If this is fair and legal, why not have Google do the same things?
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.
On the contrary, search ad revenue is but a relatively small part of Microsoft's overall business. If you want to place bets search is a critical battleground for AI (Microsoft/Satya clearly seem to), it makes sense to attack them here.
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.
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
I don't particularly like edge but I'm happy someone is poking the bear. Chrome dominance is bad and is too much power in the hand of one company. Competition and diversity of browsers is good.
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.
The problem with Chrome dominating is it makes Google ecosystem dominates. With Chrome, you can sync your history with your Google account, it pushes you to use Google services, sends analytics to Google etc.
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%.
The problem is that even Microsoft with their infinite resources has to play catch up.
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.
I know Microsoft has earned back a lot of goodwill especially from nerds like us due to some of the stuff they've done with VS Code, GitHub, and gaming, but I trust Google way more to not be a scumbag company. Of all the companies to hoard data, Google is in my view the most trustworthy and the most incentivized to be good stewards of said data.
> but a technological monopoly is often just a standard.
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.
The model the OP mentions is exactly how openstreetmap functions. A lot of big teddy companies hire people specifically to improve it. Only Google doesn't.
It's not unthinkable for a browser project to work the same way.
Technology monopolies are bad since one critical vulnerability means everybody is impacted. Having a standard that people conform to is fine, but the monopoly on an implementation is bad.
I think the concern here is that, as a practical matter, vendors wouldn't be free to make arbitrary changes within their own forks; some parts of the system would have to remain interoperable. And technical decisions regarding what those parts should do and how they should work would still have to be made somehow, and it's not clear that "open source project" type governance would be better than the W3C process that we have today, especially when it comes to interfacing with governments. Good blog post about this: https://www.mnot.net/blog/2022/06/22/chromium-only
> 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.
It has some annoying times, mostly for people using apple products, though. Like Macbooks not implementing USB-C monitor chaining but supporting Thunderbolt chaining, or even something as simple as my friend being unable to charge her phone in my car because all of my cables are usb-c.
And some nice added features. I use Edge over chrome for 2 reasons only:
- 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.
Ha! I just wrote a very similar reply to another comment. I use Linux in my personal laptop and about 6 months ago moved from vanilla Chrome to Edge because of the vertical tabs. The UI is really neat with the grouping and coloring. I also installed Tab Suspender because I didn't know it had the "sleeping tabs" out of the box.
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.
> It has vertical tab support out of the box (is this even possible in chrome?
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.
And Chrome is just Chromium with Google adware. I'd prefer people were using something else, but I would rather have them split between Google and Microsoft adware than all on Google's.
Actually, I've been using Edge as my main browser in Linux for the last couple of months. The main reason is that it is the only Chrome based browser that has a good vertical tabs interface integrated. They are pretty good, with grouping, colors and whatnot. I've tried every extension in chrome but nothing comes closer. I also used to use "tree style tabs" back when I used Firefox, but I find Fx unusable nowadays. A combo of vertical-tabs, tabs-suspender and extensity are a winner mix for me in Edge. in Linux!
Isn't the login with google just an OAuth thing? Most of the time, websites that use OAuth still want me to make an account with them. It's like, what is the point? Are people just implementing OAuth and then later deciding that they would like to be a provider for some reason? It seems tied to capital investment based on some conversations I have had with startup engineers...
Maybe, but google will create a modal that will overlay the website to notify me I can login to this website using google even though I am not even trying to login. Given that it is the same modal across very different websites, it has to be google being obnoxious.
Maybe used to be off by default? It started popping up on a third of the pages I visit recently. Don't they know that everyone hates or are annoyed by pop up?
Indeed, it's ridiculous to think that Edge does anything to keep Google in check. It's a sign of how thoroughly MS was defeated on this front that they now reskin the browser developed by their competition.
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.
There weren't defeated - the original Edge browser was popular on windows. The CEO just decided it was too much work. He did the same for Windows Phone. Maybe he will say Windows is also too much work in the future.
MS has become just another cloud company nowadays. Not much to differentiate them.
> it surely doesn't do anything to help the browser ecosystem.
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?
But Chrome, Chromium, and Edge are all Blink. IMO the GGP's fear of "Chrome dominance" is better expressed as "Blink dominance". I don't think anyone particularly liked Trident or EdgeHTML but at least they represented a more diverse rendering-engine-world.
This is working for me in Firefox on Android on twitter.com. I am not using any Google accounts whatsoever, though, so no guarantee that this doesn't break Google's login flow elsewhere.
Interestingly, the Google download page is copyright by Google.
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.
I don’t believe browser rendering is considered an act of publishing or distributing, is it? Either by the browser developer or by the computer user? I don’t see a mechanism of infringement. It would be different if Microsoft hosted a fake download page for Chrome on its server.
>I don’t believe browser rendering is considered an act of publishing or distributing, is it?
