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.)