we had an intern ask AI what it could to to completely enshittify the browser. the AI simply responded, “put me in coach!”
You know how we thought " How could chrome get any worse?" well, we have an answer.
Validating my years old decision to use Firefox
Are these fucks stupid? Chromium is open sourced. They can do it themselves
They don’t want to buy the browser. They want to buy the brand and the users. Chrome makes up over half the browser market. Think of all the data they could extract from Chrome users. It would cost significantly more to fork chromium and grow the user base to a point where they could extract anything valuable from them, and that’s assuming they’d be successful enough to make it happen.
There is no way Google would sell Chrome. But you can bet at least a thousand engineers are working on bolting Gemini onto it right now.
There’s no way Google would voluntarily sell Chrome. Unfortunately for them, they might be forced to sell Chrome.
No, MS just wants to expand their monopoly, but “MS buying most common browser, after antitrust laws already forbid internet explorer” doesnt ring so well.
I suspect Altman has ambitions beyond being Microsoft’s cat’s paw, though it may be that that’s all he really is once the shouting is over.
Existing userbase
I like to think if people want whatever it is OpenAI thinks browsers need AI for, the userbase will manifest itself.
Suuuuure
Great! Now not only can chrome eat all my system memory, it can use all my GPU memory at the same time! It’s genius!
Likely it’ll use the cloud for processing, you’ll just get really hard-to-opt-out AI features, like “prompt by default” and “AI autocomplete”, which you can only “snooze” as they’ll automatically be turned back on the moment there’s a “great new feature”, like putting a filter on by default on image generators to fool the eye that it’s made by real artists.
When a company considers buying Chrome because it could help them extend the reach of their product, they are fucking drunk and need to go home. This would be like buying the state of Nevada so you could put up billboards all over Las Vegas.
Well, killing off Chrome would probably be a good thing.
don’t they already have brave for that?
What does Brave have to do with it? It doesn’t even have ChatGPT’s models as an option.
it’s crypto trash
And is OpenAI somehow related to crypto?
crypto and ai are two sides of the same garbage
They’re really not. They’re completely unrelated.
Isn’t Google going to do it themselves?
WTF? Just download it for free.
Chome is already dead… it’s just a zombie.
This can’t happen. Not because I think google is doing a wonderful job, but it’s got serious market share now. Basically a monopoly. It needs to leave the hands of for profit companies and be transitioned to a foundation.
And if you thought there was some natural end point to enshittification, here’s your evidence that there’s no such thing.
Chrome or Chromium project?
I’ve said this before and will say it again. The only tech companies that should be allowed to buy Chrome are Canonical and its equivalents.
Isn’t Canonical up to some crummy schemes, too?
Sure but not by at least an order of magnitude
