8 ms·

Google Chrome is preparing a widget with shopping ads on the new tab page?

119 points by rbinv 6y ago

saagarjha 6y ago
> Google clarified these are not “ads.” The company points out that they only source free shopping listings for this widget and that the content is not sponsored. I'm not sure I understand how these aren't ads? In any case, is this something that literally anyone asked for?
- ssorallen 6y ago
  The title in the screenshot says “Continue search for Office Chairs,” which sounds like it shows recent Google searches that have significant presence in the “Shopping” tab of google.com. Sure these aren’t “ads,” like the article says, but if they are links to Google Shopping then they indirectly generate revenue for Google by sending you back to google.com. Agreed... who asked for this?
  - shostack 6y ago
    It's sort of like video search results. I search for a question. I get a result that looks like a video and not an ad. I click the link and get taken to YouTube where... an ad plays. And likely generates a higher RPM for Google than a text ad.
- intellirogue 6y ago
  Yeah. This doesn't seem like something that users would actually want, so there has to be a financial incentive for Google to do it. Perhaps they start off as "not ads" in order to minimise complaints about the feature, but intend to gradually allow companies to e.g. pay for prime spot.
- eznzt 6y ago
  It's like when Mozilla says that the "Pocket recommended articles" they show on the new tab page are not ads.
- danShumway 6y ago
  For the average person, the definition of an "ad" isn't contingent on whether or not Google is getting paid for it. For the average person, a promotional 3rd-party text that is trying to get them to buy an office chair is an ad. It's like Google claiming that if they give you free credits for adwords that it suddenly stops counting as an ad. Users don't care.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  These aren’t ads in that they directly profit Google’s baseline just by displaying them. Google profits from increased ad-spend on search result sites that those things link to. If however you think every product mention is an ad, of course these are ads. Either way, these things shouldn’t happen. Browsers should enable everyone to use the web.
  - xnyan 6y ago
    These are unsolicited offers to buy a good. In what world are they not ads?
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > is this something that literally anyone asked for Google executives probably. This is what you get when you hand control of the entire web platform over to an ad company. And the only way to stop it is to depose Chrome as the dominant platform. And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices.
  - _Understated_ 6y ago
    > And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices Not sure I'd agree with that. Of course, Edge is built on Chromium, but Microsoft are free to make their own changes, and to reverse any changes from Google that they don't like. So, in this case, Edge can give you all the performance characteristics of Google's own Chrome browser but without the ads... win-win I reckon.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      Edge is better than Chrome, but only slightly: Microsoft has chosen to largely follow all of Google's platform decisions, including Manifest V3. The Edge PM is a former Googler, and is absolutely unable to grasp that he's collaborating with the enemy half the time. With the increased privacy features built-in, it's definitely an improvement, and feeding Microsoft is less bad than feeding Google, but I'm not confident Edge's current developers have the backbone to stand up to Google's decisions.
  - dsissitka 6y ago
    > And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices. What choices? After seeing how they responded to Manifest v3 Mozilla seems pretty spineless compared to Brave.
  - TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
    So we're basically back to ad-supported Opera then?
simonsarris 6y ago
You can replace that page via extensions, which I did long ago to this one that shows scenes from Google Earth: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-google-ea/bhloflhklmhfpedakmangadcdofhnnoh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go... (I did this to be intentional with new tabs instead of occasionally mindlessly clicking one of the "most visited" links over and over)
- donmcronald 6y ago
  You can also replace it with Edge or Firefox.
  - fbn79 6y ago
    Or Chromium
    - SwiftyBug 6y ago
      Or Ungoogled Chromium
- anoncake 6y ago
  Until Google removes the APIs these extensions need for made-up privacy and security reasons, like it's doing to ad blockers.
  - codazoda 6y ago
    Or they stop supporting extensions all together.
- Yver 6y ago
  I replaced mine with a static HTML page via a custom extension loaded in "Developer mode". It only takes a small JSON file for the manifest and the HTML page itself.
gondolf 6y ago
> Update: Google clarified these are not “ads.” Not yet.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  They're already ads. It's just instead of being 3rd party ads, they're ads for Google Search pages. Every hit to those search pages makes Google money, and these "widgets" are ads for search pages.
netsharc 6y ago
