OpenAI wants to buy Chrome and make it an "AI-first" experience
(arstechnica.com)131 points by pseudolus 6 hours ago
131 points by pseudolus 6 hours ago
So don't allow that.
Chrome (and control over Chromium) go to a newly formed, independent nonprofit. The nonprofit is not in any way under Google's control.
Google receives zero compensation. The nonprofit is funded by Google at say $250M/year for 20 years... by which I mean Google writes checks and gets absolutely nothing in exchange. The funding is conditional only on the nonprofit doing something that can be vaguely viewed as shipping a browser. Don't like that? Shoulda thought about it before you started getting all monopolistic.
The nonprofit is required to spend all its incoming funds, and forbidden to do anything but provide a browser. Just the browser. No services. All elements of the browser are AGPL. The nonprofit is forbidden to accept any offer that would put it under the control of any other entity. Every Chrome/Chromium user can become a member of the noprofit and then vote for the board. The board may not recommend its own candidates.
The browser isn't allowed to have a default search engine, LLM, "safe sites list", sync server, or whatever. In fact, it's not even allowed to provide a list to choose from. The user has to find them.
No, I don't know if that's feasible under applicable law, and honestly I doubt it is. But it'd be the right direction to go.
This is hilarious! So billions of dollars of capital invested by Google on R&D results in all of the IP being seized with a $250m/year annual obligation?
> It’d be the right direction to go
Putting the legality of this aside for a moment, the second order effects of the government seizing IP at this scale would cause a massive downscaling of R&D investment followed by IP rapidly fleeing the country.
I think my preferred outcome would be donating it to either the Linux foundation or Apache software foundation rather than to a new foundation. But otherwise agree no default search/llm/etc...
This might fly in North Korea or Soviet Union, but seriously? At that point they could just abandon the project altogether. If we're discussing monopolistic position, we have to then account for what made Chrome come to such a position in the first place, aside from technical superiority of course. Leveraging google.com for promotion, integration with google services, android? What makes that different from what apple is doing? Yes, dominance was accelerated by strategic push from Google, but would it happen regardless? Was there even a war going on and won over FF, Safari, IE/Edge with unruly moves? It now needs to be broken away from a company because it's a success story? Was there a moment like "if you don't install/bundle Chrome we'll crush your business?" in style of Microsoft? Was there a moment like "Chrome or take a hike" in style of Apple?
I'm not even taking Google's side on this, just cannot see that side of it where they were evil to get to that point with it. If anything, Chrome made monopoly go away from clutches of Microsoft and to an extent Apple.
What company takes it over is an important question, and I honestly don't have a good answer for that. Nearly every company I can think of would have some problem.
But my question is, do we need Chrome to actually continue in its current state?
Chromium could continue as open source with multiple companies contributing to it (and maybe it falls under the linux foundation to oversee it) then with companies like Microsoft making their own forks.
We have Safari, Edge, Firefox (which its future is also in question, but that's a separate topic). I guess Oprah is still kicking around.
When not under Google's control, what value does Chrome really serve beyond its existing install base (which not discounting, but that can change)
I think the divide between HN and the world is significant, here.
For you (and me), switching browsers is annoying but doable. There was a time when I used Firefox, and then a time when I used Chrome, and someday I'll use something else. But for the vast majority of the world, the idea of switching browsers feels like a big challenge.
A lot of the world needs Chrome to keep working well for them.
It seems like all of the browsers now import data from other browsers when you install them. So, is that really much of the case?
Beyond the old stereotype "grandparent thinks the E is the internet", there is not much of a difference in how each browser behaves. The UI's are shockingly similar.
If it was, I would not think that Google would be as successful as they are to push Chrome heavily. Users would not transition over.
I will admit that I do sometimes have a different view of technology than many people, I mean as it is I have multiple browsers running right now. And generally when I step back I can see, oh yeah this really may be a bigger deal for most people.
I am struggling to see it in this case, especially with every browser trying very hard to make it as easy as possible.
> Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Only if you wait a few decades to break a monopoly up. This is the fall out of the lack of US government intervention in their megatech companies.
We see the EU trying to fight back, but really all of this is far too late. There will be significant fall out, I’m sure. The sale of Chrome could be an unmitigated disaster.
Totally agree. I think the only option here would be separating the company into multiple companies. This seems to be the direction the Meta case is more likely to go in.
