Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab | Hacker News Reader

Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

423 pointsNephx315 comments

Users are reporting banner ads such as "New! Track your health and fitness with the..." below the search box on both google.com and chrome://newtab.

Google has historically been protective of their front page, why now?

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> Google has historically been protective of their front page, why now?

Probably for the same reason that Google is shutting down Stadia [1] and cutting staff [2], and the same reason that we see roughly one announcement of layoffs here on Hacker News every week: most people expect that we are going into a recession. For example, see the price of major indexes like the S&P 500 or the NASDAQ and plot it on a 10+ year timescale.

What surprises me the most actually is how quickly Google can adapt to the situation. Basically, they have been giving out candy for free when there was lots of money coming and now that they expect less, they quickly put on extra income streams and cut out money losers.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33022768

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32927848

I’m not sure I’d call that quick. Quick would be a single deep cut and return to normal operations.

I don't buy the SP500 graph argument, economies tend to behave on a log scale.

It's not really a matter of opinion or what people think. We're already in a recession here in the United States, as we've had two negative GDP growth quarters in a row.

Anyone who says otherwise is likely just doing so for political reasons, as it's also an election year here in the United States, but to do so they'd have to literally change the definition of recession (they're trying but it's not working).

This is a classic example of how propaganda works. The layman's definition of recession, which has never been used officially or by policy-makers in America, is this bit about "negative GDP growth for two quarters".

But despite that not being how we've always determined recessions here, if you read the reply above, the user has literally invented a political conspiracy about their ignorance about economics. The layman's definition isn't right? It's more complicated than a one-liner on the news? No! It's a conspiracy!

This is EXACTLY how the propaganda is designed to affect them. Empower the ignorance such that layman's understanding is the only valid understanding, impugn the experts until economics is nothing more than an election year conspiracy.

For anyone interested in the truth of how recessions have been determined in the United States for the past sixty years, it's only about three paragraphs of information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bureau_of_Economic_Re...

Your own wikipedia link references the standard - the standard used by the media and the traders that it's two quarters of negative GDP. NBER does tend to be considered the official source.. and they tend to announce them about a year after they happen. NBER is important but "determiner of recession" is not quite their job role.

You need only to glance at the markets to see the reality of the situation we are in.

The argument the WH made for us not being in a recession is that employment is high. That situation is quickly changing.

Be fair: the link references the standard, but does so in order to say that that's not how the NBER defines a recession.

> The NBER uses a broader definition of a recession than commonly appears in the media. A definition of a recession commonly used in the media is two consecutive quarters of a shrinking gross domestic product (GDP). In contrast, the NBER defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales". Business cycle dates are determined by the NBER dating committee. Typically, these dates correspond to peaks and troughs in real GDP, although not always so.

...

> Though not listed by the NBER, another factor in favor of this alternate definition is that a long term economic contraction may not always have two consecutive quarters of negative growth, as was the case in the recession following the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

At the end of the day, the definition of Recession doesn't matter.

There are ZERO changes or decision anyone can make (including policy) based on whoever's definition of recession is.

It's really weird that humans come up with these arbitrary definitions that doesn't matter but choose that hill to die on.

Thought experiment: Knowing and feeling all the economic news around you, what decision would you make if (or what decision should policy makers make)

a) we are in some arbitrary definition of Recession?

b) we are not in some arbitrary definition of Recession?

There really is none

>the NBER defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales".

Which we have right now. But don't trust objective observations of reality. Just Trust the Experts™ and call anyone who disagrees a conspiracy theorist.

> "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months,

> real GDP

> real income

real income is down ~1% since Sept 2020 or Sept 2021 [1]. hardly seems like a "significant decline".

> employment

employment has increased since Sept 2020 or Sept 2021 [2] and infact has been steadily increasing since April 2020.

> industrial production

industrial production has increased since Sept 2020 or Sept 2021 [3] and infact has been steadily increasing since April 2020.

> wholesale-retail sales

retail sales has increased since Sept 2020 or Sept 2021 [4] and infact has been steadily increasing since April 2020.

so 1 of 5 indicators shows significant decline, 1 shows minor decline, 3 show increase.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RPI

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO

[4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS

The link you posted supports the GP’s assertion that not declaring the current economic situation as a recession is politically motivated. The third paragraph specific cites common criticism of the NBER on that very front.

That there could and should be some more sophisticated, objective definition of a recession than “two years of GDP decline” isn’t in question. But, at least according to your own source, NBER fails to provide that definition and is commonly criticized for is subjectivity during political years.

> The link you posted supports the GP’s assertion that not declaring the current economic situation as a recession is politically motivated.

1/5 indicators shows significant decline (real GDP) I'll give you. but 1/5 is slight decline (real income 1% down), the other 3 (employment, industrial production, retail sales) are up. this is based on data available from FRED, do you have data showing otherwise?

links at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33032470#33036403

Or maybe THIS is exactly how propaganda works, swapping between the connotations and denotations of words when it's politically convenient to. It's also clear to me if the president had an R next to his name, both sides of the "Are we in a recession?" debate would swap entirely.

"Accuse your enemy of that which you are guilty of"

"Yes, exactly"

Who debated the 2020 recession?

It didn't have two quarters of real GDP growth, but it did have massive job losses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

Well I just found Paul Krugman writing about the "COVID-19 Recession" here on april 30: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/economy-stock-mar...

Looked at national review, can't even find an article about the subject; https://www.google.com/search?q=recession+site:nationalrevie...

Everyone was preoccupied with other questions mostly at that time, and a lot of the debate was if policy X was too costly economically, more so than "are we in a recession?"

Krugman didn't debate recession semantics.

My point is, if you are going to claim we are in a recession now, to be intellectually consistent, you also have to claim that 2020 wasn't one of the shortest and sharpest recessions ever in history...

Oh i thought you were curious, to test my theory with people on the left and right that are fighting now over it what they used to say. I looked at Krugman because he's a major figure on the left saying we aren't (or weren't 2 months ago) in a recession https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2022/07/29/paul-...

I just looked and National Review even wrote this on the subject at the time - https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/recession-are-we-there... so maybe I need a better representative for the right and left to measure intellectual consistency.

IDK I'm not that interested in finding partisan hacks in the online debate on the subject. I will say just looking around, observing metrics and being told this isn't a recession the country is going through right now seems absurd.

That’s a lot of uses of “conspiracy theory”, “ignorance” and “propaganda” for the proof of your superior intellect and immunity to propaganda to be… a link to wikipedia.

Going off how much you have positioned yourself as an expert on economics and human psychology, I was expecting this to end with “Here is a link to my dissertation on this very issue!”

This isn't a PhD level argument here.

I agree! I suppose more informed people would probably have spent more of the post talking about the topic at hand rather than throwing around insults and accusing people of spreading conspiracy theories.

It is still pretty funny to see someone spend 80% of a post describing their acumen at spotting a social phenomenon (conspiracy theories and ignorance) only to follow it up with a wiki link about something wholly unrelated to ignorance or conspiracy theories.

For example, here’s a link to how to gather information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

I’d argue that anyone using such confident language to declare a clear definition of one of the most subjective and abstract concepts known to man clearly has some ulterior motive. Political or otherwise.

The definition of recession has always been two quarters of negative gdp growth… very recently the current administration in the US changed the definition so as to not look bad.