Google bragged when they were new, that it was better than other search engines ("portals") because it just had the search text field and 2 buttons, and no articles with pictures and attention-grabbing headlines in their home page. And now? The freaking Google Search app on Android has "trending searches" under the search bar. There's an "Explore" button that shows you articles/videos it thinks you like because it knows what you googled/watched on YouTube. I'm so glad there are still settings to turn these off (from the default of on!), but the changes pissed me off when I saw them for the 1st time.
aasasd 6y ago
Weirdly enough, this actually corresponds to my habits, if I understand the workings right. I tend to open a dozen tabs when looking for a product, with different models, reviews, and second-hand prices. Then I get tired of sitting down, go do something else, do work, get sidetracked into researching other things, and when I get back to the topic of the product I have fifty more tabs and it's time to nuke the whole mess. To start anew, I would again go to those listings on local analogues of Google Product Search/Amazon and Craigslist, so I guess linking to them would sorta help.
netfl0 6y ago
I don’t understand how folks are still putting up with Google. The only thing I need a replacement for is YouTube, that’s where the content is.
- SwiftyBug 6y ago
  It seems that you replaced Google Calendar. What do you use instead?
  - unhammer 6y ago
    Not OP, but I use Fastmail's calendar
    - beardbound 6y ago
      I do the same. I migrated all of my emails over to fastmail a while ago and have been very pleased. There's a web interface, but I mostly use it with the native calendar app on my machine (in my case iCal). A couple of colleagues even switched after I mentioned how much I like it. I've been trying to move all of my stuff off of Google for a while since I don't really approve of their business practices anymore. Although migrating everything off an old Gmail I used for a decade has been slow. I need to take a weekend to do it at some point.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Google Calendar really has nothing inherently advantageous over every other calendar solution on every other email app. Calendar invites are pretty much a universal standard, and it's perfectly easy to interoperate other people's Google Calendar with your not-Google calendar.
  - netfl0 6y ago
    I use office 365, it works great.
- FandangoRanger 6y ago
  Just use youtube-dl (it still works and will be forked) to suck the content you want out of Youtube. Use Tor Browser to screw Google out of your precious precious data as well.
Hippocrates 6y ago
Whatever the motivation, this is heinous. Why do people jump to replace safari on their laptops, and even their iPhones (often with chrome)? Even before I became aware, and strongly opposed to Google's advertising and privacy practices, I had been a Chrome user. I was on a long road trip and was frantically trying to solve a P1 for my company. My new laptop battery was was chunking downward at a staggering rate and I felt like I was trying to diffuse a bomb. I dug into the energy metrics and found that the culprit was, by and large, Chrome. Switching to Safari has made a huge improvement for me and I actually don't remember now why I was using chrome in the first place. Firefox and brave are excellent too, though they aren't default in the Apple ecosystem. I just don't understand why the draw to chrome and why it still commands such a large market share.
- MikusR 6y ago
  I just checked 6 laptops. None have Safari available. Also checked three smartphones - no Safari possible there also.
  - benbristow 6y ago
    Were you by any chance looking at 6 non-Mac laptops and 3 non-iOS smartphones?
    - DharmaPolice 6y ago
      I suspect that may have been their point.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    The sentence reads just as well with 'Edge' in place of Safari, and they call out iPhones quite explicitly. The snark does not take the parent's comment in good faith.
    - MikusR 6y ago
      Edge runs on Windows, Macos, Linux.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
abrowne 6y ago
Not a solution for most people, but if you didn't know, it's very easy to replace the new tab page with a custom one using a minimal, local extension. In your manifest.json include "chrome_url_overrides": { "newtab": "ntp.html" } and if you want it to work in incognito tabs "incognito": "split" (you will also need to go to your extensions's detail page and flip on "Allow in incognito"). Then create your ntp.html page (can be named whatever, just change the json to match), with CSS file(s) and image(s) as needed. I made a simple flexbox "speed dial" page with sites I specify rather than changing based on some kind of "frecency". In chrome://extensions/, flip the "Developer mode" switch and then click "Load unpacked" and choose your extension's folder.
- renke1 6y ago
  I wonder if one can rely on this working forever. I might have a product idea that relies on being able to change the new tab page, but I am kind of afraid Chrome forbids it one of these days.
  - abrowne 6y ago
    There seem to be a lot of extensions that do it, with nice pictures or wherever, so it seems unlikely, but you never know.
  - erikrothoff 6y ago
    It's quite a common extension use-case so I dobut it. It's also hard to abuse unlike certain tab related permissions, which is what they are mostly cracking down on.
