search to be the default on their browsers?

It seems clear that Mozilla intends to just become an ad company themselves and who knows what Apple's response will be, I doubt it's going to be to increase the amount of development on Safari vs where they currently are.

So if Google has to effectively divest from Chromium but still supports it's development but now isn't paying the only two current competitors what is the expected outcome there? Whoever now owns Chromium becomes even more of a monopoly, and Google doesn't even need to pay them to make Google the default for it to be implied they are to be the default or the developers go away.

Maybe in the actual long term we will see an improvement from this decision, but all I see in the short - midterm is more invasive user tracking in all current browsers that isn't Safari, which you can only use on Apple devices anyway.

So what will sustain the development of browsers like Chrome or Firefox? Well that's the big question... Maybe they will downsize and become a non-profit similar to the Linux Foundation, and receive funding similar to how they do? I can see this have the affect of greatly slowing down the development of various web standards, but would that be such a bad thing?

- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.

- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare on the SEM clicks themselves?

This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.

Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.

My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acquiring the Browser Company would make a lot of sense.

Chrome's non-iOS market share is probably larger than Safari's market share, so any monopoly considerations about Safari apply equally to Chrome.

Google gets other value with this besides being the default search engine. Keeping Firefox alive makes it so that Chrome is less of a monopoly.

> and an aggressive fork at some point

Maintaining a browser engine is a lot of work. With no clear upside, no one would invest the work in maintaining a fork. Related to this, Microsoft gave up maintaining a (partially) separate browser engine for Edge, and now just uses Chromium

- A pure focus on web browser monetization could lead to some interesting enterprise options. Presumably there'll be a lot of attempts to leverage Chromium, and an aggressive fork at some point.

- As AI proliferates, can they pull additional revenue by getting revshare from subscription AI products, alongside SEM? Or even revshare?

This could also change the calculus for Apple building a search engine. If they could get an independent Chrome to sign on, with some data sharing provisions to help with development, they'd have a huge leg-up.

Alternatively, maybe they try to create a fusion of search results and AI from a variety of providers, so they can monetize SERPs themselves.

My question would be whether they could get back to aggressive product execution, given the size of the codebase. Acq

Actually, this is hardly healthy. Firefox feel this single source of can be deprived anytime that they tried many other alternative -- like VPN, partnership with pockets, some sponsor ad on tab selection, and even selling some data

Other browsers go even further..

I'm thinking 500M/year is enough to pay for a lot more developers than they currently have. Even half that should be enough to do more than they are. Where is all this money going?

No it wasn't? They itemized some budget items worth less than a million dollars in total, and then, for each entity getting part of that money they admitted they had no idea who they were or what they did for Mozilla (but one of them had abortion rights mentioned on their blog!)

Incredibly lazy "expose" trying to be a twitter files.

whether that's directly as paid software, or indirectly as part of purchasing a device that has the software installed on it.

Also we already have browsers pre-installed. Safari and IE(or what ever it's called these days)

There's no call to advance these though. Chrome has profiles. That alone makes it a winner for my use case.

Even though getting it free (as I do right now) is nice, $36/year seems justifiable.

Who do you think should pay for it? What is the value to them? Do their incentives align well with yours?

I talked about paying $29 for Opera for web browser software before : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16090235

I switched to the free Chrome because it was a better browser. Just because I was paying for software doesn't mean it's a good situation for me.

>Who do you think should pay for it? [...] Do their incentives align well with yours?

Even if I (the customer) directly pay for software instead of ads indirectly paying, it still doesn't mean it's the optimal solution.

I paid $80 for a text editor but after being frustrated with bugs in the latest version, I took a serious look at the free VS Code. I realized that the editor I was paying for had really stagnated and lacking modern features. I should have quit funding them a long time ago.

Another example is Quicken home finance software. Kept paying $60+ annual renewal fee every year and yet the software keeps getting worse. Downloads of credit-card and bank transactions randomly quit working. The ledger balances on my desktop don't match the balances shown online. I had used the software for almost 30 years since the DOS floppy disk days and just finally gave up. I look at the 1-star reviews of Quicken on Amazon and browse the Quicken help forums and everybody complains about the same defects.

Often, what happens is companies don't respect their paying customers because they know they're locked in because of inertia or sunk costs. They just treat their repeat customers as ATM machines and barely improve the software. (E.g. They make superficial cosmetic changes to UI instead of fixing core engine bugs.)

I'm not convinced paying a subscription for a web browser will give me a better browser. Maybe it will. But I doubt it.

Separate Search + Google Ads platform as company A, Android + Chrome + Gmail as company B.

It will choke the user-data flow that Google Ads platform is feeding on. This opens doors to new competing search engines!

Android + Chrome + Gmail needs to be bundled with hardware purchases, licensed by HW vendors. Like Apple does with Safari + iCloud. This will create incentive to make them actually privacy focused, and could be its selling point.

Does Google have undue influence now? Sure. But I’m not so sanguine about the alternatives either.