Eg. Google could become, Google Search (and AI), YouTube, and an independent ad tech company with the remnants of DoubleClick (maybe Google Ads moves into this group as well and has deals with the other two entities).
Not quite. It exists (or at least, it originally existed) because Google didn't want Microsoft to have direct control over their main medium. (In particular, IE/Edge were funneling people to Bing.)
Yes, and it would be the same reason OpenAI would be interested. They'd get to control the client.
One more step, sama, and you too can have an advertising company.
The US courts would require they not enter the business at all, so that wouldn’t be feasible.
Best case scenario is this pisses off enough people to create a sea change toward alternative browsers.
Correct. Chrome is not and never was a profitable venture apart from Google. It was a strategic move designed to push web technology forward to allow Google's other, more profitable businesses like Gmail, Google Drive etc. to compete with their desktop counterparts.
Before Chrome, Google had an Internet Explorer plugin called Google Gears that enabled functionality like LocalStorage and Service Workers since those were not standard web features at the time. Eventually they made Chrome and only then were they able to push to make those things into web standards.
Apart from Google, Chrome can't survive in its current form. It's not profitable on its own, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably result in either huge cuts to development staff or some pretty intense enshitification, or both.
Couldn’t we have an open source group fork Chromium and keep it sane? I’d imagine that would quickly become one of the most used browsers
While I shudder at the privacy implications of some of those buyers, there's a really ironic concept here: Google always had a conflict of interest between giving the user agency in their browser, and making ads unblockable (namely, its own). Under different stewardship, we might see a shift towards the user in the ad-blocking wars.
After all, the new buyer gets value out of your loyalty in using their browser to view more pages than ever before, so that it can use that data to train its LLMs! People bouncing from pages due to ads just gets in the way. We will have freedom from online advertising, for the low, low cost of a Larry Ellison or Elon Musk-managed panopticon!
Rony Abovitz, the founding energy behind Magic Leap, does this 'AI/XR Podcast' and last episode they discussed OpenAI rumors about a Social Network. As a founder himself who lived through being flavor of the day getting showered with venture money his observation was prescient: this 'I can do anything' approach is what happens to a certain kind of person (who will "eat everything on the table" is how he phrased it) given all checks and no balances.
He contrasted that with someone like Jenson who pulled Nvidia off of a cliff more than once and so has the scartissue to limit his reach to keep focus on core business.
> given all checks and no balances.
Do you mean no checks and balances? A check is a restriction or constraint.
You can ignore it, this is just a page taken from the Musk school of attention farming.
It actually kind of makes sense.
The DOJ wants to break what it considers to be Google's monopoly, and Chrome is a prime target. The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.
OpenAI is starting to feel the competition. ChatGPT is no longer the only game in town, DeepSeek happened, Google is becoming actually good, Claude is quite popular among coders, and Grok is not a joke anymore. They need something if they don't want to lose out, and buying the most popular browser to make it into a gateway into their service may be an option.
But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick (in 2007!) -- that should never have been allowed.
Not sure how to extract that part from Google now. It would be difficult, but probably quite effective.
Quite effective at destroying anything good left of Google I would say.
Google has a bunch of nice things (search, gmail, maps, ...) that cost money, and an advertising business that makes money, the former helping the latter. Split the two and the nice stuff will be without funding and die out, and only the "evil" part will survive. Or so I think. Splitting out Chrome will not change the face of the world, but Firefox has shown that an (somewhat) independent browser can work.
> But removing Chrome from Google makes zero sense and won't stop it from being a monopoly. The monopoly part comes from buying DoubleClick
Not only. Google controls a lot of user attention. See how many services they link together to serve you ads .... erm .... recommendations to make browsing better or something: https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1908951546869498085 And one of those services is Chrome
> The problem is that Chrome by itself is worse than worthless, it is a money sink and it only makes sense as a part of a system.
Or, just an out-there idea, what if the Chrome became property of the government instead? Forced to be FOSS, put into maintenance mode and offer it as a truly user-focused browser instead of driven by any for-profit company (which will eventually run it into the ground).
Chrome is already FOSS, and there is no shortage of forks, including Edge.
The only part that isn't is the brand, and the ties with Google. And I am not a fan of the idea of a (foreign in my case) government browser, I'd rather have Google. At least, Google has a presence in my country and is bound by its laws,
Chrome is not FOSS. Chromium is FOSS. Chrome is a proprietary fork.
Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.