jiripospisil 6y ago
If you want to participate in the discussion about this feature, you can go ahead and comment on it in the tracking issue over at [0]. Oh wait, you cannot - it's set to private. It's almost as if Google didn't want any input from the community about Chromium, the open source project. Weird. More seriously though, it seems the feature calls [1] to get the list of products to show on the new page. The call is made every time the new page is opened as long as Google is your search provider and the user is signed in (not sure if to the browser or Google services). [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1130855 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113085... [1] https://www.google.com/async/newtab_shopping_tasks https://www.google.com/async/newtab_shopping_tasks
- po1nter 6y ago
  I get a "permission denied" on the first link. guess they don't want other opinions on the subject.
flattone 6y ago
Oh cool! I hate when i forget that i could be shopping.
FandangoRanger 6y ago
I'm still using IceCat, I will continue to do so. Chrome's ugly, something about the font rendering and smooth scrolling is really off-putting, plus I just know everything I do is being reported to the Google mothership.
marketingPro 6y ago
We don't need an anti trust breakup of big tech. Their own decisions are causing them to lose customers. I'm doing the unthinkable, I cut half my Google usage. No more music, no more photos, no more Android Chrome, significantly less Google search. It's happening, although I feel like anti-consumer practices hurts Google more than Apple. Maybe my original claim about not needing anti trust is a bit simple.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  > We don't need an anti trust breakup of big tech. This is a really bad take. The amount of Google's power and control isn't something a handful of HN users switching to Firefox can fix. Most people literally don't realize there's alternatives. There's a silent majority feeding the Google beast, and they aren't going to switch from the defaults. Tech industry members can set the tone, we can spread good behavior to our friends and family, but the government is needed to move the majority. Bear in mind, everyone hates Microsoft (seems like sometimes anyways), they did face antitrust law, and still in 2020, they're one of the world's most powerful and valuable companies, and everyone still uses Windows at work. Which is to say, if we want to take Google down, it needs to come from every direction, and it needs to be incredibly harsh. And once Google is no longer running the web, stronger privacy and consumer protection laws need to be passed to make sure it's understood that behavior like Google's will never be tolerated again.
  - zepto 6y ago
    As I remember it, a major reason why Chrome became so dominant is that the tech community fell in love with it and recommended it unreservedly to everyone else. That same process can be reversed.
    - eitland 6y ago
      Have my upvote. But don't forget that they used their - for all intents and relevant purposes - unlimited budget to bundle it everywhere. They were also advertising it on the front page of their search engine - a spot no one else has been able to reach AFAIK. I guess there's a lot more. If this isn't monopoly abuse I have a hard time seing what is.
0goel0 6y ago
Just switch to brave. It's chrome without google
beervirus 6y ago
What is it gonna take for y’all to switch back to Firefox?
- caymanjim 6y ago
  A UI that doesn't suck.
  - po1nter 6y ago
    disclaimer: I'm a Firefox user. I'm genuinely interested in why you think Firefox's UI sucks? What could be done better? IMO it's more customizable than Chrome's which is a big plus for me.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      Written from Firefox, so with that in mind: In full screen mode, minimize the tab, address, and bookmark bars into the top of the screen. And personally, it bugs me how obscure it is to work with bookmarks (yes, I still use them). It's still my daily driver at work and home but those are two things that always bug me.
    - caymanjim 6y ago
      It's visually unpleasant. Boxy UI elements (notably tabs); elements of different sizes in the same container; too much whitespace in some places; generally not enough whitespace in most places (bookmark folders/menus in general/the whole area around the location bar); elements that change size (the location bar); etc. I don't like customizable UIs; it seems to lead to less attention being paid to the default UI. I don't want to invest in configuring a UI; I just want it to work. Themes degrade over time as they're not maintained. Font rendering is worse than Chrome; colors are different from Chrome (I can't claim that one is right, but it's a jarring difference when comparing them, and I'm used to Chrome). Firefox doesn't have a polished UI, and its whole job is to be a UI for other content.
- intellirogue 6y ago
  Mozilla to fix the years-old issue (massive CPU usage and battery drain) using it on macOS with a high DPI display.
qwnp 6y ago
