That’s fair - I should have said major browsers to be more clear. Edited above.

The overwhelming majority of development to Chromium is done by Google and not the open source contributors to the project. Maintaining a browser is not something that can be done for free as a hobby. It requires an army of full-time developers to sustain.

Given all of the major browsers except Firefox are using Chromium, the best case scenario for spinning off Chrome is that Microsoft would pick up the lion’s share of development to keep Edge up to date.

This is the same reason that all of the major Linux distributions have large foundations to support them.

The DoJ would do less harm to the internet if they just forced Google to sell off Search instead. Then they’d be an advertising and cloud services company that happens to maintain a major browser to serve their ads.

This is the right take. This move would be so deleterious to the way the internet works on a foundational level at this point, it’s almost ridiculous. It would impact the world less if the courts forced google to sell off Search.

The idea of who might have the assets to acquire this company and be an organization that would be preferable to Google maintaining control of Chrome doesn’t conjure many candidates. The best case scenario would be Microsoft, and they aren’t buying a browser company.

Completely agree with you, fuck Google, fuck their monopolistic business practices, fuck their increasingly surveillance driven operating model, and fuck their gutless leadership for allowing their company to be reduced to an advertising enshittification factory after becoming so deeply ingrained in the way the internet is used that it became a verb.

I think it’s less that young white men actively supported Trump because the Dems didn’t pander to them, and more that young, upper-middle class, suburban white men were altogether uninspired to vote because in either scenario, they wagered they’d be okay.

The lesson seems to be a very clear and unfortunate rebuke of women as presidential candidates, but very specifically black women, as Harris seems to have gotten even less support in this demographic than Clinton did. It’s shameful, but I believe that if Newsom had been the nominee and ran a near identical campaign, Israel and all, that he’d likely be president elect today.

It’s the worms. 🤫

They may not have gotten the memo that he dropped out, though. 🧐

This is fair. But at that point the same could be said of a Chromebook for her needs, which I’d venture is true for most people’s computing needs given entire swaths of the world do everything on a phone or tablet.

The Linux vs Windows debate is peculiar, because it really only applies to users who are more advanced than the average, arguing about problems that only arise when you want to do more demanding things with your machine like development and gaming. Your average user doesn’t care about any of the anti-monopolistic / FOSS reasons to use Linux, which makes the argument for them essentially “you should use this operating system that takes more work to use because it’s better for you for reasons you don’t care about.”

In order for Linux to become more mainstream, it needs to be able to exceed Windows’ performance and ease of use for gaming and productivity - which is challenging since when most users think of productivity apps, they only think of Microsoft products. It’s not enough to be equal in order to compel people to switch from what they’re accustomed to.