Forget the Fate of Chrome, Focus on the Fate of the Browser

In this whole debate about the demand from the US Department of Justice that Google sells and/or spins-off Chrome it feels like we're talking right past a few obvious elements and realities.

The first is that a web browser remains the most-used and thus, most important piece of software for nearly everyone on the planet. This is especially true on desktops/laptops, but on mobile too as it remains the common denominator in our app environment. Through that lens alone, you can see why the DoJ thinks this is a good and powerful remedy. It's not clear they understand the broader ramifications of such an ask or even the feasibility of it, but still, you can sort of see what they're thinking. They wanted to take a big swing without demanding all of Google be broken up. This is a big swing.

The second is that unlike the default search placement and deal they're (rightfully, I think) worried about within browsers, using Chrome itself is actually a choice almost all users on desktops/laptops make. That's because beyond ChromeOS devices, most such devices are Windows or Mac machines. And these devices generally do not have Chrome installed out of the box.¹ You have to boot up Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari and yes, search for Chrome in order to install it. This is sort of a pain. And sure, Google uses prompts on Google Search at times to try to ease such actions, but this is something many users explicitly do.

Mobile, of course, is different since Chrome is the default browser on many, if not most,² Android devices around the world (but no iPhones, of course). And you could certainly argue that using Chrome on mobile creates a halo effect which causes people to use Chrome on desktop/laptop too. But the reality is that Chrome had won the browser wars long before this was the case. Chrome won the browser wars because it was a better browser, full stop. We can (and will below) argue about whether that remains the case, but that's largely because other browsers have copied many of the features and techniques Google introduced with Chrome – and/or are using Chromium itself, the underlying open source technology, to power their browsers. Including now... Microsoft!

Speaking of, while I'm now of the mind that there are better overall browsers than Chrome, including the one I use, Arc, there are a few issues/current market realities for why new entrants can't displace Chrome in the same way that Chrome displaced Internet Explorer (and Firefox). The market is simply far more mature now and inertia is a hell of a drug. People use Chrome because everyone uses Chrome – which really means everyone knows how to use Chrome. And websites are optimized to work with Chrome. Arc (and some others) get around that latter point by building on top of the aforementioned Chromium project. But the way they try to differentiate is through new features and UI and while I'm now a fan of what they do and offer, it took some learning and getting used to. Most people aren't willing to do that in 2024.

Perhaps if there was some fundamental shift in performance, but all of us have computers now that are beyond capable of running any browser without noting any real performance differences in day-to-day usage. Battery life was perhaps the one vector of attack against Chrome (largely because of the way they handled background tabs, which was a dual-edge sword) but while even though Safari was clearly lapping Chrome here on Macs for a while – and despite the fact that Safari is the default browser on the Mac – it wasn't enough to overtake Chrome. And now Chrome has taken some steps to alleviate some of those battery challenges.

Here as well, of course, mobile is a different story. Safari's huge market share is not because of its default status on the Mac but because of its default status on the iPhone. This is even more nuanced, but essentially Chrome on iOS is not really Chrome because it's forced to use Apple's WebKit technologies versus their own. Users don't care about this, but it obviously isn't an ideal situation for Google. Regardless, defaults matter more on mobile – hence, Google paying over $20B a year to Apple to set Google Search as the default on Safari!

More broadly, the reality remains that what is going to break the dominance of Google Search is not going to be another search engine, it will be something tangential out of left field. As such, asking Google to sell/spin-off Chrome is seemingly irrelevant to the DoJ's goal here. Perhaps if they forced a sale to a competitor that actually had the resources and will to support Chrome, but that would mean selling it to another tech giant, like Microsoft, or Apple, or Meta and there's no way they want that – all of those companies are also under investigation for other forms of antitrust, market dominance, etc. Also, as the testimony from Apple and others has made clear in various trials, the main search competitor right now, Bing, simply isn't good enough to replace Google even if they were offered more money to do so. Hell, even Microsoft admitted this! Perhaps after years of default placement and thus, usage, Bing would surpass Google, but the reality here remains that most people would probably just go back to using Google.

