1. Chrome
2. Google
3. Default browser app (w/unfamiliar generic logo)
They removed the option for Safari some time in the last two years; here's how it looked in 2024: https://imgur.com/1iBVFfc
And the cherry on top of dark UX patterns: an unchecked toggle rests at the bottom. "Ask me which app to use every time." You cannot stop getting these.
How is this legal?
* new automated UX experiments starts * the UI bot made a change that made the page unscrollable * the experiment has a much higher rate of retention then the control (because people can't scroll) * the experiment is deemed a success by results analysis (no one looks at the page to see WHY) * the experiment is blessed as the new pipeline
Such an obvious business improvement made by Gemini !
OK, if it is a bug, what are the different time frames for people experiencing this pretty serious bug?
The dressing up of purely malicious or greedy actions as merely resonable ones, that were executed poorly has become incredibly prevalent in the modern world.
This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff.
I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.
The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.
In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now.
Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention.
Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid.
You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale.
It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity.
Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench.
Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.
So goes Alphabet these days.
If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
I would hardly notice, TBH.
There are alternatives for all of that.
Have they ever been more valuable than now?
Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are.
In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?
MS has been successful despite fucking up the monolithic position they held in desktop and gaming, because they managed to find a particularly valuable golden goose. It's just that in doing so they allowed the other golden geese they have to become quite sick.
If you took out cloud rev MS would have been much more motivated to not let the rest of the company's products turn in to the sorry state they're in.
They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year.
Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.
In the past 1-2 years I had to stop that, as there's a good chance I will be taken to some ad-sponsored link that has hijacked the search results.
For example, if I search 'Claude' the actual link to claude.ai will not even fit on a 1080p screen.
Also Google search degradation is partly due to the web becoming infested with AI slop and most content moving to chat apps, which are walled gardens by default.
In addition, it should remember the setting forever and not keep prompting every couple months.
This is not a good faith attempt to let a user open a link in their browser of choice, it’s a push to get users to download and use Chrome. I can only assume users with Chrome as their default browser don’t get this needless slide-in.
Alas, I don't think it's a bug. A PM or VP probably got a bonus for this.
> How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Yeah this is kinda weird. I don't know if it's browser specific though. I use Firefox on my main computer and I think I still see it. Which means that the website owner opted into this weird pattern. No other auth providers do this. Just Google.
It’s a cancer on the Internet.
It's indeed aggravating. Thankfully it turns out you can turn it off (and of course the option is extremely well-hidden): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customizati...
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_g...
It's the website that spamming that.
Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts.
Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.
I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with.
Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content.
All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.
Websites that choose to put a sign-in with Google button on a page can disable the popup by setting data-auto_prompt="false". The default being "true" is how Google is pushing this, but this seems like a rather gentle way of pushing.
It's clearly a deliberate choice that websites make. Your explanation as to why they're doing it seems very plausible to me.
Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.
That's a bit silly.
Some people think pineapple doesn't belong on pizza, but that means you should avoid buying pineapple pizza, not outlaw it.
Awesome: great business opportunity to open new pizza places.
Either you make a lot of money from customers, or you sell to Google for more money. If the latter: open yet another place, rinse and repeat.
I don’t see the sheet for imgur.com either because, well, they’ve blocked access completely for UK users. :shrug:
EDIT: also just tested turning this checkbox off. I then clicked a link in an email, got the pop-up, unchecked “ask me every time”, clicked default browser, and didn’t see the pop-up next time.
I’ve seen it with non-Google apps too. I’m not sure what causes it, but I believe sometimes you can long tap the link and select the correct option.
I believe the behavior where you say no and it still tries to open the app is because the default behavior on Google Maps links is to open Google Maps.
Apple dark UX pattern is that there always has badges on Settings app if you do not subscribe to iCloud even if you have manual backup. You cannot dismiss it.
"What is Arcade, am I supposed to be paying for it?"
Sigh. Apple used to be better than this.
Sparrow made Gmail a great experience, but Google bought it and shut it down. I’m still rather bitter about that. It’s the only email client that actually made me enjoy email.
Not that hard. Get new email, autoforward old email to new. In old email, set reply-to as new email.
After suitable time has elapsed, disable old email.
It would require systematically changing my email at the 300+ sites I’m aware of, assuming they allow that, or deleting the account if they allow that. I’ve been making efforts here and it’s painful. Many companies don’t have good systems for that, if any at all. Even big companies like Amazon and Sony, I was told to just abandon old accounts and let them hang out there forever… I had duplicate Audible and PlayStation accounts. No way to delete them. I found this particularly upsetting with Sony, considering how many times they’ve been hacked. On some sites I also ended up in captcha purgatory.
Then there are the hundreds more who have my email somewhere. I tied to change my email 13 years ago. My own mother still sends to my old gmail account. I think she used the new one a few times, but do I really want to nag my 70 year old mother about using the wrong address? My dad is the only one who reliably uses it, because he uses his contacts app properly. Over a decade and the progress has been almost non-existent. All this effort did was make email and logins harder to manage by spreading it out.
The pragmatic approach is to go back to Gmail, since most stuff is still there. I don’t want to be in bed with Google, but at least it’s only one thing to think about.
Thinking about it, my Gmail account is also my Apple ID. I think Apple only recently made an option available to change that, but it feels risky.
You can use mobile Thunderbird with a Gmail account.
Maybe all those apps have since updated to natively support all Gmail’s features, but that is also a cat and mouse game with all the stuff they try that doesn’t fit neatly into established mail protocols.
I still have those accounts and occasionally check for emails from old contacts or service emails, but on a daily basis I don't interact with Gmail at all.