NBER is the entity which demarcates the start and end dates of recessions in the US, not the White House.

Who gave them that power?

Seems more reasonable to let an economic term be governed by the consensus of economists over time.

>most people expect that we are going into a recession

by the standard definition we are already in one, odds are we are actually going to enter a global depression and probably one worse than 2008

If even a fraction of what many are predicting comes to transpire over the next few months, then you can likely change 2008 to 1929.

> Google has historically been protective of their front page, why now?

Unreasonable shareholder expectations of continued double-digit percentage YoY growth. Growth that exceeds internet usage growth in general.

The only way that happens is more ads displacing content, or appearing in formerly empty spots. I would guess at this point, they've hit the wall on alternatives like better targeting, placement, etc.

> The only way that happens is more ads displacing content, or appearing in formerly empty spots.

Or eeking out more dollars per ad through better targetting, or through diversifying the business and scaling new revenue streams, or ...

I think it's reasonable to expect Google to grow faster than general internet usage. Believing otherwise means you believe Google is in maintenance mode, incapable of improving their existing product or unlocking new revenue streams through innovation. Given the sheer size of Google, that's quite a bold belief to hold.

The sheer size of google is the best reason to believe they can't innovate any more.

You can look at the historical track for both

- unlocking new revenue streams. Some success here, but modest, going from ~90% of revenue from ads to ~80%. But it all moved to GCP, which still operates at a loss. That doesn't take any pressure off the ads.

- revenue gains with targeting or other things that don't push real content down. It's pretty easy to find historical screen shots of how much the organic content gets pushed down below the fold. Today, most of the lucrative queries have almost nothing but ads above the fold. ("iphone", "vegas hotels", "robot vacuum").

or taking advertising dollars from orher channels like print, outdoor advertising, radio and TV.

Google has been promoting other Google products on the home page for over 20 years [1].

I think the only difference this time around is that people didn't realize Fitbit was acquired by Google.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt2iPpJmySU

Perhaps all those people claiming to put in two or three hours each day there aren't as productive as they believed themselves to be. I wonder how much that particular brand of hubris will be tolerated now times are tough.

Notably, this is not Google showing random search/display ads.

Those look like ads for Google's own product.

I don't think this is the first time. IIRC, Google used to show an ad for Chrome if you used the search from any other browser.

I'm surprised they advertise their own product in those places... It's such an obvious thing for the EU to go after. "Google has a monopoly position in Browsers/Search, and (ab)used their homepage to advertise their entry into a new field of business, immediately giving it free advertising the competitors could never access."

If I were Googles legal team, I would immediately put an end to such cross-product advertising (at least from Search/Chrome/Android).

Google does not have a monopoly in browsers or search.

We've always been at war with Eastaisa.

The poster above you said "monopoly position," which is defined in the EU as more than 25% of the market. Google unquestionably has a monopoly position in both areas.

The US similarly defines monopoly as having significant control over a market, not as a literal 100% stake.

To my knowledge, Google has 90% of search engine traffic in some regions, and Chrome makes up the majority of Web browsers, even disregarding Chromium

Anti trust requires market power abuses, not a monopoly.

I've said the same, how is doing that any different from Microsoft using their OS to push their own products in the past when they got sued?

Having that stuff in Chrome would cost millions in terms of normal display ads for the number of impressions they would get

The difference is, these anti-competitive tactics bring them more value than the penalty the receive, at this point, it's more of a slap on the wrist and nothing else.

Or the legal team has advised them that the legality is unclear and management has decided the easiest way to resolve murky law is to see the other side in court.

There's a lot of law like that, and Google has the war chest to ask the question when merely that act alone could bankrupt smaller companies.

While slightly dirty, I got the ad for Chrome, that made sense in the context. Advertising for Fitbits is weird and seems desperate.

My sense is that it's a test. If Google decides it went well we'll see ads for other Google products. That's a dangerous path though, at some point some one will make a nice offer for that spot, and I'm not sure the current management at Google have enough integrity to say no.

Side note: It might be Fitbits, because Fitbit is a subsidiary of Google LLC, and not Alphabet directly.

It was inevitable, you gotta get the infite growth from somewhere. Ane the next move will +1 this and so on, until google becomes less attractive than leaner competition. Because of inertia, legacy and people benefitting from the status quo, they won't be able to correct course.

This is textbook "how empire falls" and why things that seem indestructible eventually dies like anything else.

This will be the mile stone people will remember as the first sign of google decline.

If this harms their business then why would they keep doing it

Because it helps in the short term, and Wall Street doesn’t mind destroying companies over the long.

Why blame this on Wall Street?

This idea is the idea of someone at Google, it was implemented by someone at Google, the decision to go ahead was approved by someone at Google.

The someones at Google are compensated significantly by shares of the company, traded on Wall Street, and some of them are compensated with even more shares if those shares do well.

Pretending the two are at arms length is a bit silly.

Seems to me that the individuals involved would care more about getting extra shares than the expected increase in share price from this change.

The bonus might be significant, the increase in share price might be a percent or 2. Google dishes out this bonus, not Wall Street.

Harms it long term, makes money short term.

Long term, systemic damage to both product and company reputation.

Google Stadia case in point. Nobody serious backed Stadia because almost everyone expected Google to kill it off so nobody jumped to it and then it was inevitably killed off because it didn't bring in the cash Google was expecting. Even when the stars had aligned for them with the pandemic and supply shortages that should have given them tons of players Google just couldn't convince enough people to go for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are high level talks going on about the sustainability of some of this exact lines of thinking. Chasing growth organically is fine. Artificially generating it by shifting costs or cutting corners elsewhere to maintain the illusion of growth eventually sinks the whole ship.

Nobody cares though. Investors only care about short term. When it stops making money they will just move their money somewhere else. When you can get out of the game at any time there is no incentive to think long term for those at the top. The Executives are told to make money today. And why not? They will leave soon too. To run another company for a few years doing the same thing. The only people who are interested in long term viability are customers and low level employees. And their opinions don't matter.

Say you're a decision-maker at Google (or Any Large Corp). You have a KPI to increase revenue by 5% this year. If you hit this KPI, then you get a bonus. If you get the bonus, then you can afford the thing that your partner has been wanting forever (or that will make your neighbours jealous, or whatever), and you get a happy life.

You know that doing X will harm the company in the long term (defined as anything past your likely tenure in this role, so usually 2 years max). But doing X will bump revenue in the short term, and get you your bonus and your happy life.

WDYD? Given that to get to a level where you have the power to make this decision, you had to have a particular personality type and set of priorities, it's extremely likely that you decide to do the thing that helps you and hurts everyone else.

And it's turtles all the way down. Every single incentive and system is optimized for some goal like periodic revenue increase. It's not one personality type and the desire to buy a new car, it's the intentional structure of a public corporation. We have high minded ideas about sustainability and corporate citizenship, but those views don't drive decisions in the bear market.

or in the bull market. techies are greedy

Yes that's true. I just think it's particularly easy to forget how your company actually works--e.g. what puts the bread on the table--when the markets are high. Therefore we see more monetization strategy in this type of financial cycle.

How do we fix this loop in companies? It is a very serious problem for humanity’s future. It exists in government too. How do we reward long-term thinking and decisions?