For those who are required (or prefer) to use a Chromium-based browser, you might want to give ungoogled-chromium [0] a shot. I switched recently based on a recommendation from a HN reader, and so far it has been a surprisingly seamless transition. I have yet to encounter any issues aside from being unable to install extensions directly from the Chrome Web Store, which was easily remedied by first installing the chromium-web-store extension [1]. My biggest gripe is that there are no 'official' binaries, so you'd either have to build your own or trust the user-submitted builds, though apparently the project owner is currently working on setting up an official build server [2]. [0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium [1] https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store [2] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1198 https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1198
- ant6n 6y ago
  Is there a way to get this on chrome os?
  - cmdshiftf4 6y ago
    I quite literally laughed out loud. Well done.
jabroni_salad 6y ago
I recall this specific 'continue searching for....' appearing in Assistant in a previous iteration, back when it had magic widgets and wasn't just a chatbot. Are other widgets coming to this space?
SanchoPanda 6y ago
Dear Chrome team,. I'll give you this and one more if I can have igoogle back. Love, SanchoPanda
- rbinv 6y ago
  I was going to recommend Netvibes as a viable iGoogle alternative, but it seems that it has become quite "enterprisey". I, too, miss iGoogle (which ironically would be much better suited for ads like these).
brianzelip 6y ago
Stop using chrome.
crazygringo 6y ago
I mean, Google's a business and Chrome is free so I'm not exactly surprised. But I've used the "Empty New Tab Page" for I guess something like 7 years [1]. I don't like seeing any junk on a new tab page, I don't care if it's shopping or not. Now if they take away the ability to customize the new tab page, then I'd be bothered... [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page/dpjamkmjmigaoobjbekmfgabipmfilij https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page...
- fsflover 6y ago
  > Now if they take away the ability to customize the new tab page, then I'd be bothered... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
  - crazygringo 6y ago
    Oh please. This is just a consumer product from a for-profit corporation. It's an ad. Comparing it to a situation where millions of people were murdered is incredibly offensive. Please don't blithely throw around comparisons like that. It doesn't help anything, and is incredibly disrespectful.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      This is not disrespectful. Even though the current case is not about murder, that old story should teach you that you should care about other people, not only about yourself, otherwise it may eventually turn out bad for you. And this is not just a product. It is a monopolist having huge influence over most of the population (who mostly cannot customize anything and has to suffer).
      - crazygringo 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but yes, this is just a product. There are no human rights violations at stake, c'mon. And the DoJ is arguing that Search is a monopoly, not Chrome. And what do you mean, "cannot customize anything and has to suffer"? My original comment was literally about customizing the new tab page to be different. And who is "suffering" from this? Nobody is dying of hunger because Chrome wants to show an ad. The reason your comment was disrespectful is because perspective is important. Human rights violations and genocide are not comparable to a private corporation -- whether it's a monopoly or not -- deciding to show a dumb advertisement.
haberdasher 6y ago
Shout out to a great alternative new-tab page: Goal Board: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-board-g/egbpmmfglhgciocgillbpooejgfajmng https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-...
ravenstine 6y ago
Google owns Chrome and always have, and they're an advertising mill. What did you people expect? This may be one of the least worst things that Google has done to Chrome.
FreakyT 6y ago
Google's continued meddling with adding useless content on the new tab page is what pushed me to Chromium Edge. (The weird little news snippets on the bottom with no way to disable them was the first of these poorly-conceived experiments.) Edge has a ton of awful content on its new tab page too, but there's an option to turn it off which makes all the difference.
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
What do you expect when you use a browser made by an advertising company?
onion2k 6y ago
It's not the case for Google, obviously, but sticking random adverts in prominent places in a desperate attempt to increase revenue is the sort of thing web businesses do immediately before they go bust, and this has exactly the same optics to me.
tareqak 6y ago
Does Google know that the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against them a week ago? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...
siproprio 6y ago
This is just horrible! And the bug reporter issue is blocked!
PokemonNoGo 6y ago
I really really enjoy https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-google-ea/bhloflhklmhfpedakmangadcdofhnnoh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go... by Google to show a new view of earth in the new tab. Sometimes my mind wonders but it's very enjoyable.
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new-tab-page/ https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new..., which points to this.

