So please enlighten us, how will someone make money from the free product that is free and no one pays for because it is free?
Selling user browser data obviously won't fly (and note that Google has never explicitly nor directly sold user's browsing data as far as I know, but they do have a huge ad network that utilises cookies...), so what's the plan? Put ads in the browser? "Premium" features?
The only thing I can think of is highjacking links to Amazon et al to insert referral codes en masse, or selling links/ads on new tab pages.
All of these are fine examples of how a not-Google Chrome could make money. They could even get paid by Microsoft or some other not-Google search for that traffic.
This isn't hard unless you're trying to make it hard to convince us all we should just give up and let Google continue running our online lives through monopolization.
Because all of that is super-shady privacy-invading and foisting ads and monetisation in places where it wasn't before. Enshitification at its most user-hostile. How is that a positive to users?
Sounds to me that taking chrome away from Google will be a net-negative for the users.
Can you change the chromium license so that rebranding/embedding/electron usage is now paid. Embedding is now a paid feature starting with 10000 installations. You can make selenium paid after certain scale.
The details could be worked out. The idea is to make big corporations pay while keeping it free for users.
Selling user browser data obviously won't fly (and note that Google has never explicitly nor directly sold user's browsing data as far as I know, but they do have a huge ad network that utilises cookies...), so what's the plan? Put ads in the browser? "Premium" features?
The only thing I can think of is highjacking links to Amazon et al to insert referral codes en masse, or selling links/ads on new tab pages.