Far more interesting here is Microsoft's partner, OpenAI. And that's because ChatGPT seems like the most likely product capable of impacting Google Search. While the data suggests this hasn't happened yet, it's early. My own anecdotal data suggests that there is something to this notion, especially as ChatGPT grows more capable including with, yes, web search capabilities (currently powered by Bing, naturally, but that will undoubtedly shift over time).

I know many people that now at least say they use ChatGPT more often than Google. ChatGPT's new web search and Google's new 'AI Overview' results aside, they mostly still serve different use cases. If you're looking for a quick and simple answer for something, ChatGPT has been the way to go. If you're looking for a range of options across the whole web, it's Google. But it used to be that Google was the main option for all of this, ChatGPT is eating into some element of what search has been used for because it's better for those use cases. And again, ChatGPT keeps gaining more and more features. Chatting about something with a bot. Using your voice. Generating an image. Coding. Etc.

This was my answer when asked by The Washington Post yesterday what could actually make a difference here. It's not just the end of the default search payments; that likely has to be coupled with a product/service that's actually good enough to replace Google Search from Apple's perspective:

But companies such as Apple could still choose to use Google without paying for it. “It would only really change things if someone else is installed as the default,” Siegler said. The “wild cards” could be AI companies such as OpenAI improving their own search chatbots quickly enough to be able to replace Google on iPhones and other platforms, Siegler said.

That would be a hell of a second phase of an Apple/OpenAI partnership... But it would also require a lot more trust than the current deal for Siri integration. And, well, that is seemingly going in the opposite direction...

To beat the dead horse, what displaces Google Search is not going to be a search engine, but it's instead likely to be something that makes you use a search engine less. My own usage of ChatGPT suggests this is slowly happening to me. And if this spreads to other, more mainstream users... Here, OpenAI's main problem may be the many other rivals in AI including Claude, Perplexity, and others that fragment these new use cases. And, of course, Google, Meta, Amazon, even Apple (and yes, OpenAI's good friend Microsoft!) are working on their own products with basically unlimited resources in a world where resources matter.

Something in this current jumble of chaos feels like it will be what eventually displaces Google Search. But none of those have anything to do with Chrome other than they mainly run inside of it, just as other web apps do. A move towards "agents" could change this dynamic, with some early entrants likely focused on using the browser as the hub from which such AI operates – that likely includes both OpenAI and...

All that said, if Google were to leverage Chrome to give Gemini some sort of unfair advantage, that may actually matter. I'm honestly not sure the court is savvy enough to play this out and it's mainly theoretical for now – and you shouldn't litigate theoretical future problems as they may or may not happen, obviously. Still... it's worth considering in this whole debate.

And with that in mind, I do think it makes sense for OpenAI to have a browser. They shouldn't buy Chrome, nor should they be allowed to for all the reasons discussed. But they should do what Google did back in the day and build it from the ground up to tailor it for their own vision of the future of the internet – complete with a new "Omnibox" that is truly "omni". And so the reports (and hires) suggesting that they're working on such a browser makes sense, of course.

Now, you might argue that their resources are better spent working on what's next after a web browser. And yes, they should be doing that too – and seemingly are. But an OpenAI web browser product right now reminds me not of Chrome, but of Google's old toolbar for Internet Explorer back in the day. One of the early projects which, much like Chrome itself, was led by none other than... current Google CEO Sundar Pichai. This was their way to get a toehold in the market at the time. And it worked.

You might say that the ChatGPT Chrome extension – pretty aggressively installed and implemented alongside the new Search product – is OpenAI's version of this. And it may be. But I think a re-imagined browser tailored around ChatGPT would be better placed to gain a toehold within our current tech environment. Until we get to the AI wearable product or whatever is actually next.

Go back to that first point: a web browser remains the most-used and thus, most important piece of software for nearly everyone on the planet.

¹ I believe some OEMs install Chrome for out-of-the-box usage, maybe due to deals with Google, maybe not, though I'm not sure it's set to the default browser at first...

² Certainly in most Western markets, but not China...