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.
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.
Staying in business is.
MS lost phones, and desktop is on the way out.
Gadget nerd flame wars of 00-10s are over. The next gen is tired of that and see “computing” as a mathematics not a x86; the future does not care about past memes.
MS needs a novel long term solution to iterate profiting from. They have none.
Until a laptops hardware is inevitably powerful enough to train whatever model needed, we’re still going to be living with these obnoxious FAANG size tech companies as a social daycare
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.
Edge, even with it's Chromium engine, fixes all that by offering Microsoft's ecosystem.
So yes, changing to Edge does change a lot. And Google will fight to keep Chrome's lead, 100%.
They have to devote developer hours to removing Google-advantaging features instead of adding their own custom goodies.
And even if said goodies take off, they're going to have a hard time getting them merged back to "root Blink" and into the rest of the browser ecosystem.
Yeah that's why I like using it
A business monopoly is bad, but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.
Nobody gets upset because every OS under the sun uses OpenSSH rather than competing with their own implementation.
In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.
Spin the Chromium project off of being in direct control by Google and into an industry organization and I’d be happy to settle on one browser engine.
Heck, if my iPhone got to use Chromium it would be an improvement.
All the proprietary corporate stuff on top of Chromium isn’t part of the open source project, anyway.
Sure. To use, participate in, and build upon this "open standard", you (or your team) just have to keep up with some of the most well-paid (presumably for a reason) programmers in the world, and then hope they see Chromium as an open standard worthy of pull requests as well.
It's not unthinkable for a browser project to work the same way.
Sorry about the autocorrect error. It's too late to change it
> In contrast, Apple competing with USB with their own connectivity standard has a negative impact on basically everyone.
Does it? I haven't ever been negatively affected or even affected at all as far as I can tell, I happen not to use Apple products or interact with the Apple ecosystem much.
What would these effects be?
"My phone's dead, can I borrow your charger?"
"Sorry, I have an iPhone."
That's a different interface, not just a separate implementation
- It has vertical tab support out of the box (is this even possible in chrome? I know Firefox can do it with extensions) - it has very flexible support for automatically sleeping and closing unused tabs. I sleep tabs after an hour except for a couple sites I’ve whitelisted.
Both of these are features other browsers either don’t have or require opening up a potential security whole to a 3rd party through extensions.
Sideberry has every feature of TST I ever used (and a few more), and is reasonably fast.
So far it has been a superior experience to vanilla chrome, and at least in Linux I haven't seen any "adcrap". I installed Ublock Origin and everything is pretty neat.
Vivaldi browser[1] has supported native vertical tabs for many years (possibly since its introduction in 2015), though sadly it doesn't get as much coverage in the media or in discussions. Made by the original Opera founder who left that company in ~2010.
It's bundled with the Sign in with Google SDK but defaults to off.
I found it fucking creepy that random websites would say "Hi Symbiote, log in with Google" with my real name.
If you press the "X" button (_not_ just click off the popup) it will use an exponential backoff on your device.
You can't trust Edge not to edit what you see. That's hard trust to win back.
But also, Blink dominance is bad, and edge does nothing in that regard.
Edge may be good for Microsoft, because it allows them to siphon off even more user data and (apparently) inject more ads, but it surely doesn't do anything to help the browser ecosystem.
MS has become just another cloud company nowadays. Not much to differentiate them.
I'm sure it doesn't do anywhere near as much as it would if Edge had its own browser engine or JavaScript engine, but surely it does something to have a competitor who has the resources to maintain a fork if they need to?
||accounts.google.com/gsi/iframe/select$subdocument
https://www.howtogeek.com/735152/how-to-turn-off-the-sign-in...
But, you can just add this to your filters or your own list
accounts.google.com$domain=~google.*|~youtube.com|~gmail.com> Competition and diversity of browsers is good
Someone doesn't remember the early days of Internet Explorer
Microsoft changing that page for their profit is 100% NOT fair use. Google should simply sue them for all those counts of willful copyright infringement at $180k each.
If it were, I think this could cause big legal problems for ad-blockers. Of course, one big difference is that ad-blockers are usually installed by the user, and so explicitly have the user's permission to change browser rendering, whereas MS changing the rendering of competitor's web pages is not expected by the user nor were they given any permission for this.
Normally, when a user does this themselves, it isn't for commercial purposes which puts it in a different category (plus, the most popular modification involves stuff from loading onto a device rather than modifying the stuff that was loaded). This is far different in intent.
Plenty of existing and historical malware browsers and plugins have injected ads.
Furthermore, because it's a full page width banner, it's not entirely clear whether Edge is rending something next to Google's page (i.e. in MS' browser) or in Google's page (i.e. commingled with their content).
It's different with Microsoft: MS never asked for users' permission to change content, nor did users ever expect it.
it injects html.
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.
That, and a crafty bird. So if the bear has a roadrunner the parent commenter's odds of winning are greatly reduced.
