[gpm]

Probably.

There's no good technical reason why ublock and similar addons are being un-supported, merely Google's whims. If a non-advertising company buys it they won't have any reason to go through with this.

I can only imagine that there will be a whole new can of worms though, trying to maintain a technically complex project with no revenue stream, likely loss of a lot of the core developers, and chaotic management.

It might well recover and turn into a fine project. In the meantime though, firefox seems like the best bet whether chrome is removed from Google or not.

[3eb7988a1663]

I realize something as complex as a browser can never be done, but would it be so bad if new feature development slowed to a crawl? I suppose I only want a faster horse, but few of the cutting edge developments of Chrome seem like they have much to offer me.

[gpm]

New feature development? No. Security fixes slowing to a crawl though, that would be a disaster.

There's such a huge user base around chrome that I feel pretty confident it will land in a position where that isn't a problem - eventually. The transition could be rough though, right now I imagine it's quite heavily tied to google infrastructure and engineers.

[shiroiushi]

Why exactly would a non-advertising company buy Chrome? Unless they're an OS company and want to use the browser to force everyone to buy their OS?

[gpm]

OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.

There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion.

There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.

[shiroiushi]

>OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.

Great, so we go right back to the days of IE6. No thanks.

>There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested

These companies are viable because they get to outsource the bulk of the browser development and maintenance to Google for free. I don't think they can afford to buy and run the whole browser.

>There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron)

This is honestly the best scenario I can see of all the discussion I've read about this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it brought up before. Still, from what I read on Wikipedia, Electron was spun off from Github (owned by MS now) and is run by a foundation with a bunch of tech company members, so going from this to a whole for-profit company for something that is basically just an open-source wrapper over Chrome's engine seems unlikely.