I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
What's wrong with Firefox? I've used it as my main browser for the best part of 20 years now and have no issues.
The last time I used Chrome there were ads all over the place because the ad blockers don't work properly anymore (I'm guessing because of manifest v3)
as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder.
try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find)
this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles.
- can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one)
- you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain
(my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN).
there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
I currently have 8260 tabs open across 9 windows, and that's just on my main laptop, across all devices I probably have over 20k tabs, and I don't really have any issues regarding tab management.
I used to have issues with Firefox randomly nuking my state on load and having to restore backups, but now I use Tab Session Manager for that and never think twice about it.
Not who you're talking to, but there is none. Browsers have had "Bookmark all tabs" functionality for ages, which completely replaces tab hoarding. Especially now that the content of the page you visited 5 months ago isn't actually loaded in memory. It's basically a bookmark, switch to the tab and the content is reloaded.
Yes, I am aware of bookmarks, and as someone who used to use them quite a lot, I'm aware of their limitations. Some things are just ephemeral and should remain so. Browser search is great. As you mentioned, tabs lazy load so the main functionality is the same, so it's presumptuous to assume I get no value out of my organizational strategy.
Do you have FF's higher levels of privacy protection enabled? With fingerprinting protection enabled, image uploading breaks. oAuth doesn't seem to work properly on some sites. Enabling encrypted DNS breaks captive portals or private VPNs.
its really easy to configure FF to break the internet.
FF for Linux will have a different team from FF for MacOS or FF for Windows.
Given how different each OS is, they will have different internals.
You don't see the same kind of performance degradation on other browsers on MacOS like Chrome, Safari, Orion, Brave, Arc, or even Edge.
It's a uniquely FF issue, but I'll deal with it as long as uBO is blocked on Chrome.
And saying "migrate to $myFlavorOfLinux" is an unrealistic answer for most users, because even though Linux has progressed leaps and bounds, it's user experience still requires a fairly technical background so that limits personal usage, and isn't offered as a default OS option by most IT teams who give corporate laptops.
Linux as a personal OS will be limited as long as a Linux project that is actually lead by an actual UX Designer instead of an OS enthusiast doesn't arise. Elementary OS shows some promise, but it still has UX and workflow issues that deserve attention from a professional UX designer instead of OS devs alone.
The various Android flavors are a great example of how if you put UX minds to work on an OSS project, you can end up with a quality user experience, but most Android projects also enforce a common design language and support non-CLI based user workflows, whereas most Linux oriented projects overindex on technical users, leading to the chicken-and-egg situation for Linux adoption.
I personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.
Lol it's more like a death grip since nobody can compete with their ad business model.
There is almost no innovation in the browser space outside of more and more tracking ...
I'd argue that depends on what you mean by "innovation" -- Google has been pretty busy, meaning specifically developers on their payroll, churning out more or less useful Web API implementations, certainly at a far more frantic pace than people traditionally _blamed_ browsers of yester-decade for. Nevermind that some of these APIs are more haphazardly designed than others, truth be told most of them are okay and are aptly designed so it's not a critical issue (for Web developers or Chrome's market share). Google co-authors most Web standards and implement them often _before_ the "standard" is published (for better and for worse; anti-trust allegations, I am looking at you). But they're not idle, one thing's for sure. Markedly different than how I remember Microsoft resting for months if not years on their IE laurels, like a CO2 blanket in a room that evacuated all the air.
So yeah, how would you describe this lack of innovation you're referring to?
There can always be more innovation that isn't of the sort I described above, but Web _is_ made of Web APIs -- if a website cannot "do" it, you as a user of the site, won't be able to experience it, is my crude opinion. But I'd love to hear examples to the contrary, illustrating innovation that isn't Web APIs.
Removing tab-based browsing (an anti-pattern if you ask me)? Optimizations (speed, size, etc)?
I mean in term of user facing change. Vertical tabs is still presented as an innovation ...
Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.
More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.
Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.
Edit:
> churning out more or less useful Web API implementations
Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...
"benevolent" is an interesting word choice. I wouldn't consider them having positive intentions for users, but rather focused on financial gain and market power at any cost. Though if Apple owned would be anti non Apple customers, if most other companies owned would end up monetizing it as well but without the resources of Google. Or if government owned would remain stagnant. So not sure what the right path is.
> Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
I don't see how - it's a more than serviceable browser. The only issues I've ever had were because a webapp detected I wasn't using a browser of choice and blocked me specifically, which isn't really firefox's fault.
I guess I prefer chromium dev tools over firefox's but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I only was able to use the firefox ones.
