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Google Chrome Technology

Creator of Opera Says Google Deliberately Undermined His New Vivaldi Web Browser (wired.co.uk) 247

Posted by msmash from the abuse-of-power dept.
The latest allegation against Google? Jon von Tetzchner, creator of the web browser Opera, says the search giant deliberately undermined his new browser, Vivaldi. Rowland Manthorpe, writing for Wired: In a blogpost titled, "My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil," von Tetzchner accuses the US firm of blocking Vivaldi's access to Google AdWords, the advertisements that run alongside search results, without warning or proper explanation. According to Von Tetzchner, the problem started in late May. Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Icelandic programmer criticised big tech companies' attitude toward personal data, calling for a ban on location tracking on Facebook and Google. Two days later, he suddenly found Vivaldi's Google AdWords campaigns had been suspended. "Was this just a coincidence?" he writes. "Or was it deliberate, a way of sending us a message?" He concludes: "Timing spoke volumes." Von Tetzchner got in touch with Google to try and resolve the issue. The result? What he calls "a clarification masqueraded in the form of vague terms and conditions." The particular issue was the end-user license agreement (EULA), the legal contract between a software manufacturer and a user. Google wanted Vivaldi to add one to its website. So it did. But Google had further complaints. According to emails shown to WIRED, Google wanted Vivaldi to add an EULA "within the frame of every download button." The addition was small -- a link below the button directing people to "terms" -- but on the web, where every pixel matters, this was a potential competitive disadvantage. Most gallingly, Chrome, Google's own web browser, didn't display a EULA on its landing pages. Google also asked Vivaldi to add detailed information to help people uninstall it, with another link, also under the button.
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Creator of Opera Says Google Deliberately Undermined His New Vivaldi Web Browser More

Creator of Opera Says Google Deliberately Undermined His New Vivaldi Web Browser

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  • Google, you can't fight against (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:18PM (#55138263)

    Just few years ago, my every comment against Google was getting modded down. I can bet there are many Google employees on Slashdot and these die hard people don't take negative comments on Google lightly.

    Google has got too much power. With search monopoly, it can decide what sells and what does not. What websites user visits and what does not. What news user read and what does not. The only real competition is from Facebook and I am equally apprehensive about it.

    • Two problems with Google: it has too much power, and it's now abusing it's power. This instance is only one of many other similar instances of Google throwing its weight around.

      No longer content to try to develop and bring to market superior products, Google is now suppressing outside negative opinions (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/30/us/politics/eric-schmidt-google-new-america.html?mcubz=0), kneecapping competition in the best tradition of Microsoft of old, and ruthlessly enforcing a groupthink inter

  • Vivaldi is nice.. try it. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:28PM (#55138303)

    I really like it so far. Snappy and stays out of the way. Tab grouping and tiling are really nice. Support alternative browsers, it's good for the health of the web.

    • Er, Vivaldi uses the same Webkit as Chrome and Opera and Safari do. It's not an alternative browser in the sense you were going for.

      Use SeaMonkey, use Firefox, use MSIE, use Edge. Those are alternative browsers -- ones with a minority rendering engine -- that are good for the health of the web.

  • Vivaldi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:35PM (#55138323)

    In terms of UI and customization, Vivaldi is 100 times better than Chrome, and of course supports all the extensions and more (the one's Google doesn't like you having which improve its services more than they are capable of natively).
    The only problem I could emphasize when I used Vivaldi is the page loading problem. Sometimes, clicking on a link or trying to load a webpage ends up in a hangup of a few seconds or so. Don't know if that's a problem still, but it was a BIG problem that hadn't been resolved for at least 2 months of my attempted usage. I hope they have resolved it these days.
    Another thing I would love for the Vivaldi staff to do is to consider achieving what Chrome devs failed at and gave up in the very dedicated thread, while citing Chromium core as the problem: Tab Lazy Loading. Firefox has a great Session Manager that works with many tabs loading at once and never bricking or freezing any system (old or new) because it has this feature, but SessionBuddy on Chromium based browsers is malfunctioning because of the lack of this performance hack/cheat.

    • Browser customization doesn't matter to very many people. Nor does GUI customization. There is a case to be made for maintaining GUI commonality across users, especially users who will need to consult references or help each other in peer support online. If your browser doesn't look like the next person's, good luck event explaining what is going wrong in a way they can understand.

      • I'm afraid I'm going to place the people who can't describe what's going wrong in a browser in the same category of people that describes their car-problems in the style 'it made a clunking sound'.

        I can understand that commonality is good but I also expect that someone who uses a tool also understands how it works in general terms and adapt to changes. If someone can't bother to superficially understand a technological tool used by the majority of humankind it's a sad day.

        But I guess it has always been like

        • If you have to enlarge the frame by grabbing different widgets at different places, and manipulating them differently, good luck with filing a bug report to developers who aren't using the same theme as you.

      • One thing I don't like about Chrome is that it tries too hard to replace window decorations by default. I understand commonality and all that crap, but its still annoying as it just looks out of place.

