Microsoft hijacks Google's Chrome download page to beg you not to ditch Edge | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft hijacks Google's Chrome download page to beg you not to ditch Edge

theregister.com

77 pointsLinuxBender21 comments

How/why would you feel any different if Microsoft detected that you're on playstation.com and then injected a plea to switch to xbox?

Or detecting slack or discord or zoom and injecting an ad for MS Teams?

Or detecting websites for various open source tools and languages then asking you to try visual studio professional and C#?

Or linux ... windows server?

Or AWS ... Azure?

Microsoft: What great ideas!

It's a shame that every release it's less of an OS for the user and more of an OS for MS.

Quick question. I believe edge is cross platform? Did the same hijack die on other platforms it only on windows?

Microsoft does this when your search for "Firefox" from within their shitty browser, as well. That was the last straw that moved me to wipe Windows and install Linux Mint instead.

Best. Move. Ever.

Fuck you, Microsoft.

This post is a blogspam dup of the neowin article linked from focusedone's comment

It should obviously be condemned, but what's up with these articles recently?

This is not news, Microsoft has been doing it for years.

not only condemned, this is probably illegal. Microsoft got successfully sued (ab)using their os monopoly to push their own browser in the past and its still illegal in the EU.

Has Microsoft considered not making Bing so incredibly slow?

And remove all the annoying ads and news from the browser frontpage?

You can turn that off.

Wait until you see the Windows 11 “widgets”. It’s basically doom scrolling as a non-optional feature.

Like a stalker x-lover.

Meanwhile, I've recently seen a few popups/banners from Google asking me to switch to Chrome.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to conflate this with hijacking. Also, I do not see the banner when I view the page in Edge. Displaying a banner outside of the page in a separate window (as is indicated in the article) is definitely not hijacking in any sense of the term.

So you attack the clueless person writing the article.

The fact remains that by displaying that "pixel occupation window" or wtf ever you want to call it instead of intrusive spyware, you are proving to me that you are desperate and if you would resort to this you are not to be trusted.

I guess that's not really relevant if you are in the boat that is using Edge in the first place.

that is the hijacking. MS Edge injected anti-chrome content in chrome website. Chrome has not injected anti-MS on bing.com

From the article:

> There's debate among those discussing the banner online whether the ad consists of code injected by Edge into Google's webpage, which would make it detectable and removable as part of the Document Object Model.

> It has also been suggested that the ad may come from Edge as an interface element that's stacked atop the rendered web page. We believe this is the case.

So technically not.

That's an implementation detail. What the user sees is clearly a faked up web page instead of the web page the user requested.

I consider those sign in with Google prompts, to be far worse than what Microsoft is doing.

I don't see it as hijacking because it doesn't seem to interfere with the operation of the page or modify the content. In my view, it's the equivalent of displaying a toast notification or alert with the same information. Obnoxious but I wouldn't refer to it as hijacking.

I've seen those, but only on Google properties.

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