Short term rewards would need to be less enticing than the long term ones. Doing so would involve restricting many rights and privileges and people would hate that.

That only works if leadership can spot the difference between long term and short term, and more importantly that they even cares about it.

"Reward long term" is easier to say than to do.

We are restricting our long term rights and privileges though...I know it is hard to get people to see that, but that is what is happening.

We know the problems, would like to see workable solutions.

This is essentially what corruption is. Fixing corruption is extremely hard, especially when it is less overt like this. The main thing you can do is to teach people how to spot bad apples and push them out, fire them or in other ways punish them and reduce the damage they can do. It shouldn't be culturally acceptable to be a bad apple, but that requires a cultural change and those are really hard to do.

Private ownership of businesses, so long term consequences fall on someone with the authority to steer them right.

A lot of the most egregious, society-warping behavior by monstrous-sized companies is due to paying execs with stock. It was a salary tax avoidance maneuver that started in the 80's, and has led to 1) absolute fixation on short-term stock price, and 2) (also to that end) stock buybacks. Many of our largest corporations have used recent stimulus moneys to fund buybacks like it was sex or something. All it has been is a transfer of tax dollars to the oligarchy, and has "stimulated" nothing. We need some laws that do away with the loophole somehow, either by not allowing companies to pay people in stock, or by taxing the stock on its nominal value when given, making it much less attractive as a shell game.

Or we need money they can’t be created via debt.

Issuing debt to buy back shares is a strategy that works great when interest rates are very very low.

But when the money supply is scarce, only so much leverage can exist, so issuing debt to buy shares would be far far riskier.

RSUs are taxed as income according to their value on the day they vest. Companies can offer employees below-market grants, but the difference is recognized as a cost and (eventually) has to be approved by shareholders.

Stock options with a strike price below market also have tax implications for both the company and the employee.

Equity based compensation essentially comes out of the hides of shareholders: As long as they are happy (and people aren’t playing Thiel-type games), it’s not as terrible as you make it out to be. There’s a limit to what buybacks can do to juice prices and equity generally puts people into a long term mindset.

This has also completely messed with startup stock options. Because large companies used options to award execs with tax-free incentives, and the tax authorities didn't like that, we now have to pay tax on the options when we get them rather than on the capital gains we actually make. And it doesn't solve the problem - execs get paid some other way and options are still fubar'd

That's the neat part, you don't.

The problem, ultimately, cannot be solved without disassembling neoliberal capitalism. It is more or less endemic to the system. To a large extent that short termist, get returns and move on before the cost is due, mode of being is how we managed to run an economy that requires constant growth (rather than stability) to function. It's also why we won't solve any of our climate or many social issues.

There's no way to change this without drastically restructuring the utility function people apply to decisions, and that just won't happen until the aftermath of whatever collapse is inevitably going to happen when the planet floods.

Yeah. It's wild to see sibling comments thinking that it's an exec incentive "problem." No, exec incentives align to GOOGL shareholder incentives and GOOGL shareholders are pursuing returns at your expense, as is their right under capitalism. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but we either need to get much more serious about encouraging competition or we need to figure out a different way to organize control.

Personally I'm a bigger fan of "encourage competition" than "reorganize control," at least in the search engine market, but I fully agree with you that what we see here is the system working exactly as designed.

build better systems.

Easier said than done, but the basic idea would be something like what the Founding Fathers of the US did with the Constitution - make a system where incentives are set up in such a way as to align success for the individual and the group.

If you start a company, you can experiment with alternatives to the current "increase da KPI" style of organization that is so prevalent nowadays.

I think Steve Jobs was a good example of someone who governed by pointing people to a beautiful vision, rather than mindless "ya, numbers go up" type thinking prevalent amongst investors nowadays.

Family owned/controlled businesses think in terms of "what will the next generation inherit?"

Nature solved it for us: obsolete things die and are replaced by better, new things. Google dying is not a bad thing, it's how it's supposed to work. Same for countries, religions, and so on. On a different scale.

It's the alignment problem, but for people.

You have to align the long term growth and wellbeing of the company with the long term prosperity of the employee. This is why stock options with a long term vesting period have become an attractive choice.

Why do you care if you harm the company long term? It’s not like you are tied to it’s performance forever. When equity and labor markets are liquid, why wouldn’t you make decisions that help you now, and cause long term hurt something you have no long term stake in? If you don’t, your peers will.

Because as an executive officer of a company, I am supposed to have the shareholder's interests as my main priority.

I totally get your point, and I understand the "me first!" attitude that it comes from. But we can't have nice things if everyone does this.

Corporations are meant to improve our lives sustainably. If all these people can do is extract short term value for themselves instead of providing long term value to the world, then there's no reason to allow this corrupt system to continue. It's pretty screwed up that executives can go around chasing infinite short term growth and awarding themselves golden parachutes so they can jump ship when the problems inevitably start to surface. How much destruction can they cause before society stops them?

I know people that do this very thing but none of them admit to themselves that they "know that doing X will harm the company in the long term". Instead they create a narrative that says "This time it will be different" so they don't have to be bothered by any kind of pesky conscience. I don't even know if they do this consciously, it just seems to happen.

you kinda described sociopathy

You are assuming that capitalism pushes individual actors to act in their own best self-interest. It does not. It pushes people to serve capital

I agree with this statement, but it's pretty academic. At this stage of the game (metastatic capitalism), people aren't generally allowed to have interests that don't serve capital. Like, there may be some philosophical "best self interest" which is beyond the capture of capital markets, but it's not part of our culture.

Besides, look at context. We are talking about what a company does and the agents of the company. Of course it all collapses to serving capital. I read GP as "why would company take short money over long?"

People serve their own self interests in general.

You don’t need capitalism for that (as non-capitalist systems have clearly shown).

The incentives they have are not sustainable

These days Bing is increasingly my goto search engine, my switching costs are essentially zero

Why not duckduckgo?

Because hating on Micro$oft (ha! Remember that?) is a 2000s thing.

Sure. But that does not answer the question. Which is "why not duckduckgo?"

98% of time DDG fulfils my needs

That's just yahoo and bing search merged, with some graphics to tell you how much they love privacy every 2 seconds.

It also has a stupid name.

> That's just yahoo and bing search merged,

Given that we're in a thread underneath someone endorsing Bing as a good option, that sounds like a plus.

> with some graphics to tell you how much they love privacy every 2 seconds.

That is their differentiator, yes.

> It also has a stupid name.

As... Opposed to Google or Bing? This is your argument?

> Given that we're in a thread underneath someone endorsing Bing as a good option, that sounds like a plus.

Yeah, but why not just cut out the middleman?

> As... Opposed to Google or Bing? This is your argument?

I'm half kidding, but seriously "duck duck go"? What kinda goofy ass name is that? No wonder nobody takes it seriously.

The equivalent there would be GoGoBaby for Google or RingADingDing for Bing. I guess GoDaddy is a thing, but that doesn't make it any less weird.

> Yeah, but why not just cut out the middleman?

Because DDG acts as a privacy screen and doesn't tell Microsoft what I personally search for. They are, as you note, fairly pointed about this being their purpose.

> I'm half kidding, but seriously "duck duck go"? What kinda goofy ass name is that? No wonder nobody takes it seriously.

