When you visit Google’s main website and many other the company operates in a web browser that is not Google Chrome, Google displays an overlay on the screen that advertises the company’s own Chrome browser. It is a simple ad that is placed in the top right corner of the screen.
Google recommends using Chrome
Built for Windows. Easily search on Google with the fast, secure browser.
There is an option to select “don’t switch” and another that simply states “yes”. Don’t switch dismisses the widget, but it may be displayed again on the next widget.
If you have made up your mind and don’t want to switch, or can’t, then you may prefer if the advertisement is no longer displayed as it serves no real purposes in that case and may be distracting.
Chrome is certainly fast and secure, but the lack of privacy may deter privacy-conscious users from using the browser. There are plenty of alternatives available that offer better privacy, including Chromium, which is like Chrome but without many Google-bits, or the third-party browsers Vivaldi and Brave.
How to remove Google recommends using Chrome
Content blockers such as uBlock Origin may hide the advertisement on Google websites, but if you use the element picker to hide it, you won’t hide it permanently because of the way it is designed.
There is another option, one that works really well. If you are using uBlock Origin, here is what you need to do:
- Activate the uBlock Origin icon in the browser’s main toolbar and select Go To Dashboard.
- Switch to Filter Lists.
- Expand Annoyances.
- Check AdGuard Annoyances.
- Select Apply Changes at the top.
AdGuard Annoyances includes more than 44k entries, which hide annoyances on the Internet. One of the entries hides Google’s Chrome recommendation, others hide other ads by Google on its properties that advertise Chrome when you open the site with another web browser.
Manual option
If you don’t use uBlock Origin, or don’t want to subscribe to the full list blocking annoyances on the web, then you may add the following filter as a custom filter to your content blocker to block the Google recommends using Chrome widget on Google properties.
google.com,google.de##iframe[src^=”https://ogs.google.”][src*=”/widget/callout?prid=”]
You may need to edit the URLs, e.g. add a local Google site to the listing or remove one. If you use google.fr, you need to add it, e.g. by replacing google.de, which you probably don’t use.
Note that the manual option has the disadvantage of not being updated if Google changes code. The annoyances filter list is updated regularly to reflect code changes and to add new entries to the list to get these blocked. Google could change the address the banner is loaded from and the filter would stop working. You’d have to analyze the new code and create a new filter to block the widget again.
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