Google Chrome is preparing a widget with shopping ads on the new tab page? | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome is preparing a widget with shopping ads on the new tab page?

techdows.com

119 pointsrbinv101 comments

If you want to participate in the discussion about this feature, you can go ahead and comment on it in the tracking issue over at [0]. Oh wait, you cannot - it's set to private. It's almost as if Google didn't want any input from the community about Chromium, the open source project. Weird.

More seriously though, it seems the feature calls [1] to get the list of products to show on the new page. The call is made every time the new page is opened as long as Google is your search provider and the user is signed in (not sure if to the browser or Google services).

[0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113085...

[1] https://www.google.com/async/newtab_shopping_tasks

I get a "permission denied" on the first link. guess they don't want other opinions on the subject.

Whatever the motivation, this is heinous.

Why do people jump to replace safari on their laptops, and even their iPhones (often with chrome)?

Even before I became aware, and strongly opposed to Google's advertising and privacy practices, I had been a Chrome user. I was on a long road trip and was frantically trying to solve a P1 for my company. My new laptop battery was was chunking downward at a staggering rate and I felt like I was trying to diffuse a bomb. I dug into the energy metrics and found that the culprit was, by and large, Chrome. Switching to Safari has made a huge improvement for me and I actually don't remember now why I was using chrome in the first place.

Firefox and brave are excellent too, though they aren't default in the Apple ecosystem. I just don't understand why the draw to chrome and why it still commands such a large market share.

I just checked 6 laptops. None have Safari available. Also checked three smartphones - no Safari possible there also.

Were you by any chance looking at 6 non-Mac laptops and 3 non-iOS smartphones?

I suspect that may have been their point.

The sentence reads just as well with 'Edge' in place of Safari, and they call out iPhones quite explicitly.

The snark does not take the parent's comment in good faith.

Edge runs on Windows, Macos, Linux.

We get it, you are poor.

Choosing the best alternative rather than the most expensive doesn't mean one is poor.

Why bother changing in iOS devices. Its just a skin on safari engine. No choices there.

Integration. Your history is synced, your bookmarks are synced, your passwords are synced, I think your tabs can be too.

Firefox can do all this too if you really want, however, I absolutely do not want this - syncing between work persona (laptop) and home persona (phone).

You can create a separate profile in Firefox by going to "about:profiles", desktop only (it looks ugly, and it's hard to use, I know, but it does work). This way you can have both personas on the same device without mixing them up.

Too bad it does not work on mobile and the UX for it is so bad on desktop. It's a great feature that I wish Firefox invested in.

Mostly because I don't want to re-learn where buttons and settings are and how the dev tools work.

Firefox is my daily driver but I keep Chromium installed, sometimes I want FF dev tools and sometimes I want Chromium.

I’m an avid safari user on iOS and Mac, and I suspect I’ll be an avid Edge user on Microsoft now that it’s basically a better chrome.

I can see why people would want to switch it up. Especially if you use different operating systems, and want to synchronise your browser experience between them. Not having things synced has actually been a major advantage for me, as I use my phone and Mac very differently than I use my windows devices, but I can see why you wouldn’t want to run safari on Windows/Linux.

Hell, these days I gotta say that I can see why you wouldn’t want to run Safari at all. It’s terrible at Disney plus, and others, and while that may be a Disney plus and others problem, that’s still technology that doesn’t work right out the box like it’s supposed to.

I do think the fact that the new Edge is so good is going to eat into Google’s market. Exactly because of people like you and me who aren’t going to bother unless we have to.

I'd like to switch to Edge but there is apparently no way to have it default to opening links in a new tab:

https://www.tenforums.com/browsers-email/67169-can-i-make-op...

I know about Command-Click to open in a new tab (Mac) but I want thie to be the default. It's crazy that Edge does not support this because every other browser does. (If someone from Micthe Edge team happens to read this post, please fix it.)

I use Safari and Firefox nearly exclusively. There is the odd page I use chrome for due to compatibility issues, but for the most part I really prefer the former two. I, on a daily basis, have 4-7 Safari windows (work and new home-hunting) with tabs open all over the place as well as a Firefox full screen with another series of tabs (personal tasks). Never any problems.

>Why do people jump to replace safari on their laptops, and even their iPhones (often with chrome)?

totally unsupported conjecture: because to non-technical people, chrome is "the internet". It also didn't hurt that it was evangelized by many of their technical friends/family members/coworkers for being "the best", and that google bugged you to install it on many of their sites.

For a long time it was a indeed the best in many regards. I've always been a Firefox fan and users, but for a while I had to admit that continuing with Firefox meant making big sacrifices. Today, those sacrifices are only the rare website that was never tested on anything but chrome or brings my 8 cores to a halt.

Some add ons and plugins don’t work with Safari. Thus people are enticed to switch out of convenience.

