Love the top comment on ars:

Given that the market for paid web browsers is basically nonexistent and that Chrome exists as a piece of spyware to pass along its users' personal information to Google (and that does a bit of web browsing on the side), it's hard to imagine how Chrome would exist as a separate entity. Would it be bought up by some other search entity that needs a lot of user info? Would Chrome just pass along that info to the highest bidder? Or what?

The new owner continues collecting the data and sells in blocks to the highest bidder(s).
Chrome has 65% of the browser market , so theres a lot of data to distribute. Not every user will change browser immediately. And how will this affect the other chrome based browsers, not to mention Google/AndroidMicrosift web view
Proprietary
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Arc
Amazon Silk
Avast
Comodo Dragon
DuckDuckGo
Epic
Huawei
Maxthon
Microsoft Edge
Naver Whale
NetFront
Opera
Puffin
Samsung Internet
Sleipnir
SRWare Iron
UC Browser
Vivaldi
Primarily non-English

360 and QQ, for the Chinese market
Cốc Cốc, for the Vietnamese market
Yandex, for the Russian market
FOSS
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Brave
Dooble
Falkon
Konqueror
Otter
qutebrowser
Supermium
ungoogled-chromium

    Plobberfroth hope the new owner will be Brave and not that Chinese Opera. I miss the Opera from the pre-Chrome days.

    Speaking of Chrome, I blame them for the stupid version number wars. I'm old enough to remember when a change in version number (to the left of the decimal) actually meant something significant.

        router99

        It'll be interesting what happen with Google web view, play store, play protect, play services, partner setup and any other system apps integrated from Chrome into Android.
        This must be great opportunity for GrapheneOS developers to remove remnants of chrome code.

          router99

          I think it'll be either Apple or Microsoft to gleem more Android user data.
          Plus they have the funds to bid.

            router99 Hate to break the news, but Chrome is valued at somewhere between 15 and 20 BILLION USD. For some companies that might be chump change, like Apple, but for most - and especially Brave, this would bankrupt them many times over.
            Get ready for either
            A) Microsoft owned
            B) facebook/Meta owned
            C) Amazon owned (unlikely)

            Apple will never touch Chrome, because they have Safari. The only possibility they would buy Chrome, would be to bury it and establish Safari as a dominant browser. Which won't happen.

            I'd say Microsoft is the best candidate right now, in all honesty. No one really likes Edge anyway and they would have a very popular browser in their hands with the experience in browser development. Meta could have an incentive, because they have the ad network to finance Chrome, but they'd be in the same boat as Google if they did that.

            Pretty much everyone else would be burning money by buying Chrome.