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.
MS had to add content to the page then render that new content. That would count as a derivative work which would be covered by copyright.
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.
I don't think a browser render counts as creating potentially infringing content. I'm at a loss to explain why but I think it's the ephemerality of a browser render and the lack of a distribution method. Where are you getting the idea that infringement is possible at all by the browser itself, regardless of fair use laws?
By this logic, no one would be able to serve banner ads on top of copywritten content.
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).
I think your logic is flawed. Banner ads are explicitly permitted by the web site operator (they get paid for them after all). Plugins aren't permitted by the web site operator, however they are permitted by the user, who has to explicitly approve installation of the plugin. Same with malware browsers: the users chose those. Of course, the users were ignorant and clicked on something they shouldn't have, but still it's ultimately their own fault: they opted in.
It's different with Microsoft: MS never asked for users' permission to change content, nor did users ever expect it.
> Then again, I've read that 4% of Americans believe they could win a fight with a Grizzly bear.
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.
Wile E. Coyote's main strength was his DoD-like blank cheque spending ability at the defense contractor Acme Corp. His access to advanced technology was the super power that ultimately leads to his downfall.
There's an interview with John Danaher talking about if his student, and widely considered the best grappler of all time, Gordan Ryan, could compete with a grizzly or even a chimp. It's a fun listen.
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 lived in the Yukon for four years, been all over Alaska hunting, hiking fishing.
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
That brain better developed a gun and told you come prepared to a fight with a Grizzly. Mine tells me that I suck at shooting so I better bring a couple of hand grenades as well. It also tells me that I suck at throwing so I should better stay in my basement in the first place and if there is no way around it I better just burn down the whole forest to be safe.
It's like the old joke, a guy is walking through the park and he sees an old man playing chess with a dog. He says "Wow, that must be the smartest dog in the world!" The old man says "He's not that smart, I almost always win."
True, but that sort of smarts won't help me fight the bear. Bears plan ahead. They learn from past experiences. If you "play dead", they'll rough you up to make sure you're not a threat, then leave you be -- but they'll watch you for a while to see if you were faking it and get up.
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.
> If this is fair and legal, why not have Google do the same things?
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.
I can't believe I'm defending Google, but all of those things are on their own properties. Aggressive and user-hostile, yes, but they're not abusing their ownership of the browser to modify their competitor's site.
Google blocks ads from their competitors. [1] In the article, they state it’s because those companies are not following their standard, and are using too many resources. (Which they claim negatively impact device performance through metrics like battery performance)
In comparison, Microsoft implied in their advertisement that their browser is safer than Google’s because it has the “trust of Microsoft.”
I won’t defend user hostile actions regardless of where it’s done. Google is a bad actor when it comes to abusing their position, so is MS.
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.
The place to hit them would be azure. Target each azure service url with an ad for the same service in GCP and the savings they would realize if they switched.
Double down on diagnostics and error pages, and adjust the messaging during outages to highlight GCP uptimes.
I don't think it's that different. Google has a pop up ad when using Gmail that asks you to "upgrade" to Chrome. Both are leveraging a near monopoly in something else to hard sell users on their browser.
I take your point that it isn't literally modifying the html of the web page—but if it was, wouldn't the result look exactly like this? Visually, the banner does not look like a part of the browser chrome, Microsoft put it in the web page's space. That area belongs to the website, browsers aren't supposed to mess with it!
What Microsoft has done here is certainly an escalation of what Google had been doing in recent years. Perhaps Google shouldn't have started being so aggressive with the popups to begin with.
To be honest, those sound like really great numbers. The bar is 20%. Generally you can find right about 1 in 5 people that believe X, where X is anything you can think of. Anything around 20% or under isn't newsworthy at all.
I'm sure I could easily win a fight with any of these animals. Assuming, of course, I have a large gun, and enough distance between myself and the animal that it can't hurt me before I shoot it.
TIL: The Lizardman’s Constant is 4%, supposedly how many poll takers will purposely choose a joke or bogus answer. 4% is how many of Americans believe lizardmen are running the Earth.
I don't think ChromeOS is losing any sales because customers don't know "how good" it is
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
Because with search, the competition is really just "one click away", but when it comes to changing your office suite, or operating system, not so much.
What MS is doing is far more effective than if Google did the same thing in return.
If Microsoft and Google get into a war over who can be the most obnoxious to people using the other's stuff, that sounds like great advertisement for Apple to me...
"Use Safari! It won't yell at you for daring to visit a competitor's website!"
No Apple just don't even allow you to install a non Webkit browser from the app store on their phones.
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)
While there's definitely a lot of similarity, I think there's still quite a big difference between a system notification popping up saying "try Safari" and hijacking the webpage of your competitor to say "try Edge".
On their own browser, on their own operating system. I’m
not saying you’re wrong that what MS is doing is bad but this isn’t a very persuasive argument.
