Google Being Forced To Sell Chrome is Not Good for the Web

The web will suffer should Google be forced to sell Chrome. I think a fair assumption that overall investment and contribution to the open web will take a dive.

Sure, there will be some canonical fork of Chromium that keeps the sure-to-be-shunned buyer company out of it. Sure, the Linux Foundation is getting their ducks in a row to have contributors ready. But I can’t see it going well.

It won’t happen overnight, but stagnation will set in. A stagnated web is incentive for the operating system makers of the world to invest in pulling developers toward those proprietary systems. The browser wars sucked but at least we were still making websites. Being forced to make proprietary apps to reach people is an expensive prospect for the rest of us companies of the world, it will probably be done poorly, and we’ll all suffer for it. Heck, those operating systems aren’t required to ship a web browser at all.

I don’t use Chrome and don’t trust Google to save my life, but you can’t ignore all they’re doing for the browser web development.