        I have my system the way I want, Chtome should Adhere to what I defined in my system settings.

        Firefox isn't perfect, but it's better than Chrome in my opinion.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Opyros ( 1153335 )
      Is it possible to disable or restrict Javascript on Vivaldi? I tried it recently but saw no way to do that.

  • There's lots of software around that doesn't show Google ads. Even web browsers!

    You do realize that it's possible to sell software, or to get ads from other sources (or even sell advertising space yourself, heaven forfend!).

    There's even something known as Free Software that has a whole ecosystem that's built up around the idea that software can be developed and distributed without requiring everyone to reach into his pocket and pull out a credit card.

    • Re:Undermined because you can't show Google ads?? (Score:5, Informative)

      by moronoxyd ( 1000371 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @05:14PM (#55138431)

      There's lots of software around that doesn't show Google ads.

      The software (the Vivaldi browser) doesn't show ads. Except when displaying a website that contains ads. (And those will not be shown if the user decides to use some extension that supresses ads.)

      The problem here is that Vivaldi would like to advertise it's product using Google AdWords, and can't. And considering that AdWords has a pretty wide reach, that hurts.

  • Echoes of the Borg (Microsoft) (Score:4, Insightful)

    by J Story ( 30227 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:51PM (#55138367) Homepage

    Once upon a time, when Microsoft ruled the world, its Internet Explorer was undisputed King of browsers. But when upstart browsers started to make inroads, Microsoft baked its browser into the bowels of Windows, making it not only preinstalled, but impossible to remove. Believe it or not, Microsoft spun this borgian action as a Good Thing, making sure that the "user experience" was up to Microsoft's standards. Now, however, it seems to be Google that is swinging its hefty weight around, positioning its ever growing assimilation of the Internet as something it's doing for our own good.

    • Once upon a time, when Microsoft ruled the world, its Internet Explorer was undisputed King of browsers. But when upstart browsers started to make inroads, Microsoft baked its browser into the bowels of Windows, making it not only preinstalled, but impossible to remove

      You've got the timeline wrong. IE was the upstart that was trying to replace the king Netscape. And succedes using shady tactics.

      • There may have been shady tactics involved, but at the time IE was also a better browser - I remember the days when you used to have to test against specific *minor* versions of Netscape Navigator because they had massive rendering differences. Netscape 4 was also a lot slower than IE4, mainly because it was translating all CSS stuff to its own JSSS system internally (which meant you could have both CSS and JavaScript enabled or neither enabled, but not one or the other...)

        People look back at the time with

      • They succeeded because they wrote a far better browser. They also used shady tactics but that was really a sidenote, Netscape committed suicide in much the same way that Mozilla and Firefox are currently committing suicide, they refused to listen to their users and wrote a really buggy product.

  • Monopoly (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:59PM (#55138391)
    People keep saying Google isn't a monopoly, but if it can use tactics to make the market unattainable for everyone else. is that not what it is?

    • Duck it -- was Re:Monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GLMDesigns ( 2044134 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @05:22PM (#55138471)
      One reason that it might not be classified as a monopoly is that WE can easily bring Google down.

      I've stopped using Chrome. I use Brave exclusively and have been very happy with it.

      I use DuckDuckGo and use the !G to get google results. As far as I know (and I'm willing to be corrected on this) Google doesn't receive any revenue from this DuckDuckGo search.

      So, instead of saying Google it - say Duck it.

      You don't have to stop using Google but if Google's market share drops from 88% to 50% and Chrome takes a huge hit (after all Brave is basically as good as Chrome) then you will have done your part in slapping Google upside the head.

      Oh - and protonmail is an excellent privacy-centric email server. (although it's free version allows only 150 emails per day).

      Still testing out zoho.com so I don't know how they compare to Google Docs.

      • Re:Duck it -- was Re:Monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)

        by roca ( 43122 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @05:29PM (#55138499) Homepage

        Brave's good but using it still aids Google since you're increasing the market share of Chromium, which Google controls; by making Chromium more dominant, you increase Google's power over the Web.

        If you want to do your bit to reduce corporate power over the Web, Firefox is pretty much the only choice these days.

        • Brave uses Apple's WebKit - which has none of Google's Blink updates since the April 2013 fork where Google ripped out all of the iOS/Mac dependencies among other refactoring.

      • One reason that it might not be classified as a monopoly is that WE can easily bring Google down.

        No, we really cannot. All of society could. But, all of slashdot is a rounding error of a rounding error. But the same thing was true when MS put IE into windows. Turns out, it doesn't really work.

    • People keep saying Google isn't a monopoly

      They say no such thing. They say Google Search is not a monopoly. It fails many of the monopoly tests.

      Google Adwords most definitely is one, has been for a very long time, and is also what this story is about.