119 points by rbinv 6y ago

> Google clarified these are not “ads.” The company points out that they only source free shopping listings for this widget and that the content is not sponsored. I'm not sure I understand how these aren't ads? In any case, is this something that literally anyone asked for?

ssorallen 6y ago
The title in the screenshot says “Continue search for Office Chairs,” which sounds like it shows recent Google searches that have significant presence in the “Shopping” tab of google.com. Sure these aren’t “ads,” like the article says, but if they are links to Google Shopping then they indirectly generate revenue for Google by sending you back to google.com. Agreed... who asked for this?
- shostack 6y ago
  It's sort of like video search results. I search for a question. I get a result that looks like a video and not an ad. I click the link and get taken to YouTube where... an ad plays. And likely generates a higher RPM for Google than a text ad.
intellirogue 6y ago
Yeah. This doesn't seem like something that users would actually want, so there has to be a financial incentive for Google to do it. Perhaps they start off as "not ads" in order to minimise complaints about the feature, but intend to gradually allow companies to e.g. pay for prime spot.
eznzt 6y ago
It's like when Mozilla says that the "Pocket recommended articles" they show on the new tab page are not ads.
danShumway 6y ago
For the average person, the definition of an "ad" isn't contingent on whether or not Google is getting paid for it. For the average person, a promotional 3rd-party text that is trying to get them to buy an office chair is an ad. It's like Google claiming that if they give you free credits for adwords that it suddenly stops counting as an ad. Users don't care.
dna_polymerase 6y ago
These aren’t ads in that they directly profit Google’s baseline just by displaying them. Google profits from increased ad-spend on search result sites that those things link to. If however you think every product mention is an ad, of course these are ads. Either way, these things shouldn’t happen. Browsers should enable everyone to use the web.
- xnyan 6y ago
  These are unsolicited offers to buy a good. In what world are they not ads?
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> is this something that literally anyone asked for Google executives probably. This is what you get when you hand control of the entire web platform over to an ad company. And the only way to stop it is to depose Chrome as the dominant platform. And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices.
- _Understated_ 6y ago
  > And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices Not sure I'd agree with that. Of course, Edge is built on Chromium, but Microsoft are free to make their own changes, and to reverse any changes from Google that they don't like. So, in this case, Edge can give you all the performance characteristics of Google's own Chrome browser but without the ads... win-win I reckon.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    Edge is better than Chrome, but only slightly: Microsoft has chosen to largely follow all of Google's platform decisions, including Manifest V3. The Edge PM is a former Googler, and is absolutely unable to grasp that he's collaborating with the enemy half the time. With the increased privacy features built-in, it's definitely an improvement, and feeding Microsoft is less bad than feeding Google, but I'm not confident Edge's current developers have the backbone to stand up to Google's decisions.
- dsissitka 6y ago
  > And no, that does not mean switch to Brave or Edge. Chrome forks by and large fall in line with Chrome's choices. Firefox or Safari are the only choices. What choices? After seeing how they responded to Manifest v3 Mozilla seems pretty spineless compared to Brave.
- TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
  So we're basically back to ad-supported Opera then?

simonsarris 6y ago

You can replace that page via extensions, which I did long ago to this one that shows scenes from Google Earth: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-google-ea/bhloflhklmhfpedakmangadcdofhnnoh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go... (I did this to be intentional with new tabs instead of occasionally mindlessly clicking one of the "most visited" links over and over)

donmcronald 6y ago
You can also replace it with Edge or Firefox.
- fbn79 6y ago
  Or Chromium
  - SwiftyBug 6y ago
    Or Ungoogled Chromium
anoncake 6y ago
Until Google removes the APIs these extensions need for made-up privacy and security reasons, like it's doing to ad blockers.
- codazoda 6y ago
  Or they stop supporting extensions all together.
Yver 6y ago
I replaced mine with a static HTML page via a custom extension loaded in "Developer mode". It only takes a small JSON file for the manifest and the HTML page itself.

gondolf 6y ago

> Update: Google clarified these are not “ads.” Not yet.

wlesieutre 6y ago
They're already ads. It's just instead of being 3rd party ads, they're ads for Google Search pages. Every hit to those search pages makes Google money, and these "widgets" are ads for search pages.

