Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab • Hacker News Board

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#301

Post by braingenious » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 1:30 AM UTC

djmips wrote: post #299

braingenious wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!”

This isn't a PhD level argument here.

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.

For example, here’s a link to how to gather information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#302

Post by recursive » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:34 AM UTC

wooque wrote: post #150

qzx_pierri wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#303

Post by moistofreason » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:37 AM UTC

v0idzer0 wrote: post #300

skrowl wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#304

Post by recursive » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 4:39 AM UTC

monlockandkey wrote: post #271

sjaak wrote: post #32

Stop using Chrome

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. https://data.f…

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.

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#305

Post by graderjs » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

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...

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#306

Post by chlorion » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 6:47 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #184

LoganDark wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pocket.

Mozilla owns Pocket.

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.

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#307

Post by fulafel » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 6:53 AM UTC

2kwatts wrote: post #187

Caboose8685 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth noting that UGC has some significant security regressions https://qua3k.github.io/ungoogled/

When I need to use a Chrome-like browser, I just use Chromium or Brave.

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?

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#308

Post by neurostimulant » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 8:48 AM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #257

marcosdumay wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

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.

Click the gear icon on the top right corner of the new tab screen and uncheck the "sponsored shortcuts" checkbox.

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#309

Post by berkes » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 9:07 AM UTC

wooque wrote: post #287

berkes wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Where do you get this? 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.

Re: Google has added ads on both its search page and Chrome://newtab

#310

Post by tyingq » Sat, Oct 01, 2022, 10:58 AM UTC

_hl_ wrote: post #274

tyingq wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 e…

You can look at the historical track for both

- 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").