OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.
There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion.
There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.
>OS companies (particularly microsoft, who maintains a chrome fork already) seem like a good bet.
Great, so we go right back to the days of IE6. No thanks.
>There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested
These companies are viable because they get to outsource the bulk of the browser development and maintenance to Google for free. I don't think they can afford to buy and run the whole browser.
>There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron)
This is honestly the best scenario I can see of all the discussion I've read about this, and I'm surprised I haven't seen it brought up before. Still, from what I read on Wikipedia, Electron was spun off from Github (owned by MS now) and is run by a foundation with a bunch of tech company members, so going from this to a whole for-profit company for something that is basically just an open-source wrapper over Chrome's engine seems unlikely.
There are other browser companies (brave, opera, etc) who might be interested, though it would be quite a gamble for them to buy chrome in my opinion.
There's a lot of software based on top of chrome (via electron), which means a lot of money that cares about what happens to it, which could easily influence things.