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Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

> If you search for "Google Chrome" through the address bar, it will bring up Bing's search results with a Microsoft Edge header banner claiming that "there's no need to download a new web browser."

People forgot what it was to Google back in the day, where google was always showing a notification box to download their Google Chrome. So MS now uses their tactics. But they have grater leverage - they control OS and browser. And in this way they are not shooting themselves in the foot, but trying to keep the casual user base who doesn't care what color their internet gatway is.

The only pity would be Windows not respecting default browser choice when opening links.

And talking about Manifest V3 is some kind of mistake from MS... well, it is a chromium browser, what would you expect? Guess MS doesn't want to fork too deep from chromium. If users care about Manifest V3 then MS greatest competitor - Google - is also out of equation.

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> People forgot what it was to Google back in the day, where google was always showing a notification box to download their Google Chrome

What do you mean "back in the day"? My daily driver is Firefox, and every other time I go to look something up on Google Maps, it tells me I'd get a better experience using Chrome.

I wonder why you get this? I also use Firefox and I don't think I've ever seen this. I am on Linux. Is this a Windows thing?

uBlock vs no uBlock?

I'm using uBlock and specifically rejected all cookies. So maybe it respects my choices and doesn't remember that it's bugged me already and I said no. I'm also using containers and don't open maps in the same container as gmail.

I'm also on Linux.

The rare times I use Windows I use Edge, and I can't remember the last time I've used Google Maps there, so can't tell whether it shows it too.

Ironically, GMaps doesn’t have 3D view on my Google Chrome (macOS). “Download Google Earth” it says.

GMaps in Firefox has 3D views just fine. The experience of browsing GMaps is better in FF than Chrome itself.

Yes, but back then the other option was Internet Explorer and literally anything else was better than it.

Right now MS is playing the browser game again. And it is beyond me why it thinks people want to use Bing for search.

Sometimes I have this impression that Microsoft has some collective amnesia where they think they’re in the 90s-00s again where they dominanted the market with their tactics. Quite curious why it hasn’t been sued yet by the DOJ.

Google is bad enough these days that Bing could be seen as an "improvement". M$ might have a shot to make it even better by integrating OpenAI features and not involving their marketing division too much.

Of course, their objective is not to create great software but to monopolize whole sectors and extract value = techno feudalism.

Bing assistant which is maybe GPT3.5 comes out handy when searching for something. That was the time I started using Bing and it ain't bad.

Bing chat is GPT4 and, in my experience, provides better results than any search engine. I haven't been using search engines at all since they rolled that out. I can just ask GPT and I get a neutral answer without visible ads, sponsorlinks or SEO.

> And it is beyond me why it thinks people want to use Bing for search.

It's not about what people want, it's about the ads they can be shown.

> Quite curious why it hasn’t been sued yet by the DOJ.

A single corporation owns the proprietary OS running what must be upwards of 80% of the world's corporate and government workstations that is known to be laden with copious amounts of telemetry and privacy invading logging is probably quite an attractive partner to the various TLOs of the US government.

I read some fan-fic conspiracy theory that MS is actually a facade for an intelligence agency a couple of decades ago. Getting less and less certain about the weight of "theory" these days.

You should read up on Eric Schmidt then. Google's partnership with US authorities is not even a conspiracy theory.

All US corporations are effectively compelled to collaborate with US authorities at any given time. There is some pretend/acting going on for the benefit of paying consumers (like Apple resisting unlocking phones for smalltime cops, while likely passing iCloud data to the big boys), but that's it.

Hey I didn't say Google were any better.

I am also posting these remarks with a tongue in cheek. I am sure they (any) do liaise with government agencies when requested but not that they are primarily intel branches with a retail mask.

You would still get that same very behavior whenever you try any Google website in a non chrome

> The only pity would be Windows not respecting default browser choice when opening links.

It does though? Links from Microsoft/Windows applications only open in edge.

I recently raised this point in a similar thread but I couldn't reproduce it at the time. Yesterday I came across this behavior again in the Settings app of Windows 11 23H2 by clicking on any of the links in the bottom "Related help" section, e.g. Settings -> System -> Display -> Help with Display.

I also remember web results from the start menu opening in Edge before I ran one of those decrapifying scripts which disabled them completely.

People forgot that Microsoft lost an antitrust case for this EXACT SAME THING back in the day too. Kinda wild how far consumer/competition-protection has fallen in the past 25 years or so

Microsoft doesn't have a browser monopoly (ok, near monopoly) any more, so antitrust rules doesn't apply.

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