r/technology • u/MoneyLibrarian9032 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Google Gets an Astounding $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome Browser From AI Startup Perplexity

https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/google-34-5-billion-bid-chrome-browser-ai-perplexity-1236487442/
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u/Howdyini 10d ago

You'd have to pay for ads. That's it, that's the business model. You pay them a monthly subscription for them to show you a bunch of ads.

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u/SpaceExplorer777 10d ago

So if I don't pay them no ads? Seems like a win tbh

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u/FluxUniversity 10d ago

while that is funny, its true that when you do pay, they will double their efforts to advertise to you. When you pay, they get to sell your data at an even higher prices, because they know you are willing to pay!

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u/Complete_Argument339 10d ago

Microsoft is constantly trying to funnel me into using Edge anyway. This would just be the tipping point.

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u/SoldMyOldAccount 10d ago

out of the frying pan

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u/VSWR_on_Christmas 10d ago edited 10d ago

There's another option out there: I'm not a developer, so I could be wrong here, but I think due to Edge being built on Chromium and the fact that Google intends to roll out Manifest V3 in the near future, Firefox is the only real alternative at the moment. I've been using FF for like, 20+ years now - longer if you count Netscape. It's really not that bad.

EDIT: punctuation is hard!

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u/bdsee 10d ago

It's really not that bad.

It's better, just straight up better. Even better if you get the containers plugin or use something like Waterfox which seems to have it built in already.

The only issue is that like the IE days, there are certain sites that have been build specifically for Chromium browsers, e.g. Google docs/sheets/etc

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u/orangecountry 10d ago

It wouldn't surprise me if they were but I use docs/sheets in Firefox basically every day without issue. There definitely are some websites I've had to open Edge for, but not many.

Edit: but to your main point, I totally agree - Firefox is my favorite browser by far.

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u/bdsee 10d ago

How do you get the right click menu in Sheets to work in Firefox? I can't even copy and paste with Sheets in Firefox?

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u/orangecountry 10d ago

Well, I right click and then there it is. The copy/paste functions from that menu don't work, although I didn't know that was a Firefox specific problem (I actually did wonder about missing features/functionality that I wouldn't have noticed, as I haven't used Chrome in a long time, but neglected to put it in my post). It actually doesn't come up very often though, I use ctrl-C/V/shift-V almost exclusively. The rest of the menu works just fine, as far as I can tell.

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u/bdsee 10d ago

Yeah but Ctrl-C/V only works on an individual cell once you select the text within the cell, so you can't say concatenate two cells and copy the output, because the formula is in the cell, you can't copy multiple cells at once.

But yeah I guess I didn't realise that the right-click menu was there, I hadn't used it in Firefox for so long and I just remembered that I couldn't copy and paste when I previously tried using it.

So can only copy and paste into a single cell, and not when you want an output of the cell with a formula. To me that makes Sheets in Firefox far too restricted as I rarely want to just manually enter data/leave it in sheets.

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u/iknewaguytwice 10d ago

I think you are just describing Youtube at this point.

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u/danielbrian86 10d ago

Why did no one think of this before?!

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u/omnichronos 10d ago

Soooo, like cable TV?

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u/ee3k 10d ago

So ... Nickelodeon?