I think the fact that Google advertises the Chrome browser on all their major services plays a part in its adoption.

Funny enough, when I sometimes go to the google search page in Firefox, a pop up appears saying I should switch to Chrome because it saves battery life

For those who are required (or prefer) to use a Chromium-based browser, you might want to give ungoogled-chromium [0] a shot.

I switched recently based on a recommendation from a HN reader, and so far it has been a surprisingly seamless transition. I have yet to encounter any issues aside from being unable to install extensions directly from the Chrome Web Store, which was easily remedied by first installing the chromium-web-store extension [1].

My biggest gripe is that there are no 'official' binaries, so you'd either have to build your own or trust the user-submitted builds, though apparently the project owner is currently working on setting up an official build server [2].

[0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium

[1] https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store

[2] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1198

Is there a way to get this on chrome os?

I quite literally laughed out loud.

Well done.

> Google clarified these are not “ads.” The company points out that they only source free shopping listings for this widget and that the content is not sponsored.

I'm not sure I understand how these aren't ads? In any case, is this something that literally anyone asked for?

The title in the screenshot says “Continue search for Office Chairs,” which sounds like it shows recent Google searches that have significant presence in the “Shopping” tab of google.com. Sure these aren’t “ads,” like the article says, but if they are links to Google Shopping then they indirectly generate revenue for Google by sending you back to google.com.

Agreed... who asked for this?

It's sort of like video search results. I search for a question. I get a result that looks like a video and not an ad. I click the link and get taken to YouTube where... an ad plays. And likely generates a higher RPM for Google than a text ad.

Yeah. This doesn't seem like something that users would actually want, so there has to be a financial incentive for Google to do it. Perhaps they start off as "not ads" in order to minimise complaints about the feature, but intend to gradually allow companies to e.g. pay for prime spot.

It's like when Mozilla says that the "Pocket recommended articles" they show on the new tab page are not ads.

For the average person, the definition of an "ad" isn't contingent on whether or not Google is getting paid for it. For the average person, a promotional 3rd-party text that is trying to get them to buy an office chair is an ad.

It's like Google claiming that if they give you free credits for adwords that it suddenly stops counting as an ad. Users don't care.

These aren’t ads in that they directly profit Google’s baseline just by displaying them. Google profits from increased ad-spend on search result sites that those things link to. If however you think every product mention is an ad, of course these are ads.

Either way, these things shouldn’t happen. Browsers should enable everyone to use the web.

These are unsolicited offers to buy a good. In what world are they not ads?

> is this something that literally anyone asked for

Google executives probably. This is what you get when you hand control of the entire web platform over to an ad company. And the only way to stop it is to depose Chrome as the dominant platform.

And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices.

> And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices

Not sure I'd agree with that.

Of course, Edge is built on Chromium, but Microsoft are free to make their own changes, and to reverse any changes from Google that they don't like.

So, in this case, Edge can give you all the performance characteristics of Google's own Chrome browser but without the ads... win-win I reckon.

Edge is better than Chrome, but only slightly: Microsoft has chosen to largely follow all of Google's platform decisions, including Manifest V3. The Edge PM is a former Googler, and is absolutely unable to grasp that he's collaborating with the enemy half the time.

With the increased privacy features built-in, it's definitely an improvement, and feeding Microsoft is less bad than feeding Google, but I'm not confident Edge's current developers have the backbone to stand up to Google's decisions.

> And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices.

What choices? After seeing how they responded to Manifest v3 Mozilla seems pretty spineless compared to Brave.

So we're basically back to ad-supported Opera then?

Opera is also a Chrome fork now. Firefox and Safari are the only two major browsers not based on Google code.

Not a solution for most people, but if you didn't know, it's very easy to replace the new tab page with a custom one using a minimal, local extension. In your manifest.json include

    "chrome_url_overrides": { "newtab": "ntp.html" }

and if you want it to work in incognito tabs

    "incognito": "split"

(you will also need to go to your extensions's detail page and flip on "Allow in incognito").

Then create your ntp.html page (can be named whatever, just change the json to match), with CSS file(s) and image(s) as needed. I made a simple flexbox "speed dial" page with sites I specify rather than changing based on some kind of "frecency".

In chrome://extensions/, flip the "Developer mode" switch and then click "Load unpacked" and choose your extension's folder.

I wonder if one can rely on this working forever. I might have a product idea that relies on being able to change the new tab page, but I am kind of afraid Chrome forbids it one of these days.

There seem to be a lot of extensions that do it, with nice pictures or wherever, so it seems unlikely, but you never know.

It's quite a common extension use-case so I dobut it. It's also hard to abuse unlike certain tab related permissions, which is what they are mostly cracking down on.

I mean, Google's a business and Chrome is free so I'm not exactly surprised.

