With no inside knowledge of this team or feature, this appears to be almost the exact same feature MS shipped in the IE6 betas over 20 years ago, though without the ability for 3p to integrate with it:
As squirmish as this makes me, this is exactly the kind of thing that the original architects of the web imagined when they describe the browser as a "user agent" - that the browser doesn't have to show you exactly what the server sent you.
The user's agent is free to transform the data sent by the server in any way, and users will seek out agents that do useful things for them.
As a developer I'm uncomfortable with the idea that some browser or extension might break my site, or that I may break the customization with an update, but the idea here is really powerful. I don't think it's ever caught on much though. I think most extensions that do this kind of thing have pretty solidly failed.
It's certainly a powerful idea, but I wonder how well it translates to users that don't even know what a browser is, let alone understand what it means for that to be "acting as their agent".
If the original architects of the web didn't foresee corporations owning the browser so they can inject ads and propaganda into a publisher's content, of what use was the vision?
Was initially surprised that Google would have the nerve to do something like this until I realized that there's literally an app just called "Google" that doesn't seem to be a full blown web browser. The described opt out process is shitty, but realistically this seems like exactly the type of thing that someone using the dedicated Google app would appreciate. I do wonder if Google defaults to its own link or the website's link when there's an existing hyperlink in place.
That is even funnier to me than the original post! Even Google's non-existant cancellation reps are terrible at their jobs. Like, Google Lens, which recognizes nothing, and Gemini, which is the worst of everything, THOSE are the things you are relying on to stop me from leaving? Really? Okay-ish search would maybe make me chance a free-trial to a paywall.
It's got 2m reviews where as Chrome iOS only has 1.9m. It's effectively a full browser. In other words, like Google and chat apps, they've got multiple browsers on iOS.
How is this any different than selecting the text and going to “Look Up” that exists natively anywhere in the OS?
I suppose one aspect is that it looks like a link the website creator has made themselves which might therefore be deceptive? Whereas the OS context menu is obviously from the OS.
Yeah. It's fairly likely the ads link to a URL with a recognizable pattern. Failing that, if an ad is reproducible we can iterate with a site owner to detect the DOM modification a few different ways. I've drafted a blog post to collaborate with others on reverse engineering this: https://push.cx/google-ad-injection
Ahem, "don't let the door hit ya, where the good lord split ya"
Most of us recognize that YOU think that, however, it is not what many of us think and also we just want to get things done without folks like you stopping us...and you are stopping us by mastodoning the entire internet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_tag_(Microsoft)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2167301/what-is-the-purp...
https://alistapart.com/article/smarttags/
Response was extremely negative and the feature was removed. The only thing remaining is the opt-out meta tags all over the web.
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