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by spankalee 459 days ago
No one. Chrome would be bought for pennies on the dollar, and the buyer wouldn't be able to sustain the project.
2 comments

Google pays many companies tens of billions to make sure Google Search is the default engine on a variety of browsers.

Something tells me a product that can garner billions of dollars will do just fine if sliced away. If Google gives firefox $500million to be the default search at 5% user share, they should pay Chrome $20 billion for the same privilege.

The true damage that should be done is to separate Gmail + workspaces, Maps, Youtube, GCP, Android, and Search as their own separate entities then undo the DoubleClick merger.

That would be true justice.

It doesnt need to be sustained at the level Google is pushing it. Development could slow down considerably and it wouldnt harm anything, in fact it would do just what the DoJ wants and make it a fairer playing field for other browsers to catch up and compete.
As a web developer who really wants to see the web keep evolving so I can build better things: that would definitely harm things.

Chrome is keeping the pressure on Apple to actually invest in the web. Without Chrome, the web withers and Apple reenforces their walled app garden.

> the web withers

It really doesnt. The current pace of new web standards and browser features mean frameworks and code need to constantly be checking if each browser supports the new thing, and not releasing said feature until enough versions of browsers support the thing to make it widespread enough to use. Even then, people in lesser developed countries that are using older devices with older versions of browsers on them are seeing broken and unuseable versions of the web, just because big companies are racing to 'push the web forward'.

As a web developer who wants to see the rate of new standards and features slow down so that all browsers can adopt them safely at a sensible pace without needing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on development, I really hope for this outcome.