But I've used the "Empty New Tab Page" for I guess something like 7 years [1]. I don't like seeing any junk on a new tab page, I don't care if it's shopping or not.

Now if they take away the ability to customize the new tab page, then I'd be bothered...

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page...

> Now if they take away the ability to customize the new tab page, then I'd be bothered...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

Oh please.

This is just a consumer product from a for-profit corporation. It's an ad.

Comparing it to a situation where millions of people were murdered is incredibly offensive.

Please don't blithely throw around comparisons like that. It doesn't help anything, and is incredibly disrespectful.

This is not disrespectful. Even though the current case is not about murder, that old story should teach you that you should care about other people, not only about yourself, otherwise it may eventually turn out bad for you.

And this is not just a product. It is a monopolist having huge influence over most of the population (who mostly cannot customize anything and has to suffer).

I'm sorry, but yes, this is just a product. There are no human rights violations at stake, c'mon.

And the DoJ is arguing that Search is a monopoly, not Chrome. And what do you mean, "cannot customize anything and has to suffer"? My original comment was literally about customizing the new tab page to be different. And who is "suffering" from this? Nobody is dying of hunger because Chrome wants to show an ad.

The reason your comment was disrespectful is because perspective is important. Human rights violations and genocide are not comparable to a private corporation -- whether it's a monopoly or not -- deciding to show a dumb advertisement.

It's not the case for Google, obviously, but sticking random adverts in prominent places in a desperate attempt to increase revenue is the sort of thing web businesses do immediately before they go bust, and this has exactly the same optics to me.

Weirdly enough, this actually corresponds to my habits, if I understand the workings right. I tend to open a dozen tabs when looking for a product, with different models, reviews, and second-hand prices. Then I get tired of sitting down, go do something else, do work, get sidetracked into researching other things, and when I get back to the topic of the product I have fifty more tabs and it's time to nuke the whole mess. To start anew, I would again go to those listings on local analogues of Google Product Search/Amazon and Craigslist, so I guess linking to them would sorta help.

I don’t understand how folks are still putting up with Google. The only thing I need a replacement for is YouTube, that’s where the content is.

It seems that you replaced Google Calendar. What do you use instead?

Not OP, but I use Fastmail's calendar

I do the same. I migrated all of my emails over to fastmail a while ago and have been very pleased. There's a web interface, but I mostly use it with the native calendar app on my machine (in my case iCal). A couple of colleagues even switched after I mentioned how much I like it. I've been trying to move all of my stuff off of Google for a while since I don't really approve of their business practices anymore.

Although migrating everything off an old Gmail I used for a decade has been slow. I need to take a weekend to do it at some point.

Google Calendar really has nothing inherently advantageous over every other calendar solution on every other email app. Calendar invites are pretty much a universal standard, and it's perfectly easy to interoperate other people's Google Calendar with your not-Google calendar.

I use office 365, it works great.

Just use youtube-dl (it still works and will be forked) to suck the content you want out of Youtube. Use Tor Browser to screw Google out of your precious precious data as well.

Not much content there yet, but https://joinpeertube.org

Nostalgia for a time when Chrome was a breath of fresh air, and when Google was a creative haven funded by ads.

> The only thing I need a replacement for is YouTube, that’s where the content is.

Rumble seems to be growing.

Google's continued meddling with adding useless content on the new tab page is what pushed me to Chromium Edge. (The weird little news snippets on the bottom with no way to disable them was the first of these poorly-conceived experiments.)

Edge has a ton of awful content on its new tab page too, but there's an option to turn it off which makes all the difference.

What do you expect when you use a browser made by an advertising company?

Does Google know that the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against them a week ago? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...

Oh cool! I hate when i forget that i could be shopping.

Google owns Chrome and always have, and they're an advertising mill. What did you people expect? This may be one of the least worst things that Google has done to Chrome.

I really really enjoy https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go... by Google to show a new view of earth in the new tab. Sometimes my mind wonders but it's very enjoyable.

Dear Chrome team,.

I'll give you this and one more if I can have igoogle back.

Love,

SanchoPanda

I was going to recommend Netvibes as a viable iGoogle alternative, but it seems that it has become quite "enterprisey". I, too, miss iGoogle (which ironically would be much better suited for ads like these).

Shout out to a great alternative new-tab page: Goal Board: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-...

> Update: Google clarified these are not “ads.”

Not yet.

They're already ads. It's just instead of being 3rd party ads, they're ads for Google Search pages.

Every hit to those search pages makes Google money, and these "widgets" are ads for search pages.

Stop using chrome.

I'm still using IceCat, I will continue to do so. Chrome's ugly, something about the font rendering and smooth scrolling is really off-putting, plus I just know everything I do is being reported to the Google mothership.

I recall this specific 'continue searching for....' appearing in Assistant in a previous iteration, back when it had magic widgets and wasn't just a chatbot. Are other widgets coming to this space?

