I agree with you. Of all the remedies to address Google's "monopoly" this seems to the most bizarre.

My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser? In the article it said that they'd need approval for any new joint venture, collaboration, or partnership with any company that competes with Google in search or in search text ads.

It makes no mention of web browsers.

The only reason Google is trying to take away cookies is because they make you log into Chrome which gives you all their browsing data anyway and probably anything you type. So maybe not having a browser controlled by Google would be good.

> My question is if Google has to divest from Chrome, would they be able to build a new web browser?

I'm not a lawyer, and didn't read the verdict, but your query is very Hacker News. Justice is not code. If Google is forced to divest from Chrome, it of course means it can't turn around and make the Google Dhrome browser. If Google did, they'd be sued for ignoring the verdict.

There court hasn't set a remedy to its verdict yet. From the article

The proposal, filed Friday afternoon, says that Google must “promptly and fully divest Chrome, along with any assets or services necessary to successfully complete the divestiture, to a buyer approved by the Plaintiffs in their sole discretion, subject to terms that the Court and Plaintiffs approve.” It also would require Google to stop paying partners for preferential treatment of its search engine.

Think of it like MySQL and then MariaDB. So if Google sells Chromium to say Saleforce (they seem to buy everything) then Chrome is no longer Google's. Google would have complied with the verdict.

What does it mean to sell Chromium? Chromium code is Copyright The Chromium Authors. It contains a substantial amount of code not written by Google, which isn't Google's to sell.

I suppose Google could sell the rights to their parts of the codebase, possibly the rights to future Googler contributions, admin rights to the repo, domains, trademarks, CI, hardware labs, and maybe some other things I'm forgetting... but in terms of the tech being developed and shipped, there isn't really anything substantive to sell.

You're right in the short term but look how quickly the required outcomes from United States v. Microsoft Corp were relaxed and eventually ignored.

The difference between that case and the Google one now is that Microsoft was forced to sell nothing. It was a pyrrhic victory for the DOJ that comforted Microsoft.

Microsoft was forced to change their behavior. If it wasn't for that DOJ case IE would still be the dominant web browser.

Selling might not make business sense for Google or for Chrome, but it makes a ton of sense for the American public. Google is using Chrome to benefit advertisers, data brokers, and surveillance over users. Exhibit: the manifest v2 / Ublock Origin saga. And this is huge because so many other browsers use Chromium or its engine under the hood. Google can also use Chrome to push user-unfriendly web standards or de-facto standards.

Of course, this doesn't appear that related to the DOJ's reasoning.

The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome. Bare in mind that 99% of Chrome is the free Chromium open source project, so you're not buying any sort of technological asset. You're just buying a big pre-existing user base, which would be extremely difficult to monetize without making the product much worse, although I'm sure Microsoft or Facebook would be happy to give that a go. It certainly wouldn't make any sense to buy it without a sprawling advertisement business or some major conflicts of interest. But what's the point of selling it to someone else like that?

It's easy to say "just sell it" without thinking about the actual implications, but you're basically talking about destroying it. Maybe that's the point, but we should at least be honest about it.

Yeah, Chrome is "Google-flavored Chromium", just as Edge is "Microsoft-flavored Chromium."

If (say) Meta bought Edge, then they'd get the userbase and the trademark, but the product seems pointless. Why would Meta want a browser whose killer features are integrations with Bing and Office 365? If Meta wanted a browser, they'd make a "Meta-flavored Chromium."

I'm assuming this is the point - say "just sell it" to satisfy anti-monopolists, while knowing no one will buy it for any reasonable price to satisfy monopolists. Political points across the board with no consequence, why not?

I suppose then we could treat as some kind of public good and fund its development directly from our tax dollars?

I fear the US government more than I fear Google. At least Google will lose power at one point. The government may fall into wrong hands. Which is exactly why the Reps are trying to defund and dismantle half of its functions.

> The problem is that it doesn't make business sense for anybody else to buy Chrome

I don't see why divesting it necessarily means selling it to another company. Google could create a non-profit like Mozilla, or a for profit and float it as its own business.

If Google controls the spin-off, then the problem is not resolved. The whole point is that the government doesn't want Google to control it. And if Google does not control it, then who does? The judge?

There are a lot of seemingly simple "solutions" to this problem that just don't hold up under a modicum of scrutiny.