netsharc 6y ago

Google bragged when they were new, that it was better than other search engines ("portals") because it just had the search text field and 2 buttons, and no articles with pictures and attention-grabbing headlines in their home page. And now? The freaking Google Search app on Android has "trending searches" under the search bar. There's an "Explore" button that shows you articles/videos it thinks you like because it knows what you googled/watched on YouTube. I'm so glad there are still settings to turn these off (from the default of on!), but the changes pissed me off when I saw them for the 1st time.

aasasd 6y ago

Weirdly enough, this actually corresponds to my habits, if I understand the workings right. I tend to open a dozen tabs when looking for a product, with different models, reviews, and second-hand prices. Then I get tired of sitting down, go do something else, do work, get sidetracked into researching other things, and when I get back to the topic of the product I have fifty more tabs and it's time to nuke the whole mess. To start anew, I would again go to those listings on local analogues of Google Product Search/Amazon and Craigslist, so I guess linking to them would sorta help.

netfl0 6y ago

I don’t understand how folks are still putting up with Google. The only thing I need a replacement for is YouTube, that’s where the content is.

SwiftyBug 6y ago
It seems that you replaced Google Calendar. What do you use instead?
- unhammer 6y ago
  Not OP, but I use Fastmail's calendar
  - beardbound 6y ago
    I do the same. I migrated all of my emails over to fastmail a while ago and have been very pleased. There's a web interface, but I mostly use it with the native calendar app on my machine (in my case iCal). A couple of colleagues even switched after I mentioned how much I like it. I've been trying to move all of my stuff off of Google for a while since I don't really approve of their business practices anymore. Although migrating everything off an old Gmail I used for a decade has been slow. I need to take a weekend to do it at some point.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Google Calendar really has nothing inherently advantageous over every other calendar solution on every other email app. Calendar invites are pretty much a universal standard, and it's perfectly easy to interoperate other people's Google Calendar with your not-Google calendar.
- netfl0 6y ago
  I use office 365, it works great.
FandangoRanger 6y ago
Just use youtube-dl (it still works and will be forked) to suck the content you want out of Youtube. Use Tor Browser to screw Google out of your precious precious data as well.

Hippocrates 6y ago

Whatever the motivation, this is heinous. Why do people jump to replace safari on their laptops, and even their iPhones (often with chrome)? Even before I became aware, and strongly opposed to Google's advertising and privacy practices, I had been a Chrome user. I was on a long road trip and was frantically trying to solve a P1 for my company. My new laptop battery was was chunking downward at a staggering rate and I felt like I was trying to diffuse a bomb. I dug into the energy metrics and found that the culprit was, by and large, Chrome. Switching to Safari has made a huge improvement for me and I actually don't remember now why I was using chrome in the first place. Firefox and brave are excellent too, though they aren't default in the Apple ecosystem. I just don't understand why the draw to chrome and why it still commands such a large market share.

MikusR 6y ago
I just checked 6 laptops. None have Safari available. Also checked three smartphones - no Safari possible there also.
- benbristow 6y ago
  Were you by any chance looking at 6 non-Mac laptops and 3 non-iOS smartphones?
  - DharmaPolice 6y ago
    I suspect that may have been their point.
- falcolas 6y ago
  The sentence reads just as well with 'Edge' in place of Safari, and they call out iPhones quite explicitly. The snark does not take the parent's comment in good faith.
  - MikusR 6y ago
    Edge runs on Windows, Macos, Linux.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

abrowne 6y ago

Not a solution for most people, but if you didn't know, it's very easy to replace the new tab page with a custom one using a minimal, local extension. In your manifest.json include "chrome_url_overrides": { "newtab": "ntp.html" } and if you want it to work in incognito tabs "incognito": "split" (you will also need to go to your extensions's detail page and flip on "Allow in incognito"). Then create your ntp.html page (can be named whatever, just change the json to match), with CSS file(s) and image(s) as needed. I made a simple flexbox "speed dial" page with sites I specify rather than changing based on some kind of "frecency". In chrome://extensions/, flip the "Developer mode" switch and then click "Load unpacked" and choose your extension's folder.

renke1 6y ago
I wonder if one can rely on this working forever. I might have a product idea that relies on being able to change the new tab page, but I am kind of afraid Chrome forbids it one of these days.
- abrowne 6y ago
  There seem to be a lot of extensions that do it, with nice pictures or wherever, so it seems unlikely, but you never know.
- erikrothoff 6y ago
  It's quite a common extension use-case so I dobut it. It's also hard to abuse unlike certain tab related permissions, which is what they are mostly cracking down on.

