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OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience
(arstechnica.com)
Firefox keeps winning
Unfortunately the current leadership at Mozilla are also trying to pivot into being an advertisement and “AI” company smh. Hopefully they get back on track soon but rn it’s looking rough there
I sincerely doubt it. Fundamentally, web advertising is nearing its biological limit - there’s only so much of people’s time you can colonize and direct towards profitable purchases. That tit has been sucked dry. Which is why tech giants are trying to move to a more direct kind of profiteering/rent seeking.
I’m not sure (though it could just be cope) that a sufficient bumber of people are going to take them up on it. OpenAI has sunk a truly ridiculous amount of wealth into the slop generator and I cannot imagine anyone but the most brain broken dipshits queuing up to pay like 50 a month to make it break even, let alone make a profit.
Yeah, I switched to librewolf because of this.
Looks like I'll be not updating my firefox
Using an out of date browser is one of the worst things you can do security wise. You're better off switching to a fork like librewolf.
Do extensions still work in forks?
Not sure about the other forks but they work in LibreWolf.
Why not fork their own browser? 
They buy all couple billion existing users as well, and the stronger branding of Chrome
This is the answer, but unless they want to be a browser company (not impossible) I doubt they will maintain it as well as Google. Likewise, Chrome was a loss leader designed to funnel users into Google's profitable ventures of advertising and search, but apparently OpenAI does not have a profitable sector whatsoever.
Mitigating factor: OpenAI leverages its ownership of Chrome to funnel users into Bing for money.
I think OpenAI is creating their own search, that's probably the end goal to make that the default on Chrome and have chatgpt as a default extension too
Know a guy that didn't even know what Firefox was a few years ago when I asked why he was still using Chrome.
Did this person wake up from a coma and completely skip the 00’s?
He is in his late 40s and still really into stoner culture so kind of. Also the biggest blue MAGA I personally know, I remember joking about Hillary running again and he gave an non-ironic "Hell yeah".
Late 40s and stoner culture checks out. I’m happy to be part of the generation that uses weed as a crutch, not a personality lol.
part of the generation that uses weed as a crutch
Because it's a stock price grift and forking a browser doesn't juice the line like announcing you might buy the browser used by 65% of the world at sell-off prices due to a monopoly ruling. They won't buy it. And even if they did all that would happen is that it would immeadiately hemorrage users to its competitors because people use Chrome because it's a Google default, not some weird increasingly broken AI niche thing that the company can't even afford to run.
Google is an advertisement company.
Chrome is owned by Google.
Chrome is owned by an advertisement company.
Google makes money by using data collected by Chrome to sell ads targeted at you.
Google uses your personal information to sell ads.
Chrome was designed to collect your personal information to sell ads.
There is a local restaurant whose online menu only works in Chrome. It's like, this is takeout, what fucking computation is happening here that requires a specific web package? This should be a PDF with a phone number on it and it should load instantaneously
I remember visiting Italy just as things were opening after Covid and one very small restaurant had a QR code on the table which took you to a website where you had the choice of downloading the android or iOS app for the menu. My friends did it and it crashed immediately.
"hello restaurant I would like to pay you money for your food"
restaurant: 
I physically recoiled
I just want my internet browsers to work dawg. I don’t want AI, I want shit to load and not eat all 64 GB ram in my machine. I just want software to work bro. Please, just make software that does what’s on the tin. Also stop fucking with ublock origin
for a company that loses money with every transaction, this will be the kursk offensive of business deals
There was also some article saying they wanted to pivot to social media. They're just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks because they have no clue how to monetize chatgpt
They’re prompting it “where do we go from here?”
The enshittification will continue until the rate of profit improves
until the rate of profit improves
(it will not)
Problem: People saying thank you to our chatbots on paid plans is losing us too much money.
Solution: Let's take over a browser used by 65% of the world, stuff it full of AI features, and serve it for free! Cha-ching!
...and serve the basic version for free.
You want to have more than five tabs open? That's a Chrome Pro feature.
I'm just gonna shill SRWare Iron here
bruh
Oh please please please, that would be so damn funny. Would love to see it become even more unusable than it already is. Please, AI companies, just buy up every single big tech things and then all of it will go away when the market bubble bursts.
Starting to feel like AI is reaching too big to fail levels and we’ll never see a bubble burst 
It does have actual use cases, but the way it is set up and operates in the west is just a giant pyramid scheme, it'll go the way of NFTs, Bitcoin and the dot com bubble sooner or later. These companies just keeping making more and more profit but no actual value. Sooner or later people will be forced to accept that AI as it exists can't actually do any of the hypothetical future claims they say it might do and people will stop investing and the bag holders will be ruined and the people who started this will have become far more obscenely wealthy than before and suffer no real consequences.
nobody asked for this
i guess I can at least stop amending every search with "reddit" to get actual information if it's just going to browse reddit for me anyway
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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