It's a play on a commonly-known phrase (duck duck goose), and while this is all subjective I don't see how it's any weirder than anything else in the space.

People just gotta have excuses to love their favorite corp products. People should just own it, but they feel a little guilty so they have to find an excuse.

It's like Firefox haters, they find one little bug or one negative thing happens, and "Welp, just might as well use Chrome." If Firefox isn't 100% absolutely perfect, then people say they're clearly just as bad as Google.

They say DuckDuckGo is just Bing, and has a dumb name, so it's clearly no better than Google. The truth is that they fucking love Google's products, integration and ecosystem...

Isn't duckduckgo web search pretty much bing with tiny tweaks?

I finally got fed up and pay for Kagi. Very happy so far. Cents per day is worth it

I looked it up. honestly $10/month is stupid level pricing for un-established product with free competitors. the pricing needs to be what can slip below average users pain threshold (IMO thats like $2.99/mo but whatever). there is a reason most techies have not heard of it yet.

I'm guessing that going from free to $0.01 is the biggest hurdle. Once people agree to pay they're willing to pay a decent amount.

actually .01 would not be a problem at all, remember initial pricing for whatsapp? the main issue here is its value is not yet established. They need to remember that they are competing with powerful search engines like google and bing so they must rise to the quality first. Starting with low price with even just the indication that we will charge you more later is good enough, but it is imperative that they show value first.

I'm pretty happy with them too. For me it's the boosting of sites i respect and the suppression of sites I dislike that swung it for me.

Bing won't index one of my online programming books (original content, no ads, no SEO, all ages, free) for unspecified TOS violations that I can't determine. Their algorithm is broken. It makes me wonder what other legitimate content they don't index.

How would they +1 this? Require users to watch two ads Youtube-style before rendering a website? Place a persistent banner ad along the bottom of the browser window?

> Place a persistent banner ad along the bottom of the browser window?

No, they’ll place it at the top, just like Amp.

I hope nobody at Google sees your post... The web is obnoxious enough as it is.

The first sign was when they killed google reader, like 10 years ago.

It was obvious to the founders of google before they founded google:

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

I suspect ungoogled-chromium[1] is not affected by google's changes to chrome://newtab . If anyone wants to stop using Chrome but isn't drawn to any of the alternatives, perhaps you'll like ungoogled-chromium.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ungoogled-chromium

It's worth noting that UGC has some significant security regressions

https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

When I need to use a Chrome-like browser, I just use Chromium or Brave.

and people will still not recommend firefox. this is hilarious

Firefox is my daily driver but if something "works best in Chrome" I (assuming I'm interested enough) open it in Brave.

Is there evidence that Brave or your preferred Chromium build reproduce the compiler etc tooling that official Chrome supposedly uses for speedbumps to hinder exploiting their memory safety vulnerabilities?

Interesting to learn. Are these issues fixable? I'm not familiar with what changes went into UGC but something like changing the compiler toolchain seems like a strange decision.

Upstreams toolchain is pretty insane so most downstream try to do the more default thing but that often doesn't include the same customizations.

I think its all doable but community forks tend to be one person doing a job of 10 people and will never keep up.

> Security Updates

> The component updater, responsible for delivering out-of-band security updates to the various components of the browser, is disabled within ungoogled-chromium. It’s responsible for updating Chrome’s CRLSets, which are necessary for meaningful certificate revocation. Most of the components are delivered via the component updater because they have a need for out-of-band security updates, and it’s not helpful nor necessary to disable them.

> Furthermore, the extensions that users rely on aren’t updated automatically, posing an additional risk to users of the browser.

Not connecting to google services unles you explicitly request it is almost the entire point of ungoogled-chromium, so this is really misplaced criticism. Especially for the CRLs, giving Google the power to take third party websites offline is not something everyone agrees with.

The missing hardening is also not something to be summed up as "significant security regressions". Ironically it might even improve your security if it means that attacks depending on Chromes upstream toolchain configuration won't work - no one is realistically going to specifically target a niche project like ungoogled-chromium.

I use both Chromium and Chrome. Chromium is of course not affected.

I woke up to ads in my new tab page in Firefox yesterday; sponsored links to Amazon and Nike.

Browsers don't seem to serve users anymore. They, like everything else, are mostly ad delivery mechanisms.

Annoying, yes. But you can turn them off in the settings page.

You can, but it's not about that. Ads don't belong in browser UI, full stop.

Browsers used to be paid software.

> Browsers used to be paid software.

AFAIK the big ones have always been free, except for Netscape between 1995 and 1998.

IE 1.0 was included in a "Windows 95 Plus!" which was sold for $50 in 1994; However it was short-lived and it was included in later releases of Windows [1]

Netscape was sold for $50 [2]

Opera was sold (can't find the price) [3]

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!#Microsoft_Plus!_for_Windows_95
  [2]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/netscape-navigator-2-0-hits-the-streets/
  [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081013235150/http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/2006/02/15/rendering-engines-and-code-names

Thanks. I don’t think this really changes the point that no big browser have ever been paid for except Netscape. The "paid for" period of IE is insignificant (and it was barely used at the time) and Opera never had more than 3% of market share when it was free [1], let alone when it was paid for.

[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/internet-browser-market-sha...

And Opera 1995-2005 (ads alternative to money since 2000).

Never.

Opera was a paid software

What world are you living in?

Sigh.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/netscape-cuts-prices...

why? there's no standard or moral law that says this.

there have been countless examples of watch-ads-get-X schemes. I remember back in the dialup era it was seen as a way to get online. (then fortunately technology and the market progressed and these died out.)

also, let's not forget that the browser market was always fucked up.

The browser is traditionally the “user agent”. An agent operating in my interests does not advertise to me.

I personally believe that the goal of ads should not be to hook you on new products just because they can. They should not be to sell you on a problem that you don't have. They should not be to pile on tons of "marketing" and look professional and presentable and whatever.

Ads should show you things that you needed anyway; things you wouldn't have known to look for, or didn't find when you did. Things that actually solve problems that you actually have, where you see the utility as soon as you see them.

For example, 45drives has their ads down. They contain nothing more than a little joke, a product image, and a link to their website. You'll know if you need it; they're not trying to market to you or convince you of anything. They know you will come when you're ready.

Advertising culture is currently extremely hostile and I hate it.

Funny you say that, I just opened Safari, no ads.

Safaris default new tab page is the Apple store and most don't know how to change that.

edit: turns out I was wrong.

2nd edit: this used to be the case many years ago, thanks for those who confirmed

The first part is correct, but the second certainly isn't.

I'm not even sure the first part is. I logged into a Guest Account on my Mac and the default for 'New tabs open with:' is the 'Start Page', which is a blank page with history, bookmarks, frequently visited, etc.

Oh forgive me, I've just checked are you're right. The new tab page is now frequently visited sites.

Our family Mac we got in ~2011 did show Apple as the new tab page, or at least the start page when you opened Safari after booting. However this must have changed in the last few (read: >5-7) years.

> Our family Mac we got in ~2011 did show Apple as the new tab page, or at least the start page when you opened Safari after booting

Pretty certain this is also incorrect.

My recollection seems to accord with the Wikipedia page on the history of the Safari browser which (although it doesn’t itemize the default StartPage for each version) doesn’t cite any inclusion of an AppStore link, as far as I can see.