jiripospisil 6y ago

If you want to participate in the discussion about this feature, you can go ahead and comment on it in the tracking issue over at [0]. Oh wait, you cannot - it's set to private. It's almost as if Google didn't want any input from the community about Chromium, the open source project. Weird. More seriously though, it seems the feature calls [1] to get the list of products to show on the new page. The call is made every time the new page is opened as long as Google is your search provider and the user is signed in (not sure if to the browser or Google services). [0] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1130855 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=113085... [1] https://www.google.com/async/newtab_shopping_tasks https://www.google.com/async/newtab_shopping_tasks

po1nter 6y ago
I get a "permission denied" on the first link. guess they don't want other opinions on the subject.

flattone 6y ago

Oh cool! I hate when i forget that i could be shopping.

FandangoRanger 6y ago

I'm still using IceCat, I will continue to do so. Chrome's ugly, something about the font rendering and smooth scrolling is really off-putting, plus I just know everything I do is being reported to the Google mothership.

marketingPro 6y ago

We don't need an anti trust breakup of big tech. Their own decisions are causing them to lose customers. I'm doing the unthinkable, I cut half my Google usage. No more music, no more photos, no more Android Chrome, significantly less Google search. It's happening, although I feel like anti-consumer practices hurts Google more than Apple. Maybe my original claim about not needing anti trust is a bit simple.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
> We don't need an anti trust breakup of big tech. This is a really bad take. The amount of Google's power and control isn't something a handful of HN users switching to Firefox can fix. Most people literally don't realize there's alternatives. There's a silent majority feeding the Google beast, and they aren't going to switch from the defaults. Tech industry members can set the tone, we can spread good behavior to our friends and family, but the government is needed to move the majority. Bear in mind, everyone hates Microsoft (seems like sometimes anyways), they did face antitrust law, and still in 2020, they're one of the world's most powerful and valuable companies, and everyone still uses Windows at work. Which is to say, if we want to take Google down, it needs to come from every direction, and it needs to be incredibly harsh. And once Google is no longer running the web, stronger privacy and consumer protection laws need to be passed to make sure it's understood that behavior like Google's will never be tolerated again.
- zepto 6y ago
  As I remember it, a major reason why Chrome became so dominant is that the tech community fell in love with it and recommended it unreservedly to everyone else. That same process can be reversed.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Have my upvote. But don't forget that they used their - for all intents and relevant purposes - unlimited budget to bundle it everywhere. They were also advertising it on the front page of their search engine - a spot no one else has been able to reach AFAIK. I guess there's a lot more. If this isn't monopoly abuse I have a hard time seing what is.

0goel0 6y ago

Just switch to brave. It's chrome without google

beervirus 6y ago

What is it gonna take for y’all to switch back to Firefox?

caymanjim 6y ago
A UI that doesn't suck.
- po1nter 6y ago
  disclaimer: I'm a Firefox user. I'm genuinely interested in why you think Firefox's UI sucks? What could be done better? IMO it's more customizable than Chrome's which is a big plus for me.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Written from Firefox, so with that in mind: In full screen mode, minimize the tab, address, and bookmark bars into the top of the screen. And personally, it bugs me how obscure it is to work with bookmarks (yes, I still use them). It's still my daily driver at work and home but those are two things that always bug me.
  - caymanjim 6y ago
    It's visually unpleasant. Boxy UI elements (notably tabs); elements of different sizes in the same container; too much whitespace in some places; generally not enough whitespace in most places (bookmark folders/menus in general/the whole area around the location bar); elements that change size (the location bar); etc. I don't like customizable UIs; it seems to lead to less attention being paid to the default UI. I don't want to invest in configuring a UI; I just want it to work. Themes degrade over time as they're not maintained. Font rendering is worse than Chrome; colors are different from Chrome (I can't claim that one is right, but it's a jarring difference when comparing them, and I'm used to Chrome). Firefox doesn't have a polished UI, and its whole job is to be a UI for other content.
intellirogue 6y ago
Mozilla to fix the years-old issue (massive CPU usage and battery drain) using it on macOS with a high DPI display.

