Tasting their own poison? Does Google use Chrome to inject ads onto others websites under any circumstance?

They used to bundle themselves to installers and updaters like literal spyware. I don't see how you can defend either of them so let them fight. Also their competitor Apple has normalized the idea that they have a say what gets installed to your machine and not, they can invite Apple to the party as well as far as I care.

Google uses their websites to inject Chrome into your computer. I'd say they have no right to complain

So Google advertising their own products on their own website means we shouldn't be complaining about Microsoft injecting ads when viewing competitor websites? And as users, we have to wait for Google to stop advertising on their own websites before having the prerogative to complain about Microsoft using their browser to inject ads?

Microsoft advertising their own product on their own product?! The horror! If you’re going to treat software as a fiefdom where the “owner” of that software can do whatever they want because it’s theirs then that applies to the browser and OS too.

So you're saying that if I support your ability to write what you want on your blog, including an endorsement for Pepsi, then I must surely also accept that as a user, Microsoft ought to be able to inject content as I visit your website?

And if I accept your ability to place advertisements on your website, surely you're not saying you feel motivated to argue that AT&T should be able to inject content on competitor websites? And Samsung too?

What kind of brightline are you trying to draw here?

As a user, I just don't want browsers to inject content when I'm viewing websites. I also want owners of websites to be able to say what they want. What are you trying to argue for?

If the reason that I'm allowed to have ads on my blog or in my software products is "because it's my digital property" then that applies to everything, including a browser. Since the situation you're outlining is the absurd logical conclusions of that reasoning then the reason it's acceptable to run ads on a webpage and not a browser must be something different.

Controlling the browser is about users getting control of their own machine. Controlling what happens on your hypothetical Pepsi-endorsing website is about controlling what happens on your server machine -- why should support of your ability to control your server's response also mean that as a user, you've lost the moral prerogative to argue about what happens on your desktop machine?

Again, what kind of brightline are you asking for here? One where you cannot control how your own server responds to requests? One where you cannot determine the content of your own website?

So showing ads in native apps in unethical because it deprives the user control of the device they bought? Android devs are gonna be big mad when they find out.

I don't know what the bright line is, no one in the comments has been able to come up with one that defines ads in browser as bad (especially because they're not the only browser to have ads -- *waves to Firefox and Brave*) but wouldn't affect other forms of advertising we already find acceptable that isn't "I just don't like it." And that's fair, I don't like it either but we've kinda painted ourselves in a corner with the whole, "software is the property and platform of the who make it" thing.

Transmitting me a piece of code I run on my machine or voluntarily install as part of the OS isn't really any different than what we do with browsers anyway. After reading everyone's comments I'm leaning toward, "these ads in particular make tech people uncomfortable because they're well targeted and it breaks the mental model they've mistakenly held that the browser is actually theirs and not serving the interests of corporate daddy."

Big Stallman was right energy.

I must laugh that Microsoft adopted Google’s work and then leveraged it against them with such force.

It goes deeper, Google forked Apple's WebKit, which was forked from KDE's KHTML forked from khtmlw.

This is so weird to me. I was an early KDE user and remembering thinking KDE was great but the integrated web browser was absolute garbage. At that time it could only render a tiny fraction of pages at a usable level, I certainly never expected it to become what it has.

Linux spreading everywhere .... like cancer. Balmer was right!