I think it is a very good argument. I'm really taken aback by seemingly everyone playing dumb. Maybe I'm dumb. I feel like I'm in the twilight zone.
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?
> But having your car tell you, unprompted, not to go to this candy store, but rather to the one owned by the car brand
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."
Microsoft has what Urban Dictionary would call "chronic Small Dick Energy". It's why they constantly erode user agency and do bizarrely counterproductive things like putting ads in the file explorer. It's not financial, it's the culture. They don't like you, and they want you to know they think the people who use their operating system are stupid.
Except that chrome and edge are the same thing for the most part, meanwhile ChromeOS desktop is a piece of crap not supported by any major enterprise software.
You realize that Chrome only became the dominant browser because Google abused their search monopoly, right? 99% of average users don't know bupkiss about browsers, or what the difference is supposed to be. Unless antitrust laws are finally thrown at Google for what they did (and continue to do), I'm not going to criticize Microsoft for employing a similar strategy to break Google's unfair monopoly.
People here are insanely hypocritical for complaining about Microsoft but treating Google like they're innocent.
That's the narrative tech guys tell themselves because they don't care about anticompetitive behavior unless it's a company they don't like. I worked with normal users for years. Half of them weren't aware of what browser they used, much less why.
> they don't care about anticompetitive behavior unless it's a company they don't like
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.
Anecdotally, I clearly remember when Chrome came out and it was _vastly_ more performant than any other browser, owed to its one-tab-one-process model. I tried it, enjoyed it so I switched from Firefox, and switched all my family from Firefox.
The "average" user just knows "chrome is fast" because for the last 10 years, that's what they've heard. Even a lot of older people I talk to seem to use chrome. This is especially so for the younger generation.
There were a few years there of mainstream "I posted this from internet explorer" with a delayed piece of news or reaction.
ITT: People who don't understand shit about how Chrome became the dominant browser. And also so closed-minded as to not want to consider anything beyond "Chrome was better". I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I don't know how people can be so insanely naive and unwilling to look deeper.
> Then again, I've read that 4% of Americans believe they could win a fight with a Grizzly bear.
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.
There are echoes of the net neutrality debate here, where one might argue that: beyond the OSI Application Layer (HTTP etc.) there is also the Layer Where The Browser Decides What Pixels To Show, and that we would want that new layer to be every bit as neutral as, say, whether T-Mobile can shape lower-layer video traffic based on its business partnerships.
But there's also a lot of nuance here. Imagine there was a law or regulation that said that a browser manufacturer must only write code that is agnostic to the current URL; imagine it said, say, that Edge developers cannot deploy code that detects that Edge is on google.com/chrome and decide based on that information to execute certain code.
Unfortunately, a version of this per-site customization is arguably exactly what Chrome does for the HSTS preload list: https://hstspreload.org/ - and disallowing this would not be good for security at all!
And imagine if there is an urgent Chrome security fix that, as a side effect, causes the Outlook login screen to bug out - or any other mission-critical login page on the web. The most reasonable hotfix might be to push a quick fix that whitelists certain domains for the legacy behavior. But this, too, would be disallowed.
We definitely don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because Microsoft got a little cute - arguably too cute - here.
Go look at the amount of times IsGoogleHost or HasGoogleHost are called from within Chromium. For instance, autofill works differently for Google-owned services:
I don't think there's a realistic baby-bathwater trade-off here. This is just leveraging, using your power in one market (PC operating systems) to gain a competitive advantage in another market (browsers). It's not some deeply technical subject the courts and legislators are incapable of understanding, they just haven't cared since US v. Microsoft ended.
and disallowing this would not be good for security at all!
Maybe once we can stop drinking the corporate "security" kool-aid, we'll realise that it was all just an excuse to take control away from us. Saying "security" should be like saying "terrorists" or "think of the children" at this point.
There are many situations where this comment rings true - I've been vocally opposed to Google's so-called security-inspired restrictions to its extensions in Manifest V3, for instance. But the cross-browser initiative that is HSTS, allowing site operators to opt-in to protection against HTTPS downgrade attacks, is not one of those situations. Empowering businesses and creators to make their sites more secure for their users, in situations where there aren't side effects, is a good thing!
And then there is also CloudFlare which demands a lot from the browser before proxying traffic to many popular websites, forcing users to use one of the most common and unmodified browsers.
In some ways they really have: They're a cloud oriented, device agnostic platform company that's actually built a pretty nice and smooth ecosystem a la Apple. Others, well. See article. AI and the ad department want your data.
I thought of "the context" as "we'd like to inject some cheesy ad into the website you are visiting and we are so desperate that we put an outright lie (trust) into it while performing one of the most untrustworthy actions that anyone could think of."
I didn't see Google doing something like this, but I am afraid it won't be long until they copy it.
