Internet users are accustomed to seeing ads on Internet pages. One of the most prominent advertisement schemes used these days is Google Adsense which is available for websites, searches on websites and for mobile devices. Adword ads dominate the Google search result pages, and other Google properties are also displaying their fair share of ads.
Salimane Adjao Moustapha recently posted a photo of another place where Google (seemingly) has started to display ads: The Chrome browser. The screenshot shows a new tab page of the Chrome browser. The Apps section is open and at the top of it is an ad for Google’s own Chromebook. It states: Get a Chromebook for the holidays: the computer powered by Chrome.
The first part of the ad is underlined. It is not clear where it leads to as it is not revealed by Salimane, and I was not able to reproduce it.
The post on Google Plus sums up all the different opinions about the ad in Chrome. Some say it is Google’s right to display ads because the browser is free. Others that they should not do so without giving the user control over the ads. A third group is suggesting to switch to Firefox or Chromium. And a last group is angry but not angry enough to switch just yet. It would not make much sense either at the time considering that the majority may not have seen ads in Chrome yet.
I’d like to know your opinion about ads in web browsers. Do you think it is ok for Google to display ads in the browser, especially if it is for other company products? Or would you say that ads in a browser are a no-go, regardless of what they promote?
My personal opinion on the matter is that Chrome has turned adware if Google makes the decision to display these kind of ads to all Chrome users. It does not really matter if the ads promote Google products or third party products, it is still an ad.
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I suppose it’s their right, but I certainly won’t use Chrome, especially in light of Google’s propensity for gathering data which could be hacked for personal information.
I’ve been using SRWare Iron, an open source clone of Chrome for some time now.
Yep,not showing up in Chromium.Besides,New Tab Redirect extension opens user-specified URL which I use to display my home made StartPage with mouse over Bookmarks below the banner:
http://i.imgur.com/d10Sy.png
This is why I use Firefox 11.0. Google only cares about profits and shareholders, not their users.
Mozilla cares for their users, not for profits and shareholders.
Dont want damn ads in chrome? Use SRWare.
Sounds like adware to me. Then again you could argue that Chrome is an operating system not a browser. Or maybe a black hole, its hard to tell with all the wizardry on the web now. It should also be noted that Google (and Microsoft) are the only ones that advertise to get users to use a web browser. Don’t see this with Mozilla’s open source browser.
“It should also be noted that Google (and Microsoft) are the only ones that advertise to get users to use a web browser. Don’t see this with Mozilla’s open source browser.”
Mozilla did do ads for Firefox. Remember the Spread Firefox campaign? Or the Mozilla video contest, where they asked users to make ads for them, and the winning ads got used in real ads?
I use Opera, and Opera also made ads, and their browser was adware until version 8.5. Safari was used as an ad for Macs. There is no shame for browser makers to advertise their product.
There is indeed something going on lately…anyway I am not seeing any advertisement on my chrome browser yet. Martin, if Google allows adsense to be used on chrome application developer application page then that will be nice for a developer to make a few dollars from there, but it is not happening yet…:)
I agree that no matter what they’re for, they’re still ads; and ads, as a part of the browser itself, are not good. In the past there have been other browsers — lesser-known; some of them which use the Intenet Explorer engine — which have inserted ads into open areas in the top bars of the browser, or which have a taller footer and squeeze a little ad bar or two or three, across the bottom, in said footer.
Those browsers, I notice, to the last of them, are gone, now; and have BEEN gone for a long time.
If Chrome gets like those old examples, then I dare say that people will leave it in droves. However, if they remain as described in this article, then they’re darned similar to what pops-up for many as they move from page to page in their GMAIL accounts. While I hate them, they’re surprisingly easy to get used to, and ignore. Though I wouldn’t want Google to do it more than that in the browser, I confess that I might not even notice it after a while. Who knows. That still doesn’t make it right; and to be clear: I’m four-square against it, no matter what.
Whether it would make me stop using Chrome, I don’t know. Hmm. Part of the reason I’m not sure is that I don’t really use Chrome as my primary browser. Misguided though some reading this may say it is, I use IE9 most of the time. I’m only using Chrome right now because I’m using my wife’s machine while my new one (my old one just died) is being shipped from Dell; and I don’t want to use her copy of IE9 and inadvertently get all my login and pasword and other cookies and whatnot implanted in it. Yes, of course I know how to clean/clear them all, in any or all brosers, but then her logins and whatnot in IE9 would get all wiped clean. So I’m just using Chrome while on her notebook. So, what I’m saying is that I, by and large, tend to use either Firefox or Chrome pretty much only when I encounter a web page which will not reder properly in IE9, or when I need to be logged-in to the same web site (like eNom, for example) through two different accounts simultaneously.