> Yep, move it into an independent non-profit foundation and have the government fund its development through taxes as a public good software that benefits everyone. The idea makes sense, which is why it'll never happen.
Or turn it into a tightly regulated natural monopoly, a la a public utility.
But I totally agree with you: some things should just be state-owned. We should put our energies into identifying those things and addressing any legitimate concerns (e.g. spying via requiring open source and reproducible builds) instead of trying to free market all the things.
Yeah, let’s put Trump in charge of the most popular browser in the world. What could go wrong?
New Gemini models are quite good, Gemini 2.5 Pro is 1st in the user-benchmarks [1]. They also have Gemma, very good model that can run locally [2]. Benchmarks are not oracles of truth, but I feel like Google is not a kid who arrived late at the party anymore.
Totally agree, I stopped visiting Ars Technica because a lot of the "journalism" is reports on Elon Musk and reposts from Hacker News. It is very clear some of their writers just watch for what is popular on this site then write about it (which is not bad in itself, they just don't put more effort than the original report on it).
The original Ars I had bookmarked and visited every day. With seriously in depth articles about computers. When they got bought out it quickly became attention seeking with very shallow articles. It has not gotten better. I had honestly forgot they existed.
> it quickly became attention seeking with very shallow articles
Welcome to the internet post-2008
Two of top Chrome co-founders, beng and darin, who are also Firefox alumni, are now working at OAI. It's rather surprising if they do not build a web browser. These are browser people.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bengoodger/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/darin-fisher-7059ab/
I think it's less about the difficulty of forking versus buying Chrome and more about not wanting to compete with a Google owned Gemini enabled Chrome
> I honestly wonder whether they even have to buy Chrome.
Momentum. Any change of direction they take after such a purchase is taken by a huge number of current users whether they like it or not (unless they dislike it enough to make the effort to switch their daily driver browser).
> They can just fork it.
That would result in much lower user numbers unless their changes are incredibly attractive. Most users will start where they are due, again, to product momentum.
WTF. I had the exact same idea. Why buy Chrome when Chromium is open source and there are existing successful forks (e.g. Brave browser) which managed to do it... Why pay $100 million for something you can have for free? It's not like Open AI would struggle to find users for their new browser... They could just advertise it "Download our new GPT Browser" on their website above the chat window.
This sounds a bit clickbaity, they could just fork Chromium and build their own version as Edge or Brave. After all, they already have the distribution (ChatGPT).
The title is clickbait. Most of openai's comments were about their desire to have access to google's index. They also discussed how open AI is thinking about creating a chrome Fork to compete with Google Chrome. The specific part where they mentioned wanting to buy chrome was a hypothetical muse:
> According to Turley, OpenAI would throw its proverbial hat in the ring if Google had to sell. When asked if OpenAI would want Chrome, he was unequivocal. "Yes, we would, as would many other parties," Turley said.
If they get chrome they can push updates to the already existing user base.
They’d be buying the user base.
I guess most people use chrome because it is the default. Some people think I don't have internet because I don't have a chrome icon.
Surely they'd be wanting to buy 3.5billion users, though?
I actually wonder what the price tag is for that, lol.
That's it, if Chrome goes independent and / or is opened up for purchase, it's a very attractive target for companies for data harvesting. I mean I'm sure Google does as well (and got in trouble for e.g. incognito mode not being as incognito as advertised), but they keep it under wraps and make sure to not scare people off.
So if Google sold off "Chrome" to OpenAI for billions. Now that OpenAI can push whatever update or search to Chrome as default. Assuming they have use of it.
What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code? And market the hell out of it on its Web property?
> What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code? And market the hell out of it on its Web property?
Probably a court order, no? If you’re ordered to sell something, can you just recreate it immediately?
I dont know I have no idea. Could a court ruling bar certain entity from doing business in certain areas? Because That sounds silly to me. I wont be surprised if it was in other countries such as China, or EU , UK and Canada.
But US? The place that is perhaps the most pro Business or capitalistic on earth?
> What would stop Google to build another browser say Information Explorer with the same engine and code?
The courts. The courts would stop them. The entire premise for Google selling-off Chrome is a mandate that they divest themselves from the business itself.
Chromium would be hard to relicense due to copyright but trivial to fork.
So, chromium won't go away. Those 1000+ people are the main resource here. Effectively they work mostly on chromium and not on chrome. What happens to chromium if that stops?
My guess is MS might step up and hire people.
