[iLoveOncall]

Some companies / services are just not viable as a standalone company, but still provide immense value to customers.

What will end up happening is not that Amazon will have to compete with others on video game streaming for example, what will happen is that video game streaming will disappear because not viable.

Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.

People won't spend $50 a month to subscribe to what Google currently provides for free, they will just lose access.

In the end the users will just flock to the Chinese equivalents which will be happy to steal all of the western data for the low cost of providing file hosting.

[alt227]

> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.

Maybe what will happen is there will be a slowdown of new browser standards as Google wont have the muscle to push things through in the browser space anymore. This would be a great thing, as it would stop the moving target of web standards and would allow other browsers to catch up.

It would also stop google being able to do things like force Manifest V2 out of Chromium just because it serves their own purpose.

I'd like to see this outcome.

[smnthermes]

> Browsers won't suddenly flourish when Google cannot finance browsers anymore, they'll just turn to shit.

Great! Let's go back to actual applications.

[sunshowers]

Why would browsers turn to "shit"? The web platform is quite capable these days.

I think Chrome on Android is already pretty "shit" these days, because it doesn't support ad blocking at all.

[ehutch79]

*Points at firefox*

[AnthonyMouse]

Alternative browsers raise money in proportion to how many people use them. Google funds Chromium development and advertises to get people to use Chrome, so Firefox market share is eroded until they don't have enough to sustain themselves. Meanwhile Google pushes through changes to web standards at a rapid pace which consumes smaller competitors' resources implementing them. Also, Mozilla in particular is a mismanaged organization.

If you take Google out of it, Chromium gets to be its own thing. Then Chromium and Firefox compete with each other on equal footing and people use whichever one is better, but they're both actually open source instead of "Chromium is open source but everybody actually uses Chrome" and the latter isn't controlled by the company trying to break ad blocking and push DRM.

[radlad]

I'm a happy Firefox user on desktop and Android. Can you be more specific?

[xvector]

It is terribly insecure and much easier to exploit than Chrome.

[sunshowers]

In the narrow case of zero day vulnerabilities perhaps, but a good ad blocker is part of any reasonable security posture and is key to avoiding exploitation in practice.

[radlad]

What makes you say that? Like Chrome it supports site isolation and sandboxing. Can you be more specific?

[sunshowers]

I use Firefox on desktop.

Firefox on Android is sadly not great either -- it regularly drops frames on my 120Hz Pixel 9 Pro. Firefox on iOS doesn't have extension support.

I hear Edge Canary on Android has extension support.