Just switch to brave. It's chrome without google

This is just horrible!

And the bug reporter issue is blocked!

Url changed from https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new..., which points to this.

What is it gonna take for y’all to switch back to Firefox?

A UI that doesn't suck.

disclaimer: I'm a Firefox user.

I'm genuinely interested in why you think Firefox's UI sucks? What could be done better?

IMO it's more customizable than Chrome's which is a big plus for me.

Written from Firefox, so with that in mind:

In full screen mode, minimize the tab, address, and bookmark bars into the top of the screen. And personally, it bugs me how obscure it is to work with bookmarks (yes, I still use them).

It's still my daily driver at work and home but those are two things that always bug me.

It's visually unpleasant. Boxy UI elements (notably tabs); elements of different sizes in the same container; too much whitespace in some places; generally not enough whitespace in most places (bookmark folders/menus in general/the whole area around the location bar); elements that change size (the location bar); etc. I don't like customizable UIs; it seems to lead to less attention being paid to the default UI. I don't want to invest in configuring a UI; I just want it to work. Themes degrade over time as they're not maintained. Font rendering is worse than Chrome; colors are different from Chrome (I can't claim that one is right, but it's a jarring difference when comparing them, and I'm used to Chrome). Firefox doesn't have a polished UI, and its whole job is to be a UI for other content.

Mozilla to fix the years-old issue (massive CPU usage and battery drain) using it on macOS with a high DPI display.

We don't need an anti trust breakup of big tech. Their own decisions are causing them to lose customers.

I'm doing the unthinkable, I cut half my Google usage. No more music, no more photos, no more Android Chrome, significantly less Google search.

It's happening, although I feel like anti-consumer practices hurts Google more than Apple. Maybe my original claim about not needing anti trust is a bit simple.

> We don't need an anti trust breakup of big tech.

This is a really bad take. The amount of Google's power and control isn't something a handful of HN users switching to Firefox can fix. Most people literally don't realize there's alternatives. There's a silent majority feeding the Google beast, and they aren't going to switch from the defaults. Tech industry members can set the tone, we can spread good behavior to our friends and family, but the government is needed to move the majority.

Bear in mind, everyone hates Microsoft (seems like sometimes anyways), they did face antitrust law, and still in 2020, they're one of the world's most powerful and valuable companies, and everyone still uses Windows at work. Which is to say, if we want to take Google down, it needs to come from every direction, and it needs to be incredibly harsh. And once Google is no longer running the web, stronger privacy and consumer protection laws need to be passed to make sure it's understood that behavior like Google's will never be tolerated again.

As I remember it, a major reason why Chrome became so dominant is that the tech community fell in love with it and recommended it unreservedly to everyone else.

That same process can be reversed.

Have my upvote.

But don't forget that they used their - for all intents and relevant purposes - unlimited budget to bundle it everywhere.

They were also advertising it on the front page of their search engine - a spot no one else has been able to reach AFAIK. I guess there's a lot more.

If this isn't monopoly abuse I have a hard time seing what is.

I thought it was because Google Captcha punishes you SEVERELY if you're not using Chrome.

I think we give ourselves more credit than it's due. Average users get Chrome shoved down their throats. Plenty of users are happy to use Edge or even IE until they update Adobe Reader and find Chrome is now their default browser.

Or how when I signed into a Google account once for five minutes on my iPhone in a private Safari window and immediately got an email from Google inviting me to set up Chrome on my new iPhone...

Chrome on iphone is just Safari with a Google logo iirc.

Kindasorta. Chrome on iOS is using Safari's rendering engine, yes. But it's still collecting data on you to send to your Google account, just like Chrome proper.

That, and the fact that Google would get it bundled along with stuff like Adobe Flash and AVG Antivirus, so that it would be installed and set as your default browser if you weren't paying attention.

You can replace that page via extensions, which I did long ago to this one that shows scenes from Google Earth:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go...

(I did this to be intentional with new tabs instead of occasionally mindlessly clicking one of the "most visited" links over and over)

You can also replace it with Edge or Firefox.

Or Chromium

Or Ungoogled Chromium

Until Google removes the APIs these extensions need for made-up privacy and security reasons, like it's doing to ad blockers.

Or they stop supporting extensions all together.

I replaced mine with a static HTML page via a custom extension loaded in "Developer mode". It only takes a small JSON file for the manifest and the HTML page itself.

Google bragged when they were new, that it was better than other search engines ("portals") because it just had the search text field and 2 buttons, and no articles with pictures and attention-grabbing headlines in their home page.

And now? The freaking Google Search app on Android has "trending searches" under the search bar. There's an "Explore" button that shows you articles/videos it thinks you like because it knows what you googled/watched on YouTube.

I'm so glad there are still settings to turn these off (from the default of on!), but the changes pissed me off when I saw them for the 1st time.

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