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Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

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Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#121
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t the same thing. Some people are happy with viewing ads in general, but are not happy with aggressive pop-ups that tell them to upgrad. In essence these alerts are saying their choice is the wrong one, even though it’s a choice that YouTube itself gave them.

More specifically: "good" ads aren't modal and don't force you to click through to continue. If YouTube just mixed YouTube Red ads in with all their other ads, I doubt that anyone would be complaining. (Except for the people who want everything to be free without any ads.)

A good ad is a blocked ad.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#122

FWIW Google also returns malicious chrome ads. My father had a brand new laptop and the first thing he did was to google chrome. He got a bunch or malware by clicking on the first link.

There was a short time about seven years ago when Google was returning a malicious link for Blizard's BattleNet. Had my WoW creds stolen and I wasn't what you would call naive on a computer.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#123

It's possible to install Google Chrome on a Windows box with chocolatey, the Windows answer to apt and brew. But, still, Microsoft's browsers still aren't good. In my workplace (where we do some complex cross-browser work) they're an enormous nuisance to development and QA. I wish Edge were far better than IE, but they're both quirky. Firefox and Google Chrome ordinarily work predictably. Safari has a few quirks, Edg…

Microsoft wouldn't even need to license Firefox, they could build their own browser on top of it and do minimal work. They already do that on Android (Chrome) and iOS (Safari), and once GeckoView stabilizes, they can even use that on Android.

However, I think it's more of a branding thing. Microsoft wants a complete experience when you install their OS, and they want something that will keep users on that platform. If they build IE, they can control the platforms it runs, which means users will feel uncomfortable on anything else.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#124

Using browsers to download software should never have become the standard practice... Linux got it right with the built-in package repositories. Unfortunately Windows and Mac have never really adopted the super-easy "apt install this" style.

Yeah, I mean obviously what the average users wants it to have to type in apt get commands and finding the slug to get the right package instead of clicking a link. Very intuitive. You know how Google & Firefox could easily help fix this? List their browsers in the Mac and Windows Store.

Package managers have had nice gui front ends for a long long time. The first earliest I'm aware of (which is to say it came with the first linux distro I ever used) is synaptic [0]. Looks like it was first released in 2001...

The interface for this is "start nice gui front end, type firefox into search bar, select firefox package, click install"

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaptic_%28software%29

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#125

Using browsers to download software should never have become the standard practice... Linux got it right with the built-in package repositories. Unfortunately Windows and Mac have never really adopted the super-easy "apt install this" style.

Yeah, I mean obviously what the average users wants it to have to type in apt get commands and finding the slug to get the right package instead of clicking a link. Very intuitive. You know how Google & Firefox could easily help fix this? List their browsers in the Mac and Windows Store.

There are GUIs for most if not all Linux package managers.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#126
post #43

Using browsers to download software should never have become the standard practice... Linux got it right with the built-in package repositories. Unfortunately Windows and Mac have never really adopted the super-easy "apt install this" style.

True, this was one of the things that originally appealed to me about Linux. But on a for-profit operating system this turns into an "app store" which gets to pick which software is and isn't allowed, while taking a 30% cut of the profits.

As if distro mantainers didn't get to pick which software is and isn't allowed.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#127

Using browsers to download software should never have become the standard practice... Linux got it right with the built-in package repositories. Unfortunately Windows and Mac have never really adopted the super-easy "apt install this" style.

Package managers are a fundamentally flawed concept:

You depend on your distro mantainers to package what you need to install. If it isn't packaged, best case scenario is you get a tarball, which is already too hard for 99% of computer users. Snaps and Flatpaks are still too unpolished.

Getting all your user applications (DAW, IDE, etc) from your OS developer (instead of getting it from the application developer) is also against the sentiment of freedom that so many Linux users preach.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft could just as well ship Firefox with Bing as the default search. The problem is Bing.

Why would Microsoft do this?

I'm really not clear why they don't. Apart from driving traffic to bing, what advantage do they gain by developing edge? How does edge drive more traffic than a customized firefox?

The only thing plausible thing I can think of is hoping to execute another round of embrace extend extinguish on the web, putting other desktop operating systems at a disadvantage. With google chrome's dominance that seems unlikely to work.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#129

FWIW Google also returns malicious chrome ads. My father had a brand new laptop and the first thing he did was to google chrome. He got a bunch or malware by clicking on the first link.

There was a short time about seven years ago when Google was returning a malicious link for Blizard's BattleNet. Had my WoW creds stolen and I wasn't what you would call naive on a computer.

That sucks.

I know it's a tired point, but it nevertheless amuses me that someone would search for BattleNet. The name is literally the domain name: battle.net.

Re: Bing has been serving up malicious Google Chrome ads for months

#130

Using browsers to download software should never have become the standard practice... Linux got it right with the built-in package repositories. Unfortunately Windows and Mac have never really adopted the super-easy "apt install this" style.

Yeah, I mean obviously what the average users wants it to have to type in apt get commands and finding the slug to get the right package instead of clicking a link. Very intuitive. You know how Google & Firefox could easily help fix this? List their browsers in the Mac and Windows Store.

Browsers are banned from the Windows Store. For 'security' reasons.

It's tricky to get win32 apps in general into it, too.

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