I just got this popup while playing New vegas. I don’t even use chrome, i’ve switched to firefox. How can this be allowed? Also, this is Win10

  • Chozo@kbin.social
    2517·
    2 years ago

    Anti consumer and anti competitive.

    I’m not so sure how it’s either of those things. I mean yeah, it’s annoying (especially if it’s popping up while you’re playing a game), but I don’t feel like it’s crossing either of these lines. If you click “Don’t switch”, it goes away, and it’s not changing anything without your permission. I’ve never seen it pop up again on my devices. I forget where in the settings it would be, but I seem to recall there being an option to disable suggestions like this, as well (although an argument could be made that this should be opt-in instead of opt-out).

    I know this community has a (largely justified) hate-boner for big tech companies, but not every annoyance is a crime. If anything, I’m just glad to see that they’re at least respecting the user’s consent these days; in the before times, Microsoft would just revert all your shit to what they wanted, whether you liked it or not, permission be damned. I lost track of how many WinXP updates would reinstall that Bing Bar (or MSN or whatever they called it back then) without asking me.

    Unless there’s another angle that I’m not seeing, I don’t see how this is that much of a problem. If anything, it’s a good advertisement for Linux, though.

    • andallthat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      21·
      2 years ago

      I’m not even remotely a legal expert and I don’t know what type of popup that is but I think the anti-competitive piece is “could Google use the same technique to push the user to switch to google search on Edge or not?”.

      If this was an ad from a web page OP had opened or from the game and if clicking “Yes” only directed the user to a site with instructions on how to switch default search engine on Chrome, then yes, obnoxious but probably fair. Google could strike a deal with the game developers to push their search engine to Edge users or buy an ad. Someone writing a new browser or search engine will probably have considerably less money than Google but could reasonably do something similar to try and gain market share.

      On the other hand, if that popup comes from Windows itself and especially if clicking “Yes” directly changes Chrome’s settings, then this is Microsoft using their ubiquitous (on desktops) OS to nudge more users to switch a competitor’s browser to their own search engine. Google, or even less a new competitor. would probably not have the same type of OS-level access to switch the settings of a different browser.

      • sfgifz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        Google already does this - and has been for years - use Google Search or Gmail on a non-Google browser and it will “suggest” you use Chrome

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      162·
      2 years ago

      Using a dominant market position as leverage against competitors, is per definition Anti consumer and anti competitive.

      Apart from that, they are basically hijacking a competitors product to show this, which I think if not already illegal, it absolutely should be.