Also, trust isn't additive in this way: now you have to trust Google AND Microsoft, which is a weaker property than just trusting Google.
(unless of course they're alleging that Microsot has gone and reworked the browser to such a degree that you no longer have to trust Google. Which is obviously nonsense)
You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
You may not owe Microsoft better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
> Google is using much less annoying banners to promote its browser. More importantly, only on its own websites!
In fairness, they only show the message on their website, but their website is most people's home page, and it is how most people would find an alternative browser in the first place. It's debatable whether it's actually less visually annoying.
People forget that when Chrome first came out, Google was paying to have it bundled alongside antivirus updates, and pretty much every other place they could shove it in.
At some point I gave up switching my mother's computer back to Firefox, there was no way I could keep Chrome off of her machine, it just kept getting installed.
Chromeframe was back when IE 6/7 were still commonly used yet couldn't support "modern" HTML5/JavaScript functionality because Microsoft gave up on web standards. It was a workaround but not a particularly evil one imo.
Lol! I can’t even use Google anymore because half the screen asks me to sign in even when I’ve repeatedly denied to do so when searching in Safari on iOS. I simply use DDG now.
I don't know how they didn't get fined for their decade-long Chrome spam campaign. They even used to bundle it with other software downloads, a la Ask Toolbar
I tend to block these elements via ublock's node selector. I do thr same on youtube for all their "context" boxes that try to lie to you via appeal to authority.
Wait, so if you live next to a busy road you must be ok with me posting lawn signs for my desired candidate on your front yard because everyone sees your front yard and not mine.
I'm on a new Windows 11 machine. It seems every other time that I receive a Windows update it resets my browser preferences. Talked with a friend who manages thousands of Windows 11 instances and he says it is a freaking nightmare for him.
I have good friends working for Microsoft and I am generally positive towards the company. But it is stuff like this that makes them rather hard to defend to their critics.
Might be worth having a look under Settings / System / Notifications and the check boxes at the bottom of the screen which are:
Show me the Windows welcome experience
Offer suggestions on how I can setup my device
Get Tips and suggestions when I use Windows
Since I turned those off I don't think I've had the browser preferences get reset (I suspect this means the next update will be very annoying and reset my settings).
For your freind there should be a GPO or Intune policy to set another default browser. Say what you want about Windows but for enterprise machines the controls are there to change every single setting in GPO or Intune.
For your PC I would run, the green/recommended settings:
The escalation here (moreso than the size/language) is that there appears to be zero indication that this banner is part of the browser chrome (unlike previous iterations). I believe that it is still technically browser chrome, but the UI is indiscernible.
Yeah, this is a huge breach of trust! Ads in the browser would merely be super annoying and unprofessional, ads injected into the content box of a competitor's website is downright scary. What's next? Blocking users from downloading Chrome outright?! Replacing the Chrome installer with a program that extols the virtues of Edge?!
Okay, I don't actually believe they would go that far. But if you'd asked me before seeing this article whether they'd even go this far I'd probably have said no, so who even knows at this point? Even if it turns out the misleading nature of this ad was unintentional, that's a pretty egregious oversight, especially since they had to know an ad in this context would be closely scrutinized regardless of how they presented it.
Ah fascinating, I honestly thought they were injecting HTML on Google's Chrome page, that's what it looked like, and I was wondering how in the world that was legal.
Your explanation makes a lot more sense, if it's part of the browser chrome, and only shows up when people visit the Chrome page, there's probably no legal boundaries crossed here or injection into other websites happening.
But man does that look like part of the website and injected in there.
If it looks indistinguishable from the user's perspective, why does it matter whether it's technically part of the website? The effect is exactly the same.
The problem with Edge is that Microsoft can't understand one simple thing: do not shitify user experience with wasteful default pages, nag popups, and questionaries. Nobody wants to waste their time on that! This is one of the core reasons Chrome is so popular: it's mostly a clear slate on the first run.
The same applies to Firefox (to a lesser degree though): it nags users with "What's new in Firefox" after every update. Nobody reads that anyway but it significantly worsens the experience by thrashing user's attention.
The narcistic attention seeking behaviors cultivate rejection.
> Google also shows banners to promote Chrome, but they appear only on the company's websites.
On Gmail for iPhone it is constantly pestering me about what browser I’d like to use to open links: the Safari I already have or Chrome that I don’t. And even if I leave the toggle for “ask me which browser to use every time” unchecked, I still have to deal with it.
As a side note, I’ve noticed I may have some sort of mild ADHD because every time I want to do something with my phone or computer it is constantly prompting me to solve some unrelated problem. It’s extremely annoying because it takes mental energy to remember what I was even trying to do in the first place. I thought popups were a thing of the past but no, they just look nicer now.
uBlock Origin has annoyance filters that work great for this but obviously not compatible with iPhones. Upside is the iOS release later this year will make it possible for Firefox on iOS
It’s not even just popups though, it’s the entire computer-using experience. Installing update 1/5. Log in to unsubscribe. You need to open up your 2FA app to access the password. Respond to this message. Your free trial has come to an end. iCloud is almost full. Would you like to install updates now or later? Our privacy policy has changed, accept? Rate and tip your Uber driver.