Therefore, other than being categorically against it, and, of course, hating it whenever I see it when I used Chrome, I’m not really sure it would bother me all that much in a real sense, mostly because I’d likely not see it very often. That still, however, doesn’t make it right; and, again, to be clear, my vote is “NO ADS IN CHROME!”
Google’s pretty smart, though, if you think about it, to ease us into it slowly by having displayed similar-looking ads in GMAIL for a while, now; perhaps to desensitize users to them so there won’t be such an outcry when they start doing it elsewhere… notwithstanding how counter-intuitive that is, considering that the whole point of ads, in whatever form, is to be noticed.
One thing which may help, though, are plugins/extensions like Ad-Blocker; or the use of a HOSTS file. That’s what I use… AdBlocker+ in Chrome and Firefox; and the adserver list from it, via EasyPrivacy, used in the “Tracking Protection” part of “Manage Add-ons” in IE9.
It’s the HOSTS file, though, which, in largest measure, provides the SERIOUS protection. I use the freeware “HostsMan” by Abelha Digital to manage it. It’s the hands-down best of the… oh… I’d say maybe four, total, well-known HOSTS file managers. And HostsMan comes pre-configured to download and keep up-to-date the either full HOSTS files, or the ad-server-only HOSTS files, of MVPS Hosts, hpHosts, Peter Lowe’s AdServer list, etc. It’s quite good and amazing; and it’s easy to enter exclusions so that web sites listed in those pre-configured HOSTS files can be accessed anyway, if you insist on it. HostsMan will also remove duplicates from the HOSTS file after each update. Just don’t choose to optimize the HOSTS file in HostsMan, because it makes it hard to find a given web site in it since optimization causes multiple sites to be listed on a single line in the file. And if one adds or excludes a site from the HOSTS file, one must first flush the DNS cache before the change will be reflected in the browser; or sometimes the browser must be closed and restarted to make it take… a small price to pay for the overall coolness of it. HostsMan, I tell you: It has no rival.
And the HOSTS file will effectively block at least some Google ads; but here’s the problem: Google has gotten wise to that, and so is now running some Google search results through its adservers so that if said adservers are blocked in the HOSTS file, then Google search, itself, stops working. Pretty smart, on Google’s part, I say. And so when one excludes that particular Google adserver in order to make Google search, itself, work, voila!, the ads in other areas also return. So, in that case, one can’t win for losin’!
Monitizing the web has been an upwardly-moving trend for a long time, now; and there may, in the end, be little that most of us can do about it. Any browser which dares to do it, though, had darned-well better follow the Android apps model and make sure there’s an easily-affordable version without ads which may be purchased. If THAT doesn’t happen, then I dunno… I may spend my senior years not even using the Internet… just sitting on my front porch, rocking in my rocker and farting a lot… so that the kids in the neighborhood giggle and hold their noses as they walk by, saying “Ewyouoooo… there’s smelly ol’ Mister DesElms! Runnnnnnnnn……”
Hey… one can DREAM, can’t one? [grin]
___________________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com
Step slut by Google
I still use IE…
honestly – I find Google has shown quite a good taste in advertising all along on their products. Ads are usually not taking up a lot of space – are non invasive and make quite often sense. As long as I don’t have to click pop ups away and having a stupid frame puling over my screen – I don’t mind. For being angry – there still are quite a few companies that have a very aggressive approach to advertise.
Commerce supplying what is wanted is good and advertising is useful, but it can be too much, and it can be in inappropriate places.
Users of Ad supported software usually do so because they either have no choice, or the ad (or other) strategy is reasonable.
Any advertising strategy that works will proliferate, obnoxious or not.
Its not that Chrome users should switch, but that they can. This is an issue of convenience, not patriotism.
Choose.
I’ve already voted. I surf with Firefox and search with Duckduckgo and Ixquick, which allow me to search Google without Google searching me.
People should just use Opera, it’s better than all other browsers in virtually every single way.
Sure they don’t have the budget to tell the world about their product, but that doesn’t mean it’s not excellent…
The next step: native ads support inside Android)
Opera is the best browser. Chrome is crap.