5 ms·

I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed… This kind of thing should b

I hate this pop-up so much. I don’t even have Chrome installed on my phone. How about open up on the only browser I have installed… This kind of thing should be illegal. The default browser is the default for a reason, to avoid this kind of stuff. I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too. The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting? Google really has made the internet and worse place in so many ways.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
paulddraper 8mo ago
> not spam it on every website just for visiting? It's the website that spamming that. Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts. Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.
- harry8 8mo ago
  Google is guilty
  - hilbert42 8mo ago
    Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact. Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.
- al_borland 8mo ago
  There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious). I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with. Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content. All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.
  - still_grokking 8mo ago
    Just use µBlock Origin for most of the annoyances, and for the stupid google popup a simple Stylus CSS rule is enough.
  - fauigerzigerk 8mo ago
    You can disable it in your Chrome settings: chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi Websites that choose to put a sign-in with Google button on a page can disable the popup by setting data-auto_prompt="false". The default being "true" is how Google is pushing this, but this seems like a rather gentle way of pushing. It's clearly a deliberate choice that websites make. Your explanation as to why they're doing it seems very plausible to me.
    - al_borland 8mo ago
      I don’t using Chrome. Having to use Chrome to disable a Google “feature” doesn’t feel like a path forward.
      - fauigerzigerk 8mo ago
        I think this whole functionality is actually based on an experimental browser API (FedCM) that may be coming to other browsers as well. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API But ultimately websites can pop up whatever annoying nonsense they want. There isn't really any "way forward" except avoiding bad websites or using ad blockers.
  - paulddraper 8mo ago
    They did it because they want you to be signed in, for tracking, upsell, or whatever else.
b112 8mo ago
It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused. In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now. Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention. Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid. You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale. It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity. Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench. Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market. So goes Alphabet these days.
- al_borland 8mo ago
  The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows. If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
  - still_grokking 8mo ago
    > mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium I would hardly notice, TBH. There are alternatives for all of that.
abustamam 8mo ago
> I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too. Alas, I don't think it's a bug. A PM or VP probably got a bonus for this. > How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting? Yeah this is kinda weird. I don't know if it's browser specific though. I use Firefox on my main computer and I think I still see it. Which means that the website owner opted into this weird pattern. No other auth providers do this. Just Google.
- sureMan6 8mo ago
  I opt into it on my site it's just a login option you can ignore if you want to log in another way, but for those who use it it removes the friction of writing out a password and verifying the email
  - calmworm 8mo ago
    I’m annoyed by it every time on every site when I have to dismiss it. Probably not the only one and probably depends on your type of site/visitors.
    - abustamam 8mo ago
      I'm sure some number of website owners ran A/B tests and determined that more people signed in when it was present. I'm also sure that some number of website owners don't know or care that it's annoying to some people. Personally I've just learned to ignore it; but if it did annoy me enough I'd zap it with uBlock.
  - al_borland 8mo ago
    It can’t just be ignored, it covers content, and if someone accidentally clicks the wrong thing… poof, they now have that site linked to their Google account. It’s a cancer on the Internet.
  - abustamam 8mo ago
    Thanks for sharing! It's not really easily ignored for some people (I ignore it the same way I ignored banner ads in the 00s). I'm curious if you have any metrics on bounce ratios with/without the option. The sentiment here on HN appears to be largely negative but HN does not represent the population at large. I find that many people don't mind or even like a lot of stuff that HN tends to hate.
dataflow 8mo ago
> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. It's indeed aggravating. Thankfully it turns out you can turn it off (and of course the option is extremely well-hidden): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customization#chrome_on_desktop https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customizati...
- breakingcups 8mo ago
  But only on Chrome? I'm on Firefox and I see those prompts all the time.
  - the_pwner224 8mo ago
    Go to your uBlock Origin settings and enable the annoyances/social filter lists.
- al_borland 8mo ago
  Having to use Google browser to disable Google’s own bad behavior is unacceptable.
eru 8mo ago
> This kind of thing should be illegal. That's a bit silly. Some people think pineapple doesn't belong on pizza, but that means you should avoid buying pineapple pizza, not outlaw it.
- Tepix 8mo ago
  If you have a monopoly, different rules apply.
  - eru 8mo ago
    Google doesn't exactly have a monopoly here.
- duskdozer 8mo ago
  Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. The delivery driver also stays and watches to make sure you don't take the pineapple off and if you do, you're banned from buying Google Pizza anymore. It's a long drive to find a pizza place that isn't owned by Google.
  - eru 8mo ago
    > Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. Awesome: great business opportunity to open new pizza places. Either you make a lot of money from customers, or you sell to Google for more money. If the latter: open yet another place, rinse and repeat.
    - bentinata 8mo ago
      Except the fact that opening up new pizza place have a huge upfront cost. Your pizza may need to be pricier too. You thought people are flocking to your new pizza place, but the reality is that most people just want to not get hungry, and will rather chomp down pineapple pizza while being surveiled, than spending more for non-pineapple pizza. Look, I love making a analogies. Just that they have scale, and competing against it is hard.
xp84 8mo ago
The funny thing is that until like 2024 iOS actually HAD no default browser control, so this kind of thing was a huge help for people who wanted to use Chrome against Apple’s monopolistic wishes. Of course it’s fair to argue that it should be eliminated now. The commenter who mourned the web view option also has a good point, but tbh that ought to just be asked once and then live in settings.
- al_borland 8mo ago
  Even when it had no default browser, it should only prompt for Chrome when a user has Chrome installed. I do not. In addition, it should remember the setting forever and not keep prompting every couple months. This is not a good faith attempt to let a user open a link in their browser of choice, it’s a push to get users to download and use Chrome. I can only assume users with Chrome as their default browser don’t get this needless slide-in.
  - dieortin 8mo ago
    Can the app tell if Chrome is installed?
    - hunter2_ 8mo ago
      Even if the OS prevents it, Chrome could tell a Google server what device ID you've logged into Chrome with (if you logged into Chrome, of course), at which point the Gmail app could ask the Google server.
starkgoose 8mo ago
You can set a personal rule in Ublock origin to block these sign in with Google pop-ups. https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_google_login_dialogs_on_various_pages https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_g...
edg5000 8mo ago
> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now This drove me really, really mad last winter. How did they even achieve this? My policy is no US vendors. Period. Not for work stuff at least; not for things I depend on. What a mess.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

