[T-Winsnes]

I think you underestimate the value of controlling the platform that you base all your revenue from. Chrome controls the internet and android has a huge market share on mobile.

The latest changes to chrome that breaks plugins like ublock origin allows them to keep maximising their advertising revenue.

I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted. It isn’t direct revenue, but the control and indirect revenue that comes from that which is the driver

[hzia]

I think you are drastically overestimating the revenue gain from ad blockers

But I agree that default search with being Google must have heavily blocked competition.

Comparing how much they pay Mozilla and Apple to maintain search, it would be reasonable to estimate Chrome’s implementation to save them $1b a year

But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

[thayne]

Possibly a greater benefit to Google is the influence it gives them over web standards.

For example, if google didn't control the most popular browser, they probably would have had to say goodbye to third party cookies a long time ago, but since they do they've been able to delay it for quite a while, at least for a considerable portion of users.

[Kbelicius]

> I think you are drastically overestimating the revenue gain from ad blockers

I think you are underestimating it. There must be a reason why google is trying to work around ad blockers on their platforms.

> But I highly doubt they make any back given > 1k people work on it

Where did you find that number? I highly doubt it. Maybe if you are counting contributors to chromium.

[lolinder]

What you're describing is why Google is willing to sink money into Chrome, and you're right. But that doesn't mean that Chrome can become a viable independent company.

Chrome synergizes with the rest of Google's portfolio.

[shiroiushi]

>android has a huge market share on mobile.

Not in the US they don't; it's a minority share, split across many different manufacturers who all have their own flavor of Android, their own (crappy) app stores and pre-loaded crapware apps, etc. Apple has a clear majority of the US smartphone market (and it's a vertical monopoly, with Apple controlling the phone hardware and the app store and not allowing any alternatives), but no one's looking at breaking them up.

>I think these two being open source is a major reason why they have been so successfully adopted.

iOS isn't open-source, and it has a commanding majority of the US smartphone market.

[sciurus]

If these measurements are correct, iOS has about 11% more of the US market share than Android.

This is very different from the global market share, where Android has 45% more.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ios-vs-android-market-s...

[kelnos]

> Not in the US they don't

I'm not sure in what world 42% isn't huge when it comes to market share. iOS having a majority isn't really relevant to this point.

And regardless, GP didn't say "in the US"; globally, they are far ahead of iOS. Sure, this anti-trust action is a US matter, but a break-up would absolutely affect Google globally.

[briandear]

Windows isn’t open source. Perhaps Office and Windows should be broken up? They have far more market share comparatively speaking. The fact that most of the enterprise run on Microsoft could be more concerning than an consumer App Store.

[IX-103]

People keep bringing up Manifest v3 like it's some evil plot to show people ads. Nevermind that Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads.

The fact is that with the Spectre mitigations added to Chrome, the performance of networking with manifest v2 was bad. Having to keep sending every network request through 3 different processes just in case there is a plugin (uses by the minority of users) that wants to filter the requests before they are made.

Of course, blocking resource fetches like that could have easily been detected by any server that cares about it, and the interaction with service workers was...weird.

With manifest v3 you can still block ads. You can remove them from the DOM, you can make them invisible, you can replace them. You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter - only a declarative model for resource filtering is supported.

[kelnos]

> Chrome already ships with its own adblocker which blocks bad ads.

No it doesn't, because I define all ads as bad, so Chrome's ad "blocker" is does not even remotely meet my needs.

> You just can't programmatically decide which resources to filter

That "just" is doing a ton of work there. Declarative ad blockers aren't terrible, but they're not great either. And I don't want my browser fetching ads (which could also be malware) at all. Downloading them and then hiding them is insufficient.

[rockskon]

Bad ads?

No, that is horseshit.

The goal of blocking ads isn't to only allow in "good ads".

It's to block ads. Not some ads. Not a few ads. Not just malware delivered via ads. Not just Google's competitors.

It's to block ads. All of them. To stop the relentless harassment of the advertising industry claiming other peoples' screens and time as their own.

[lupusreal]

All ads are psychological warfare being waged by corporations against the public. They ruthlessly exploit human psychology to sell product.

[ledauphin]

it's at the very least an evil plot to stop users (and extension authors) from _making their own decisions_ about the efficiency trade-off.

which is really just absurd when you think about it. I don't care about another hour of battery life, but even if I did, I'd be perfectly happy if Chrome just told me "hey these extensions aren't very battery-efficient!" and I got to make my own decision about that.