Think of a 7'+ man who weighs 500+ lbs, carries around knives, and looks at you half-interestedly... like he's flipping a coin in his head to decide whether or not to eat you.
That's a lot of presence to ignore when there's only open field between the two of you.
I’ve Been stalked by a big grizzly a couple of times, almost rode into a big female who the started frothing at the mouth, stamping her feet and snarling while 10 feet away. I assure you, there is no fight.
Even a modest grizzly will take the door off a cabin in one swipe without slowing down. The bear will annihilate you in a second or two.
Of course a gun changes the equation, Though plenty of people have shot grizzlies many times and still been killed. I believe the outcomes are statistically worse for those with a gun
Are you sure? Bears (at least, black and grizzly bears) are really smart. Like, scary smart.
My favorite "smart bear" story is an area where bears have learned how to get into bear canisters people use to protect their food from bears. They'll sneak into your camp, roll the canister to a cliff, and push it off to crack it open on the rocks below. And they teach other bears how to do this.
A ranger once told me that the real difficulty in making bear-proof garbage receptacles is that the smarter bears are more intelligent than the dumber humans.
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.
In comparison, Microsoft implied in their advertisement that their browser is safer than Google’s because it has the “trust of Microsoft.”
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2020/05/resource-heavy-ads-in-chro...
I don’t however think there’s a strong argument to be made that MS is modifying the website unless they MITM it. It’s well within their right to make their browser display something they want it to in a specific situation.
Double down on diagnostics and error pages, and adjust the messaging during outages to highlight GCP uptimes.
It would be quite different if Google's browser started modifying Microsoft's websites, as Microsoft is Google's.
I think both are absolutely disgusting
Of course, the user explicitly installed the ad-blocker; the user didn't expect MS Edge to screw with the way the web page looks.
Yes, I think both are absolutely disgusting too.
14% believe they could win a fight with a Kangaroo. 8% with a Gorilla, an Elephant or a Lion, and for the Grizzly bear, it's actually 6%.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
The analogy between people and Grizzly bears fails because Microsoft's market cap today is $1.8 trillion... Sure, I went on Google, not Bing, to check that $1.8T figure—Google may very well be the king of search, but Microsoft is the king of countless other products
What MS is doing is far more effective than if Google did the same thing in return.
"Use Safari! It won't yell at you for daring to visit a competitor's website!"
Why waste time advertising on competitor's websites when you can just stop them from using competitors altogether (or at least require them to use you at the same time)
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...
Imagine going to the iPad product page on Edge and being met with “hey you should buy a surface tablet instead”.
Apple then retaliates with similar tactics.
Chrome had an ad on the google homepage and in search results for years and years, so MS are copying Google here.
No one would make a big deal if MSEdge recommendation appeared on Bing or other MS related websites.
Displaying whatever you want on your website is an established thing. It might not be a very friendly thing (unskippable ads, etc.), but it's ok. The user visits you for what you have to say, and you say it. Going to the candy store with your car and hearing the owner tell you about his new candy, or even his opinion about your car, is fine.
But having your car tell you, unprompted, not to go to this candy store, but rather to the one owned by the car brand, is nuts. It's not okay. How on earth can people equate these two things?
Because that's just an ad, literally the same as any other ad we've been conditioned to put up with for our entire lives. Drawing the line here but not "$company's thing advertising it's unrelated product with 1st party ad space" is silly. Every company shamelessly does this, you're just used to it. This the 1st party equivalent of your competitor buying an ad for your company's name on Google because they're an alternative, the whole industry spies everything I do online chasing this kind of ad targeting.
Everyone in this thread is made really uncomfortable because of the stupid digital fiefdoms we've created and complete lack of user protection we have and are now realizing how little control we have over the previously somewhat neutral staple apps we've grown to rely on. But there's nothing different about this, or your car for that matter. This is the conclusion of "it's their platform blah blah."
Because it would be referred to the trade commission for false advertising is my guess.
People here are insanely hypocritical for complaining about Microsoft but treating Google like they're innocent.
If you think that Google generally gets treated positively around here, you haven't spent much time on HN: there's very rarely a Google story that doesn't go negative in the comments. And I'm also quite curious why you think you're the only one around here who "worked with normal users for years".
I also worked with normal users for years (and still do), and actively taught people what a browser was and recommended Chrome on the basis that it was better than everything else.
There were a few years there of mainstream "I posted this from internet explorer" with a delayed piece of news or reaction.
I'm not a chrome fan either.
I assume you're talking about a bare-handed fight? If we can use tools and have time to prep, I'd say the odds shift pretty handily in the human's favor. Anyway, I dunno about a bear, but the guy who invented Gunite managed to strangle a leopard to death in a bare-handed fight. Although, if I recall, he had shot it before it jumped him, and it did take him a few months to recover from the wounds he suffered.