It all started when noticed that I was wasting time on the Google Discovery features which is all around you on Android phones and on Chrome. On my recently acquired Pixel 8 Pro, it is a given that google apps and features are well integrated within the phone and it works great unless you want to remove them.
Some of the default apps cannot be easily uninstalled and can only be pause or disabled.
I like using google chrome as an interface and I love google search and its integrated apps in the browser but one thing that is annoying is the Discovery features that just pop up news articles for you to read, first it started annoying me because most of those suggested articles where behind a paywall which if I knew before that the site for doing that I wouldn't even bother wasting my time to start and reading something I can't finish. For news I read written report from TV/News website that don't have those paywall just to keep a little bit inform on what is happening, I could argue this is also a wast of time.
Below is a screenshot of the default new tab view and homepage if you don't change it on Chrome (running android 15), I have managed to change the homepage to the default google.com where the discovery toogle isn't there but it always shows on new tab and this is not customizable.
My problem is that you can "turn off" the feature and not see the suggested news article but you do not have the ability to remove that line (Discover - off :.) from your sight and I have noticed it is so easy to turn back on that my brain got train to click it on then off when I am doing without me realizing it. I don't want to have to fight myself and use will power not to turn on this feature every time I see this page, and it can be at a weak moment so you basicly unconscious click toggle on just with muscle memory
I want this option removed entirely when disable, moving it to within setting parameter, where I won't go into to turn it on because it isn't in my face
I would have settled for having google.com or another page as a default for new tab but that isn't possible at the moment and clicking every time on home page isn't a viable option either.
Picture below is what I want from my new tab page and I can get it only as a homepage:
I was happy to find some ressources only to see to what extend I could customize chrome. Apparently before a flag existed in order to remove that but I was unsuccessful in finding that.
Something really crazy if that even if you change the search engine to something else like duckduckgo you would still get this function on your screen below the suggested apps based on history.
Below is the same image but using Bing as default search engine, no logo is showing (seems only google logo shows if you set that up as default), you can notice that the discover feature is still here using google service even if you want to use another engine for search.
At this point I had enough and after a last ressort where I asked Chat-GPT what could be done and basically only installing another launcher would work, I gave up and decided to switch browser entirely. Spoiler, I went with option 3.
After doing it, I thought it would be funny to ask Gemini too
I am also using brave on my desktop (Ubuntu), the one I am working on to write this article, I like it on desktop as I can have the keychain extension working unlike when on my MacBook with safari as my primary.
I have been using Brave as a browser for some time and one feature I like is the sync where you create you own little chain of devices all link together and where you need to scan a secret QR code from one old device to add a new one very.
This seem like a logical option but one thing wouldn't work out is the fact that apparently i cannot be using the google password manager inside Brave on mobile because it wasn't implemented so back to square one.
After a quick web search, I found out that Firefox did the implementation for using Google password manager within the app so I can use that and still have google as my primary search engine and not have the Discovery feature.
I will try it out over the month, I feel the app is not running as smoothly and design feels a bit off to me but I was attacking the problem with so much dedication that I am willing to keep that for a few month and see if I can adapt to using a new browser which I haven't used seriously for a long time, only to test some front end features when it needed to be done for multiple browser.
A good compromise for now Firefox with google search, password manager and no Discovery:
It took me some hours to actually get through all of it, including a lot of search to find out if it was possible to customize chrome to my linking but it seems to be a feature too important for Google and is off-limit, today I got so annoyed with it that I actually had the motivation to go the extra length to get back some simple control over my digital life and my phone. Not saying this is a case of dark pattern but it was clearly not working out in my interests and the fact that I can easily customize something that should be trivial.
I don't think it would be difficult to have this feature as a toggle on/off from the normal chrome setting instead of leaving it on the page with those 3 little dots which is only use for a single feature. If this is intentional and by design then I guess my wish will never become true for Chrome.
I am sure it is for the security of the user or something.
Anyway maybe later on I will look into other launcher but for the moment I am very Happy about my Google Pixel 8 Pro and I am sure I will keep it for a long time so it makes sense top customize it the way I want to.
Thank you for your time reading this article.
Walt.
