Google to Mozilla: "I'm gonna pay you 400M a year for antitrust to fuck off"

Seems like it didn't work though.

Firefox lost too much market share. And while some of that is due to bad leadership at Mozilla, Chrome running big advertising campaigns and Google advertising Chrome on their own properties (hints to download Chrome on Google Search, Drive, etc. when you visit with other browsers) were also a big driver. Google flew too close to the sun.

I wish the result of the case was just “you can’t pester users to switch browsers. Unless the browser they’re using isn’t meeting an open standard that’s necessary to the proper function of the site you’re pestering them on.”

If another entity buys Chrome, they’re only doing so based on the belief of increased future value/revenue from it. Google doesn’t want to sell it because they see more future value in it. If Chrome sucked, there’d be no antitrust case. So this is all a “you’ve done too good a job, now give it all up.”

I don’t use Chrome or Chromium based browsers because Safari works well for all of my use cases. But I want to see alternatives prosper. I don’t think needing Chrome gets anyone there.

I would say almost 100% of it is due to bad leadership at Mozilla. They seem to have zero interest in improving Firefox, and lots of interest in all sorts of random... stuff, like decolonial climate justice using AI in Zambia.

Maybe it needed to be a cool billion.

It worked until they decided to unfairly compete with Firefox and get all the market share.