Weekend Poll: If Google's Forced To Sell Chrome, Who Would You Want To Buy It?

Do you remember a pre-Chrome world? It probably depends on your age. Personally, I feel like I’m right on the cusp, having grown up in an Internet Explorer-dominated era throughout most of my childhood. By the time I graduated high school, though, Chrome was everywhere. On your computer, on your phone, on school computers — it was difficult to get away from, and that’s only grown more true as all of our lives have grown more connected.

In fact, I’m just young enough that my first non-IE browser wasn’t Chrome, but Firefox. My family purchased our first “modern” desktop PC in 2006 after I got an iPod nano for my birthday (no, Windows 95 did not support iTunes, thank you for asking. It did pretty much whatever a “family” computer needed to in the mid-2000s, but once we’d upgraded away from dial-up (again, thank you iTunes), it became obvious just how much of a headache Internet Explorer was.

For whatever reason, every time you dared to open a new IE window, our tower PC would freeze. Sometimes it was 20 seconds, sometimes it was long enough to go make a sandwich. Getting online was painful, to say the least. Despite being 11, I was the one who finally realized it was a browser issue, not an internet connection issue, which is how I ended up teaching my entire family how to use Firefox. It became the browser of choice in my household until Chrome rolled around right as I was starting high school, and as I said up top, Google would come to win the browser wars by the time those four years were up.

Today, Chrome is a completely different beast than what first arrived on PCs in the late ’00s. For one thing, speed is no longer the name of the game. Google’s browser uses more of my laptop’s RAM than any Adobe application I’ve ever used, right alongside most video games and other intensive apps. This job basically requires a handful of pinned tabs open all the time, and they routinely drain upwards of half a gigabyte of memory each. It’s, in part, a consequence of our resource-heavy modern internet, but Chrome certainly isn’t helping.

Look, you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain, and these days, Chrome is something of a villain. It’s not just being a RAM hog that has some browser experts looking elsewhere. Google’s decision that ad blockers are actually dangerous tools that its user base must be protected from has been a thorn in the side of millions of uBlock Origin fans, while for some, last year’s Incognito mode settlement was more than enough reason to leave Chrome in the past.

All of that brings us to this week, where the discussion of a potential Chrome sale got serious. In November, the Justice Dept. declared Google to sell its browser in order to appease the government surrounding its search monopoly. And with the remedies trial underway, some of Google’s most notable rivals — past and present — have emerged from the woodwork to try and swing things their way. OpenAI, Perplexity, and even Yahoo have all stated their respective interest in buying the browser, while DuckDuckGo straight up said it can’t afford it.

Obviously, Chrome’s deterioration into the very thing it sought to destroy — a bloated, overcontrolling browser — and the DoJ’s decision to seek a browser sale as a monopoly remedy are two very different cases, but they could come together to demonstrably change how you browse the web today. Imagine if OpenAI does take over Chrome, or Perplexity, or even Yahoo. I truly cannot comprehend what browsing the internet even looks like in that universe, and yet, with politicians on both sides of the aisle

Personally, I’m all for some kind of browser shake-up. Chrome gets the job done, but I’m not particularly happy with it for all of the reasons outlined above. What’s worse, though, is that a good alternative really doesn’t exist. I’ve found Firefox a little too cumbersome for my liking — perhaps I’m not giving it enough of a chance, though — while the vast majority of other options remain powered by Blink, feeling more like skins to Chrome than actual choice.

I’m not sure a sale solves my problems, and I’m not sure any of those brands are the names I’d trust to take over the browser I rely on for my job. But I do think it’s time we see something in the browser space change, and a sale of Chrome could be the move we all need. So, who would you like to see buy Chrome, should a sale happen? Are you going old-school with Yahoo? Diving into AI with OpenAI or Perplexity? Are you starting a GoFundMe for DuckDuckGo? Let us know in the poll — and comments — below.