[O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

Not the "Apple Store", but apple.com

I believe it is correct. It was back when we didn't call it a new tab page, but 'homepage' and it was set to an actual website.

Of course Safari defaulted to apple.com, what else was it supposed to default to?

It is correct, back in the Panther days when Safari was new the default home page was Apple.com.

I’m not sure how long they did that for, but like you said, what else were they supposed to do? It was a different time, homepages were treated differently.

> what else was it supposed to default to?

about:blank until the user sets something else.

Having a home page set to something isn’t the same as having ads that you can’t disable.

You can disable the ads in Firefox though

Not in Chrome apparently.

> Safaris default new tab page is the Apple store and most don't know how to change that.

There are a list of alternatives in Safari that the user themselves can choose from, including Favorites, Frequently visited, and so on.

None of the choices are the Apple AppStore.

> 2nd edit: this used to be the case many years ago, thanks for those who confirmed

No - what other posters 'confirmed' is that www.apple.com was one of the choices that could be made for a new tab or homepage - absolutely not the Apple store as you said.

Worth correcting yet again because of what's become a knee-jerk 'but whatabout Apple?' in comment threads about Google on HN.

I'd say they are analogous. If I go to apple.com it is the definition of an online store, there are a number of call to action "buy" buttons with pictures of various Apple devices.

I think you're being pedantic if you say apple.com is not the apple store. If I wanted to go to the apple store I'd go to apple.com.

Software still serves its users... to advertisers.

Well that's a new low for Firefox. I'm a little surprised because I didn't think it'd be that quick.

Librewolf

Whenever I open a new tab in Firefox it is a blank tab because I set New Tabs to Blank.

Wake me when I can't do that anymore (and point me to a decent fork).

I'm on 105.0.1 on Linux, and just checked because of this discussion. Firefox announced ads on the new tab a while ago, and I used about:blank by that time, but I saw the switch to turn them off in the settings. Now there are no ads and the switch is gone.

Firefox seems to be going everywhere at once, so it wouldn't surprise me to discover there is a 105.0.2 with ads, or that ads exist on a few regions only. But at least for me, the trend seems to be on the other way, they are backing down from that decision.

This is the screenshot I took this morning: https://p.mort.coffee/0Yy.png -- note the sponsored Amazon and Nike. It wasn't like that yesterday. I might not have restarted Firefox in a little while though, so it might be from an update which was released some time in the past week or two.

Click the gear icon on the top right corner of the new tab screen and uncheck the "sponsored shortcuts" checkbox.

This is not "unprecedented" at all, see e.g. here: https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/lf9egy/comment/iivz...

I am not sure why you're being downvoted. Both the newtab (at the bottom of the page) and the search page have had subtle "ads" for google's new product launches. I remember seeing it for Stadia, and I remember seeing it for "Google One"

They also use it for non-google products.

For example the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II had a hyperlink to "See todays events" on both places.

I believe* the first ad ever under the search bar at google.com was to download Firefox. They've been doing it for that long...

* I think I read that in some book about Marissa Mayer and her decisions around the homepage.

Wasn't the Nexus 7 (2012) the first such ad? Aside from chrome itself bring advertised this way, that is.

A decade before that they had an ad for the Google Search Appliance, which was the first physical product Google sold:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020703150514/http://www.google...

Not entirely unprecedented:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800175 ("Mozilla: Ad on Firefox’s new tab page was just another experiment" (2019))

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022 ("Why am I seeing this adorable red panda?") (2022)

Annoyingly, the new tab page used to have an exclusion for these "announcements". The flag was removed.

I've ended up installing one of those "inspirational new tab page" extensions, just so I don't see an ad. I am sure that means someone else is siphoning my data.

I like the earth view one [0] and you get to keep your data with goog

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go...

I use one that just lets me use some custom HTML, I just have some plaintext bookmark type links

Both in Chrome and Firefox, I always set my new tab page to `about:blank`, or in other words, absolutely nothing. Why? Because the address bar is all I need to get where I'm going. I type faster than I click.

There's no setting to set the new tab page in Chrome - not even in the policies json.

There is a setting for what the home icon does, and it defaults to new tab...but is settable. Maybe that's what was meant?

Edit: See https://imgur.com/a/wQhvFF9

There is no home icon in Chrome, at least I don't see it. Or is that also some setting?

It's a setting. You can enable the home button and then set it to be a custom address.

The home icon only appears next to the refresh button when you have a "home page" configured. It is separate from the New Tab page.

On Chrome, I had to use an extension that redirects it. It's annoying, and overrides the content of the address bar if you start typing too quickly -- but it's better than ads.

I switched to Firefox earlier this year, but the blatant memory leaks are making me strongly consider switching back to an old version of Chrome (v70 or so), which did not require a monstrous page file to run days or months without crashing.

use this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blank-new-tab-page...

it's just an .html file with an empty body, no tracking & 5 lines of JS:

    window.addEventListener("load", () => {
      if (chrome.extension.inIncognitoContext) {
        document.body.style.background = "#53718e";
      }
    });

It's a tiny amount of code to write your own new tab page. I like mine, it's nice, it's custom to me. This whole story made me feel like it's great that I control what makes it to my eyes when I open a browser or a new tab

Who still using chrome? Use safari, brave, or Firefox.

> Who still using chrome?

According to statcounter[1], Chrome had 65.52% of the browser market share in August 2022.

[1]: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

On my computer, Chrome has a 0% market share!

Mine too. But it unfortunately doesn't change the fact that Chrome is the most popular browser.

Hope its domination, just like anything Google, ends soon though.

I heard that ad blocking will not work after January. I am going to wait until ads actually start appearing in my browser again to switch because the internet is full of bad information but assuming it actually happens I, and all the non tech dependents I influence, will be giving Brave a try. I am attracted to it because it says it blocks ads by default, however I am concerned because it doesn't appear to have even 1% of browser share. I don't know where else to go though because Edge...just I can't believe myself ever using a Microsoft browser again after the IE drama and Firefox is a zombie from a by gone era that only exists on the fumes of massive payments from Google to prevent anti trust so not worth investing in either. Slim options and no clear path forward.

If you are on Mac I'd strongly suggest Safari.

If you are on Windows or Linux I'd give Chromium a try. While still bloaty as its the basis of Chrome, it's essentially de-Googlified without anything extra that Brave might bring.

If there is one thing good about Chrome dominance, its that at the end of the day its core Chromium is open source so we can have a non-Google version of it while still being supported.

I just wanted to nit-pick and state that this includes mobile (ie. Android) but on Desktop it is not better (67.33%) as Safari is not that strong there. And Firefox still loses on Desktop (0.5% compared to last year). Wow.

Safari isn't available for Windows or Linux. So that is one important reason for its low desktop usage.

(And which also shows that this "Apple is protecting Browser Diversity by not allowing another browser on iOS" narrative is wrong: Without even improving Safari, by "just" supporting it on Windows and Linux, they would move the needle for browser diversity)

Firefox has had ads on its "new tab" page by default for ages now.

you can remove them though

By ads you mean the popular articles from Pocket?

That is an ad for Pocket ?

Not sure if this is what the GP was referring to, but I constantly find Google and Amazon (two sites I almost never use) pinned to my frequently accessed sites in Firefox. I unpin them, then check all settings for any kind of advertising opt, and yet, some month later, they're back.

