I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed…
This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff.
I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.
The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.
It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused.
In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now.
Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention.
Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid.
You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale.
It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity.
Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench.
Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.
The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows.
If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
Real change starts with real pain. People aren’t interested in obsessively checking privacy settings in apps or disabling tracking everywhere and I don’t expect them to. Governments don’t protect them because of gestures widely at status quo. People will realize those services are important and there will be a massive realignment. That’s how I expect things will go.
>Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market.
I think it’s more about how they are perceived. They’re making a lot of money somehow, but they have been losing desktop OS marketshare for at least 15 years, they completely missed mobile, Xbox seems to be failing, they completely gave up on the browser and just threw a skin on Chrome. They have O365 in the enterprise, sure, but that was a market they once owned… now they share it with Google Docs and a host of others. They had to shove Linux into Windows just to get developers to stick around. They had the PC gaming market on lockdown, but Valve is coming for them with all their Linux based efforts… we have PewDiePie as an Arch user now. How bad does Microsoft need to screw up to push someone all the way to Arch? All their consumer facing products seem to be trending down.
Everyone loves to talk about FAANG… there is no M, why not? One would think Microsoft would belong more in that collection than Netflix, yet here we are.
In terms of technology and looking forward, what is Microsoft doing really right? Even their investment in AI seems questionable and they pushed it into their products so hard that everyone hates it. They have GitHub and VS Code, but that was an acquisition and people are always nervous, because they don’t really trust Microsoft based on their track record. Azure is fairly popular, but AWS is still the benchmark everyone talks about. There is their enterprise management software… that helped take Styker completely down last week (maybe not totally Microsoft’s fault and more the admin, but that’s still some really bad press). Did I forget something big?
TBH, you could change a few terms and that text wouldn't look much different in the 90's. Microslop never gave a shit on end-users and what they think. Nobody ever "liked" Microslop. People were always complaining that Windows is shit, Office is shit, MS Servers are a joke, etc. Nobody at Microslop ever cared. They always cared only about having all the companies and governments in ransom, which was always their golden egg goose. The only other thing they care about, to make the first thing happen, are developers. They put a lot money into keeping people developing using their tech, and this actually works. Even on Linux it's hard to avoid Miroslop tech. (I've got just today a Pipewire update which pulled in some MS libs for ML; and there is for sure more as they have even code in the Kernel.) Microslop's EEE strategy is a long game, which is actually pretty hard to beat.
Office was considered a very solid product for many generations. Windows 95 was loved. So were Windows 2000, Windows XP with the SPs, Windows 7, Windows 10.
.NET was the envy of the Java world for many years.
Microsoft had many duds but they also had some great products.
You can't sell as many products as they did without also having some good products.
> Office was considered a very solid product for many generations.
When was that? My introduction to Excel was in the 1990s when a scientist asked about data corruption, and my response was "oh, yeah, Excel does that, you need to fiddle with these options and hope the options do not get turned off, seeing as companies may randomly screw over user preferences". The look in their eyes...they probably had done a whole bunch of data entry before they even noticed the corruption. Anyways, a few decades later those genomes got renamed, for some reason or another. Other customers came to me and pleaded, please do not install Word 6, it's bad, and I was like, well, be that as it may, but Microsoft has broken the file format, again, so if someone sends you a Word 6 document you will not be able to read it. They've got you over the barrel, perhaps consider not using their software? Unless you like being chained to that main-mast, of course, don't shame the kink! Later on a coworker said, try Visio, and I was like, this is sort of bad, and they were like, yeah, it was better before Microsoft bought it. So, when was Microsoft not producing kusogeware? Sometime during the semi-mythical 80s, perhaps?
I don't think everyone hates Microsoft's AI offerings, but rather a vocal group of online people.
Copilot is useful, particularly if it is the only thing enabled in your company.
Don't get me started on Azure though. Their VMs are insanely slow, yet still cost like hundreds per month.
I don't know who in their right mind thinks it is a good deal and that they should move all their services into Azure. Apparently a lot of senior management.
I think if, 10 years ago, you spun Microsoft into several different companies with everything playing out exactly as it has today in the product management side, the most direct consumer-facing sections like Windows Desktop and Xbox would have cratered and most analysts would say that they have bleak futures, while Azure and 365 would have grossly overperformed and would have been titans.
MS has been successful despite fucking up the monolithic position they held in desktop and gaming, because they managed to find a particularly valuable golden goose. It's just that in doing so they allowed the other golden geese they have to become quite sick.
If you took out cloud rev MS would have been much more motivated to not let the rest of the company's products turn in to the sorry state they're in.
Most client PC are still running on Microslop Windows.
They are, as always, using Windows to sell all their other crap, especially Azure and 365. Things like their AD or office tools are tightly integrated into the cloud so you realistically can't even use the one without using the other.
At work, we needed a PC for a Linux-based Webkiosk the other day. The computer proposed by the colleague who actually orders stuff comes with a Windows license. I said we don't need that. A fruitless, lame effort was made to locate a substitute w/o a Windows license. I renewed my protest, but the feeling that the problem is me was already floating in the air. I gave up. We purchased a Windows license to run Linux. For the umpteenth time.
