this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2024
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And chrome from everything else too
Chrome doesn't make any money. How is it supposed to support itself as a separate company?
It defaults you to the Google web suite, where Google makes money on ads. And it harvests your data, which it can then sell to ad agencies as a tool to optimize targeted ad sales.
It doesn't have to be free. People used to pay for licensed software with money instead of their private data. We can do that again, or there's still open source options like Firefox and it's derivatives.
It does have to be free. It's open source software. If they tried to charge money for Chrome, people would just use Chromium or one of the other browsers based on it.
Chromium is open source. Chrome is not. Open source also doesn't mean that you can't charge for the compiled binaries. But that isn't my point. My point is that the reason it's free is that you're actually paying for it through the value of Google tracking and storing everything you do, but as a society have don't have to structure services this way.
Chrome and Chromium are 99.9% the same. Source: I used to be a Chrome developer at Google.