qwnp 6y ago

For those who are required (or prefer) to use a Chromium-based browser, you might want to give ungoogled-chromium [0] a shot. I switched recently based on a recommendation from a HN reader, and so far it has been a surprisingly seamless transition. I have yet to encounter any issues aside from being unable to install extensions directly from the Chrome Web Store, which was easily remedied by first installing the chromium-web-store extension [1]. My biggest gripe is that there are no 'official' binaries, so you'd either have to build your own or trust the user-submitted builds, though apparently the project owner is currently working on setting up an official build server [2]. [0] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium [1] https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store [2] https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1198 https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium/issues/1198

ant6n 6y ago
Is there a way to get this on chrome os?
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  I quite literally laughed out loud. Well done.

jabroni_salad 6y ago

I recall this specific 'continue searching for....' appearing in Assistant in a previous iteration, back when it had magic widgets and wasn't just a chatbot. Are other widgets coming to this space?

SanchoPanda 6y ago

Dear Chrome team,. I'll give you this and one more if I can have igoogle back. Love, SanchoPanda

rbinv 6y ago
I was going to recommend Netvibes as a viable iGoogle alternative, but it seems that it has become quite "enterprisey". I, too, miss iGoogle (which ironically would be much better suited for ads like these).

brianzelip 6y ago

Stop using chrome.

crazygringo 6y ago

I mean, Google's a business and Chrome is free so I'm not exactly surprised. But I've used the "Empty New Tab Page" for I guess something like 7 years [1]. I don't like seeing any junk on a new tab page, I don't care if it's shopping or not. Now if they take away the ability to customize the new tab page, then I'd be bothered... [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page/dpjamkmjmigaoobjbekmfgabipmfilij https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/empty-new-tab-page...

fsflover 6y ago
> Now if they take away the ability to customize the new tab page, then I'd be bothered... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
- crazygringo 6y ago
  Oh please. This is just a consumer product from a for-profit corporation. It's an ad. Comparing it to a situation where millions of people were murdered is incredibly offensive. Please don't blithely throw around comparisons like that. It doesn't help anything, and is incredibly disrespectful.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    This is not disrespectful. Even though the current case is not about murder, that old story should teach you that you should care about other people, not only about yourself, otherwise it may eventually turn out bad for you. And this is not just a product. It is a monopolist having huge influence over most of the population (who mostly cannot customize anything and has to suffer).
    - crazygringo 6y ago
      I'm sorry, but yes, this is just a product. There are no human rights violations at stake, c'mon. And the DoJ is arguing that Search is a monopoly, not Chrome. And what do you mean, "cannot customize anything and has to suffer"? My original comment was literally about customizing the new tab page to be different. And who is "suffering" from this? Nobody is dying of hunger because Chrome wants to show an ad. The reason your comment was disrespectful is because perspective is important. Human rights violations and genocide are not comparable to a private corporation -- whether it's a monopoly or not -- deciding to show a dumb advertisement.

haberdasher 6y ago

Shout out to a great alternative new-tab page: Goal Board: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-board-g/egbpmmfglhgciocgillbpooejgfajmng https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goal-board-vision-...

ravenstine 6y ago

Google owns Chrome and always have, and they're an advertising mill. What did you people expect? This may be one of the least worst things that Google has done to Chrome.

FreakyT 6y ago

Google's continued meddling with adding useless content on the new tab page is what pushed me to Chromium Edge. (The weird little news snippets on the bottom with no way to disable them was the first of these poorly-conceived experiments.) Edge has a ton of awful content on its new tab page too, but there's an option to turn it off which makes all the difference.

TheCoelacanth 6y ago

What do you expect when you use a browser made by an advertising company?

onion2k 6y ago

It's not the case for Google, obviously, but sticking random adverts in prominent places in a desperate attempt to increase revenue is the sort of thing web businesses do immediately before they go bust, and this has exactly the same optics to me.

tareqak 6y ago

Does Google know that the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against them a week ago? https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monopolist-google-violating-antitrust-laws https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-monop...

siproprio 6y ago

This is just horrible! And the bug reporter issue is blocked!

PokemonNoGo 6y ago

I really really enjoy https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-google-ea/bhloflhklmhfpedakmangadcdofhnnoh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/earth-view-from-go... by Google to show a new view of earth in the new tab. Sometimes my mind wonders but it's very enjoyable.

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new-tab-page/ https://9to5google.com/2020/10/23/google-chrome-shopping-new..., which points to this.