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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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'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
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.
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
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
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.
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! :)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ;)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
379 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 307 ms ] threadIt's a nasty precedent. One stop of browsers banning you from access to competitors 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.
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.
And all of their apps which conveniently "firget" user selection: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1625756307297914883
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.
If you want the server administrator to definitely read your private messages, there's always Twitter! :P
That is a cute quote. They should have a smiley after that quote on the ad.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/after-seven-...
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.
Glad https murdered that company. (No, I won’t mention the company.)
And fortunately, it didn't add these ads to your outgoing email, like Microsoft used to do.
10 years ago this would have been on The Onion
Well yeah, because that's all they can do...
It’s not illegal, should they do it?
I think somebody just coined a phrase
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?
Again, what kind of brightline are you asking for here?
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."
Big Stallman was right energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/15/technology/microsoft-inve...
This act basically says "Hey, use Edge and you cannot trust what you are looking at is what was transmitted".
What trust is left? Trust that they'll sell your data to loan companies? https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la...
The scorpion stung the frog. Quelle surprise.
They do 20 other things that are worse.
I didn't see Google doing something like this, but I am afraid it won't be long until they copy it.
(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 may not owe Microsoft better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
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
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
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 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.
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?
MS has become just another cloud company nowadays. Not much to differentiate them.
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.
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.
[1] https://vivaldi.com
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
But also, Blink dominance is bad, and edge does nothing in that regard.
> Competition and diversity of browsers is good
Someone doesn't remember the early days of Internet Explorer
"Use Safari! It won't yell at you for daring to visit a competitor's website!"
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.
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/TRYTHENEWSAFARI.html
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-...
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
Yes, I think both are absolutely disgusting too.
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
it injects html.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
Because it would be referred to the trade commission for false advertising is my guess.
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 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.
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Akeley
Double down on diagnostics and error pages, and adjust the messaging during outages to highlight GCP uptimes.
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%.
People here are insanely hypocritical for complaining about Microsoft but treating Google like they're innocent.
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.
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.
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.
What MS is doing is far more effective than if Google did the same thing in return.
Based on customer surveys Google is more trusted than Microsoft.
I'm sure Microsoft will love it.
Thankfully.
Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13400291, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30721728>
• https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/19/browser_line_of_death...
• https://emilymstark.com/2022/12/18/death-to-the-line-of-deat...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34074966
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, the author clearly states it "might be a thing Microsoft tries on a limited set of Edge insiders or only in specific regions".
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).