> 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.
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.
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.
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?"
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-...
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.
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.
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?
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!”
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.
>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.
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.
I don't think the response should have been flagged. Sources are directly from CDC. They've changed the definition of what a vaccine is regardless of your position on vaccination.
> 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.
- 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").
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ^_^
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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 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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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)).
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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