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> Google is using much less annoying banners to promote its browser. More importantly, only on its own websites!
In fairness, they only show the message on their website, but their website is most people's home page, and it is how most people would find an alternative browser in the first place. It's debatable whether it's actually less visually annoying.
Happily living on Firefox for several years now on my Macs. I wish I could quit more of both Google and Microsoft. But I'm an Apple-whore and I don't see myself quitting them anytime soon. I probably should though...
If this is fair and legal, why not have Google do the same things?
You're using Chrome and on the website to buy Office? How about an injected ad that says that Google docs is free and just as good.
Attempting to buy a Windows PC? How about an injected ad explaining how good ChromeOS is?
Microsoft are honestly insane to try to play these games with Google. Then again, I've read that 4% of Americans believe they could win a fight with a Grizzly bear.
The escalation here (moreso than the size/language) is that there appears to be zero indication that this banner is part of the browser chrome (unlike previous iterations). I believe that it is still technically browser chrome, but the UI is indiscernible.
There are echoes of the net neutrality debate here, where one might argue that: beyond the OSI Application Layer (HTTP etc.) there is also the Layer Where The Browser Decides What Pixels To Show, and that we would want that new layer to be every bit as neutral as, say, whether T-Mobile can shape lower-layer video traffic based on its business partnerships.
But there's also a lot of nuance here. Imagine there was a law or regulation that said that a browser manufacturer must only write code that is agnostic to the current URL; imagine it said, say, that Edge developers cannot deploy code that detects that Edge is on google.com/chrome and decide based on that information to execute certain code.
Unfortunately, a version of this per-site customization is arguably exactly what Chrome does for the HSTS preload list: https://hstspreload.org/ - and disallowing this would not be good for security at all!
And imagine if there is an urgent Chrome security fix that, as a side effect, causes the Outlook login screen to bug out - or any other mission-critical login page on the web. The most reasonable hotfix might be to push a quick fix that whitelists certain domains for the legacy behavior. But this, too, would be disallowed.
We definitely don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because Microsoft got a little cute - arguably too cute - here.
I'm on a new Windows 11 machine. It seems every other time that I receive a Windows update it resets my browser preferences. Talked with a friend who manages thousands of Windows 11 instances and he says it is a freaking nightmare for him.
I have good friends working for Microsoft and I am generally positive towards the company. But it is stuff like this that makes them rather hard to defend to their critics.
The problem with Edge is that it's become loaded with so many useless features. I like Chrome because it's fairly lightweight in terms of design. If I wanted a fully loaded browser I'd use Vivaldi.
Fuck Google and their internet monopoly, but I have to give it to them for not doing shit like this. If I had to pick a tech giant to run the internet, I'd rather have Google than Microsoft.
...although, fuck Google still (and the rest of big tech)
Google and Microsoft are two of the worst companies I have seen that have
no regard for the end user.
to them we're just dumb consumers - who don't know know anything or have no personal agency.
google will literally change your android settings on a whim, whether it's the
how the icons looks etc, colors whatever.
microsoft will try by all means to reset your personal choices about the applications you wanna use or the settings / preferences you want for your machine.
both these companies treat consumers as landlords treat tenants. as a pest merely
to be tolerated
MS, please fire everyone ok with this and focus on making great product not growth hacks.
The false goal of short term gains without good product foundation is like smoking 60 a day and pretending cancer doesn’t exist. My children will never know what a “Microsoft” is.
The problem with Edge is that Microsoft can't understand one simple thing: do not shitify user experience with wasteful default pages, nag popups, and questionaries. Nobody wants to waste their time on that! This is one of the core reasons Chrome is so popular: it's mostly a clear slate on the first run.
The same applies to Firefox (to a lesser degree though): it nags users with "What's new in Firefox" after every update. Nobody reads that anyway but it significantly worsens the experience by thrashing user's attention.
The narcistic attention seeking behaviors cultivate rejection.
> Google also shows banners to promote Chrome, but they appear only on the company's websites.
On Gmail for iPhone it is constantly pestering me about what browser I’d like to use to open links: the Safari I already have or Chrome that I don’t. And even if I leave the toggle for “ask me which browser to use every time” unchecked, I still have to deal with it.
As a side note, I’ve noticed I may have some sort of mild ADHD because every time I want to do something with my phone or computer it is constantly prompting me to solve some unrelated problem. It’s extremely annoying because it takes mental energy to remember what I was even trying to do in the first place. I thought popups were a thing of the past but no, they just look nicer now.
I tend to block these elements via ublock's node selector. I do thr same on youtube for all their "context" boxes that try to lie to you via appeal to authority.
I don't know how they didn't get fined for their decade-long Chrome spam campaign. They even used to bundle it with other software downloads, a la Ask Toolbar
People forget that when Chrome first came out, Google was paying to have it bundled alongside antivirus updates, and pretty much every other place they could shove it in.
At some point I gave up switching my mother's computer back to Firefox, there was no way I could keep Chrome off of her machine, it just kept getting installed.
On the contrary, search ad revenue is but a relatively small part of Microsoft's overall business. If you want to place bets search is a critical battleground for AI (Microsoft/Satya clearly seem to), it makes sense to attack them here.
For google, search revenue largely is the business. Every point Microsoft can take out of Google's search marketshare hurts Google far more than the reverse. Attacking Google's browser share will also reduce the number of people with Google search as the default.