I get the feeling this Perplexity guy is a mix of SBF the bitcoin dude with the Palantir guy but actually dreams to be early Elon, or a troll. Maybe another another deep state plant? If we really want to go that road..
Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
Genuis. The ultimate way to bypass all AI bot crawling blocks. Just make every chrome browser upload whatever they view to perplexity for training data^W^WAI summarizing.
Google has already seen most users [0] directly use AI search instead of clicking into a website.
It is fairly straightforward for an organization to start pushing recommended sites from an AI-driven search, and with even less pushback as most users simply assume the AI search is always true [0].
This also would mean Perplexity could differentiate from OpenAI or Anthropic as a business by being able to build a strong B2C play whereas the former have concentrated on Enterprise B2B.
You may be unaware that Google has lost an antitrust suit and that the DOJ has asked the courts to require Google sell Chrome. Whether or not Google can bribe their way out of it is yet to be seen, but they may not have a choice, so it's a pretty big one time opportunity.
That’s ultimately for the courts to decide but what’s at issue is not the control of Chrome itself but wether Google is allowed to offer a browser. Any browser.
People on this site seem to forget that courts can compel companies. Open-source is not a magic bullet that invalidates consent decrees. If Google is forced to sell off Chrome and forbidden from offering a browser due to their monopoly in the ad market, they can’t shout open-source and it no longer applies. Google could probably keep spending engineer hours working on Chromium, but wouldn’t be allowed to offer it bundled with its products, and have it on their own website.
Are they going to compel Google to not allow people to go to their sites? Even when it’s not the default search engine (Windows), they still voluntarily go there.
Who is going to fund the browser development? Is it going to be funded like Firefox dependent on Google ad revenue?
The only product bundled with Chrome are ChromeOS notebooks and Android phones and neither has a majority market share in the US.
And the customer base is still is going to voluntarily choose to go to Google search and YouTube like they always have. That’s where the money is. Windows still has the majority of the desk to market share and Google search is not the default. Yet people still choose to use Google.
As far as Chrome itself, every single desktop OS user except for those forced to use ChromeOS went out of their way to willingly download Chrome.
And how, pray tell, where all of these people made aware of Chrome?
Google made the first ad for its front page for Chrome. This is not in itself a problem, but Google has a monopoly in search and ads. They cannot be allowed to also have a monopoly in browsers. That’s the whole point of American monopoly laws. Once you have a monopoly, you can’t do everything you want. There are limits. Owning a browser is too much power in one monopolistic giant.
So let’s say that Google doesn’t own Chrome. Does that affect where Google actually makes its money? In 2025 when most people first by a Windows computer, do they use Bing or go to Google?
Google does not have a monopoly on ads. Billions are spent on ads on Facebook properties, Amazon, Apple (app store), TikTok. People choose to use Google for search and can go to any other search engine if they choose.
In 2025, Google search is so bad more and more people are using LLM based search tools.
While the vibes around Google Search are indeed bad, the numbers haven't shown a dip in usage. And it's not like Google has rested on its laurels. They're shoving AI in search as much as they can.
This is an extremely naive take. Sundar Pichai's claim to fame was getting the Google Toolbar and Chrome pushed into the Adobe Reader installer back in the day. So many OEMs were shoving Chrome and Google into their default loads that Microsoft had to make a "Bing Edition" of Windows for a bit with a lower price to include Bing and Edge as default, and have now outright blocked the practice I believe.
When you visit Google Search or Gmail on your default browser, you get at least one but sometimes as many as three separate popups telling you to install Chrome for "faster" ability to search/email.
Today many product vendors incorrectly claim that their website or service will only work on Chrome, and refuse to provide support unless you switch to it.
Oh, and my personal favorite: If you aren't the admin of a PC, Chrome malware-installs in the user profile folder so you can circumvent your IT department!
Google's power to force Chrome on people is insane, and as the government has now determined, illegally anticompetitive.
No I am honestly terrified that the industry is that bad. Good Lord. You're telling me you've never worked somewhere which has ever complied with a bare minimum IT security policy ever? Has nobody where you work heard of defense in depth? We have built a temple to madness.
I worked at Amazon - AWS Professional Services to be exact. They trusted their employees with admin access. You had to toggle an option and click on a box saying you would be responsible with admin access.
I think AWS knows a little bit about defense in depth…
Every blue badge employee at Amazon as far as I know has the ability to get Admin access by clicking on a button on the home built app.