I’m mixing between phone, computer, apps, and websites but the point is the same. This software demands that I solve their problem right away before I can do what I wanted to do.
It’s debilitating and I’ve resorted to writing down on a paper notebook what I need to get done so I can re-engage after one of those endless pre-work interruptions.
More and more are switching to Edge as the default if they have Office 365 as it all syncs and you are paying them so there is some trust there.
It is also an OS thing. If you are on Windows, the best protection, NOWADAYS, is going to be Microsoft stuff. Yes they used to be bad in the XP days but Edge + Windows defender + ublock now you have good protection for free.
Google does not have clean hands here, they paid to have chrome bundled with all kinds of scummy (and not so scummy) software and made it really difficult not to accidentally install.
This is something a lot of people forget. Among tech folks the narrative was always "Chrome won because it was faster", but in the real world most people got Chrome for the first time because they installed a Java or Flash update and Google paid for Chrome to automatically be installed and instantly set itself as the default browser (this is literally how I got Chrome installed for the first time, against my will, via a Flash update).
MS, please fire everyone ok with this and focus on making great product not growth hacks.
The false goal of short term gains without good product foundation is like smoking 60 a day and pretending cancer doesn’t exist. My children will never know what a “Microsoft” is.
Google and Microsoft are two of the worst companies I have seen that have
no regard for the end user.
to them we're just dumb consumers - who don't know know anything or have no personal agency.
google will literally change your android settings on a whim, whether it's the
how the icons looks etc, colors whatever.
microsoft will try by all means to reset your personal choices about the applications you wanna use or the settings / preferences you want for your machine.
both these companies treat consumers as landlords treat tenants. as a pest merely
to be tolerated
> it has by far the best vertical tab implementation of all browsers (someone please copy this)
TIL. I think it's still far behind TreeStyleTabs (TST) on Firefox. Missing for me:
- No nested groups. I know it's called vertical and not tree, but branches offer more context when navigating deep.
- Groups are standalone containers, while in TST the group is the root tab. This saves space but also allows to close/CTRL-F4 a tab to close the group/branch.
- Open in a new tab adds the tab at the end of the group, loosing context. There might be an extension for that.
- Closing a group and all its tabs requires to open a context menu.
- No automatic collapse behavior when selecting other groups and there are lots of tabs open.
- Open in a new tab doesn't create a group automatically, they must be manually initiated. Killer feature for me: by the time I realize I should have created a group it would be too late to bother assembling one.
- You can hide the titlebar/tab-bar at the top therefore maximizing vertical space
- It can be set to either be sticky (always open) or auto-collapse into a thin icons-only vertical toolbar.
The grouping functionality in Edge is inherited form Chrome without improvements.
The grouping functionality in Firefox with TreeStyleTabs or Sidebery is unmatched but this is all implemented by extensions and Firefox abandoned a lot of interface customizability when it abandoned XUL extensions. (you can theoretically do it by hacking userchrome, but it's buggy)
With old XUL extensions, TreeStyleTabs actually had the option to hide the tab-bar. And you also had the option to move the window controls to one of the toolbars.
Vivaldi does have the option to use vertical tabs but you are left with a titlebar you can't hide.
> -it has by far the best vertical tab implementation of all browsers (someone please copy this)
Brave is copying it. Still WIP, but it's starting to get really good.
Turn off the tab scrolling flag if you have it set, set the bookmarks bar to be always on so window height is static (otherwise tabs will jump around when you grab them), and turn vertical tabs on in flags. Not quite as smooth as Edge's yet, but it's getting there.
Happily living on Firefox for several years now on my Macs. I wish I could quit more of both Google and Microsoft. But I'm an Apple-whore and I don't see myself quitting them anytime soon. I probably should though...
Whenever I have to (re)install/setup Windows on a family member's machine, it's a miserable experience. The only silver lining is the petty satisfaction I get from watching Edge and Bing pathetically beg me to not install Chrome. I actually always type "Google Chrome" into Bing instead of going directly to chrome.com, just for the show.
There is something satisfying about the thought that some percentage on an analytics dashboard at microsoft just went down by 0.00001%. However small it is, at least with modern windows, your malfeasance is measured and logged! :)
The problem with Edge is that it's become loaded with so many useless features. I like Chrome because it's fairly lightweight in terms of design. If I wanted a fully loaded browser I'd use Vivaldi.
Exactly this, Edge was #1 until they started adding stuff. At this point, I'm honestly expecting them to add a OBD2 VAG debugging application as a built-in feature...
