zlacker

>>transp+(OP)
This is entirely unsurprising. It's been clear that Google has been into their Android duopoly-abusive stage for a while now, with more and more of their Android changes moving into GMS or non-AOSP Google apps (like camera, messages, location services, etc) over the last decade. Graphene has been doomed to this fate for a long time, and anyone who thought otherwise was naively optimistic.

The same is clearly coming for Chromium forks, which is why I've always thought the privacy and ad-blocking forks are a joke - if they ever gain enough marketshare, or if google just tires of the public open source charade, they have no chance of maintaining a modern browser on their own.

This is all the more likely now that Google has been emboldened by not having to sell off Chrome for anticompetitive reasons.

>>scottb+ll
Just a year prior, I would have been against a decision to force Google to part with either Android or Chrome.

Now, I'm of the opinion that they should have been forced to sell off both, and maybe Chromebooks too, for the good measure.

No company with a direction as vile and openly user-hostile as what Google currently demonstrates should have anywhere near this level of control over the ecosystem.

>>ACCoun+9m
The sad thing is I think Google keeping Chrome is actually likely the better of two possible bad outcomes... Anyone else interested and willing to pay the true value of owning the entire Internet ecosystem is almost certainly going to look to extract value from that, and that's almost certainly worse than what Google does today. E.g. using everyone's browser to extract training data for AI without getting IP blocked.

>>scottb+io
A year or so ago, I would have agreed. Not anymore.

Sure, a company can buy Chrome and proceed to sell user browsing habits data to the highest bidder, or use it as a backbone for decentralized scraping - backed by real user data and real residential IPs to fool most anti-scraping checks. But if they fuck with users enough, Chrome would just die off over time, and Firefox or various Chromium forks like Brave would take its place. This already happened to the browsing titan that was IE, and without the entire power of Google to push Chrome? It can happen again.

The alternative is Google owning Chrome for eternity - and proceeding with the most damaging initiatives possible. Right now, Google is seeking to destroy adblocking, tighten the control over the ad data ecosystem to undermine their competitors, and who knows what else they'll come up with next week.