Forcing Google to adopt more LLM/AI features will also significantly increase their cost per search query in the near term, if Microsoft can meaningfully change consumer expectations of search. These LLM queries are much more expensive to service today than a traditional search.
This is all the more interesting because for the first time ever Google have wobbled in their dominance of search, there might actually be an opportunity here for Microsoft. That was almost unthinkable a couple of years ago.
I personally don't see how this is any better or worse really than the billions of dollars Google pay Apple every year to secure the iOS default search engine setting, eliminating vast amounts of rival marketshare in a single move.
Lol! I can’t even use Google anymore because half the screen asks me to sign in even when I’ve repeatedly denied to do so when searching in Safari on iOS. I simply use DDG now.
Yeah, this is a huge breach of trust! Ads in the browser would merely be super annoying and unprofessional, ads injected into the content box of a competitor's website is downright scary. What's next? Blocking users from downloading Chrome outright?! Replacing the Chrome installer with a program that extols the virtues of Edge?!
Okay, I don't actually believe they would go that far. But if you'd asked me before seeing this article whether they'd even go this far I'd probably have said no, so who even knows at this point? Even if it turns out the misleading nature of this ad was unintentional, that's a pretty egregious oversight, especially since they had to know an ad in this context would be closely scrutinized regardless of how they presented it.
I don't particularly like edge but I'm happy someone is poking the bear. Chrome dominance is bad and is too much power in the hand of one company. Competition and diversity of browsers is good.
And yes, I am getting "login with google" modal on half of the websites I visit even though I don't even have a google account, don't use chrome, and don't want touch anything google.
> Then again, I've read that 4% of Americans believe they could win a fight with a Grizzly bear.
I bet I could. Maybe on a good day. Not, like, 9 times out of 10, but maybe 1 or 2. Sure, he outranks me in muscles and claws, but I can out-think him, and really, isn't our brain our most powerful muscle? Much like how the powerful and crafty coyote is more than capable of catching a roadrunner, even though the bird is ostensibly faster.
Ah fascinating, I honestly thought they were injecting HTML on Google's Chrome page, that's what it looked like, and I was wondering how in the world that was legal.
Your explanation makes a lot more sense, if it's part of the browser chrome, and only shows up when people visit the Chrome page, there's probably no legal boundaries crossed here or injection into other websites happening.
But man does that look like part of the website and injected in there.
Exactly this, Edge was #1 until they started adding stuff. At this point, I'm honestly expecting them to add a OBD2 VAG debugging application as a built-in feature...
Go look at the amount of times IsGoogleHost or HasGoogleHost are called from within Chromium. For instance, autofill works differently for Google-owned services:
> If this is fair and legal, why not have Google do the same things?
Google has never injected an ad from what I know, but they’re bad actors too.
- They push chrome when using Google via Edge
- If you login from Edge or IE the security warning email includes a huge ad for Chrome, or at least it did.
- On iOS they refuse to let you simply open links from YouTube in safari. They always prompt about what browser you want to use and ignore the default. The prompt is obnoxious, designed to make you misclick, and the app never remembers your choice.
Whenever I have to (re)install/setup Windows on a family member's machine, it's a miserable experience. The only silver lining is the petty satisfaction I get from watching Edge and Bing pathetically beg me to not install Chrome. I actually always type "Google Chrome" into Bing instead of going directly to chrome.com, just for the show.
I don't think there's a realistic baby-bathwater trade-off here. This is just leveraging, using your power in one market (PC operating systems) to gain a competitive advantage in another market (browsers). It's not some deeply technical subject the courts and legislators are incapable of understanding, they just haven't cared since US v. Microsoft ended.
No google took your (and your mum's) gmail sign in from the gmail website, intercepted it in their browser to log your /browser/ into their servers that have /nothing/ to do with email so they could better spy on you and build a better database about your online activity. Without your consent. Without your mum's consent. Knowing they didn't have it. Knowing exactly what they were doing when they did it and making shitty excuses pretending it was something anyone wanted.
They did it dishonestly, covertly and knowingly for profit. People should have gone to jail the same as if they broke into sergey and larry's houses and photographed everything and sold the pictures to the highest bidder while claiming "consent" because they typed the question into chrome which larry and sergey have decided to monitor.
The idea that Google is better than Microsoft is like arguing whether fresh horse manure is worse to eat than fresh cow manure.
Take each crook entirely individually.
Google is horrible, market abusing, foul, dishonest and needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.
Completely separately to that and in no way is it related:
Microsoft is horrible, market abusing, foul, dishonest and needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.
In the race to the bottom everyone who passes the threshold of acceptable behaviour in civilized, democratic society that upholds the rule of law and equality before it needs to dealt with separately in the strongest terms. "But s/he does worse!" is as ridiculous a defence as it sounds.
And when you look at what Apple are doing, google are not interesting.
And when you look at what facebook does, microsoft are not interesting.
And so on.
Break them up.
/me waves to the cia/fbi/nsa aplogists who clearly want them all big and controlled.
edit: pretty sure the thing I was responding to has been stealth edited away. @dang any news when you'll get a release showing a parent has been edited after being responded to in some way? Then at least we'll know they should have stuck an "edit: " description or something.
Google does not have clean hands here, they paid to have chrome bundled with all kinds of scummy (and not so scummy) software and made it really difficult not to accidentally install.