Where "did some marketing" equals "unethically abused monopoly position to aggressively push through dark patterns", sure. I think I can still blame them for that.
I have pictures from 2012 (I think) when they had the entire grand hall of Paris' Gare de Lyon hung with dozens of huge Chrome banners.
That alone must have cost them tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of Euros.
That said I think the web's under Google's thumb screws (AMP, mail, DNS, browser-almost monopoly, etc) is in a bad place. But they did invest a hell of a lot in pushing Chrome.
They spent a ton of money on promoting Chrome But essentially defending them on that specific issue doesn't make it a nice, or admirable company in my book.
Edit, to clarify some more: I was "defending" them on some accusations that they promoted Chrome with dirty tricks and dark patterns. Initially, I'd wager, they didn't.
Does that clarify it?
If that's not true, and some marketroid in Google woke up one day and thought "hey, we could get a lot more bang for our buck by being super scummy!", then that would be an interesting tale. But it seems more likely that what happened was that Google just pulled out all the stops.
At any rate it's not much of a defense. Their "legitimate" marketing in no way absolves them for their "illegitimate" marketing.
I think we are in general agreement here.
Spending a lot of money on legitimate marketing certainly doesn't absolve scammy tacticts at all.
One of my more recent pet peevees is their fiddling with GMail in a way that a lot of mails from external sources are flagged as spam. Even though they're sure as shit and very obviously not. And not only that. They're constantly moving the goal posts on what is "legitimate" mail.
Having such a big slice of global email this is super scummy and I really hope that (probably European, if any) regulators crack down hard on them yet again.
But I'm digressing here, I'm afraid.
Do you mean that they advertised for Chrome on their properties? Advertising on your own property is legitimate in my book. And simple advertising isn't a "dark pattern".
Or do you mean something else?
The most interesting part in all this is that the Adobe Flash you just downloaded and installed is not even used by Chrome, which ships its own.
It is ostensibly for security and benefits developers because of less fragmentation. But it actually hurts users in the long run because of the centralizing effect. It also enables chrome to sneak in features that users wouldn't necessarily accept.
And advertising something on your own property sure sounds reasonable, but I think it's a slightly different story when "your own property" is "the de facto homepage of the internet". That's what I meant by "abusing monopoly position".
Maybe as someone with above-average technical ability this looks obvious to you. To a lot of people, it isn't. And this pattern is aimed at fooling the less technically literate.
The requirements to have unticked checkboxes predates GDPR.
For example, signing into a Google site from Chrome also signs you into the browser; it's unclear how this happens, what personal information it compromises, and more than that it's an unexpected and unwelcome surprise when it happens.
Clearing Google cookies in Chrome also doesn't work, for related reasons. Try deleting all cookies in Chrome the immediately refreshing the list: Google cookies immediately re-appear.
It's not that these things are necessarily actually dangerous. But the blurring of the line between service and user agent scares me.
They eventually created an option to disable that behaviour after a lot of user complaints:
"While we think sign-in consistency will help many of our users, we’re adding a control that allows users to turn off linking web-based sign-in with browser-based sign-in—that way users have more control over their experience. For users that disable this feature, signing into a Google website will not sign them into Chrome."
https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/product-updates-base...
So much so that many many people I know that worked on helpdesk;s at the time where getting lots of complaints about "the internet is missing" meaning their Icons changed from the IE logo to the Chrome logo because chrome was changed to the default browser with out them understanding what happened.
Add to the fact that Chrome would also install in AppData to avoid having to have Admin rights to install so it could be install on corporate/enterprise systems by normal users...
Another example: Windows: Chrome, installation being under user profile to bypass any system checks during installation process itself and further updates.
IE was free when Netscape Navigator was a paid product.
Chrome was free when Opera was a paid product.
Chrome didn't exist when Opera was a paid product.