OpenAI say they would buy divested Chrome browser [0].
Perplexity say they want to want to buy Google Chrome [1].
Who do you hope buys Chrome?
[0] MLex
[1] India today
Personally, I donāt want to see any AI company buy Chrome. Iām sure a lot of internet companies are checking their bank balances and putting out feelers to money sources right now. We just arenāt hearing about it because nobody knows if the court will order it and what conditions the court will put on the sale.
If itās sold (and I think it likely) itās going to be interesting to see the potential reactions of all the third party browser companies that use the Chrome engine.
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Ideally, someone who will make it FOSS (free and open source). Otherwise itāll remain a tool for surveillance, data aggregation, and control.
Granted, this feels like a pipe dream. More likely itāll end up in the hands of a company that keeps it proprietary and fills it with LLM slop features.
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The Verge is reporting, behind the paywall, that Yahoo is interested in buying Chrome. Which would be better than AI.
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anyone using chrome as their daily driver (gaagle or otherwise) doesnāt care about privacy, or is too ignorant to realize the consequences
almost all corporations traverse exactly the same path: a startup that may have some ethical guidelines and good intentions > investors > caring only about the next quarterly report
look whatās happened to mozilla over the years - from netscape and an open web, to a multi-billion industry and blatant promotion of censorship, and firefox is still the best browser on the mainstream market regarding privacy (with a LOT of tweaks)
i really donāt get why people donāt get it ā¦ money = greed = corruption - it doesnāt require a rocket scientist to recognize the pattern
the definition of insanity, again?
maybe we could develop new systems???
the chances that āxā company will buy chrome and respect privacy? approximately zero, so who cares who buys it?
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Good point. Still it would be nice if it was a company slightly less intrusive than Google.
iād like to see a lot more competition in the browser market but the problem is that it requires a huge amount of resources to develop a capable web browser and so itās only sizable corporations/entities that can manage such a project - being non-profit can help to stave off the inevitable decline in ethics, but here again i mention the Mozilla Foundation which claims to be non-profit and separate from Mozilla Corp., but it seems they are separate in name only
Possibly, but they said the same thing about search. I call it a Google engineered myth.
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X itself will no doubt be āpitchingā.
Yes, approx zero. But competition will help. Monopolisation is toxic.
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the modern web browser contains more code than some computer operating systems, literally, and the āmodernā joke of a web only adds to the complexity
i wish you were right, but developing a capable web browser in a remotely reasonable amount of time is no longer a task that can be undertaken by a few dedicated people
as of 2022, ReactOS contained ~9m lines of code
as of 2020, Firefox contained ~21m lines of code
ReactOS has been under development for approximately ā¦ forever ā¦ and still hasnāt reached 1.0 and if it ever does, my semi-educated guess is that itāll be long obsolete
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I donāt know who, but Iād pay Ā£10/m for a browser that keeps on top of spec evolution, respects privacy and has no need to inject ads or any kind of 3rd party tracking.
Last I looked at Firefox, an initial install heads straight to Google to download a safe browsing list which may inevitably fingerprint a user indefinitely.
Brave, I use their browser to skip Youtube ads which is nice, but based on their search engine and their purported sources, I donāt believe in them.
Iād like to think that for a % of the browser market (those able and willing to pay) that ~$100 a year for a bleeding edge browser without obvious privacy caveats is doable.
Firefox is not an ideal product, granted, but it is better suited to tweaking for privacy than any other in my opinion
safe browsing is optional and easily disabled if you donāt want it
if you want to make it easy, grab LibreWolf, a Firefox fork
if you want to get your hands dirty, see the āarkenfoxā project
to squash ads everywhere, see uBlock Origin which is much more than just an ad blocker
on another note, if anyone knows what the heck Mozilla did with the Firefox āsystemā add-ons, please let me know - these are the 5 add-ons that ship with the browser which used to be located in /usr/lib/firefox/browser/features on Linux, but which have been relocated apparently and iāll be darned if i can figure out where
not an ideal product, granted
Agreed
safe browsing is optional and easily disabled
Iād really like having to not bother second guessing new options. Albeit when Gās safe browsing list came out, there was nothing like it. I can understand why they use it, but it feels too much like a dependency.
get your hands dirty
Not really 
But I probably should. I think the payment and a clearer company ethos might save that time.
Related blog: Every Web Browser Absolutely Sucks. | Luke's Webpage
I tend to agree with him. Granted, I donāt know enough about the history of web protocols to understand exactly where we went wrong, but it seems undeniable things have gone horribly wrong.
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I agree on
It must actually work on the modern web
and I think a single configuration file can be useful, but I do not agree on the rest of the article.
I know what I will write sounds litteraly crazy.
I dislike ad-blockers. He wrote:
No one opens up a browser to view ads
well, not everyone write on the web for free.
People put their rants on the web, push their worldview, attack someone, write to prise someone. But this is exactly whatās wrong with the web and the world, and the reason I use Mojeek: zero neutrality. You canāt be objective if it doesnāt pay, even if you want.
Maybe the web and the world will be a better place if we pay the price of the connection non flat and part of that price will go to the websites.
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Iāve always really liked that idea, micropayments et al. Devil in the detail.
I rarely feel it is worthwhile to debate/argue with people online, but your points are acknowledged/noted.
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Ads might pay the publisher better if Google didnāt control most almost all the ad networks.
On browsers, I donāt mind seeing ads but I do mind the tracking by ad networks.
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Can you explain that, please?
When a page has an ad on it from an ad network like Google Adsense it takes note of who I am and starts tracking me. If their are ads from Google Adsense on other websites they also track me. Pretty soon they have a good idea of what my interests are and start showing me ads about whatever they think Iām interested in. They longer they track you the more accurate their profile of you is.
I have the ad blocker on my browser set to block network ads (most of them) but to show me any local ads (the kind the website might sell themselves) that donāt track.
I would turn my ad blocker off if no ads tracked at all.
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