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Comment by foerbert | Hacker News Reader

Yep. It's way beyond anything I consider acceptable. I'm disgusted, really.

It's still pretty fresh, so it's possible my opinion softens later, but right now I'm thinking it's appropriate to consider Chrome and Firefox pretty much equivalent on 'ethical' (or whatever you want to call it) grounds.

Google is far more of a concern than Mozilla, but at this point it feels like Chrome is out to get you less than Firefox is.

I nearly acted on my impulse to start switching everything over to Chrome. The only thing that saved Firefox here is the memory of some concerns about adblocking on Chrome in the future. I haven't looked into it much, so I don't know how significant of a concern that is. But functionally no adblock is worse than being forced to turn off user-hostile options, so, here I remain. I guess. For now.

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Yea, I can't even imagine the furor if Chrome were to do this and make it opt-out. Very unexpected from Mozilla, even with my lowered standards of the last half decade.

> Yea, I can't even imagine the furor if Chrome were to do this

But... Chrome does do this. They're just not labeled as ads.

Type the letter "K" (or any other single letter) into your Chrome search bar on a fresh profile and tell me what you see. Because I see an awful lot of "contextual suggestions" that are not really any different from ads.

https://imgur.com/a/baXZDrN

Welp. I guess that's my daily dose of 'oh god everything is actually worse than I thought and I don't know why I'm surprised again.'

There's no way that's a decent no-history guess for what is intended.

Not saying I ditrust you, but do we know for sure that those are paids ads not unpaid sugesstions?

I don't honestly think it matters. They're effectively ads in practice regardless of whether they're paid or not.

But I do get the feeling that "Kahoot", a mobile game I've literally never heard of, isn't an organic result.

I get zero suggestions for that within Google Chrome.

https://i.imgur.com/2uREs6u.png

I think it may be your own history popping up there.

I think there's some weird A/B test shenanigans going on with this one. I have a machine where some letters or whole words will get google search results and ads with images in the first few entries of the dropdown, but on my main machine it's just google searches and then history/bookmarks at the bottom.

It's not my own history because I have no history, I use Chrome exclusively for things that are completely broken on Firefox, which is mostly just 1 or 2 google websites.

Yeah, I think it might be A/B testing as well. I don't get any suggestions from typing K. Everything that popped up is from my history.

Also, not really related, but from my experience, Kahoot is really popular in education. I bet at least 80% of my classmates in college have used it at least once. I am a bit surprised you never heard about it.

I don't think I understand your point. Are those ads, or just entity search? Or are you saying you don't think that the distinction between paid autocomplete results and rich autocomplete results are meaningful?

Mostly the latter, but I also don't think these results (especially the first one) are organic.

Surely you'd agree that most people _do_ recognize this distinction though? And that's what relevant to whether the would be a furor, not your personal view on what makes ads harmful, which is rather idiosyncratic (regardless of whether it's more defensible/correct).

I'm switching to Nyxt browser on Linux and keep only Safari on Apple devices. Mozilla indeed developed a brilliant way to lose last 5% of market share.

Browser vendors know they need to change this gradually as a sudden impact would spawn a fork with a slight chance that it might catch on. Mozilla is certainly trying to boil some water here, but I think Google is worse in the long run.

Mozilla is still dependent on Google for funding, so the situation is already bad.

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