Are you installing Firefox and signing into them on new machines? I don't have hard evidence but I feel like when I install FF on a new box and sign in, the pinned sites sometimes show up on other machines when everything is synced.

Amazon.com is pinned when you install the app

I'm so tired of seeing people recommend Brave. Firefox is what the web needs. Organizational shenanigans aside, Firefox is the best browser on the market right now.

Brave works, Firefox don't, simple as. I tried Firefox numerous times and I always stumble upon glitches, and it still measurable slower. Chromium won, deal with it.

I don't know, using Firefox for many years (100% of time since FF Quantum), never encountered any issues anywhere.

What glitches? Can you be more specific?

It sometimes failed to load reaction icons on Linkedin. This was happening for a long time, but seems that either Firefox or Linkedin fixed it. I didn't stumble upon it recently.

Firefox don't play MKV videos, I use some site that has embed MKVs.

Slack calls didn't work on it (they workaround it). But I had trouble with other sites that use WebRTC in Firefox.

This is things I recall at this moment, but I don't want to have to use backup browser when something like this happens, so I use Chromium based browser and get on with my life.

How do you separate which of these are bugs in Firefox and which ones are bugs in the sites that don't test against more than one browser engine? Reminds me of back in the day with the "works best in Internet Explorer" banners.

The MKV thing sounds like a Firefox or codec issue, but I couldn't say. I haven't had issues with MKV or WebM, which is effectively a MKV profile, in many years.

Brave is super shady by default due to their cryptocurrency associations, and also has made several questionable decisions in the past (see: hijacking your URL bar and replacing it with an affiliate link).

Firefox is the superior browser, but if you must use Chromium I strongly suggest ungoogled-chromium over Brave.

Also, if you check the changelogs in brave every release all you're going to find is "crypto" or "wallet" in each of the changelog they mention.

I don't touch crypto with a 10-foot pole, but it baffles me why anyone would care about Brave's "cryptocurrency associations". It takes a few clicks, one-time at initial install, to completely disable the "BAT" advertiser network and all of the crypto ads on the New Tab.

Everything in tech is shady. I think advertising is super shady. So I use an ad-blocker and move on with my life.

The bottom line is that your choice today is between Firefox, and something that is Chromium-based. Mozilla is a wreck of an organization, and their browser has compatibility issues all over the place because it's just not large enough to be relevant anymore (I'm sorry, it's true).

So people choose Chromium-based. If you don't want to go with Google or Microsoft, then this means you can use "ungoogled-chromium" or Brave. Brave is available on all devices (Vivaldi doesn't support iOS), and syncs bookmarks and passwords across all your devices.

So yeah. It makes a ton of sense for a lot of people to gravitate toward Brave. Why do I care whether their business model is showing NFT ads to people who don't turn that off? Just turn it off.

It isn't slower. Not measurably, nor in feeling. Where do you get this?

It's also not faster, if that is what you read in my comment: Chrome/ium and Firefox keep improving. And depending on what month and what benchmark, one will outperform the other. Slightly.

It could be anecdotal? For any of both browsers, though. E.g. some plugins/addons will slow down the browser significant. Or usage specific? Maybe one handles having 2000 tabs open better than the other? Or page-specific?

>Where do you get this?

By visiting sites I visit often/everyday in both Brave and Firefox and comparing DomContentLoaded/Load/Finish timings in Developer Tools. Brave (but also Chromium in the past when I used it) is consistently faster.

Not much, but I noticed even before I measured, I did it to check if my feeling is wrong, and it isn't.

To be clear: I'm not saying your feeling is wrong.

But this is the definition of "anecdotal". I can see all sorts of biases luring in your methodology. And the body is way too small to have any statistic meaning.

Again: performance, measured or perceived, may be bad for you. But that is completely different from "Firefox is slower than Chrome".

You cannot make such a statement based on measurements on a few websites where Firefox appeared slow to you.

These days I find more glitches in Chrome than Firefox. Last one I found was that a certain fetch request showed an empty response in the devtools network monitor. Spoiler: it was not actually empty.

I use Vivaldi because about a year ago I realized Firefox Android had an issue with smooth scrolling. It would stutter a lot. Also, it would reload tabs every time I left and came back to one, which is awful.

So I'm using Vivaldi in mobile, and decided to try it on desktop too. I like the reading list feature, basically a twist on bookmarks.

yeah, except it doesn't work half the time (I have issues with it on MS Teams, Outlooks, even Gmail sometimes) the Mozilla boss thinks the solution is raise her own pay and fire devs.

EDIT: and I should mention that I am a die-hard Firefox fanboy, that I've been using it since like Firefox 2 or something, and that seeing it fail to properly render certain web apps and having to use chromium, which I consider to be uglier from a UI point of view as a fallback pains me dearly.

Alas, life ain't always perfect.

What extensions are you using? I (anecdotally) never have any of the issues you describe. And I'm on my computer 12+ hours per day, most of which is spent galivanting across the web in Firefox. Are you using a forked version of Firefox?

I similarly have had very few issues with firefox and use it every day.

I fall back to edge if I have an issue but it's not common.

ah, good point about the extensions, I do have uBlock Origin and NoScript, so it could actually be those, even if the latter is basically off 90% of the time... thank you for pointing that out ^_^

It's more a function of the websites you visit. When your bank or pay is locked behind a site that breaks on firefox... it's hard to keep the faith.

Same here... I read comments all the time in browser threads about these issues in Firefox and I must be lucky or my basic install with just uBO is the difference (I also don't use any Google websites outside of search and Youtube). I have been daily FF user on both desktop and laptop for 4+ hours a day since I left Opera when it changed to a Chromium base and I can probably count on one hand the issues I've had with FF working with sites properly. One was a repeatable memory leak that would crash FF like 4 years ago that I submitted as a bug report and it was fixed in next release.

To me FF is just as fast in general browsing than anything else. I routinely try other browsers and I just feel "wrong" using any of the Chromium based others of Edge/Brave/Vivaldi when FF needs us right now. It needs the us to stand against non-open source web browsers and as an alternative engine to the web. I really like Vivaldi and would be my 2nd choice (then Edge then Brave, refuse to use Chrome) but it isn't open-source nor does it do anything to protect privacy.

If FF is giving crashes, issues at sites etc please try at least refreshing your install in the options and don't install so many extensions. Even better backup your bookmarks and uninstall it while making sure to also delete all users\$username\Appdata folders as well then reinstall.

Firefox embeds spyware and advertising. No thanks.

Mozilla is a Google subsidiary in all but name and has been for a while.

Brave is not customizable at all, Vivaldi is much better.

On the Android phone it's easy choice since only Kiwi Browser supports extensions.

Brave is way worse. They have product ads everywhere, pushed a weird crypto scam, and even injected affiliate codes in URLs.

Firefox has ads on their new tab too.

We need better and more respectful competitors.

I have never seen a 'product ad' anywhere on my brave. Crypto got turned off (and i also have an extensive hostsfile for that, too). Never seen an affiliate code being injected anywhere.

I have no choice but to use Firefox because I have switched to vertical tabs (with Sidebery) and it seems that every other browser besides Edge(?!) is stuck with horizontal tabs.