paulddraper 8mo ago

> not spam it on every website just for visiting? It's the website that spamming that. Either via google.accounts.id.prompt(), or options provided to loaded Google scripts. Google is guilty only insofar as that feature is possible.

harry8 8mo ago
Google is guilty
- hilbert42 8mo ago
  Trouble is we cognoscenti know it but the great unwashed do not and or don't give a damn about the fact. Google and all of Big Tech well know of our objections but unfortunately we are only hardly perceptible noise to be ignored on their way to even greater profits.
al_borland 8mo ago
There is no way this many sites did it organically without Google pushing it in some way, not to mention they built the thing in the first place (as you mentioned). There also doesn’t seem to be any way to disable it (other than maybe an extension that I saw recently, but at $15 I needed to think about how much I want to spend just because Google is obnoxious). I’m sure the real goal of this “feature” is to get people to sign-up for the site without them actually realizing they are signing up. They click OK just so the modal goes away and now the site has their email address. They can use that growing email list to seek higher prices from sponsors when they put an add in their newsletter the user will now be spammed with. Imagine if the other auth providers followed suit. Open a news article and you need to close the Google auth, Apple auth, Facebook auth, Microsoft auth, GutHub auth, X auth… I’m sure I’m forgetting some. After closing those 6 modals, reject the cookie prompt, close the newsletter modal, and maybe now we can start reading the article if there is an auto-playing video ad covering some of the content. All of this is really pushing me away from the internet in general and souring me on the tech industry as a whole. I’m at that point where I find myself casually browsing for jobs that won’t require I ever touch a computer again.
- still_grokking 8mo ago
  Just use µBlock Origin for most of the annoyances, and for the stupid google popup a simple Stylus CSS rule is enough.
- fauigerzigerk 8mo ago
  You can disable it in your Chrome settings: chrome://settings/content/federatedIdentityApi Websites that choose to put a sign-in with Google button on a page can disable the popup by setting data-auto_prompt="false". The default being "true" is how Google is pushing this, but this seems like a rather gentle way of pushing. It's clearly a deliberate choice that websites make. Your explanation as to why they're doing it seems very plausible to me.
  - al_borland 8mo ago
    I don’t using Chrome. Having to use Chrome to disable a Google “feature” doesn’t feel like a path forward.
    - fauigerzigerk 8mo ago
      I think this whole functionality is actually based on an experimental browser API (FedCM) that may be coming to other browsers as well. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/FedCM_API But ultimately websites can pop up whatever annoying nonsense they want. There isn't really any "way forward" except avoiding bad websites or using ad blockers.
- paulddraper 8mo ago
  They did it because they want you to be signed in, for tracking, upsell, or whatever else.

