[HN Gopher] DuckDuckGo now blocks Google sign-in pop-ups on all ...
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DuckDuckGo now blocks Google sign-in pop-ups on all sites
Author : elorant
Score : 164 points
Date : 2022-12-25 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
| gareth_untether wrote:
| Thank goodness, it is a terribly annoying pop up that reminded me
| of surfing the net a decade ago. What is Google thinking? Thanks
| to DuckDuckGo for a great upgrade.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This just makes average user's lives harder in signing up for
| sites.
| andybee wrote:
| Yeah, but giving all website interaction data to a company for
| "convenience" is exactly not how to make that easier. The
| logins and account information belong on the client side along
| with the person; and should be implemented fully on a client
| (with a separate encrypted backup strategy). The way this whole
| thing was implemented is so it can be abused.
| WASDx wrote:
| I assume it's just the pop-up that requests you to sign up that
| is blocked, not when you explicitly want to sign up.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's useful to inform users that they can easily sign up
| without having to go through a confusing account creation
| process and having to worry about the site's security
| t-writescode wrote:
| And yet Reddit asks me to sign in with Google, *even when
| I'm currently signed in with my Reddit account*.
|
| Yeah, no. It's almost always an anti-pattern that's
| designed to get someone's real identity through their gmail
| account
| charcircuit wrote:
| That sounds like a bug in reddit. Did you report it?
| propogandist wrote:
| >BleepingComputer has found that the option is baked into the
| general protection feature of the browser extension, so when the
| extension is active, all Google prompts are blocked
| automatically.
|
| pop-up modal blocking becomes a standout "protection feature"
| when duckduckgo buys a big native ad to make this seem newsworthy
| solarkraft wrote:
| Nice, but I think this should be uBlock Origin's job.
| lapcat wrote:
| div#credential_picker_container >
| iframe[src^="https://accounts.google.com/"], iframe#crede
| ntial_picker_iframe[src^="https://accounts.google.com/"]
| { display: none !important; }
|
| That's all you need. Covers both desktop and mobile.
| DavideNL wrote:
| I wonder if there's (uBlock Origin) filter lists with only
| _separate_ / specific things like this, which keeps up to date
| with latest updates/changes.
|
| There's `AdGuard Annoyances` and `Fanboy's Annoyance` lists
| (which i assume also have this blocking rule), but these big
| lists frequently break things unfortunately, so i avoid them.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Thank you for this snippet. I hate those windows and they seem
| to always appear on the scammiest of sites.
| Raed667 wrote:
| DDG are really good at generating headlines for the smallest
| stuff they release.
| aliqot wrote:
| Haven't seen a headline about them making search better. Seems
| like every search engine this year got markedly worse. Even the
| alternatives are pretty poor.
|
| I want to say I'd rather pick an independent alternative, but
| even that space is bleak. A founder here most famously made a
| fool out of himself and represented his search startup so
| poorly and asserting that not only would people pay for his
| search app, but that it was in the interest of privacy, while
| also requiring a browser extension.
| prh8 wrote:
| Have you tried Kagi? I think you might find it appealing.
| Especially if you are a developer or someone who is regularly
| searching technical/code related things. It's really good for
| that, and allows you to weight/block sites as you please to
| further improve results.
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| Try Kagi - it's a breath of fresh air.
| dazc wrote:
| 'Seems like every search engine this year got markedly worse'
|
| Maybe the sum total of available content got worse instead?
| Will 2023 be better, I suspect not.
| willhinsa wrote:
| If a search engine cannot recognize what content is good
| and which is bad, it's not a good search engine.
|
| If there was a sea of garbage with some beautiful healthy
| fish still in it, it doesn't mean I'm going to start
| catching garbage and passing it off as halibut.
|
| But the model of constant growth required and advertising
| to cross purposes of your users means that they're selling
| garbage by the pound and calling it fish!
|
| I have no interest in agreeing that the emperor's new
| clothes exist.
| janalsncm wrote:
| There are two possibilities:
|
| 1. Search engines are getting less good at ranking bad
| content below good content
|
| 2. The good content is getting worse. So bad, in fact,
| that it looks like bad content.
|
| It may be a little of both. I lean towards 2, though.
