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US justice department plans to push Google to sell off Chrome browser
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2024
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Technology
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TBH I am not sure this will end well at all. Google needs to e broken up but splitting off chrome? What will that achieve? Chrome does not directly make any money for Google really, they don't sell it, they don't sell ads in it, they don't even collect much personal data though it. No where near as much as they really could if they really wanted to. Google have not been terrible at managing chrome or pushing as much profit out of it as they could.
Instead they are using it to create a good platform for all the rest of their services where they actually make money. So what will selling off this loss leader do for chrome? Most likely it will get bought up by someone else that will want to see a return on investment that wont be using it as a loss leader. Which I can very well see it getting en-shitified like everything else that is purely driven by profit.
Best case it is gets bought by a non profit foundation that can develop and take care of it - but lets be real, they wont have the money to out compete anyone wanting to buy it to make more money.
I personally don't really trust google with my browser either - hence why I avoid chrome. But I would trust anyone seeking to buy it for profit far less and can very well see this as a overall negative if the wrong people buy it (which I see as more likely).
Where to start with this? Didn't Google just kill adblockers in Chrome?
That is a more complex story then that. The manifest v3 changes primary give a lot of security and privacy changes that stop extensions from doing a lot of questionable things in the background on all your page you visit. But that does stop ad blockers from doing a lot of what they currently do - blocking in page elements and modifying the pages you visit. But it does not block them from blocking page requests so ad blockers like ublockorigin lite can still function in a more limited capacity to block ads.
I do think the teams outside of the chrome team are happy for this change - but I don't think the chrome team set out to do this purely or even mainly to block ads.
Besides even if they did it does not change my argument - whom ever buys chrome will likely want to squeeze it for more money then google currently are doing and will likely do far worst things like including ads directly in the browser. Or trying to monetize it in some other way.
I would love it if chrome where maintained by some non-profit foundation. But how likely is that going to be from a court order sell off?
I would rather they split up google in other ways first.
It also killed a lot of other genuinely useful extensions.
And if security is their main concern they should have spent resources on making sure the extensions they themselves redistribute are safe, not on killing a huge chunk of extensions. Sorry but you'll have a very hard time convincing anyone that getting rid of ad blockers wasn't their primary motive.
It completely changed how they do this, and made it way less effective and more limited. All completely unnecessary from a security standpoint.