I assume a condition of the sale would be a contract to pay OpenAI $XX B/yr for the default search.
> But who would buy it? An OpenAI executive says his employer would be interested.
These days, OpenAI seems to be leaning more toward expending its business beyond AI. Not sure why, but they may have come across a roadblock that is holding them back from achieving AGI soon. The past few days we heard that they maybe in the process of building a social network [1] and the willingness to buy the AI IDE, Windsurf [2].
Also, from the article:
> Among the DOJ's witnesses on the second day of the trial was Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT at OpenAI.
Perplexity has also been asked to testify in the Google DOJ case [3] and their opinion about Chrome was:
"Google should not be broken up. Chrome should remain within and continue to be run by Google. Google deserves a lot of credit for open-sourcing Chromium, which powers Microsoft's Edge and will also power Perplexity's Comet. Chrome has become the dominant browser due to incredible execution quality at the scale of billions of users"
_________________
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43694877
MMW: This will be the death of Chrome.
I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising. With their own browser they control the full length of the wire between the ad-server and the user. Without it, they don't. Only way I could see this happening is if Google then released what they considered a better browser.
> I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising. With their own browser they control the full length of the wire between the ad-server and the user. Without it, they don't.
They've already been convicted of anti-trust behavior for precisely this reason. Now the trial is in the remedy phase where the DOJ is asking that they be forced to divest ownership of Chrome and other properties.
Google will have no choice in the matter. It's entirely up to the judge at this point.
Up to 'the' judge', plus the many other appellate judges, unless DoJ and Google come to an agreement and Google decides not to appeal. Google can both appeal the original verdict and any remedies.
> I also do not see Google parting with something so critical to their advertising.
This is not really their choice at this point. They were already found to have abused their position so it's up to a judge to decide what Google has to to next. Google doesn't need "a browser", they need a tool that allows them to exercise more control and this whole court case is about preventing that.
OpenAI is just looking for new ways to funnel data into the training of their models. And I'm afraid so many people would eat it up as long as OpenAI gives them some AI candy in return.
> deep-pocketed corporations pay huge amounts of money to pay for open source products.
There are many names for this: co-opt, assimilate, bribing ...
A lot of times it is like when Tony Soprano offers you a deal, or like when the U.S. made the NAFTA deal with Canada and Mexico.
It feels good and awesome at the beginning but later on, when you become dependent on it, you'll have to pay an heavy price.
Chrome: unilaterally disables uBlock Origin
Mozilla response: mess around with Firefox's privacy notice in such a way that it generates _negative_ press
Potential future Chrome: gets bought by OpenAI
Estimated future Mozilla response: "every time a user installs Firefox, a healthy tree is chopped down, the wood is used to create bats with the user's name engraved on them, and the bats are used to hit endangered animals"
Make default search be a version of ChatGPT and put ads on it? Could work (I wouldn't use it though). The way a lot of people use their browser they might be fine with it if it puts navigation-type links up top (I have literally seen a technical colleague with a PhD do a Google search for "x" and click a link rather than type the ".com"). The inference costs would surely make it hard to profit from though.
Having just closed a $40 billion USD funding round [1], OpenAI might actually be able to afford a fair price for Chrome (supposedly $15-20 billion USD [2]).
[1] There are some catches to that: https://www.investopedia.com/openai-closes-up-to-usd40b-fund...
Google won't even make sure that the ads they show you above the search results are safe
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/01/the-great-goo...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the DOJ requires Chrome to be sold off ... they would also not allow the new owner of Chrome to get revenue from search engines to be the default search engine.
In which case, what is the monetization model for the new owner of Chrome - other than just buying a daily portal where users go?
> if the DOJ requires Chrome to be sold off
The DOJ doesn't require anything. They are the ones arguing for Chrome to be sold off. The federal court is the one that would require a particular remedy outcome to the anti-trust conviction.
> they would also not allow the new owner of Chrome to get revenue from search engines to be the default search engine
There would be no such mandate. Google will be allowed to pay the new company to be their default search provider. And other search providers can bid on that opportunity as well.
Google itself just cannot own the business end-to-end as it does now.
But related, isn't the DOJ targeting Mozilla for exactly what I described above ... that because Google can pay so much for being the default search engine - it's not creating an environment for fair competition.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-r...
The DOJ / FTC / W3C / SEC / whomever vets all of the entities purchasing a share of the Chrome userbase. Part of the purchase agreement would be to have the update and development infrastructure in place and commit to updating their version of the browser and making good faith efforts to adhere to W3C standards for the next 3 years.