| It's kind of a race to the bottom in terms of jamming
| your page with ads, buzz words, and popups these days.
|
| Generally speaking, the web doesn't have great results
| for e.g. product recommendations. Part of it is because
| of how centralized the internet has become.
|
| The best you can do a lot of the time is to just serve
| mostly Reddit results. But even that can be gamed.
| willhinsa wrote:
| the PROPORTION of content is getting worse
|
| but GREAT content on an absolute numbers level is rising
| every single year
|
| excepting the death of good content through attrition and
| entropy good content only goes up unless we're all dead
|
| it's just discovering good new content is difficult,
| especially when you're a sclerotic barnacle tied to
| legacy interests of all stripes!
| janalsncm wrote:
| > the PROPORTION of content is getting worse but GREAT
| content on an absolute numbers level is rising every
| single year
|
| I'd love to believe this is true, but it can't be true
| for every query. How much great content is out there for
| _best gaming laptop_ or _marinara sauce recipe_?
|
| Tech gadget review sites are filled to the brim with ads
| and paid links these days, without exception.
|
| Recipe websites are also filled with ads, facilitated by
| long descriptions of unnecessary family history to create
| more vertical space.
|
| > discovering new content is difficult
|
| Indeed, great new content is almost impossible. There are
| blog search engines which do a decent job. Trouble is,
| those won't cover all my queries.
|
| > sclerotic barnacle
|
| Solid vocab choice. Respect.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I also _feel_ like the quality of search engines have gone
| down, but can we quantify that?
|
| If yes, then how so? Would that be based on bounce-rate,
| position of the clicked search result, suggestion accuracy...
| ?
| Beaver117 wrote:
| It'll be quantified in their financials slowing or even
| shrinking
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Thank god. That was irritating. Now also do the cookie popups.
| yegg wrote:
| Thanks. On cookie popups:
|
| * Our Mac browser already does this, announcement for that was
| here: https://spreadprivacy.com/duckduckgo-for-mac-open-beta/
|
| * It's open source at:
| https://github.com/duckduckgo/autoconsent
|
| * For our Android app it is in beta, and you can enabled it in
| settings.
|
| * For our iOS app, it is coming soon, and then we'll work on
| extensions.
|
| * We're updating this page quarterly for all our Web Tracking
| Protections across platforms:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...
| andybee wrote:
| Cool, considering switching as well. At first glance so much
| Apple stuff, thinking that somehow iOS and Apple devices are
| more privacy friendly is kind of a false analogy. Apple has
| lied about privacy protections and if you look into it you
| will find that Apple collects data for itself while blocking
| others from doing it (from their "ad campaign"). For example,
| if you opt out of health data, Apple still collects this
| information in the background but just doesn't show it to
| you. AppStore has been shown to collect extensive data as
| well. Don't put all your eggs into the Apple basket.
| WASDx wrote:
| I'm not sure if it's common knowledge around here but there is
| https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
| DavideNL wrote:
| Better yet, there is https://github.com/OhMyGuus/I-Still-
| Dont-Care-About-Cookies
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I was just about to post this, but you beat me to it. Now if
| only google would let you use addons on mobile chrome...
| [deleted]
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Unfortunately, I have to take the contrarian view and agree with
| some of the grayed out (presumably downvoted?) comments here that
| DDG's search featureset has stagnated and they're solely relying
| on the narrative of "Big Tech Bad!" to carry their brand and
| product forward.
|
| "Big Tech Bad!" isn't in of itself an issue and can be a viable
| marketing message for ad blockers, VPNs, and products in that
| space. However, I'm afraid the real innovation in search is
| happening elsewhere; either in the form of traditional search
| engines (Kagi, you.com) or large language models (ChatGPT, LaMDA
| etc.)
| netr0ute wrote:
| > they're solely relying on the narrative of "Big Tech Bad!" to
| carry their brand and product forward.
|
| I don't know, that is kind of the whole purpose of DDG to begin
| with.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Every company can market themselves the way they want. I'm
| simply lamenting the choice that DDG has made, in the same
| way Steve Jobs lamented the marketing-heavy PepsiCo for a
| lack of attention towards their products.