b112 8mo ago

It's OK. This is the dying, last gasp effort that a company makes when it has no way to innovate, no way to add any real value, no capacity to drive change internally, and has become completely non-user focused. In short, it's what companies like IBM and Broadcom are now. Shallow husks of their former self, mere holding companies for patents, with a complete lack of care and concern about any end-user retention. Google search has turned completely into junk over the last two weeks. You may think "two weeks only?!", and you're right there, but this is a whole new level of stupid. You may not be getting this where you are, but here searches are constantly prepended with human checks, searches can take up to 5+ seconds, you name it. They literally spend so little on maintaining and working on their search engine, that it's effectively unusable much of the time now. I don't care whether it's bot traffic, or what, and no it's not just me, or my ISP. This is wide-scale. It takes so long I just click on an alternate search engine and search there. I don't have time to waste in their inanity. Any sane and sensible company wouldn't entirely trash and destroy their mainline product, which is key to drive users to experience Google products. But this degree of sheer, unbridled arrogance is what topples empires. The thought that it really doesn't matter, flows off of google as a foul stench. Look at Microsoft of old, the god of arrogance. Once the most dominant, powerful tech company in the world. They were king. Browser king. OS king. Everything king. Now they are barely noticed by large swaths of the market. So goes Alphabet these days.

al_borland 8mo ago
The problem is that these companies can remain on life support for decades, phoning it in and making things continuously worse as their desperation grows. If they follow the path of IBM and Broadcom, they will move away from the consumer market and focus more on the enterprise. If Google fully realized that vision it would be extremely disruptive. Them shutting down Google Reader practically killed RSS for quite a while. Imagine that level of disruption with products that have mainstream appeal… mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium.
- still_grokking 8mo ago
  > mail, maps, docs, search, etc. It would be pandemonium I would hardly notice, TBH. There are alternatives for all of that.

abustamam 8mo ago

> I think I’ve reported this as a bug to Google a couple times, in a couple different apps… as they do it in their other apps too. Alas, I don't think it's a bug. A PM or VP probably got a bonus for this. > How about just giving the option to login with Google if so choose to login, and not spam it on every website just for visiting? Yeah this is kinda weird. I don't know if it's browser specific though. I use Firefox on my main computer and I think I still see it. Which means that the website owner opted into this weird pattern. No other auth providers do this. Just Google.

