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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t matter if no one buys it, or if it doesn’t even continue to exist as a standalone business. That’s preferable.

The important part is ending the egregious conflict of interest where an advertising behemoth controls access to the internet.

Ideal result is that Chrome ceases to exist and Chromium continues as an independent open source project controlled by a nonprofit. Even if Google is one of the contributors, so long as they don’t control the product they will exert a lot less control over the web and how people access it.

TLDR just be like Mozilla

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What would that even mean? Anyone can fork Chromium and do whatever they want including establishing a non-profit foundation to finance its development.

Should Google be banned from forking an open source project and/or just developing any type of browser at all?

The only reason Google "controls" Chromium is that they are spending the most money/development time on it.

Yes, Google can be forced to sign a consent decree saying it will not engage in browser building or distribution for a set length of time and the DOJ can set up offices inside of Google and staff them with DOJ employees who make sure Google follows that agreement.

It seems like you have no familiarity with any of this. If so, happy to help educate you. If I'm wrong and you're just trolling, it was hard to tell.

To the users who use chrome, it will matter. Not clear to me how strong Chromium will be if the Google efforts for Chrome go away.

> TLDR just be like Mozilla

Please don't.

Do we really want incompetent management going into ad business? Declining market share, while raising management salaries and firing developers?

> TLDR just be like Mozilla

Mozilla is rapidly deciding they want to be an advertising and AI company at the expense of their primary product.

So, tl;dr: be like Mozilla used to be, not like they are now.

I don't like Mozilla's advertising strategy either. But their primary product can't sustain itself.

I desperately wish they'd give me the option to pay for Firefox Sync. I would, genuinely, pay for that every month. I get a massive amount of value from being able to throw tabs from my laptop to my phone and vice versa, and have everything synchronized, in a way I trust.

Did you mean people could sync and not pay? Few people would pay. Or did you mean people would have to pay to sync? The market standard is free sync.

You can give money to Mozilla Corporation by paying for Firefox Relay, Mozilla Monitor, Mozilla VPN, MDN Plus, or Pocket Premium.

A browser can't sustain itself. That's kind of the core problem.

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