Once the sale details are finalized, Google pushes out a final update that changes where the next update to Chrome would come from (and it would be a random selection from the list of buyers).
I guess they could effectively copy Kagi's model at mammoth scale - offering a premium internet browsing experience with a 'personalised assistant'.
Easy to convince at least 10% of the users to sign in to their browser with a verified credit card to 'protect the children', and governments around the world would give you full support.
At that point, would be trivial for them to track browsing habits, and then to start offering personalised assistants which save you time and eventually cost money.
Pretty sure you could save money throuh having a huge botnet of computers to tap into, and a huge amount of data to help cache and standardise common requests.
Chrome/Chromium's value is in the development momentum. You can pile up features, manipulate the entire web, and make it impossible to compete for others. This is what they're trying to buy. A fork isn't enough - there's a huge difference between a technical fork and a meaningful fork.
I have the latest S25 (regular not the oversized +) and it does a lot of AI first like things. It can see what's on the screen, summarize your day, circle to search etc.
I disabled most of it within a few days because it mostly gets in the way of normal basic things like taking screenshots or just reading my actual notifications in full.
The picture editing can be nice, but realistically there's just no need for most of its 'support', it's just clippy on your phone getting in the way.
Chrome is installed on (almost?) every Android phone. So they'd be buying much more than this.
Not a new "AI phone", which has to gain traction, find users, convince people to switch, compete in highly competitive (hardware( and duopolized (OS, Software) landscape.
I won't be suprised if amongst Android users, Chrome is one of the most installed apps - if only because many phones have it locked (i.e. its really hard or impossible to remove).
Maybe "Google Assistant" is installed more than chrome, IDK. But Chrome has the additional benefit that it is also installed on many iPhones. Sou Chrome would be a gateway into "making your iPhone an AI phone" too.
It kind of shows the state of Indie development over the last 2 decades that it's only the big players that can move mountains. Linux on the phone never happened, and it seems like we are all resigned to the fact that the future AI phone OS/AI browser will be made by the titans and not anyone else. Even if it came out of the open-source scene the titans just buy the damn thing.
Opera is owened by a Chinese entity today. Buying it can be much harder in today's environment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/11/business/dealbook/china-o...
It would be even easier to make a minimum effort fork of chromium. What would be the point though?
I don't know what's going on here but it sounds like "Hey, I want to take your wife and have sex with her". Gotta read between the lines here. I think Google has a 14% stake in Anthropic. Along with Gemini, Chrome and Android as delivery vehicles, and search. The monopoly lawsuit is about this (the advertising ship sailed long ago, so what's this really about), and there's some nasty legal talk going on here. I think if they just give up the Anthropic stake and promise to allow any AI provider in chrome, then this nonsense will all end.
/tinfoil
Honestly, Google should sell Search to OpenAI. And keep Chrome and the rest of Google. It will be contrary to what the DOJ intended. But it makes sense for Google and Open AI.
By making search an AI first experience, both behemoths will signal the new dawn of AI is here.
Google’s greatest advantage is the use of AI in drive and docs and presentation and excel and cloud services.
I don't even use chrome and this sounds miserable.
I had to run it for something the other day and immediately got nagged to remove uBlock Origin because they automatically disabled it. And I'm just thinking.. I will never, ever use this browser for anything other than light dev work if I really needed to.
And you all still won't use firefox, mostly for silly or dumb reasons.
As annoying as chrome can be under Google, i'd hate to imagine the dumpster fire it would become if run by OpenAi, as an "AI-first experience".
I think you're missing what makes consumer companies valuable. It's all about distribution. They get way more data (usage, browsing, etc.), they get 3.5 billion users (this is the main thing) and they get to be the interface for all those people onto the web. I just don't think they can afford it.
They've consumed yesterday's web.
Why not get the user to pay the energy and processing bill for subsequent rounds?
Being able to track the habits of 3.5 billion users at source is probably quite useful, too.
This is the problem with breaking Chrome out of Google. It’s not just OpenAI, but the constellation of potential buyers is short and problematic.
Is Apple a good buyer? Oracle? OpenAI? NVIDIA? The Saudis? (I think I’m kidding about that?)
Someone is going to buy this for $100B and find a way to make a (big) profit off of it. I’m not sure the new landlord is going to be less rapacious than the last one was.