Show HN: Google hijacking search from GitHub, Twitter, others
Here's what it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/idXLYOJ
I opened a new Chrome tab just now, typed GitHub in the address bar. Opened the top suggested repository I'm checking frequently, and then used the GitHub search input box. As GitHub search results loaded, on the right side of the Chrome address bar I noticed a new, and colorful G icon. Animating and distracting, the icon expanded into a pretty big inline notification saying "See more search results". After a few seconds it animated and minimized itself back to the G icon.
Clicking the icon opens a right side panel with Google results of my GitHub query.
I then tried to search for something via the Chrome address bar. Without clicking on any of the results, I used the address bar again to open Twitter's home page (typing twitter.com). The animated G icon showed up again - right there on Twitter's home page.
Firefox installed.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Don't get me wrong, I use Firefox myself, but every once in a while I have to disable Pocket, or Studies, or whatever-the-colors-thing-was-called. I have to click the "what's new" button in the menu on Android and immediately close that tab so that the obnoxious blue dot goes away. A new persistent tab thing appeared this week, I am probably going to have to fiddle with my userChrome.css to remove it.
I think it's the better browser but I definitely don't feel in control.
I’m guess just pointing out this particular case is especially bad, why couldn’t Google start to hijack searches on internal company sites in the future? This feature seems ripe for abuse or errors causing issues.
If you know how, yes. The problem with all mainstream web browsers (Edge, Chrome, Firefox) is that with every release you need to disable something.
This must be done after every update, not just once.
No CSS mods required, you just right click on it and click "Remove".
Theming and introduction of new features are legit features. Not even remotely the same as Google hijacking competing search services.
If that is enough to put you up in arms against Mozilla, you should see Google's PR notice when they suddenly kill off one of their services.
It's not a comparison to Google, just something silly that Mozilla does. Google is a boring kind of evil. There's no fun to it.
Exactly. Next example: 2 weeks ago they introduced a new version of the internal pdf viewer and set it as default (that I accept - it's their application). However, when you set FF as the default browser in Windows they make the browser a default pdf application too (see Release Notes 106.0).
But the color theming thing on the page tries to show me how virtuous it is to pick a color theme, and turns my stomach. they couldn't just let me pick a color, they have to try to talk about why its a good thing for society to pick a color on my firefox theme. The exact text says:
>Color can change culture. The latest colorways celebrate voices making the world a better place.
This is stupid nonsense and should never have made it out to users as if picking a color does anything other than picking a theme color. Stop trying to co-opt social nonsense to justify a theming feature. It's incredibly difficult to understand who reads this tripe and feels good about picking a color to 'celebrate voices making the world a better place' by 'changing culture'.
The people who release a theme color feature under the flag of social change need to be removed from the product development team, they are already driving down the average IQ. They are buffoons, advertising features in a way that only buffoons would appreciate.
It's not quite the same. Firefox will push Pocket et al as extensions, which can be disabled. Annoying, but that's a pretty reasonable approach.
In this instance of Chrome's behaviour, it looks like it's reading the contents of text fields the user has entered, then feeding that data to back to Google's mothership. It's not clear whether it sends the data when the user opts to view more search results, or if it has already sent it by that point, but either way, Mozilla is doing nothing that egregious.
It may in some cases be helpful, but in general I'm very opposed to these "attention grabber" features. I really just want to get into what I'm doing and not see little doodads hanging around my screen for little benefit of my own.
The results themselves obviously don't visually fit either - looks like they just slammed an iframe on the side instead of giving it some kind of native browser chrome/UI experience. Lazy.
I remember when computers were meant to be a bicycle of the mind.
hijacking would be is you want to search on github but instead of getting github search results, you get google search results.
the button as it appears would not be a problem if it would offer to send your github or twitter search to your configured default search engine instead of always to google.
come to think of it, did anyone check if that feature is configurable? most people still have google as the default search engine so it would naturally default to google even if it wasn't actually tied to google.