Choice Window to Arrive on Chrome

In the recent months, Google has been having quite a couple of issues with litigation. In one of the most recent cases, the company has been fined €2.42 billion after the EC (European Commission) stated that the tech giant has been violating the anti-trust regulations enable by EU within the community. Basically, Google has been inflating the shopping service results that appeared on their search pages.

More Conflicts

In mid-April, Google had another conflict. This one was connected to the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), which also ruled that the company has been going against their market dominance. They were doing so by forcing OEMs to preinstall the Google services on the devices they were using. Moreover, the agreement between the two also touched upon creating a new Google Chrome search widget that may replace the default one made by Google.

With this, users have the option of changing their default search provider in the Chrome settings. Te new widget can access any 3^rd party search engine providers. However, the new widget represents only part of the agreement the company has with the Russian government. Russia asks Google to introduce an active “choice window” for the Chrome. This choice window will ask the user to choose what default search engine do they want.

…and a Solution

Up until now, Google hasn’t offered the choice screen Russia wants from them. However, if you take a look at their most recent Chromium open source project, this is about to change. The commit offers the ‘search engine promo’ by default. This is a flag that will appear and show a promo dialog about letting you choose a different search engine, depending on the locale.

Initially, the search engine promotion dialogue will only be available in China and Russia, but it might soon extend to the EU as well.