Any company purchasing Chrome would do it for power – since Chrome can’t become a paid product.

Any NGO receiving Chrome would be extremely vulnerable to spying, because of the immense power of having software installed on a billion computers.

Mozilla already exists, and it behaves as a non-profit arm of Google. If you created another non-profit it would do the same unless it was banned from receiving money from search engines (but then it would have no money.)

Yeah, I agree with all this.

The right answer is to nationalize it. Set up some sort of independent non-profit steering committee, and maybe redirect some of the massive savings Elon has pulled out of his ass to fund the actual core development. That solves the "who spends $1b per year on development if not an adtech" problem. If the US was a functioning state right now, I might suggest making it an international organization to encourage buy in from developers and backers outside our borders.

Browsers are one of the most critical pieces of modern software infrastructure, both from a security-footprint perspective and as a vehicle for (mis-)information delivery, so maybe they're too important for ANY commercial entity to use them as a bludgeon to for their agenda.

If they no longer control the core project, then Google (or Microsoft) have a much harder job doing self-serving stuff. They could nuke Manifest v2 in THEIR Chromium derivative, but core Chromium isn't going to give it up-- the Operas and Vivaldis of the world don't have to spend their limited resources trying to unwind the change to keep a desired feature.

> It's a common misconception that tons of users manually install Chrome, but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser

Maybe 10 years ago, but which ones do it now? thinkpads and HP machines, at least, ship with Edge as the default. Dell or something?

Windows is also _hyper_ aggressive about pushing Edge now too. Like it's nuts how hard it pushes it, to the point that it embarrasses people who do actually prefer Edge. "Recommending" at every turn that you not switch, having the edge browser itself warn against downloading Chrome, pushing edge into various OS-level browser launches even if it's not your default, and, of course, randomly resetting the browser default on various updates.

edit: at least from this page, it's edge by default on at least some dell machines too, but I haven't owned one in so long I won't say that for sure: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000128257/how-to-ch...

It doesn't seem to be a default on PCs.

I don’t remember chrome being default anywhere. You always needed to open edge to download chrome and I have installed windows numerous times in past.

I believe the claim was that it's coming default on prebuilt PCs. If you're installing Windows, that's not the situation where Chrome would be the default.

Right but what OS is installed on a pre-built PC if not Windows?

not sure what exactly that has to do with prebuilt versions of Windows that come with bloatware/adware or other nonstandard customisations?

I think the GP has only encountered business laptops (which don't have as much bloatware). I can confirm that current "normie" laptops (from HP at least) do already have Chrome installed, although it is unclear if this is as part of paid marketing or just to reduce support headaches.

Also, there was the time where Google pays antivirus companies like then-Avast to shove Chrome. Unsure if it is still happens, but this points out to how Chrome can pay through the marketshare.

I do a lot of IT support. Edge is the default on every single prebuilt / laptop I have setup for people.

This is ancedotal sure but it's several hundred datapoints from the cheapest student focused budget laptops(running windows not chrome os) to business grade laptops from the big 3 (HP/Dell/Lenovo). Apple ships Safari by default and every linux distro I have used ships firefox or a spinoff of firefox by default.

So in my experience Chrome is actively installed by the local it help (me, things are just plain broken for some use cases on non-chrome). I personally do not use Chrome, that doesn't mean I won't make it the default for every PC I touch for an enduser purely because I get less calls for support when users are using chrome.

It's no secret that I feel like other search engines are worse that Google even though Google's results are nearly unusable.

Google built a mote by having a better product, nobody else tried to compete and now it's become nearly impossible to compete. I actively avoid Chromium based browsers personally but even then I need to have one installed because even in Firefox and Safari derived browsers things are broken or website just plain don't work (https//f1.tv actively does not work on firefox as an example, unless they have since backtracked)

>> I feel like other search engines are worse that Google even though Google's results are nearly unusable.

Give Kagi a go - the usability thing is superb, as you can down rank common awful sites so they never appear in the results and they aren't stuffing ads into the results either

I find the results excellent 99% of the time and for those odd cases I'm not convinced it found the best results I pop back to Google. I tend to find that I do that most with subtle image searches (which are kind of rare but you are usually after something very specific where Kagi occasionally struggles with on the image side)

For me almost all conventional search is dead now. Sure, perhaps useful for “what going on tomorrow where I live” but for everything else I now rely on LLMs.

