TBH I am not sure this will end well at all. Google needs to e broken up but splitting off chrome? What will that achieve? Chrome does not directly make any money for Google really, they don’t sell it, they don’t sell ads in it, they don’t even collect much personal data though it. No where near as much as they really could if they really wanted to. Google have not been terrible at managing chrome or pushing as much profit out of it as they could.
Instead they are using it to create a good platform for all the rest of their services where they actually make money. So what will selling off this loss leader do for chrome? Most likely it will get bought up by someone else that will want to see a return on investment that wont be using it as a loss leader. Which I can very well see it getting en-shitified like everything else that is purely driven by profit.
Best case it is gets bought by a non profit foundation that can develop and take care of it - but lets be real, they wont have the money to out compete anyone wanting to buy it to make more money.
I personally don’t really trust google with my browser either - hence why I avoid chrome. But I would trust anyone seeking to buy it for profit far less and can very well see this as a overall negative if the wrong people buy it (which I see as more likely).
Where to start with this? Didn’t Google just kill adblockers in Chrome?
That is a more complex story then that. The manifest v3 changes primary give a lot of security and privacy changes that stop extensions from doing a lot of questionable things in the background on all your page you visit. But that does stop ad blockers from doing a lot of what they currently do - blocking in page elements and modifying the pages you visit. But it does not block them from blocking page requests so ad blockers like ublockorigin lite can still function in a more limited capacity to block ads.
I do think the teams outside of the chrome team are happy for this change - but I don’t think the chrome team set out to do this purely or even mainly to block ads.
Besides even if they did it does not change my argument - whom ever buys chrome will likely want to squeeze it for more money then google currently are doing and will likely do far worst things like including ads directly in the browser. Or trying to monetize it in some other way.
I would love it if chrome where maintained by some non-profit foundation. But how likely is that going to be from a court order sell off?
I would rather they split up google in other ways first.
No but their executive overlords assigned this to block ads. I cannot believe that an ad company removed ad blocking because of reasons outside of adblocking.
If that were the main goal why not just ban them from the extension store? Or why allow manifest v3 extensions to block requests at all? Ad blockers still work and this did not kill off any of them. Just forced them to change some of their functions. I don’t doubt the executive overlords are happy about the turmoil that this has done to ad blockers but they would be pissed if that was the only or main goal of this as there are still loads of effective adblockers about.
Adblockers work now because they removed functionality, don’t get it twisted.
The manifest v3 changes primary give a lot of security and privacy changes that stop extensions from doing a lot of questionable things in the background on all your page you visit. But that does stop ad blockers from doing a lot of what they currently do - blocking in page elements and modifying the pages you visit.
It also killed a lot of other genuinely useful extensions.
And if security is their main concern they should have spent resources on making sure the extensions they themselves redistribute are safe, not on killing a huge chunk of extensions. Sorry but you’ll have a very hard time convincing anyone that getting rid of ad blockers wasn’t their primary motive.
But it does not block them from blocking page requests so ad blockers like ublockorigin lite can still function in a more limited capacity to block ads.
It completely changed how they do this, and made it way less effective and more limited. All completely unnecessary from a security standpoint.
Chrome has achieved its utter dominance through its sheer push on Google.com, YouTube and all the high traffic channels they own.
If chrome is unbundled, it’ll have to compete on equal terms with Firefox. It will truly and thoroughly help.
Who would realistically buy Chrome that wouldn’t degrade the consumer experience?
Also, would Google lose incentive to target the web entirely with its properties? In other words, what happens to the web if Google’s focus shifts entirely to Android?
Well, it doesn’t necessarily need to be bought, it just needs to not be part of alphabet anymore. I think the ideal outcome is actually that chrome become an independent non-profit that maintains an important piece of software using funding from a consortium of different sources that want it to continue to exist.
This kind of thing is actually very very common and far from a new concept.
Who would realistically buy Chrome that wouldn’t degrade the consumer experience?
Hopefully noone, so it would lead into more fragmentation in the browser space, which is a good things.
Desperately needed but with the new administration I don’t think it would be done…
Being the gateway, access point, and ad server of the internet certainly does not bode well for fairness or openness, or stability (in more ways than one).
I hope something comes out of it. I’ll be interested to read the courts assessment and reasoning.
Chrom
