So they’d be Firefox & wholly dependent on Google for search revenue money (I.e. ad money) anyway? Firefox already gets a lot of flack with their 3.65% & I don’t think that complaints about Chrome will stop if they’re still owning ~70% of browser market share with Google paying their bills.

The only solution that would actually work is better regulation of the advertising space, but all advertisers (Google included) actively fight this. For example, ban governments from purchasing personal information without a warrant. Ban the sale of any/all personal information between companies - any personal information transferred should be gratis with at most nominal costs for the cost of the transfer itself. But then you might have to actually start paying for some services rather than everything being totally ad supported. Not to mention that governments, despite all their outcries about “privacy” and “evil corporations” love the status quo because of how easy it makes to invade your privacy without a warrant.

> So they’d be Firefox & wholly dependent on Google for search revenue money (I.e. ad money) anyway?

Not necessarily, its engine is now what powers Edge. Microsoft might support it.

> Chrome has nearly limitless options for monetization.

They do?

Apple gives away a pretty decent browser with their OS.

Microsoft gives away a version of Chrome with their OS (and for MacOS).

Most Linux versions ship with variants of Chromium.

The Chrome source which is a fork of WebKit which is in turn a fork of KHTML... is Open Source.

Chrome can't really be sold.

What exactly could "Chrome" the company do to make money?

Chrome already has an enterprise version with support and management tools (mostly for Chrome OS), that plus donations from Microsoft/Google could make it profitable for the team required. (Although it'd probably end up being a foundation like Mozilla)

The question is: can that income fund the Google-style salaries and benefits that are currently being payed for people working on it?

Otherwise lots of existing employees may not want to be part of this split company. If that is a large loss of talent (think veterans with lots of experience) that could hurt the quality (security, stability) and velocity of the project resulting in much less interest from those companies to pay the Chrome company for their services. What I'd suspect at that point is that Google might just fork it and develop it internally for internal use only (it's going to be hard to trust a third party browser to access internal confidential/critical resources when said third party has trouble maintaining high quality engineering talent). We're talking about state actors here that could have much easier time attacking a smaller Chrome company to introduce data exfiltration code.

Microsoft will probably have much of the high-quality engineering talent upstreaming work from Edge. Maybe Google will fork it, but nation-state actors haven't compromised Firefox (to our knowledge) even at its peak, why would they have more luck with Chrome?

> Chrome can't really be sold.

Right. Now try to use that top right "user" icon on your chrome window to log in as a user that is not from a google account.

No idea what icon you are speaking of. I don't use Chrome much and don't log into it when I do. I certainly don't think anyone is going to pay for the privilege.

OMG the lack of understanding of basic ad tracking in this forum baffles me.

Nobody is going to pay. But if google serve an ad for a logged out (or firefox) user, they get paid 0.05c if they serve the same ad to someone logged in (via that button or otherwise) they get paid 1.7usd.

the button is just to make you be always logged in.

You are paying all the time and don't even realize.

>> Chrome can't really be sold.

Chrome can not be sold for many reasons, being open source is not one of them, nothing prevents the selling of open source software, one just has to include the source or make the source available

Finding someone willing to buy chrome would be a harder problem

Indeed, especially when you have an official/trustworthy solution. For example, you could gate off value-adds for paying customers, whilst still making them open source. Sure, users can remove the "paid user" aspect and either compile it themselves or entrust that process to a third party. But the majority of users would not do so because of the effort or trust involved. (This is similar to movie piracy. Sure, it's trivial to pirate movies and music, but the majority of people pay for them.)

You mention nearly limitless options but fail to mention one. Can you give some examples?

at the very least, Google could pay to be the default search provider... it works for Mozilla, so far, and if Google had to , even at arms length, separate Chrome from the rest of Google, it would strengthen, not weaken, the case for Google's investment in paying Apple and Mozilla for top placement, helping to reinforce competition on both the mobile and browser fronts.

default search seems to be pretty lucrative.

It's data collection is in Chrome's DNA. They could just continue to collect data on browser usage, and then "sell" that data to Google. No need for sites to install Analytics into their website when they can get 100% of all site analytics viewed from within their browser.

A key difference here is that Chrome could sell aggregated analytics data for performance testing and such, but not allow the ad company to get user-targeting quality data. With them in the same company, this is a nearly impossible barrier to achieve.

I'll bite: why is this nearly impossible to achieve?

It may be nearly impossible to prove to you, but what makes it impossible, or even particularly difficult, to achieve if the company is interested in doing it?

limitless options? you mean ads. I don't think they can start charging users money. And if Chrome is forced to start directly monetizing, I can't see that ending well for the product. Any way they could possibly extract money from me would require it to do something I don't want, such as interjecting itself between me and an online merchant, or between me and content, or via integrations with partners I don't want (maybe even Google, which would defeat the purpose of the proposed split), or by selling a "premium" feature set. If Chrome had to make money it would suck as a product and everyone would move to safari/edge/etc bc they don't have the same pressure.