You guys just didn't pivot fast enough, you should have become your own certificate manager so you could run a man in the middle attack and break the https, add your ads, and then re-encrypt it
Can't modify the license without the approval of previous contributors, and I don't think the F/OSS Qt/KDE devs who originally created WebKit are going to agree to that one.
Fuck Google and their internet monopoly, but I have to give it to them for not doing shit like this. If I had to pick a tech giant to run the internet, I'd rather have Google than Microsoft.
...although, fuck Google still (and the rest of big tech)
No google took your (and your mum's) gmail sign in from the gmail website, intercepted it in their browser to log your /browser/ into their servers that have /nothing/ to do with email so they could better spy on you and build a better database about your online activity. Without your consent. Without your mum's consent. Knowing they didn't have it. Knowing exactly what they were doing when they did it and making shitty excuses pretending it was something anyone wanted.
They did it dishonestly, covertly and knowingly for profit. People should have gone to jail the same as if they broke into sergey and larry's houses and photographed everything and sold the pictures to the highest bidder while claiming "consent" because they typed the question into chrome which larry and sergey have decided to monitor.
The idea that Google is better than Microsoft is like arguing whether fresh horse manure is worse to eat than fresh cow manure.
Take each crook entirely individually.
Google is horrible, market abusing, foul, dishonest and needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.
Completely separately to that and in no way is it related:
Microsoft is horrible, market abusing, foul, dishonest and needs to be broken up into tiny pieces.
In the race to the bottom everyone who passes the threshold of acceptable behaviour in civilized, democratic society that upholds the rule of law and equality before it needs to dealt with separately in the strongest terms. "But s/he does worse!" is as ridiculous a defence as it sounds.
And when you look at what Apple are doing, google are not interesting.
And when you look at what facebook does, microsoft are not interesting.
And so on.
Break them up.
/me waves to the cia/fbi/nsa aplogists who clearly want them all big and controlled.
edit: pretty sure the thing I was responding to has been stealth edited away. @dang any news when you'll get a release showing a parent has been edited after being responded to in some way? Then at least we'll know they should have stuck an "edit: " description or something.
> edit: pretty sure the thing I was responding to has been stealth edited away. @dang any news when you'll get a release showing a parent has been edited after being responded to in some way? Then at least we'll know they should have stuck an "edit: " description or something.
Yeah look in my view it is possible, I'm a long way from being infallible. Maybe I misread and took a pretty different thrust the second time somehow? No way for me to know now. Anyway hence the request to @dang for a pretty obvious feature. "this post was edited after being responded to" flag.
If you didn't edit after the response I apologise for the suggestion.
My (Zwift) gaming PC is on Windows. The contrast to my work/hobby OSX is jarring. I am constantly bombarded with ads with opt-out tricks. It feels unclean to say the least.
The worst OSX gets is trying to get me to agree to iTunes ToS once a month without a way to turn it off.
Microsoft does so many good things, then does things like this. I don't get this company sometimes. Feels like half the company is one step into the future and the other is stuck in the 90s. That being said, Google has so many stupid nags when I use Edge. Not a justification, but this runs both ways.
Related: I recently opened a link from Outlook on Android. It asked me which browser to choose: Chrome or Edge. I didn't even have Edge installed on my device. The promot seemed to try to look like Android system prompt, but it suggested installing missing Edge browser.
The YouTube app on iOS does the same thing, putting "Chrome" first in the list of browsers to open links in, even though I don't have Chrome installed.
Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with this. They have momentum and good cred built from their other bets then some overstuffed suit pushes for time to be spent on this.
Is anyone surprised? Microsoft has good parts in it, but wolf changes clothes something something.. core was rotten for so long, so what and when changed?
Honestly if this is really injected into the DOM being rendered by the web view... I'm sure someone at google with an insider's windows license has a branch somewhere that silently waits for it to be added, then removes it.
I highly doubt it is injected in the DOM. I assume it is a banner shown directly above the web view. You can see in the screenshot that the scrollbar (on the root web view) is below this banner.
I honestly feel like Edge is run by product owners with no accountability to anyone, who get paid substantially more if the numbers go up. Except they're different numbers per team, and some of them are working against each other.
In my opinion AGI is much more likely to be first deployed by a country. If it is a company it would be a Chinese company with government backing. They are already funding massive models for their big tech companies and universities.
I cannot confirm or deny that I am the developer behind this ad. Satya was staring over my shoulder while I did or did not write the code. He also made me sign an additional NDA.
I bet it’s accelerationism. The developers will “yes-man” every harmful idea made up by marketing until there are clear consequences illustrating why it was a bad idea.
Something is off there... those look like mock-ups, not real UI. Also, I just tried on my Windows 11 machine, running the latest Edge and all I see is a pop-up (not injected into the HTML of the page, but separate from the browser window), just like in the past.