sureMan6 8mo ago
I opt into it on my site it's just a login option you can ignore if you want to log in another way, but for those who use it it removes the friction of writing out a password and verifying the email
- calmworm 8mo ago
  I’m annoyed by it every time on every site when I have to dismiss it. Probably not the only one and probably depends on your type of site/visitors.
  - abustamam 8mo ago
    I'm sure some number of website owners ran A/B tests and determined that more people signed in when it was present. I'm also sure that some number of website owners don't know or care that it's annoying to some people. Personally I've just learned to ignore it; but if it did annoy me enough I'd zap it with uBlock.
- al_borland 8mo ago
  It can’t just be ignored, it covers content, and if someone accidentally clicks the wrong thing… poof, they now have that site linked to their Google account. It’s a cancer on the Internet.
- abustamam 8mo ago
  Thanks for sharing! It's not really easily ignored for some people (I ignore it the same way I ignored banner ads in the 00s). I'm curious if you have any metrics on bounce ratios with/without the option. The sentiment here on HN appears to be largely negative but HN does not represent the population at large. I find that many people don't mind or even like a lot of stuff that HN tends to hate.

dataflow 8mo ago

> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now. It's indeed aggravating. Thankfully it turns out you can turn it off (and of course the option is extremely well-hidden): https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customization#chrome_on_desktop https://developer.chrome.com/docs/identity/fedcm/customizati...

breakingcups 8mo ago
But only on Chrome? I'm on Firefox and I see those prompts all the time.
- the_pwner224 8mo ago
  Go to your uBlock Origin settings and enable the annoyances/social filter lists.
al_borland 8mo ago
Having to use Google browser to disable Google’s own bad behavior is unacceptable.

eru 8mo ago

> This kind of thing should be illegal. That's a bit silly. Some people think pineapple doesn't belong on pizza, but that means you should avoid buying pineapple pizza, not outlaw it.

Tepix 8mo ago
If you have a monopoly, different rules apply.
- eru 8mo ago
  Google doesn't exactly have a monopoly here.
duskdozer 8mo ago
Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. The delivery driver also stays and watches to make sure you don't take the pineapple off and if you do, you're banned from buying Google Pizza anymore. It's a long drive to find a pizza place that isn't owned by Google.
- eru 8mo ago
  > Google buys up all the pizza places in your town and stops selling anything but pineapple pizza. Awesome: great business opportunity to open new pizza places. Either you make a lot of money from customers, or you sell to Google for more money. If the latter: open yet another place, rinse and repeat.
  - bentinata 8mo ago
    Except the fact that opening up new pizza place have a huge upfront cost. Your pizza may need to be pricier too. You thought people are flocking to your new pizza place, but the reality is that most people just want to not get hungry, and will rather chomp down pineapple pizza while being surveiled, than spending more for non-pineapple pizza. Look, I love making a analogies. Just that they have scale, and competing against it is hard.

xp84 8mo ago

The funny thing is that until like 2024 iOS actually HAD no default browser control, so this kind of thing was a huge help for people who wanted to use Chrome against Apple’s monopolistic wishes. Of course it’s fair to argue that it should be eliminated now. The commenter who mourned the web view option also has a good point, but tbh that ought to just be asked once and then live in settings.

al_borland 8mo ago
Even when it had no default browser, it should only prompt for Chrome when a user has Chrome installed. I do not. In addition, it should remember the setting forever and not keep prompting every couple months. This is not a good faith attempt to let a user open a link in their browser of choice, it’s a push to get users to download and use Chrome. I can only assume users with Chrome as their default browser don’t get this needless slide-in.
- dieortin 8mo ago
  Can the app tell if Chrome is installed?
  - hunter2_ 8mo ago
    Even if the OS prevents it, Chrome could tell a Google server what device ID you've logged into Chrome with (if you logged into Chrome, of course), at which point the Gmail app could ask the Google server.

starkgoose 8mo ago

You can set a personal rule in Ublock origin to block these sign in with Google pop-ups. https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_google_login_dialogs_on_various_pages https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/#wiki_g...

edg5000 8mo ago

> The only thing that bothers me more are the, “sign-in with Google”, prompts on 90% of websites now This drove me really, really mad last winter. How did they even achieve this? My policy is no US vendors. Period. Not for work stuff at least; not for things I depend on. What a mess.