You also might be surprised that in the last 8 years since working with AWS technology, I’ve never worked at a company where I didn’t have Admin access to an AWS account. At AWS we could create as many sandbox accounts as we wanted to with Admin access and every client I have worked with for thd pass five+ years I’ve asked for a none production account with the “PowerUser” policy + iam::* permissions - which is admin in all but name.
I am suppose to believe a random HN poster knows more about governing a large internal IT department - actually the second largest employer in the US and the largest cloud provider?
If so, I still know some people inside AWS. I’m sure they will be willing to back up a shit ton of money to your doorstep to teach them the error of their ways.
All I'm saying, is what you've told me is so foundationally bad that instead of being a sort of off-topic comment in this post, it should be the #1 headline on HN. I'm frankly stunned. I don't really care if I don't have enough authority to be believable to you or not, I never asked you to. But most community college professors for the IT trade degrees could explain it if you asked.
And oh, I'm sure Amazon folks would have some high buzzwordy reasons to suggest this is okay in their environment. Everyone bad at security does it.
Yes, because community college professors know the latest best practices from spending years in the industry working with large enterprises and managing employees at scale…
I would be shocked if most BigTech developers don’t have admin access to their computers and some type of MDM software that
automatically disable disallowed apps.
When was the last time you heard about an exploit to AWS’s or GCPs internal systems based on employee installed software? It might shock you, that it started at Google with the zero trust initiative. But AWS was rapidly moving away from requiring VPNs to gain access to any of their internal systems.
This is a completely bipartisan aligned issue. Trump's administration has basically said that Biden's antitrust enforcement is the one thing they did right (in their opinion). These investigations started under Trump 1, continued under Biden, and will likely be successfully enforced under Trump 2.
There's a lot of reason big corps were trying to get Harris to agree to fire Lina Khan in exchange for support: The only way they get out of this is a bribe. And we've already seen Trump is both happy to take the bribe... and still punish you anyways.
Perplexity buying chrome would be a disaster, it just feels that way. Every vibe I got from that company is not good. They would commercialize every aspect of the browser so fast, as in insert ads everywhere. Again I just get that vibe.
anyone who spends 10 years writing performance reviews and rebuilding a service they already rebuilt last year, all to collect RSUs, was never going to land us on mars
"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to accept the offer."
".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"
"I understand your concern, I really do.
But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!
Consider a gorilla.
The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens
A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it.
breathes heavily
The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.
We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.
Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson.
bows
"
---
Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news
"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"
"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
Hard to understand whether this is a positive or negative. Chrome is trampling the internet in favor of Google. Will Perplexity just make Chrome even worse than it is, or will they degrade Chrome's market share through incompetence? More competition in the browser space would be welcome, but I'm not optimistic.
How much of that would trickle down to the developers who worked on KHTML on which Chrome is based I wonder. They should feel pretty chuffed that their offspring has resulted in such a large valuation.
This is a troll right by Aravind? $34B is nearly double the valuation of Perplexity. I find it hard to believe so called “multiple investment funds” agreed to pony up that much cash. Kind of childish by Aravind.
But here's the thing, nobody can monetize that space as effectively as Google, except maybe Meta.
It's the same sort of confusion many people have about Google paying Apple. It's not just for the default position, it's a revenue-share for the ads seen by Apple users on Google's properties. Nobody has the same potential.
You just said the magic words, "nobody!", that's throwing the gauntlet in front of every major toxic masculine billionaire. Now Trump HAS to buy it, and show everyone. Musk HAS to buy it, just like how he showed everyone how to run Twitter. And of course, Bezos HAS to buy it to prevent them from using Chrome to destroy Amazon... Popcorn time!
I don't think any serious tech company with somewhat competent leadership would have any bit of trouble raising that much cash to buy Chrome if they had an accepted offer and ability to close.
This isn’t exactly projecting an image of solid leadership and thinking from Perplexity.
#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
Lol not a chance, remember that they got into browsers because that's almost the same tech for web crawling. It's a core tech for their 1T mcap company
They got into browsers to make sure all the google properties (all web based) worked really well and weren't held back by Microsoft's dead-ending of web browser development.
Not really. Google has Android first of all, and apps. So it's incorrect that all google properties are web based.
Second, web apps would work just fine on browsers like Firefox, Safari, and even IExplorer.
Thinking that someone would develop a browser so that their webapps work well is missing the point entirely. If the user trusts you enough to download your application and your engineers can write code that interfaces with the OS, you would just develop an native application. Writing a browser to write your webapps would just be incredibly inefficient, and as a side effect it would help your competitors.
Google developed a javascript engine to parse webpages with javascript, then they realized they basically had a browser so voila, and that they could slap search on the search bar, so voila they published a browser.