| dadoge wrote:
| I don't think this is that contrarian of a view.
|
| I, for one, assumed that at least half of HN would agree with
| you. HN has a skew of people that are pro DDG, but not so much
| that this is all that contrarian of a view
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Serious question: what's the alternative? I've been using DDG
| for 1-2 years now (switched away from Google), but I'm open to
| trying alternatives.
|
| My rough requirements are:
|
| 1. Ads are served based on searches, not tracking me across the
| web (I could also probably be convinced to pay a reasonable
| price for an ad-free search engine, but the search better be
| _really_ good)
|
| 2. Something similar to DDG's bangs. And yes, I know I can
| replicate the effect myself in browser, but that's not what I
| want - I want the pre-existing library of them.
|
| 3. Ability to search a specific site, (i.e. Google's/DDG's
| site:example.com)
|
| 4. Image search (bonus points for a reverse image search)
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| Kagi. Search results are far better than DDG, and all the
| customizations they offer bump the quality higher than Google
| for me.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| I took a look, but I am _very_ worried they will drop my
| account for (as their ToS puts it) "our provision of the
| Services to you is no longer commercially viable".
|
| It allegedly costs them $1 for every 80 searches. On the 5
| days of the week I do my day job I probably average 60-80
| searches _per day_.
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| Interesting. I have a horrible habit of typing just the
| beginning of a domain name and then letting the search
| engine find that website for me. So I end up searching
| hundreds of times per day. Kagi has not complained to me
| so far.
|
| I think that clause is in their ToS to prevent actual
| misuse of the service, e.g. building a scraper. Saying
| that, I agree that it's a concerning provision.
| yegg wrote:
| We have actually been continually working on improving our
| search results. We're working on a new page to detail major
| updates on a quarterly basis, which should be live in a few
| weeks.
|
| At the same time, we've been continuously developing our Web
| Tracking Protections for our browsers and extensions. We also
| made a page for that here that is already out:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/we...
| notlukesky wrote:
| Did you join the "downranking" and "censorship" game to
| create a competitive advantage? Or was there national
| security state forcing, threats, payoffs and interference as
| the Twitter files have revealed?
|
| https://www.vox.com/recode/22981115/duckduckgo-free-
| speech-p...
| yegg wrote:
| No. There have been many inaccurate stories going around
| about us. Here's a recent fact check: https://www.usatoday.
| com/story/news/factcheck/2022/12/02/fac.... And here is the
| page we put out ourselves on our news rankings:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/ne.... From that page: "A
| search engine's primary job is to rank results. In other
| words, search engines try to put results that most quickly
| and accurately answer the query on top. At DuckDuckGo we
| produce search results from a variety of sources, and when
| we apply our own ranking signals we do so in a strictly
| non-political manner, meaning we don't evaluate or
| otherwise take into account any potential political bias or
| leanings of websites in our search result rankings."
| puffoflogic wrote:
| Silence is violence. By refusing to up-rank reliable
| sources you have declared your allegiance to Neonazis and
| other undesirables.
| rolph wrote:
| ads are never relevant to my search query, but they
| always show up top, google style, when i use DDG
| pessimizer wrote:
| I can't seem to remove terms from search results any more,
| and I've tried every syntax I could think of. The reason I
| tried every syntax I could think of is because I couldn't
| figure out anywhere on DDG where search syntax is explained
| (other than !bangs.) I could have sworn there was an easily
| accessible page in the past that explained that.
| naavis wrote:
| You open the DuckDuckGo website, select "Help" from the
| sidebar and write "syntax" into the search box:
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/sy...
| dingaling wrote:
| The main problem I have with the syntax is that "-"
| doesn't remove that term from the search results. In fact
| I'm not sure what it does.
|
| For example, search "cats" and "cats -adopt". The second
| result for me in both cases is "Cats for adoption".
| naavis wrote:
| That is true, no arguments against that. I merely wanted
| to point out that it is relatively easy to find the
| mentioned help page.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Note that these prompts can also be disabled in your Google
| account settings. I find them very irritating so I've disabled it
| on all accounts I manage.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/735152/how-to-turn-off-the-sign-in...
| kramerger wrote:
| Doesn't that require you to be logged in with Google already?
