If this is fair and legal, why not have Google do the same things?<p>You're using Chrome and on the website to buy Office? How about an injected ad that says that Google docs is free and just as good.<p>Attempting to buy a Windows PC? How about an injected ad explaining how good ChromeOS is?<p>Microsoft are honestly insane to try to play these games with Google. Then again, I've read that 4% of Americans believe they could win a fight with a Grizzly bear.
There are echoes of the net neutrality debate here, where one might argue that: beyond the OSI Application Layer (HTTP etc.) there is also the Layer Where The Browser Decides What Pixels To Show, and that we would want that new layer to be every bit as neutral as, say, whether T-Mobile can shape lower-layer video traffic based on its business partnerships.<p>But there's also a lot of nuance here. Imagine there was a law or regulation that said that a browser manufacturer must only write code that is agnostic to the current URL; imagine it said, say, that Edge developers cannot deploy code that detects that Edge is on google.com/chrome and decide based on that information to execute certain code.<p>Unfortunately, a version of this per-site customization is arguably exactly what Chrome does for the HSTS preload list: <a href="https://hstspreload.org/" rel="nofollow">https://hstspreload.org/</a> - and disallowing this would not be good for security at all!<p>And imagine if there is an urgent Chrome security fix that, as a side effect, causes the Outlook login screen to bug out - or any other mission-critical login page on the web. The most reasonable hotfix might be to push a quick fix that whitelists certain domains for the legacy behavior. But this, too, would be disallowed.<p>We definitely don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater just because Microsoft got a little cute - arguably <i>too</i> cute - here.
> added trust of Microsoft<p>What trust is left? Trust that they'll sell your data to loan companies? <a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-later/" rel="nofollow">https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-edge-buy-now-pay-la...</a>
> Google is using much less annoying banners to promote its browser. More importantly, only on its own websites!<p>In fairness, they only show the message on their website, but their website is most people's home page, and it is how most people would find an alternative browser in the first place. It's debatable whether it's actually less visually annoying.
I'm on a new Windows 11 machine. It seems every other time that I receive a Windows update it resets my browser preferences. Talked with a friend who manages thousands of Windows 11 instances and he says it is a freaking nightmare for him.<p>I have good friends working for Microsoft and I am generally positive towards the company. But it is stuff like this that makes them rather hard to defend to their critics.
The escalation here (moreso than the size/language) is that there appears to be zero indication that this banner is part of the browser chrome (unlike previous iterations). I believe that it is still technically browser chrome, but the UI is indiscernible.
While I can't say I particularly trust Google,<p><i>> “with the added trust of Microsoft”</i><p>is comedy gold. Next they'll be advertising WSL as “the friendliness of Unix combined with the stability & security of Windows”.
The problem with Edge is that Microsoft can't understand one simple thing: do not shitify user experience with wasteful default pages, nag popups, and questionaries. Nobody wants to waste their time on that! This is one of the core reasons Chrome is so popular: it's mostly a clear slate on the first run.<p>The same applies to Firefox (to a lesser degree though): it nags users with "What's new in Firefox" after every update. Nobody reads that anyway but it significantly worsens the experience by thrashing user's attention.<p>The narcistic attention seeking behaviors cultivate rejection.
> Google also shows banners to promote Chrome, but they appear only on the company's websites.<p>On Gmail for iPhone it is constantly pestering me about what browser I’d like to use to open links: the Safari I already have or Chrome that I don’t. And even if I leave the toggle for “ask me which browser to use every time” unchecked, I still have to deal with it.<p>As a side note, I’ve noticed I may have some sort of mild ADHD because every time I want to do something with my phone or computer it is constantly prompting me to solve some unrelated problem. It’s extremely annoying because it takes mental energy to remember what I was even trying to do in the first place. I thought popups were a thing of the past but no, they just look nicer now.
MS, please fire everyone ok with this and focus on making great product not growth hacks.<p>The false goal of short term gains without good product foundation is like smoking 60 a day and pretending cancer doesn’t exist. My children will never know what a “Microsoft” is.
Google and Microsoft are two of the worst companies I have seen that have
no regard for the end user.<p>to them we're just dumb consumers - who don't know know anything or have no personal agency.<p>google will literally change your android settings on a whim, whether it's the
how the icons looks etc, colors whatever.<p>microsoft will try by all means to reset your personal choices about the applications you wanna use or the settings / preferences you want for your machine.<p>both these companies treat consumers as landlords treat tenants. as a pest merely
to be tolerated
There was a point when I actually started liking Edge. It had a few things going for it:<p>-it has by far the best vertical tab implementation of all browsers (someone please copy this)<p>-it has great PWA integration<p>-it isn't Chrome while being Chrome<p>-it has the option of two extension stores<p>-it integrates nicely with Windows Hello<p>Unfortunately, Microsoft appears to be hellbent on ruining it with bloat and ads and tracking.
Happily living on Firefox for several years now on my Macs. I wish I could quit more of both Google and Microsoft. But I'm an Apple-whore and I don't see myself quitting them anytime soon. I probably should though...
The problem with Edge is that it's become loaded with so many useless features. I like Chrome because it's fairly lightweight in terms of design. If I wanted a fully loaded browser I'd use Vivaldi.
Google should one up them and add banners to Outlook, Office, Bing, and Teams.<p>Based on customer surveys Google is more trusted than Microsoft.<p>I'm sure Microsoft will love it.