I wasn't sure where to say it but your comment seems appropriate. It must impact install numbers when companies(ones I've been at) only want you to use chrome. Wasn't really an option for our regular staff. I was able to get away with using ff.

Agree as well - I still end up mostly using Google search, tho half the time when I don't get any decent results I realize it wasn't that important anyways. Interesting side effect of poor search results.

Edge moved from their own engine to Chromium’s Blink engine, so from an IT support perspective, it should work equally well.

Mostly correct yes and for certian users I actually do encourage them to try out edge.

Many users are so used to Chrome though it is jarring to switch to edge. Open them in two workspaces and flip between them, although the UI are both browsers, edge feel like the Temu version if a browser, at least to me.

But then I use Zen/Vivaldi so I personally find most other browsers these says a little weird.

I bought 2 machines in the past year and neither of them had Chrome installed. Maybe it happens, but not on the two brands I got.

>I believe the claim was that it's coming default on prebuilt PCs.

That's the claim, but I've never seen a pre-built with chrome installed (other than a chromebook obviously), let alone configured as the default. Which OEMs are pre-installing it as the default?

Chromebooks are a thing, and are extremely popular

> extremely popular

for really small amounts of "extremely"

(outside US K-12 they are hardly a thing)

And Australian K-12 too :)

crucial though, that's were audiences get introduced with their software

I wouldn't be surprised if Chromebooks alone gave Chrome more market share than Firefox.

They don't do so badly in the UK with non-technical types (eg the elderly) especially where a full computer isn't safe or supportable.

I have a very nice Chromebook tablet (a Lenovo Duet). I use it to run a Debian Linux VM; it has its quirks, but I use it to run Emacs, TeX, and various Scheme implementations. It is relatively cheap, and even though it's a relatively low-powered device, it has adequate performance for my needs. (And yes, it is not “really” Linux: you can't install your own window manager, for example. But it's usable.)

I have lots of criticisms of Chrome OS, but the fact is that the year of Linux on the Desktop has arrived. You buy one of these machines, and out of the box you can have Linux apps (and a terminal) running within 15 minutes of switching the machine on.

Yea, I don't disagree it is a decent product. I was just refuting the "extremely popular" comment. Statistically their market share is minimal. People still by-and-large buy Microsoft Windows laptops.

German here. I know 0 people who own a Chromebook. In fact I think I have never seen one in my entire life (outside of a store).

Schools I know are using Windows laptops or iPads.

If you buy a cheap computer with Windows S it is very hard to get out of the S configuration and in S configuration you can't install Chrome at all or Firefox.

You can switch out of S mode (for free) https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...

Doing it that way is a pain if don't want to create a microsoft account, which when tries to convert your computer account to a microsoft account. Pretending that it's easy to switch by requiring you to use the microsoft store to do so is a really shitty antipattern.

99% of Windows users use a microsoft account these days, so this method is trivial for most.

Not very hard in my experience. Not even hard.

But very much nonobvious. I recently had to help one of my parents when they couldn't figure out how to install some software, and it turned out to be S - but I had to do a bunch of digging to figure it out and I'm good with computers.

I can confirm Dell's default for Windows devices is Edge. I believe Dell's Ubuntu laptops come with both Firefox and Chrome installed.

Before Edge, everyone had to install Chrome because the web wouldn't work with IE. It is still the case that some major sites don't work with Firefox either. Edge is as close to a de-Googled Chrome as you can get to work properly. Unfortunately de-Googling meant re-Microsofting

The web wouldn’t work with IE just because Microsoft had this unique strategy of deviating from standards, having non-working APIs and providing an awful experience to developers. It’s unique.

Firefox compliance is another story, but very mild compared to IE. Chrome also had to deal with compatibility issues when Firefox was the leader, but Mozilla relinquished their leadership position because it was very important to them to fire their CEO / original writer of Javascript for ideological reasons - he had given $1000 to an anti-abortion NGO, which is an unacceptable thoughtcrime. Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.

Sounds like the history of browsers is just made of strategic mistakes.