| SquareWheel wrote:
| Yes. If you're not logged in with Google, you won't get these
| prompts in the first place.
|
| edit: Some comments below suggesting this is mistaken. Sorry,
| I hadn't noticed that in the past.
| lapcat wrote:
| Not true at all. Happens even in incognito/private windows.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Is this only whilst using Google Chrome? Cause
| technically most people on Chrome login to it
| lapcat wrote:
| > Is this only whilst using Google Chrome?
|
| No, also in Firefox and Safari.
|
| > Cause technically most people on Chrome login to it
|
| I don't.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I dont either but most people I know do. I use Firefox
| containers which deters that dialog if you get the multi
| account container plugin.
| dessant wrote:
| Google has decided to show these popups by default to
| everyone that is browsing the web with tracking protection
| enabled since October 2022. This prompt has started to pop
| in our faces on most sites that integrate Google Sign-In as
| soon as we visit a page, often covering the content we are
| trying to view, and the website operators need to take
| specific steps to change the default behavior. We can only
| applaud DuckDuckGo for attempting to mitigate the
| destructive actions of Google.
|
| https://developers.google.com/identity/gsi/web/guides/itp#o
| p...
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| Now this page is also broken (iOS Safari). The sidebar
| menu is open all the way and blocking most of the page.
| No way to close it. Nice work, Google!
| kramerger wrote:
| Don't you get the other one, about logging in with Google?
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Yes, you do.
| batter wrote:
| Thank you, was looking for this long time.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| The instructions in the "key takeaway" part are wrong. There is
| no "Google account Sign-in Prompts" option in the "Signing in
| with Google" section.
| SquareWheel wrote:
| They're not wrong, but there are two sections with similar
| names. Scroll down further to this box.
|
| https://www.howtogeek.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/06/2-sign-...
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| Oops, thank you. One is "to", and the other is "with".
| ck2 wrote:
| How long is DDG's contract with Bing?
|
| Amazing how far they've come just as a Bing proxy but if they are
| ever cut off, they will be gone overnight.
|
| BTW how do people know they truly are anonymous, has their
| code/connection to Bing ever been audited?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They weren't just a Bing proxy. They also mixed in Yandex
| results which were obvious when they were links to Russian
| language sites.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I hate that one of the results of that arrangement is that 50%
| of news search results are the MSN version of articles posted
| elsewhere. Another 40% of the results are the _Yahoo version_
| of an article posted elsewhere; I assume that 's not a Bing
| thing, but it's a bad thing.
| kamray23 wrote:
| Barely news, to be honest. Just blocks the annoying popup and the
| requests that popping it up causes. Google Sign-In still
| explicitly possible, you just don't get a pop-up. One annoyance
| less.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| ...it was news for me. As a Brave browser user, there are a few
| social media switches in the setting that i have set to 'off';
| combined with this - things should be even better (as well as
| having another reason to go through the ://flags settings). I
| rotate through my available built-in search engine[s] in Brave,
| I'll go back to ddg to try this out. Nb - search with all
| engines this past 18months has been uniformly 'poor'.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Give kagi (paid) a shot. It's been the only tolerable option
| for me and has been working well even on obscure searches.
| we_never_see_it wrote:
| [dead]
| archsurface wrote:
| Good riddance. I have zero tolerance for that obnoxious dark
| pattern.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| What content blockers do people use alongside Safari on iOS?
|
| I've been trying Firefox Focus but it's barebones, ad-centric,
| and doing nothing for cookie popups. Now with these Google popups
| infesting the web it feels like the 90s again and has made me
| stop browsing the web on my tablet.
| foreverCarlos wrote:
| AdGuard Pro. It's a paid (one-time fee) app that works almost
| as well as uBlock Origin on desktop.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Wipr.
| bunnyfoofoo wrote:
| I'm using Wipr combined with NextDNS. It doesn't block these by
| default, but I added the accounts.google.com domain to NextDNS.
| lazycouchpotato wrote:
| I've been using Orion browser for a while. It did not show the
| Google pop-up like Safari did.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/orion-browser-by-kagi/id148449...
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(page generated 2022-12-25 23:02 UTC)