Google says Chrome will suffer if it’s forced to sell the world’s most popular web browser

• Parisa Tabriz, general manager for Google Chrome, testified Friday during the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google’s illegal monopoly in the search market. Tabriz said it’s impossible to “disentangle” Google from the success of Chrome, adding she doesn’t “think it could be recreated” elsewhere.

Google believes it’s the only company that can operate Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, and that it would suffer in anyone else’s hands.

“Trying to disentangle that is unprecedented,” Parisa Tabriz, general manager of Google Chrome, said in federal court Friday.

Tabriz said Google Chrome is the result of “17 years of collaboration” between the Chrome team, Google, and the companies that submit technical contributions to the company’s open-source Chromium Project, which is also utilized for several other Google projects like the Android operating system. “Google invests hundreds of millions of dollars” into Chromium, Tabriz said, but noted other companies “are not contributing now in any meaningful way.”

Over the course of several hours on Friday, Tabriz made it clear that Google being forced to sell Chrome, which is what the Justice Department has asked it to do (as well as sharing some of the data it collects to power search results), would ultimately hurt Chrome. 

“I don’t think it could be recreated,” Tabriz said of Chrome’s success under Google.

Tabriz also mentioned the Chrome team is currently working to bake artificial intelligence into the browser to make it more “agentic”: in other words, Google wants Chrome to be able to automate tasks on behalf of users, from filling out forms to doing research to shopping.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com