> he had given $1000 to an anti-abortion NGO

That's not what he did. He donated for California's Prop 8, which opposed same-sex marriage, in 2008. I'm personally not judging, as many US progressives have forgotten that during those days, even Obama opposed same-sex marriage. But it's important to get the facts straight, even when being sarcastic.

---

> Then they spent their time politicking and not enough coding.

Mozilla's management certainly is guilty of blunders, but I'm pretty sure the developers who have worked on Mozilla don't feel like they've spent time “politicking”.

The failure of Firefox in the marketplace starts from the fact that it's pretty hard to compete with a browser that's funded with more than 1 billion $ per year. And people may not remember much about the launch of Chrome, but it was literally years ahead of its competition. Have a look at its famous comic book, with which it was announced, describing its design and philosophy, and count the years it took for the competition to catch up (across the board, including Safari): https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

I mean, sure, you can blame that on politics, but I don't think anyone was able to stop the decline and when Brendan Eich resigned, people were already talking about Chrome's hegemony and Firefox dying.

> And people may not remember much about the launch of Chrome

And remember -- the original browser engine that Chrome (+ Safari) came from was KHTML + KJS from the KDE folks, which was doing pretty good at the time considering the development resources available to it

Yeah, I really feel like Brenden pretty much screwed over the entire browser scene by going all political and not doing his heavy lifting of reading the mid 00s political zeitgeist better. Feels like he doomed us all to live under Google's boot for his poorly timed performative activism.

Using your money to help pass a law that binds every person in your state is not a “thoughtcrime”.

How do you suggest to fund citizen initiatives then? The only two things he’s guilty of is not being on the winners side, and facing an army if wokists.

One day the wokists will be trialled like the Nazis.

I'm not suggestion anything. All I'm saying is that Brendan Eich wasn't pilloried for simply holding a heterodox opinion, but for his actions to enshrine it in the state constitution. Agree with it or not, that is categorically different from "thoughtcrime".

> Unfortunately de-Googling meant re-Microsofting

That's an understatement. Microsoft Edge is, in fact, a more privacy invasive browser than Chrome. And that was a pretty high bar.

In the EU, straight from the get-go, Edge presents users with the IAB interstitial, informing them that Edge is going to share their data with the entire advertising industry. Note that Chrome doesn't do this, as Google only wants you to share data with them, and it's not the browser that asks for consent. Edge's IAB interstitial is filled with dark patterns as well, such as legitimate interests being unlawfully declared.

Edge is also filled with Microsoft's telemetry, which you can't turn off. Every browser instance, of course, comes with a unique ID that's reported to Bing Ads. Using Edge without Bing is fairly difficult. And end-to-end encryption for its synchronization feature isn't supported.

I entirely understand why people want to degoogleify, but picking Bing in that process is fairly stupid.

> It is still the case that some major sites don't work with Firefox either.

This comment keeps popping up. Every time I ask the commenter to show me some sites that dont work with Firefox. Nobody has ever shown me one. I think people are stuck in the past here, Firefox has been absolutely fine for about 10 years now.

I have yet to find an actual web site that breaks with Firefox and works with Chrome.

Closest would be Google's Android Flash Tool that uses WebUSB to image an Android phone. But that is more like a browser extensions versus a HTML5 application.

I have had numerous experiences with ZScaler, corporate man-in-the service, breaking web sites with Firefox. I need to use Chromium to upload to Virus Total. ZScaler even likes to brake web sites on Chromium and requires multiple reloads with minutes or hours between refresh.

Microsoft services with ZScaler break easily with Firefox and Chromium but work fine with Edge or MS Teams. Don't know if this intent to push users to Edge or just a correlation with ZScaler.

ZScaler developers, thanks for making my work life living hell with 30s or more latency and lack of ability to properly connect to web services and handle cross-VM HTTP testing.

Ok, I tried to sign up for a Reddit account and it failed over and over on Firefox. Same computer, Chrome worked first time. I guess Reddit wanted to fingerprint my browser in a way that Firefox wouldn't allow.

This is not the only case btw, just a nice clearcut one

Wouldn’t it be funny if the aggressive “are you sure you want to leave Edge?!” kind of messages actually made people ton the whole think it was a lower quality product…

> Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default.

Have you used a Windows PC lately? It seems like once a week I have to ignore/decline prompts to change my default browser to Edge.

I’m not sure PC makers have any say/control over this behavior.