Horizontal tabs are objectively inferior - why are vertical tabs so rare???

Vivaldi has the best vertical tabs implementation I've used. Edge would be 2nd. Sideberry would be great if it was easier to rid of the horizontal tabs in FF when Sideberry is active. Horrible having the horizontal tabs still while also having vertical tabs and only some CSS hacks fixes it.

Brave has vertical tabs coming soon as they are in nightly I believe.

It would be cool if Firefox supported modern browser APIs like Chrome does, but they’ve decided not to (web serial).

Can confirm (https://i.ibb.co/ygp2x49/Fitbit-Ad-Google-com.png).

It actually reminds me of old Google announcing "New! You can now search for images" or such except repurposed for things outside of Search. The first one is reasonable (there are people that do want to search for images or research papers), but the current incarnation reminds me of a corporation solely running on inertia.

I see the ad, and I'm not amused. I would be more at ease if the line said "You know what? We need money after all this browser-making. Give us yours and we will let you go on with your day."

What's the full text of the ad?

Google hasn't been above self-promotion via those channels for approximately a half-decade. On my newtab and on google.com, I'm seeing an ad for Google's new search features.

Stop using Chrome

Firefox has ads too. At least you can turn them off, until they add another category and you have to go figure out how to turn off the new ones.

It's times like these that I'm glad I use about:blank as my new tab page.

Glad I'm not alone in this.

Having an Amazon and Nike sponsored links in the new tab page is having ads strictly speaking but they are nor intrusive nor targeting you specifically, so they can be "tolerable". To be honest my mind just skip them. The day they change this for worse, then I'll complain as well.

I don't think I've ever seen a single ad on Firefox (including on any website thanks to uBlock working better on FF than anywhere else), what ads are you talking about?

There are ads in the urlbar, ads on the newtab page, ads, ads, ads!

This is on desktop.

I was mainly thinking of the ones on the new tab page. Years ago they had "tiles" or something and I turned those off, then they added "suggestions" and they're not different but the old setting doesn't apply to them.

Pocket.

Mozilla owns Pocket.

I think his point is that Pocket is the piece of shit that pushes the "sponsored" articles people refer to as ads.

Google owns the product that they are advertising in Chrome as well I think.

That doesn't make it any better really!

Afaik both Firefox and Chrome are advertising their own products in the browser at this point in time, so there isn't a whole lot of options to escape this. Maybe Linux distros could patch some of this stuff out or disable it via default settings at least.

I have never seen ads on Firefox?

The entire internet discourse is filled with "Chrome evil, use Firefox". Go to any browser discussion on the internet and 99% of the thread is "just use Firefox or Firefox is the best". You would think that everyone uses Firefox.

The internet is a bubble. Reality is Firefox usage is pathetic. 32 MILLION people have *STOPPED* using Firefox in the past 4 years. The browser only has a 3.16% market share.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Chrome is a good browser. Can be considered objectively better than Firefox given its superior performance, equivalent if not slightly better resource usage, web compatibility and integration with the Google ecosystem (which the vast majority of internet population use (excluding niche tech circles)).

I have no vendetta against Firefox. At the end of the day, it is just a browser and that is a personal preference. But people act like it is some sort of saviour that will bring them to the light. There is such an aggressive tribal mentality with browsers. It makes no sense as all browsers look the same, feel the same and have the same functionality. Just a matter of preference given your needs, and for 70% of the population, Chromium delivers.

I know that everything you say here is true.

The niche tech circle you speak of /is/ the audience here on HN. If we can’t be bothered to stop using Chrome then all is lost.

All is indeed lost!

Browsers are incredibly expensive technologies to produce. If Microsoft of all companies could not find success with Edge classic, a browser that they wrote from scratch. Added with the ability to advertise and bundle with the worlds most popular OS, then Firefox has no chance to be the bastion against Chromium.

One part of me is curious what a realistic web landscape would look like if it was all Chromium (including Firefox). I guess at first it would be great to see cool new browser APIs, but then something will be added would cause an uproar.

Microsoft...? Like, did you see their OS? I don't even.

In any case the type of people joining Firefox is very different from that of other companies.

Internet explorer used to be the objectively best browser in the same way. The problems start happening after one browser so thoroughly beats all the others that sites start getting locked into proprietary stuff. I was around the last time. And I remember saying similar glowing things about IE at the time.

It was exactly the same 20 years ago with IE. It was ok, delivered for 70% of the population. There were even browsers built on IE engine, which were awesome at the time (Maxthon had add-ons, ad blocker, tabs).

All was fine until Microsoft didn't start to add their own standards, without any regard for everyone else. If they succeeded, web today would be mess of ActiveX controls and other propertiary extensions.

Web is simply way too important to allow it to become walled garden controlled by single corporation. This is about a lot more than tribalism.

It's notoriously difficult to have a new tab page without ads/Google connections, but still keep the 8 thumbnails. One can change the search engine and then an alternate new tab page appears which is the right one: Only thumbnails. Unfortunately there is code in chrome to detect the search engine one confiured and activate the matching new tab page. I think they have one for ddg?

Even creating a custom search engine in chrome settings, pointing at google does not work, they detect the google url.

I have yet to create my own "search engine" url which would redirect to google, to put this search engine in the chrome settings!

It's very annoying, because despite it being Chrome from google, chrome is quite reasonable with data protection and settings in many areas and can be tamed with group policies. In our company GPO we have to turn off the new tab page, but my goal is to have one without ads.

Or don't use Chrome? Lol

Firefox had/has "snippets" for a while. You can turn them off, but the point still stands.

There has been a blank new tab extension in Chrome for ages.

But I like the 8 thumbnails, I only want to get rid of the "new tab promo". Chrome contains a complete new tab page which is adfree, but it's only enabled for obscure search engines

They are changing their natural listing results to be multi media photos and video content will be prioritised on search results, it is going to be released in America first this month I believe

They are also seeing the results will be far more varied and scrolling down will likely give you a result that you are looking for, and the traditional way of looking with the top result, being the one that you wanted may not be the case anymore

I think they are maybe trying to replicate the TikTok experience when looking for a result, you will end up scrolling different content relative to your search keyword

All of this will benefit content creators. If you have an ability to create video content, this will give you a competitive edge.

> All of this will benefit content creators.

Could they do something to benefit the users instead?

Rest assured, it'll hurt both equally. Or do you think Google would treat content creators as equals?

Here's a reminder to everyone in the thread that Google owns YouTube. Content creators are, literally, the product. YouTube would not exist without them. They are not equals.

I hope this means that all the SEO bullshit will move to videos and the textual web will become usable again.

> They are changing their natural listing results to be multi media photos and video content

I’ve been unfortunate enough to see this, it’s absolute hot garbage and made it way harder to find what I wanted.

Is this a knee jerk response to TikTok kids using TikTok as their generations google?

I don’t think many understand how much Google land is up for grabs right now. Google Images is right there for the taking if you just supply the same experience as 10 years ago Google Images.

I've had something similar happen to me before. Google showed me an advert for Pixel 6a on the bottom of the search bar in both the new tab and Google.com main page

Proves the saying, "If you are not paying for the product, you are the product"

You're still the product for a whole bunch of paid services. The line has blurred significantly since that saying became commonplace.

