You're using Chrome and on the website to buy Office? How about an injected ad that says that Google docs is free and just as good.
Attempting to buy a Windows PC? How about an injected ad explaining how good ChromeOS is?
Microsoft are honestly insane to try to play these games with Google. Then again, I've read that 4% of Americans believe they could win a fight with a Grizzly bear.
For google, search revenue largely is the business. Every point Microsoft can take out of Google's search marketshare hurts Google far more than the reverse. Attacking Google's browser share will also reduce the number of people with Google search as the default.
Forcing Google to adopt more LLM/AI features will also significantly increase their cost per search query in the near term, if Microsoft can meaningfully change consumer expectations of search. These LLM queries are much more expensive to service today than a traditional search.
This is all the more interesting because for the first time ever Google have wobbled in their dominance of search, there might actually be an opportunity here for Microsoft. That was almost unthinkable a couple of years ago.
I personally don't see how this is any better or worse really than the billions of dollars Google pay Apple every year to secure the iOS default search engine setting, eliminating vast amounts of rival marketshare in a single move.
Staying in business is.
MS lost phones, and desktop is on the way out.
Gadget nerd flame wars of 00-10s are over. The next gen is tired of that and see “computing” as a mathematics not a x86; the future does not care about past memes.
MS needs a novel long term solution to iterate profiting from. They have none.
Until a laptops hardware is inevitably powerful enough to train whatever model needed, we’re still going to be living with these obnoxious FAANG size tech companies as a social daycare
And yes, I am getting "login with google" modal on half of the websites I visit even though I don't even have a google account, don't use chrome, and don't want touch anything google.
You can't trust Edge not to edit what you see. That's hard trust to win back.
But also, Blink dominance is bad, and edge does nothing in that regard.
> Competition and diversity of browsers is good
Someone doesn't remember the early days of Internet Explorer
Microsoft changing that page for their profit is 100% NOT fair use. Google should simply sue them for all those counts of willful copyright infringement at $180k each.
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.
Think of a 7'+ man who weighs 500+ lbs, carries around knives, and looks at you half-interestedly... like he's flipping a coin in his head to decide whether or not to eat you.
That's a lot of presence to ignore when there's only open field between the two of you.
I’ve Been stalked by a big grizzly a couple of times, almost rode into a big female who the started frothing at the mouth, stamping her feet and snarling while 10 feet away. I assure you, there is no fight.
Even a modest grizzly will take the door off a cabin in one swipe without slowing down. The bear will annihilate you in a second or two.
Of course a gun changes the equation, Though plenty of people have shot grizzlies many times and still been killed. I believe the outcomes are statistically worse for those with a gun
Are you sure? Bears (at least, black and grizzly bears) are really smart. Like, scary smart.
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.
Double down on diagnostics and error pages, and adjust the messaging during outages to highlight GCP uptimes.
It would be quite different if Google's browser started modifying Microsoft's websites, as Microsoft is Google's.
14% believe they could win a fight with a Kangaroo. 8% with a Gorilla, an Elephant or a Lion, and for the Grizzly bear, it's actually 6%.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
The analogy between people and Grizzly bears fails because Microsoft's market cap today is $1.8 trillion... Sure, I went on Google, not Bing, to check that $1.8T figure—Google may very well be the king of search, but Microsoft is the king of countless other products
What MS is doing is far more effective than if Google did the same thing in return.
"Use Safari! It won't yell at you for daring to visit a competitor's website!"
Why waste time advertising on competitor's websites when you can just stop them from using competitors altogether (or at least require them to use you at the same time)
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/how-do-you-...
Imagine going to the iPad product page on Edge and being met with “hey you should buy a surface tablet instead”.
Apple then retaliates with similar tactics.
Chrome had an ad on the google homepage and in search results for years and years, so MS are copying Google here.
No one would make a big deal if MSEdge recommendation appeared on Bing or other MS related websites.
Because it would be referred to the trade commission for false advertising is my guess.
People here are insanely hypocritical for complaining about Microsoft but treating Google like they're innocent.
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://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/15/technology/microsoft-inve...
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
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.
(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)
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.
https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com...
Additional network telemetry is enabled when interacting with a Google-owned property ( this is known as "domain_reliability" -- https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:com... )
Chromium is not a neutral browser already.
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.
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.
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 PC I would run, the green/recommended settings:
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
That turns off a lot of annoying shit but does not break your OS install like all those shady github scripts do.
What do they think about stuff like this? They have, even if minimally, a better chance of actually getting their complaints heard.
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.
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
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.
"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.
-it has by far the best vertical tab implementation of all browsers (someone please copy this)
-it has great PWA integration
-it isn't Chrome while being Chrome
-it has the option of two extension stores
-it integrates nicely with Windows Hello
Unfortunately, Microsoft appears to be hellbent on ruining it with bloat and ads and tracking.
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.
- Scroll-wheel up/down doesn't quick switch tabs. Killer feature for me.
- Drag'n'drop zone to create a group VS reorder tab action is very small and hard to hit.
Nice feature though. I'm kind of amazed they bothered to implement this yet flat out refuse to re-enable the vertical taskbar lost with Windows 11.
- 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.
I use Firefox + vertical tabs reloaded as TST was too slow for me and adding tabs is much slower when you have lots open.
Edge vertical tabs implementation flies in comparison.
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.
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.
Any browser that crosses this line is irredeemably corrupt in my book. I will not have it.
Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox all operate independent sync services that are zero knowledge.
> “with the added trust of Microsoft”
is comedy gold. Next they'll be advertising WSL as “the friendliness of Unix combined with the stability & security of Windows”.
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.)
It's a nasty precedent. One stop of browsers banning you from access to competitors websites.
Seriously though, do normal people like Microsoft?
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.
And fortunately, it didn't add these ads to your outgoing email, like Microsoft used to do.
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.
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.
Based on customer surveys Google is more trusted than Microsoft.
I'm sure Microsoft will love it.
I stopped using Brave since they added a bunch of crypto garbage. Chrome and Edge both have telemetry and Google/Microsoft account sign in nagging.
Currently using Firefox. Love Orion as well on my phone but the Webkit Devtools make it unusable for development.
Well yeah, because that's all they can do...
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.
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
...although, fuck Google still (and the rest of big tech)
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.
The worst OSX gets is trying to get me to agree to iTunes ToS once a month without a way to turn it off.
Something like...
^^ THE ABOVE IS A LIE. GOOGLE ROCKS!!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".
I think somebody just coined a phrase
This act basically says "Hey, use Edge and you cannot trust what you are looking at is what was transmitted".
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
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.
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.
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.
(If this is in the testing phase maybe we were a canary)
Awful idea.
Trust? (Eyeroll)
Now they steal chromium and try to start another browser war?