I think you might be holding it wrong? I've only been asked once, I said no. Quite sternly. It apologised, we laughed about it. Now Edge has no internet access.

I just opened Edge, first thing it did was ask me to become default browser:

https://i.imgur.com/u2Nby1b.png

I think every non-default browser asks that the first time you open them. It's not a huge deal, but it is a huge deal when you start getting prompted from the OS to change it.

Where on the statcounter page does it show that people are using their default browser? You're making a lot of claims about Chrome commonly being the default browser without linking to any evidence of your correction of this "common misconception" that people install chrome manually.

At this point Microsoft has embedded bing so deeply into windows they don’t care

> The only viable business model for a web browser, the one that literally all major browsers use, is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default. Even Kagi makes its own Orion web browser, for exactly this reason.

The only viable business model ... while the incumbent (IE, now Chrome) is allowed to give the product away for free in service of some other predatory agenda.

Since Chrome's engine is used by Edge, Opera, Brave, etc.. Probably the best move is to become a non-profit and have all those organizations chip in.

The main reason even Microsoft gave up and rebased their browser on top of Chrome is because of the breakneck speed at which Google introduces new standards and features to the ecosystem. Having them be forced to slow down might be a good thing for browser diversity and the future of the Internet.

Or maybe because Chromium is pretty good, open-source and there's nearly no upside to reinventing the wheel?

If Mozilla would fork Chromium now and base Firefox on their fork I would switch from Brave. The engine simply technically superior.

According to this maybe somewhat broken website (idk there's a warning that it's broken but it still seems to work) https://www.netmarketshare.com/, Chrome has 65% market share on OS X.

Cite? I’ve literally never had a PC come with Chrome on it.

Hell, MS makes it super hard to even install Chrome now, including numerous irritating nag messages and ‘are you sure?!?’

If spun off, why wouldn’t Chrome then be free to sell its default search provisioning back to Google?

Because the DOJ demands two things. First, Google must sell Chrome to a DOJ approved buyer. And second, Google must not pay anyone for the default search engine spot.

About one in five Windows updates shows a notification along the lines of "Update your browser preferences to secure defaults?", which is code for "Can we bing you mate?"

Every time I visit my parents, I need to de-bing them again

Why bother to "de-bing" their computer?

I like your analysis, but wonder about this line:

>> The only viable business model for a web browser is to accept money from a search engine (Google, specifically) to be make them the default.

Mostly, it's just that giving away browsers for free as a source of garnering search traffic distorts the market.

"Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default."

Why would they pay the manufactures when they can just add annoying reminders and make it hard to switch in the OS they ship it with?

This is just flat out wrong. Edge is the default browser on ~all new Windows machines, and Safari is the default (obviously) on macOS. If you have data showing the opposite, please provide it.

People go out of their way to install Chrome because it's better than the competition. Just like they used to do for Firefox, back when Firefox was a better browser than the competition.

>> Microsoft just doesn't make enough money from Bing/Edge to pay PC makers to leave Edge as the default.

Not only is this not true for lots of manufacturers, but the minute you click on a web link anywhere in windows (help, start menu, etc) it opens in Edge, and Edge cannot be uninstalled on a windows machine.

> but Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser.

Unless you have a source for that, that's flat-out wrong. I've never heard of that, I've never seen that, and I can't find any supporting evidence of that.

> Here's StatCounter's estimates of desktop browser market share. The overwhelming majority of users are using their computer's default browser.

That's not what that graph shows. It doesn't show anything about defaults.

> (Safari was available on Windows from 2007-2012, but it never captured much market share, because Apple was never willing to pay PC makers to make Safari the default.)

I think it must have been bundled with iTunes as I remember family members having Safari installed on Windows computers at the time.

But I think it being available for Windows right when Firefox and then later Chrome started to become popular didn't help - it was just some other browser that no one was recommending.

Your source shows the "Market Share Worldwide". I don't see it shows the "Default Browser Worldwide".

AFAIK, in the US, the default for:

- Windows: Edge

- Mac: Safari

- Ubuntu: Firefox

I think the claim that "Google just pays PC makers to make Chrome the default browser" needs a clear source.

The main problem with Google anti competition is how chrome is being leveraged to mine user behavior signals for search engine algos. That is the unfair advantage that needs to be killed off