  • ""Was this just a coincidence?" he writes" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@nOSpam.keirstead.org> on Monday September 04, 2017 @05:25PM (#55138481)

    Yes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mashiki ( 184564 )

      Considering they've been doing the same to other organizations? Likely no. Google was doing it to mypetjawa.mu.nu over half a decade ago, and there's instances of them doing the same to other organizations just in the last few weeks.

      • I have no clue what "mypetjawa.mu.nu" is or was (and am not going to be foolish enough to open it) but based on the domain alone I do not fault Google from denying them access to AdWords.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Mashiki ( 184564 )

          They directly track and go after jihadi networks on social media that try and recruit young people into becoming terrorists. They're fairly well known in anti-terrorism circles.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The guy seems to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. Google has the most popular web browser in the world, and doesn't give a shit about his new fork of Chromium. His market share is non-exisitant, he is no threat.

      These are the same rules they have for everyone. Don't be a dick, provide a link to the EULA and how to uninstall your software, pretty much the bare minimum anyone could reasonably expect.

      • Sadly, gone are the days of including an uninstaller shortcut; Windows 8 and 10 "start" systems don't really jive with it, though many softwares still do include one, and the search function will usually find it if someone searches for it. That being said, the Windows add/remove program control panel applet ("appwiz.cpl") has been around for 20+ years, so unless someone has exempted/partially exempted themselves from this avenue of uninstallation, the potential for harm seems quite low. Agreed though, unins

  • Not unique to Vivaldi (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ebrandsberg ( 75344 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @06:20PM (#55138679)

    I have a software project, and had my ads taken offline for exactly the same reasons he had. We don't compete with Google in any way. This isn't about them using their position against competitors, it is that they will error on the side of posting ads, and when they review them, if the landing pages don't meet their requirements, they will take them back offline. Noting unusual about their behavior here folks. They want several things, including a clear download link, EULA and install/uninstall instructions so if someone doesn't like it, they know how to get rid of it.

    • Serious question. If what you're getting is their AdWords, why should they care what or how you're set up wrt landing pages, etc? It doesn't impact their ad business. Which is to serve up your advertisements to people they've identified as potential buyers and/or interested parties. Those extra requirements are well outside any immediate considerations when it comes to serving up advertisements to the correct audience. And while Google can have requirements they want to be part of their ad program, none of

      • Serious question. If what you're getting is their AdWords, why should they care what or how you're set up wrt landing pages, etc? It doesn't impact their ad business.

        It does, actually.

        Google gets paid when people click on the ads. That means that Google wants to maximize the chance that people will click. If people have a bad experience when they click, they'll be less likely to click in the future.

        Google actually goes well beyond the landing page requirements, and offers a lot of guidance to advertisers on how to make their sites more effective. You can advertise with AdWords if you don't follow the guidance, but your results will be less effective, which means you

  • News flash (Score:5, Interesting)

    by viperidaenz ( 2515578 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @06:33PM (#55138731)

    Google don't need to follow the AdWords terms and conditions for their Chrome pages.
    Not because they are AdWords, but because those pages have no advertising. None of the Chrome pages do. Infact, pretty much no Google pages apart from their ad platforms - YouTube, Gmail, Search - have anything remotely to do with AdWords.

    • Additionally, when you click "Download" on the chrome page, you must accept the EULA presented to you before you can download it.

      When you click Download on the Vivaldi page, it says "thank you" and the download starts automatically.

      Appears Google have themselves covered there too.

  • I was baffled that mobile Firefox did not show full functionality on Google search pages. Turned out that google is disabling the functionality by checking the user agent. Once I changed the user agent to a generic Nexus 5, the functionality was restored.

  • Google's predominance is the result of the original architecture of the Internet, together with the way we provide and charge for Internet access. And Google's predominance isn't just a problem because Google is misusing it more and more, it's also a problem because it gives governments easy access for privacy invasion and censorship. (Facebook and the current DNS system are secondary problems.)

    This needs to change: we need distributed, decentralized name services, P2P web sites, and distributed and crytocu

  • Dear Google (Score:4)

    by ChunderDownunder ( 709234 ) on Monday September 04, 2017 @09:52PM (#55139273)

    Stop with the "best viewed in Chrome" notification bullshit.

    I really don't give a hoot that you've optimised youtube and other sites for Chrome. The whole point of the web is to be cross platform.

  • The "or else" means you either disappear off the Internet, or any browser with any association with them lists you as a malware site.

    Fuck Google.

  • That question is "Where did the monopolistic swine go after they left Microsoft?" Because, let's face it, Microsoft is a creampuff compared to their good old days. The consent decree certainly seemed to affect their market behavior, and that meant there were a lot of hyper-competitive cheating dirtbags who couldn't work to their full potential at ol' MS.

    The question has been answered. "Google hired them."

  • Technically it should be illegal as their own products don't have the same requirements. but the deck is stacked. Google actually makes it a bit inconvenient to remove their stuff. And the "update server" was nuts. Nobody needs an update server. With Firefox you can remove the update service but not with Google, at least not without remove other google software packages. Consequently I don't use Google in MS Windows. "This smells funny, and I'm not eating".

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