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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
I think the only difference this time around is that people didn't realize Fitbit was acquired by Google.
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
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.
If I were Googles legal team, I would immediately put an end to such cross-product advertising (at least from Search/Chrome/Android).
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.
Having that stuff in Chrome would cost millions in terms of normal display ads for the number of impressions they would get
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.
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.
> 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
No, they’ll place it at the top, just like Amp.
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.
> 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.
Browsers don't seem to serve users anymore. They, like everything else, are mostly ad delivery mechanisms.
edit: turns out I was wrong.
2nd edit: this used to be the case many years ago, thanks for those who confirmed
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.
Wake me when I can't do that anymore (and point me to a decent fork).
For example the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II had a hyperlink to "See todays events" on both places.
* I think I read that in some book about Marissa Mayer and her decisions around the homepage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20020703150514/http://www.google...
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)
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.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go...
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";
}
});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.
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.
That is an ad for Pocket ?
According to statcounter[1], Chrome had 65.52% of the browser market share in August 2022.
Horizontal tabs are objectively inferior - why are vertical tabs so rare???
Brave has vertical tabs coming soon as they are in nightly I believe.
Firefox has ads on their new tab too.
We need better and more respectful competitors.
On the Android phone it's easy choice since only Kiwi Browser supports extensions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could they do something to benefit the users instead?
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.
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.
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.
Anyone have a screenshot of said banner ad?
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.
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).
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.
Now shut up and watch the ads.
https://techdows.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Chrome-dismi...
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?
Google Search has had ads since the beginning. What do you mean?
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...
Now I daily find myself saying "Fuck You, Google".
It's strange how our brains work - I actually never look there, but somehow I did notice it.
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
##[class*=slot-promo]Might be exclusive to a portion of users or locations.
Probably they are testing on a selected range of users.
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.
Yes, things need funding to survive. That's the core of the problem. I bookmarked an interesting older HN comment to that effect.
I lost you there, who is "they" referring to?