It's like a Microsoft tax on PCs.
Those OEM licenses do seem quite cheap. I think it was Dell who gave an option for a while. To remove the Windows license and have Ubuntu instead only saved $10.
It was low enough where I think most buyers questioned if it would be worth it to have the license just incase.
I'm not sure where you are but at least here Microslop is still ruling more or less everywhere besides the online ad market.
They are big in everything that is mass scale developer oriented with things like GitHub, VSCode, or all their libs, tools, and integrations (they "own" in large parts for example Python, TS, and Rust). Governments and public services are all running on Azure. So do a lot of companies; more or less all small and mid sized. They are still dominant in the gaming market, and get stronger there with every year.
Microslop was always, and still is the same Microslop. They are very successful with what they do since decades. Whether one likes that or not.
They haven't been dominant in the gaming market for a long time now. Since the beginning of the last generation (Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch), Microsoft has had the worst selling game consoles. And they are getting weaker with every year: the Xbox director was fired just a few weeks ago.
They still control PC gaming. Even Valve has long given up on disrupting DirectX and the Win32 API in general and is just translating whatever APIs Microsoft decides we should have.
That only grants market control so long as Microsoft keeps releasing new APIs, otherwise the people reimplementing them like valve/wine will catch up.
I think Valve’s play isn’t to steal tons of Microsoft’s gaming market share; their play is to just get enough of a market that game developers are incentivized to code to the APIs that work well in Proton, not whatever the latest and greatest in Windows is. If we cross that inflection point, Microsoft’s PC gaming chokehold will be on life support.
Sadly I'd say it's the opposite with them winning that antitrust case, none of these big guys give a shit anymore, they're basically slowly easing into doing whatever the hell they want.
Also Google search degradation is partly due to the web becoming infested with AI slop and most content moving to chat apps, which are walled gardens by default.
The funny thing is that until like 2024 iOS actually HAD no default browser control, so this kind of thing was a huge help for people who wanted to use Chrome against Apple’s monopolistic wishes. Of course it’s fair to argue that it should be eliminated now. The commenter who mourned the web view option also has a good point, but tbh that ought to just be asked once and then live in settings.
Even when it had no default browser, it should only prompt for Chrome when a user has Chrome installed. I do not.
In addition, it should remember the setting forever and not keep prompting every couple months.
This is not a good faith attempt to let a user open a link in their browser of choice, it’s a push to get users to download and use Chrome. I can only assume users with Chrome as their default browser don’t get this needless slide-in.
Even if the OS prevents it, Chrome could tell a Google server what device ID you've logged into Chrome with (if you logged into Chrome, of course), at which point the Gmail app could ask the Google server.
> I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.
Alas, I don't think it's a bug. A PM or VP probably got a bonus for this.
> How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Yeah this is kinda weird. I don't know if it's browser specific though. I use Firefox on my main computer and I think I still see it. Which means that the website owner opted into this weird pattern. No other auth providers do this. Just Google.
I opt into it on my site it's just a login option you can ignore if you want to log in another way, but for those who use it it removes the friction of writing out a password and verifying the email
It can’t just be ignored, it covers content, and if someone accidentally clicks the wrong thing… poof, they now have that site linked to their Google account.
Thanks for sharing! It's not really easily ignored for some people (I ignore it the same way I ignored banner ads in the 00s). I'm curious if you have any metrics on bounce ratios with/without the option. The sentiment here on HN appears to be largely negative but HN does not represent the population at large. I find that many people don't mind or even like a lot of stuff that HN tends to hate.
> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now
This drove me really, really mad last winter. How did they even achieve this? My policy is no US vendors. Period. Not for work stuff at least; not for things I depend on. What a mess.
There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious).
I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with.
Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content.
All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.
You can disable it in your Chrome settings: chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi
Websites that choose to put a sign-in with Google button on a page can disable the popup by setting data-auto_prompt="false". The default being "true" is how Google is pushing this, but this seems like a rather gentle way of pushing.
It's clearly a deliberate choice that websites make. Your explanation as to why they're doing it seems very plausible to me.
But ultimately websites can pop up whatever annoying nonsense they want. There isn't really any "way forward" except avoiding bad websites or using ad blockers.
Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact.
Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.
Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. The delivery driver also stays and watches to make sure you don't take the pineapple off and if you do, you're banned from buying Google Pizza anymore. It's a long drive to find a pizza place that isn't owned by Google.
Except the fact that opening up new pizza place have a huge upfront cost. Your pizza may need to be pricier too. You thought people are flocking to your new pizza place, but the reality is that most people just want to not get hungry, and will rather chomp down pineapple pizza while being surveiled, than spending more for non-pineapple pizza.
Look, I love making a analogies. Just that they have scale, and competing against it is hard.
> [...] but the reality is that most people just want to not get hungry, and will rather chomp down pineapple pizza while being surveiled, than spending more for non-pineapple pizza.
In that case, who are we to judge the company that gives people what they want?
This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff.
I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too.
The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting?
Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.