[franga2000]

Why is there a search bar? A browser is more than a URL bar and a rendering engine.

Search is a common operation for many people and having a unified entrypoint for different search providers in the browser makes sense.

Chatbots are also quite common now and having a single chat box that users can use with any chatbot provider (even local ones!) is a good feature. If anything it helps break the big players' chances at a monopoly, since it makes switching between providers easier.

Why is it so hard for people to just...not use a feature they don't like. Sure, the popup was annoying, but I still like that it let me know this feature exists. I don't use it now, but it might be useful to me in the future or so I can recommend it to someone who needs something like that.

[HWR_14]

Google didn't pay billions to Mozilla for a search bar because it increased the visibility of their competitors. A default LLM in the browser is likely to be retained. After all, there is more stickiness to that choice than typing a different URL when you had to choose one.

[franga2000]

Google didn't pay Mozilla to add a search bar. Mozilla added a search bar because that's a sensible feature, Google just paid to be the default.

If the search bar didn't exist and Google paid to be the home page, fewer people would find out about alternative search engines and id switching was more effor that changing one setting, fewer people would do it.

I just opened the AI sidebar for the first time and it gave me a list of 5 options, along with a link to a help page that compares them and links to each one's privacy policy. This is 1000x better than the current way people use AI, which is to bookmark ChatGPT and never try anything else (well, unless Gemini is shoved down their throat).