• @[email protected]
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    934 months ago

    to me, shaving Android off their business (suggested next step if this fails) would be way more impactful

      • @[email protected]
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        34 months ago

        good point, I guess one worry here is about the way in which this will affect Firefox (note Firefox here, not the Mozilla Fdn who have managed to Elon their own thing without help, seemingly)

    • @[email protected]
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      344 months ago

      I’m worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.

      • @[email protected]
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        94 months ago

        They would have to be more scummy and also at least similarly competent… Google can’t innovate for crap, but they’re pretty good at maintaining projects (when they don’t randomly kill them off)

        If they stop work on chromium, or belief in the stewardship of chromium wanes, it’ll fragment the ecosystem again. Which is sorely needed at this point - we need to get back to standards and away from centralized control

        Imagine Twitter/musk acquires them. Microsoft, Apple, and many other big companies directly or indirectly rely on a chain now controlled by a group known for mismanagement - are they going to wait and see, or are they going to diversify?

          • @[email protected]
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            14 months ago

            Someone needs to compile an annual league table of the scummiest companies and their practices for that year.

        • @[email protected]
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          84 months ago

          Chiquita and Nestlé come to mind. Within tech industry, I’d say Amazon and probably Microsoft are worse as well, and there’s probably a ton of potentially even worse companies lurking in the shadows outside the top of the economic food chain.

        • @[email protected]
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          34 months ago

          I don’t know man. There’s a lot shittier business practices out there than paying to be the default search engine - which is laughably easy to change on any browser. Like marketplaces and services that pay to be exclusive sources of content and then use the fact that they’re the only source for most content to force extortionate deals on content creators and enshitify every aspect of the end user experience. Just to name one.

          • @[email protected]
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            24 months ago

            Did you know that paying to be default search engine isn’t the only business practice that Google does.

            Google has enshitified every single one of its products or deprecated it and then released an inferior replacement.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              Is enshittification the scummiest thing you can think of? While other multinationals are paying for goon squads that kill people in other countries? While banks reorder daily transactions from largest to smallest so they can charge more overdraft fees, literally stealing from poor people? Even if enshittification is literally your biggest problem, you’d have to be living under a rock to think Google’s products are the most enshitified of all the garbage out there. You’ve never heard of anything from Meta? Amazon? Netflix? Microsoft?

      • bruhduh
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        64 months ago

        Android also becoming chrome OS in light of recent news of developing Android desktop mode and native Android compatibility with Linux apps, looks like they make hybrid OS that could do it all

    • @[email protected]
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      4 months ago

      if Google was to sell Android that would be like a nuclear bomb dropping. I mean aside from budget Android phones people are going more and more to apple devices just because of the stability.

  • @[email protected]
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    404 months ago

    The next day, the Chrome division is sold off to a new company “Bloogle” and we’re back to square dumb.

    And before you think about applying for a job there, know that the new company is still demanding mandatory 5 days in the office

  • @[email protected]
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    374 months ago

    If Google does not set the price for 200 trillion USD and it can be really bought, then it will be probably M$ and they will change the search engine to Bing and integrate Coplilot or whatever the fuck it is called now into it.

    • Aedis
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      294 months ago

      Pretty sure that would count as monopoly as well and the sale wouldn’t be approved.

      • @[email protected]
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        4 months ago

        And I was pretty sure them aquiring Activision Blizzard would count as monopolizing but here we are.

        • @[email protected]
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          134 months ago

          Did you consider that Microsoft lawyers said prices wouldn’t go up? Cause they did, they did say that, which is why the merger was approved. Do you think lawyers can just lie? Don’t you think it’s much more fair now that companies can make pinky promises that prices won’t go up before they become more monopolistic. That’s just good business for both customers and businesses /s

  • @[email protected]
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    294 months ago

    Why does it need to be sold to another big company, why can’t they just break Google up so chrome becomes its own business?

    • @[email protected]
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      154 months ago

      Chrome by itself would likely cost 100 billion dollars to sell, and then more to maintain, without any clear revenue except selling user data. Chrome is not a profitable product on its own. Not many companies can afford that.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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        124 months ago

        Well shucks, I guess it should just be made fully open source, the code distributed, and the business dissolved. Womp wooomp.

        • @[email protected]
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          4 months ago

          The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.

          Given all of the major browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.

          This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.

          The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.

          • @[email protected]
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            34 months ago

            Ehh, I wouldn’t consider Safari “using chromium” at this point. It has been hard forked for years. Chrome could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect Safari development.

            • @[email protected]
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              14 months ago

              Safari has roots in chromium? I thought it was WebKit or something else for it’s engine.

              • @[email protected]
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                24 months ago

                Safari is using WebKit. WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE and has since been further developed by  KDE contributors, Apple, Google, Nokia, Bitstream, BlackBerry, Sony, Igalia and others. On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome, under the name Blink. Source: Wikipedia

          • @[email protected]
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            34 months ago

            There are multiple other browser startups in development that are not Chromium based. Like LadyBird (which is completely independant), and Zen browser (which started as a FF fork)

      • @[email protected]
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        34 months ago

        Google could pay chrome billions just like they pay mozillla and apple…

        Besides it’s not like that’s really true anyway, chrome would make tons of money independently, it would just sell user data to Google or other parties instead of Google getting it for free. Chrome ‘doesn’t make any money’ because it doesn’t need to on paper, the same way a parking lot doesn’t make any money for a grocery store, but if a third party owned the lot, the grocery store would just pay them to use it, or the individual people using the lot would.

        Chrome is the biggest browser and successfully collects data on billions of people, additionally, chrome development would absolutely be supported by all of the companies that build chromium based browsers like Microsoft, opera, brave, etc.

  • And what’s to stop it from continuing to monopolize search engine usage just because it’ll be owned by another company? Wouldn’t whoever purchases it just continue operating it the same way, banking on the name recognition?

  • @[email protected]
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    134 months ago

    The buyer of chrome could make bing the default search engine and re-enable whatever broke Ublock origin (the ad blocker)

    They could also cripple gapps and gmail a bit. It would also be harder for google to unilaterally develop new web standards.

    That would no doubt consternate a few at Google and knee cap them forcing web shit down our throats that only improves their ad business.

  • @[email protected]
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    114 months ago

    It will be another tech giant probably amazon or something.

    Enshittification intensifies

  • @[email protected]
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    64 months ago

    Good news, but does someone more knowleagable of these things know the likelihood of a Trump DOJ derailing this? I am hopefully as the original case was brought in 2017 under Trump, and his relationship with Big Tech is at best strained, but I truly don’t know what to expect moving forward.

    • @[email protected]
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      54 months ago

      according to Cory doctorow (pluralistic), trumps gouvernement will likely selectively enforce antitrust, so the Google case would go through, but cases against, say, tesla would be dropped.

    • KmlSlmk64
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      64 months ago

      Well, it mostly already is. The Chromium project is essentially everything Chrome already has, except Chrome contains a few proprietary components (IIRC the tracking is proprietary)

    • ඞmir
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      24 months ago

      I wished I got a nickel every time someone argues Chrome should be open source, only to find out it always has been

        • ඞmir
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          4 months ago

          Open source =/= FOSS, yes it’s licensed as proprietary, but you can compile Chromium from scratch and the only drawback is Google’s backup server not letting you connect. Other than that, the browser is identical…