Logic 101: "If A, Then B" does NOT imply "If not-A, Then not-B".

Human speech is not formal logic. The only point of saying ((bad thing)) is a consequence of an action (using free services) is to imply that not doing that (using non-free services since you can assume that not using anything is not a realistic opton) would have avoided ((bad thing)).

Not true for self hosted open source software.

Not necessarily. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/base-files/+bug/17...

No website I have worked for has ever called users the product. The products are what is being built by various teams. For ads the product at a high level is everything from the parts that show ads to users to the tools that allow advertisers to create ads.

> No website I have worked for has ever called users the product.

Sure, and folks putting lead paint in children's toys don't call their wares "poison". Doesn't change anything.

Advertisers wouldn't buy all that fancy ad tooling "product" on a platform with zero users.

Not much choice with browsers!

As far as I know, Orion browser is the only browser on the market today that you can pay for with your wallet instead of your data.

Google has had house ads for its own products on the search homepage since at least 2010. I'd like to see a screenshot of the "banner ad" claimed by OP. Text ads on Google's homepage are nothing new. I don't see a banner ad on the homepage at the moment, I see a text ad for "Learn about the latest innovations coming to Google Search"

Anyone have a screenshot of said banner ad?

That thing on the google.com page is really annoying. Google is probably trying this out but I am really hoping that this is some behind the scenes look at the fact that google might be a dying company and are grasping for straws. Not that I think that is really real, but because it would be glorious.

I can't believe how many people here still use Google search and Chrome browser.

Unfortunately quite some things only work entirely on Chrome. My default is still Firefox but it’s no getting around it at times.

I use brave browser for those sites. Alas, it is still chrome underneath...

Why is this so surprising? Google search gives me better results than DuckDuckGo for my purposes (especially when using the "site:" search syntax). Some web apps and websites are buggy on non-Chrome browsers or a lot faster on Chrome (e.g. Google Workspace apps like Google Sheets are often a lot faster).

If I want to submit high quality work on time, it makes sense to use the best (most performant) tool for the job. Firefox, DuckDuckGo, and other alternative tools are helpful for personal use, but I have less to worry about when using Google and Chrome for work.

I also don’t understand “why people still watch TV. I haven’t watch TV in 20 years” (tm Slashdot 2002)

Well, Chrome is inexcusable because of ungoogled Chromium and Chromium Web Store. But Google search still delivers more complete results and will be hard to switch from until Bing or other competitors improve.

There are entire categories of search I perform on a daily basis in which Bing ignores the most relevant result (usually from a domain that just doesn't appear on Bing for some reason).

I can't believe people don't use Google search and Chromium.

Google search does the job well. Chromium browsers are faster than Firefox, equivalent if not better resource usage, excellent web compatibility and ecosystem integration.

People want to get stuff done. Yes Firefox and DDG will not handicap you, but for the general population, search and Chromium do an excellent job over competition.

It's not unprecedented, they did that when Google+ launched too.

Google has drifted gradually from helping you find things, supported by ads, to actively steering you away from what you're trying to find in order to sell you to advertisers.

Google on Android has already been stupid for a long time. You can swipe right from the home screen of a Pixel phone to get to Google search, which is a Yahoo!-style portal with news, etc under the search bar. And then you click on the search input field, and you get suggestions based on trending searches (a week or 2 ago one of them was something about King Charles). Luckily both idiocies can still be disabled, and I use DDG for my searches anyway.

Inflation means the blood boy’s rates go up, too. Are you going to tell the plutocrat they have to live a normal life span???

Now shut up and watch the ads.

I've already seen ads like those, some even pushing their political stuff.

https://techdows.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Chrome-dismi...

> Users are reporting banner ads such as "New! Track your health and fitness with the..." below the search box on both google.com and chrome://newtab.

Do we know more? E.g. do we know if this is an A/B test or a rollout in progress? Where are the users reporting this? Are there any screenshots?

Did you see what they did to YouTube? It's now like watching the Superbowl. Ads ads ads. I guess they are trying to convert as many people as they can to premium. But I think it's also because they don't know how to grow their revenue besides displaying more and more ads.

The more ads they put in, the more people get an ad blocker, so they have to add more ads to compensate.

Come on, man. Go easy on them. They're in a downturn. They're suffering. They're going to suffer more. Facebook is just ahead of the curve. What's happening there will probably happen to many more jumbo tech corps over the next 12 mnths...

> Google has added ads on both its search page

Google Search has had ads since the beginning. What do you mean?

It looks like they're testing it on a small portion, but not sure what's the pattern

Lol, the advantage of domination?

Tbh, I really want Apple do something innovation for browser. However, looking back to Webkit on both iOS and macOS, I can see no hope...

Another incentive to switch to Firefox.

I think I've been seeing ads for things like the Nest and Pixel phones in AU for a few months now.

In the early 2000's I used to love Google.

Now I daily find myself saying "Fuck You, Google".

I've seen widgets on the bottom of Google search home page. I used uBlock to hide them.

Seen it too !

It's strange how our brains work - I actually never look there, but somehow I did notice it.

Stop hitting yourself. Get Lynx.

Don't know why it's so surprising. Google has had ads for Pixel phones right below the search box. I remember Stadia ads that showed up there too.

The newtab on Chrome is not even considered a web page so you can see those ads that show up there as a part of Chrome which is not so surprising either

Stupidity is contagious. If MS does it, why should't Google ?

I wouldn't say it is stupidity.

MS seems to have stopped innovating and exploit as much of their business before it dies.

Possibly Google realised the same?

If IBM is any indication, it takes decades for big corp to die.

It's their own product ads though... It's not very problematic, you're using their product and they're announcing they have more products for you.

Unprecedented how? I am sure most browsers do such crap on their home page. Even firefox had its "experiments" and pocket

Vivaldi time!

Don’t equate precedent with morals.

uBlock filter for some ads on google.com:

    ##[class*=slot-promo]

Have you seen this banner by yourself? Tried from a few different locations with no luck

Yep, Fitbit smartwatch ad for us in Sweden, no Chrome plugins (even shows up in incognito).

Might be exclusive to a portion of users or locations.

> Might be exclusive to a portion of users or locations.

Probably they are testing on a selected range of users.

Also see the Fitbit ad from Singapore.

www.fitbit.com - add it to your hostsfile.

uBlock filter for ads on

pulling for Firefox

The internet doesn't work without advertising. Almost as if the money to build all this infrastructure has to come from somewhere.

If only we could create a digital token that would be in such demand it would generate its own network and infrastructure effect.

Oh wait... they ruined that, too.

>Oh wait... they ruined that, too.

I lost you there, who is "they" referring to?

Wall Street and it's need for gross revenue to justify unearned bonuses. Advertising is a direct feed into projected values which dictates which stocks can be manipulated with the most justification. And, often the largest fallout later.

In the good old days, the money came from your job. And you used that money to create free content out of the kindness of your heart.

This stopped working when people realized that they can replace giving kindness with taking money and quit their jobs.

In the good ol'days when profit drove value not perceived market dominance based on shoddy short-term user data created by a generation of graphic designers.

> Almost as if the money to build all this infrastructure has to come from somewhere.

Yes, things need funding to survive. That's the core of the problem. I bookmarked an interesting older HN comment to that effect.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231960

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