Fuck Google and their internet monopoly, but I have to give it to them for not doing shit like this. If I had to pick a tech giant to run the internet, I'd rather have Google than Microsoft.<p>...although, fuck Google still (and the rest of big tech)
My (Zwift) gaming PC is on Windows. The contrast to my work/hobby OSX is jarring. I am constantly bombarded with ads with opt-out tricks. It feels unclean to say the least.<p>The worst OSX gets is trying to get me to agree to iTunes ToS once a month without a way to turn it off.
Microsoft does so many good things, then does things like this. I don't get this company sometimes. Feels like half the company is one step into the future and the other is stuck in the 90s. That being said, Google has so many stupid nags when I use Edge. Not a justification, but this runs both ways.
Related: I recently opened a link from Outlook on Android. It asked me which browser to choose: Chrome or Edge. I didn't even have Edge installed on my device. The promot seemed to try to look like Android system prompt, but it suggested installing missing Edge browser.
Microsoft snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with this. They have momentum and good cred built from their other bets then some overstuffed suit pushes for time to be spent on this.
Is anyone surprised? Microsoft has good parts in it, but wolf changes clothes something something.. core was rotten for so long, so what and when changed?
The google site should detect the window size shrinking and inject their own banner below.<p>Something like...<p><pre><code> ^^ THE ABOVE IS A LIE. GOOGLE ROCKS!!</code></pre>
I honestly feel like Edge is run by product owners with no accountability to anyone, who get paid substantially more if the numbers go up. Except they're different numbers per team, and some of them are working against each other.
Something is off there... those look like mock-ups, not real UI. Also, I just tried on my Windows 11 machine, running the latest Edge and all I see is a pop-up (not injected into the HTML of the page, but separate from the browser window), just like in the past.<p>It's possible they got some PM's "smart idea" that no one will ever greenlight. Or it's possible they're on some pre-release / insider builds where MS is testing / experimenting with it.<p>Either way, I'll reserve my outrage for when I see this in a released version.
So clearly injecting third-party code into an SSL-served website considered malicious attack? If it can be done for Chrome download webpage, then this attack vector is possibly open inside edge for other web pages? I'm afraid bad actor can find it quickly and use the "feature" to inject his own login form into banking websites unchecked, I wonder if it's too different from injecting an ad.
It's a little amusing to see the leech Microsoft trying to compete with Google, when the former is already relying on the core rendering engine from the latter. I'll continue to use Firefox, and simply refuse to use sites that don't work in it (along with a strongly-worded complaint to those responsible), but I think the whole reason we got into this mess is because of web developers' greed for the new and shiny, along with Google's ability to weaponise change to outrun its competitors --- even Microsoft.<p>What needs to happen to stop the increasing user-hostility is to take the web back to its roots. Stop trendchasing and consuming the marketing propaganda about how X is better because it's newer. Maybe once browsers (as in actual rendering engines, not more skinned Chrome-clones like Edge) become far more diverse and the web becomes mainly documents-readable-in-almost-any-browser again, that'll make things better.
I just went right now to <a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/chrome/index.html</a> using Edge and didn't get a full-size ad, but a little corner pop-up.
And when I have to use Bing and go to google I get a similar (ok it is only half-size) Chrome advertisement :D Wonder who was first and if this is some kind of rebuttal, or just sad coincidence of today's world.
Looks like their fond memories of United States v. Microsoft Corp is fading away. Perhaps it's a great time to make MS recall this, and all other big techs as well?
Google also doesn't have clean hands in this fight, but also I don't really care about which company that's brazenly acting in a user-hostile way is more user-hostile at the moment?<p>Both companies ought to be legally slapped with some kind of regulatory consequence for the ways that they push their browser; beyond that I'm not too particular about what order they're slapped in as long as it doesn't stop with one of them.
This sound a lot like Microsoft’s “Smart Tags” in IE6 that would linkify (non-href) text in non-Microsoft web pages to point to Microsoft-recommended websites or applications.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft)</a>
I'm curious what Chromium based browser HN users would recommend for web development.<p>I stopped using Brave since they added a bunch of crypto garbage. Chrome and Edge both have telemetry and Google/Microsoft account sign in nagging.<p>Currently using Firefox. Love Orion as well on my phone but the Webkit Devtools make it unusable for development.
I believe I saw this on a Windows laptop purchased in the last week - was very surprised it was technically possible for a neutral browser to do this but I moved on as quickly as possible. Yeah the browser clearly wasn’t neutral - how is it possible to trust software like that?<p>(If this is in the testing phase maybe we were a canary)
They advertise “With the added trust of Microsoft”. That goes over like a lead balloon in some circles. Now pardon me while I run screaming in the opposite direction.<p>Seriously though, do normal people like Microsoft?
The UX of my favorite chrome downloader got worse but there isn't a competitor that's as easy to use to download chrome so I'll stick with it
I nearly considered moving to Edge on my last Windows install.<p>In the end, it's true that IE/Edge were bad choices before moving to WebKit. Now, why not? A more integrated browser (as Safari is for Mac) makes sense x Google being evil(er) x Firefox being left behind (for bad reasons, but still) x Bing being a good Bing x Google Search being less useful.<p>I agree the method isn't good, but feels like Edge is not a bad choice anymore.
When I go to the chrome download page, I just get a little popup on the side, which is very clearly not part of the page. Pretty much exactly the same as when I visit google from any non-chrome browser.
I'd quite like to see Microsoft do this for other software and services too.<p>Like if someone goes on the Adobe Illustrator website, it shows a little banner informing them of Inkscape.<p>Or if someone is about to sign up to a Mastodon instance, it gently points out that this isn't really Twitter, and that the server administrator will probably read your private messages.
>Google is using much less annoying banners to promote its browser. More importantly, only on its own websites!<p>Well yeah, because that's all they can do...