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Comment by simula67 | Hacker News Reader

Google is acting more like Microsoft.

They are building huge moats around their business ( Android, Chrome etc ) so it becomes harder to use some Google products without using others.

Google discontinued 'Google Sync' ( https://support.google.com/a/answer/2716936?hl=en ).

It favors Google Finance and Youtube over its rivals in search results page.

They 'have not figured out' how to allow extensions in Chrome mobile.

They had no-poaching agreements with rival companies.

I am almost a Google fanboy, but I suspect they will be no different to Microsoft in a few years. Letting products stagnate, pushing the tech industry backwards but making a pretty profit for investors.

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To be fair, Chrome for iOS won't ever have extensions because Apple requires all HTML rendering to be done with their web viewer (which can be embedded in other apps), meaning that Google simply can't control the rendering of the page (and thus implement the majority of chrome extensions). The app is basically just a wrapper for the same browser that Safari uses.

Chrome on Android is a different story though. Firefox on Android allows you to use add-ons for the web version of Firefox with no fuss. Why can't Chrome do the same?

Because the very first thing many people would install is Adblock Plus.

Google, however, desperately needs mobile advertising, because people are using desktop/laptop PCs less and less (and more and more people use adblockers on these), and mobile advertising is the only space not yet "disrupted" by ad blockers.

I'm not sure how valid that claim is, since Content Blockers are a thing on iOS and I'm sure there are similar solutions on Android.

I think it's more towards the school of thought of 'if it isn't easy, most people won't.

Installing an ad blocker isn't as easy as installing an add on someone links, you have to actively search for it (and require root on Android? Not 100% sure about that. For chrome this is, I have ff on my Android).

If you want to block ads in apps as well as the browser, you have two options. One is an adblocker that's implemented using the VPN API. This doesn't require root, but it does mean that all of your data usage will appear to come from the adblocker app, rather than your specific apps. The other is to use an app that adds blocklists to /etc/hosts. This does require root.

That only works because of another bit of anticompetitive behavior, on the side of Apple. There is in fact only a single browser available on ios (without hacking/sideloading) : Apple Safari.

The Chrome and Firefox browsers are skins over embedded Safari [1] + utilities (such as bookmark/password sync) (technically it uses UIWebView, which is Safari). So, it is despite Google's sincerest efforts that Chrome has adblocking on ios.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/ios/overview

> Because the very first thing many people would install is Adblock Plus.

Because I can't install Adblock in Android Chrome, I won't use Chrome at all. And because I like my bookmarks/history synced between phone and desktop, that means that I won't use Chrome on desktop either.

I ended up using a hosts-file based solution on my home server to block ads in my household at the network level. Then I connect to my VPN and push all traffic from my mobile through it so ads get blocked when I'm out and about.

On the upside, this works in Chrome and in apps, so my mobile experience is ad-free without having to root my device.

Bit extreme, I'll admit...

Completely wrong. UIWebViews can render your modified HTML.

There are many Apps that do that, and Google already did that, with their data compression feature.

>It favors Google Finance and Youtube over its rivals in search results page.

Finance is integrated with specific financial queries, so searching "goog" will show stock history and similar. This is different from the actual search results however. It's similar to special queries for translations, definitions, conversions, and so on.

I can understand this being criticized, but I don't think it's an abuse of power in any way.

As for Youtube, that's just an extremely popular website. It ranks highly organically because it has tens of thousands of links coming in all the time. There's also always fresh content to index which Google ranks favorably. The site has every expectation of ranking highly. So I don't buy that one without some evidence.

I mean, where do you expect links to go? If you look at the biggest websites there's:

* Facebook,which has large portions of its content invisible to Google * Wikipedia, which is probably in the #1 spot * YouTube really is the next most likely result for many queries.

For profit companies doing business for profit is not that shocking imo. The holier-than-thou attitude like the don't be evil motto is a bit rich coming from a company that participated in the prism program the same way as others and one of its main revenue source is selling ads. I mean, I don't get the special/fan treatment for some companies, Google included. Unless I'm a shareholder I don't believe for a second there is a Big Corp out there looking out for my interests.

> so it becomes harder to use some Google products without using others.

This was a phase around the boss of Google+. Google found that people don't like it and stopped doing it, like 2-4 years ago. Now it's perfectly possible to use things separately I would argue.

really? I still can't unlink my gmail account from my youtube account. Voice is still falling to the wayside, and hangouts is being pushed instead.

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you

Microsoft has never been "cool" and I can tell you, even in the 90's.

>Google is acting more like Microsoft.

No company will ever act as Microsoft did.

>They are building huge moats around their business ( Android, Chrome etc ) so it becomes harder to use some Google products without using others.

You must not use iOS because you're forced to use their apps as the default apps and they cannot be changed.

>They had no-poaching agreements with rival companies.

Steve Jobs/Apple instigated this and threatened Google if they didn't comply. To level this accusation at Google and not even mention Apple reveals your agenda.

How did they threaten Google?

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