It's possible they got some PM's "smart idea" that no one will ever greenlight. Or it's possible they're on some pre-release / insider builds where MS is testing / experimenting with it.
Either way, I'll reserve my outrage for when I see this in a released version.
Nothing about it looks like a mock-up to me, and the author is clear they were running real software. Can you point to what specific part of the interface doesn't appeal real?
Also, the author clearly states it "might be a thing Microsoft tries on a limited set of Edge insiders or only in specific regions".
The UI controls don't look like that in Windows 11 (even on the white theme), and also who actually installs the Bing add-on? (or are they saying that Bing icon thing should now be in Edge as well?).
Again, it's possible they're signed up for insider builds (or dogfooding, or otherwise obtained some branch build of Windows); but with all the latest updates applied to my Windows 11 OS (and Edge) I see nothing like this (so no repro).
So clearly injecting third-party code into an SSL-served website considered malicious attack? If it can be done for Chrome download webpage, then this attack vector is possibly open inside edge for other web pages? I'm afraid bad actor can find it quickly and use the "feature" to inject his own login form into banking websites unchecked, I wonder if it's too different from injecting an ad.
It's a little amusing to see the leech Microsoft trying to compete with Google, when the former is already relying on the core rendering engine from the latter. I'll continue to use Firefox, and simply refuse to use sites that don't work in it (along with a strongly-worded complaint to those responsible), but I think the whole reason we got into this mess is because of web developers' greed for the new and shiny, along with Google's ability to weaponise change to outrun its competitors --- even Microsoft.
What needs to happen to stop the increasing user-hostility is to take the web back to its roots. Stop trendchasing and consuming the marketing propaganda about how X is better because it's newer. Maybe once browsers (as in actual rendering engines, not more skinned Chrome-clones like Edge) become far more diverse and the web becomes mainly documents-readable-in-almost-any-browser again, that'll make things better.
That popup has been around in Edge for awhile, judging by the Bing icon in the top right corner of the article screenshot, I think the author is using a pre-release version of Edge that has the bigger version of the prompt.
And when I have to use Bing and go to google I get a similar (ok it is only half-size) Chrome advertisement :D Wonder who was first and if this is some kind of rebuttal, or just sad coincidence of today's world.
Maybe, but personally I don't care and feel that difference much at all - both can go and d... forcing me a specialized advertisement just because I use your unrelated search site with the wrong and not your browser is the same as advertising when I visit another browsers website that is not you - to me.
But to be honest, I have a strange relationship with unasked and unconsented advertisements at all, imo they are one of the biggest unnecessary wastage sins today ;)
I think the only legal issues is from an anti-competetive angle which the courts would have to settle. I don't think they are violating any sort of computer crime laws. It definitely feels slimy, though.
Worst case scenario, they could just move the banner to be "within the browser's GUI" (while still seeming to extend over the page) rather than actually in the page and that issue would go away.
Listening in to what users do is the way to earn their trust and if they don't get it by themselves what could be better than telling them straight away.
Looks like their fond memories of United States v. Microsoft Corp is fading away. Perhaps it's a great time to make MS recall this, and all other big techs as well?
Google also doesn't have clean hands in this fight, but also I don't really care about which company that's brazenly acting in a user-hostile way is more user-hostile at the moment?
Both companies ought to be legally slapped with some kind of regulatory consequence for the ways that they push their browser; beyond that I'm not too particular about what order they're slapped in as long as it doesn't stop with one of them.
This sound a lot like Microsoft’s “Smart Tags” in IE6 that would linkify (non-href) text in non-Microsoft web pages to point to Microsoft-recommended websites or applications.
Ungoogled Chromium. Chromium is open source, but still has most of the google stuff baked in. This project strips that google stuff out and that’s about it. I’ve been using the build available on home brew for a few years with no complaints.
I believe I saw this on a Windows laptop purchased in the last week - was very surprised it was technically possible for a neutral browser to do this but I moved on as quickly as possible. Yeah the browser clearly wasn’t neutral - how is it possible to trust software like that?
(If this is in the testing phase maybe we were a canary)
"Power and privacy to the people. No need to dig into your security settings. Fierce privacy is our default."
- Firefox on a recent update. You know, a browser that defaults to Google search and having search suggestions on. I know I'd have a couple privacy settings to change.
I've been using it a fair bit recently, and don't come across issues very often at all. It doesn't support Webext extensions (there's a bug in the tracker to do so, but it hadn't got much attention in years, last I looked) but it does have a built-in adblocker that works reasonably well on a decent percentage of sites, so it's not all bad.
Edit: some particularly JS-heavy sites do peg my CPU pretty badly, so it appears that the JS engine isn't as snappy as FF/Chrome, but sites that use either don't use much JS, or that use have optimised the use pretty well are fine. Airbnb was a notably bad case that I spotted last week.
