So I was watching that Spike Jonze-directed HomePod ad, and I noticed something odd:

See it? No?

How about now?

See, the funny thing is – this was a full-screen video. However, I could not dismiss the warning, which also meant that all the controls stayed visible on the screen, instead of disappearing as they should.

What is this, incompetence, or malice – or both? This was a video embedded on a third-party site. Was Google attempting to prevent me viewing it full-screen unless I clicked through to, presumably for some adtech or tracking reason of its own?

Anyway, it’s a good thing that Safari is quite happy to ignore these sorts of shenanigans. It also lets me do picture-in-picture, though I have to click twice to dismiss Google’s useless context menu.

While we’re on that topic, Google’s menu is not just in the way, it’s also insulting: “Stats for nerds"? What is this, elementary school? If I want statistics on the video or the stat of my buffer, just give them to me, without silly names.

Google are of course hell-bent on taking over absolutely everything about your browser, whether it’s constantly nagging you to use Chrome, trying to get you to agree to some T&C document before you can do a search, or actually hijacking your keyboard commands:

Can’t we just go back to Google giving good search results and leaving it at that?