They advertise “With the added trust of Microsoft”. That goes over like a lead balloon in some circles. Now pardon me while I run screaming in the opposite direction.
Seriously though, do normal people like Microsoft?
I nearly considered moving to Edge on my last Windows install.
In the end, it's true that IE/Edge were bad choices before moving to WebKit. Now, why not? A more integrated browser (as Safari is for Mac) makes sense x Google being evil(er) x Firefox being left behind (for bad reasons, but still) x Bing being a good Bing x Google Search being less useful.
I agree the method isn't good, but feels like Edge is not a bad choice anymore.
Do you like a browser that doesn't end to end encrypt your browsing history when syncing it? Because that's what Edge does, and there's no option to turn e2ee on as far as I know. As far as I know, Chrome doesn't default to it, but it can be turned on.
Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox all operate independent sync services that are zero knowledge.
It's not part of the content area, but above it. The browser decides what it paints in its window. And apparently Microsoft thinks pushing an ad above a competitors page is a good idea.
To the people who care, it's another reminder on why they don't trust Microsoft. For the rest, it's just another ad. Disregarded.
Edit: I find the term "inject" in the article's title to be misleading, because it sounds like doing HTML injection. It's more shoving than injecting.
When I go to the chrome download page, I just get a little popup on the side, which is very clearly not part of the page. Pretty much exactly the same as when I visit google from any non-chrome browser.
I'd quite like to see Microsoft do this for other software and services too.
Like if someone goes on the Adobe Illustrator website, it shows a little banner informing them of Inkscape.
Or if someone is about to sign up to a Mastodon instance, it gently points out that this isn't really Twitter, and that the server administrator will probably read your private messages.
> Or if someone is about to sign up to a Mastodon instance, it gently points out that this isn't really Twitter, and that the server administrator will probably read your private messages.
If you want the server administrator to definitely read your private messages, there's always Twitter! :P
So Google advertising their own products on their own website means we shouldn't be complaining about Microsoft injecting ads when viewing competitor websites? And as users, we have to wait for Google to stop advertising on their own websites before having the prerogative to complain about Microsoft using their browser to inject ads?
Microsoft advertising their own product on their own product?! The horror! If you’re going to treat software as a fiefdom where the “owner” of that software can do whatever they want because it’s theirs then that applies to the browser and OS too.
So you're saying that if I support your ability to write what you want on your blog, including an endorsement for Pepsi, then I must surely also accept that as a user, Microsoft ought to be able to inject content as I visit your website?
And if I accept your ability to place advertisements on your website, surely you're not saying you feel motivated to argue that AT&T should be able to inject content on competitor websites? And Samsung too?
What kind of brightline are you trying to draw here?
As a user, I just don't want browsers to inject content when I'm viewing websites. I also want owners of websites to be able to say what they want. What are you trying to argue for?
If the reason that I'm allowed to have ads on my blog or in my software products is "because it's my digital property" then that applies to everything, including a browser. Since the situation you're outlining is the absurd logical conclusions of that reasoning then the reason it's acceptable to run ads on a webpage and not a browser must be something different.
Controlling the browser is about users getting control of the machine they bought. Controlling whether a server may respond with speech that sells Pepsi is about controlling someone else's machine.
Again, what kind of brightline are you asking for here?
So showing ads in native apps in unethical because it deprives the user control of the device they bought? Android devs are gonna be big mad when they find out.
I don't know what the bright line is, no one in the comments has been able to come up with one that defines ads in browser as bad (especially because they're not the only browser to have ads -- *waves to Firefox and Brave*) but wouldn't affect other forms of advertising we already find acceptable that isn't "I just don't like it." And that's fair, I don't like it either but we've kinda painted ourselves in a corner with the whole, "software is the property and platform of the who make it" thing.
Transmitting me a piece of code I run on my machine or voluntarily install as part of the OS isn't really any different than what we do with browsers anyway. After reading everyone's comments I'm leaning toward, "these ads in particular make tech people uncomfortable because they're well targeted and it breaks the mental model they've mistakenly held that the browser is actually theirs and not serving the interests of corporate daddy."
They used to bundle themselves to installers and updaters like literal spyware. I don't see how you can defend either of them so let them fight. Also their competitor Apple has normalized the idea that they have a say what gets installed to your machine and not, they can invite Apple to the party as well as far as I care.
This is so weird to me. I was an early KDE user and remembering thinking KDE was great but the integrated web browser was absolute garbage. At that time it could only render a tiny fraction of pages at a usable level, I certainly never expected it to become what it has.
Not at all. Most people use Chrome as their browser. It would be trivial for Google to show a Gmail ad when you visit outlook.com using Chrome just like Microsoft are doing.
It might be as annoying, but I don’t find it quite as evil. At least that is just Google deciding to put an ad on their own website that is annoying… it isn’t abusing the browser to put an ad on someone else’s website
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.