Google Buys Apture, Shuts It Down

DRE

Well-known member
This is so wrong. Apture was an app that lets you highlight a word and it automatically brought up search results for you in the same window. You didn't have to leave the page or google the info at all. Got this in my email today.

The8thLegion,

We are writing because you have Apture installed on your CloudFlare-powered domain via CloudFlare Apps.

Apture was recently acquired by Google, and is shutting down the service.
 
apture.joins.google.chrome.webp


http://www.apture.com/
 
Apture was an annoying product, and I am for one glad they shuttered it. It broke browsers, created privacy leaks and pretty much violated every common web ui standards. Unfortunately, CloudFlare is rolling out their own service (their customers accounted for ~1% of Apture installs. Can't really blame them for wanting to continue a service their customers obviously like, but still...), which means I'll still have to resort to using adblock and other trickery to strip it away on those (misguided) sites that use it.

If anything, such a feature should be provided by the browser on an opt-in basis, which is maybe what Google intends to do.
 
Apture was an annoying product, and I am for one glad they shuttered it. It broke browsers, created privacy leaks and pretty much violated every common web ui standards. Unfortunately, CloudFlare is rolling out their own service (their customers accounted for ~1% of Apture installs. Can't really blame them for wanting to continue a service their customers obviously like, but still...), which means I'll still have to resort to using adblock and other trickery to strip it away on those (misguided) sites that use it.

If anything, such a feature should be provided by the browser on an opt-in basis, which is maybe what Google intends to do.
My site's members and I haven't had any of those problems your complaining about. Best thing about Apture was that you could attach your Amazon Affliates ID to your account and it would automatically insert your ID into any Amazon links. That's way more convenient than something like Viglinks which takes a percentage of what you make. I tried using Cloudflare's Highlight app but it isn't working so I turned it off.
 
My site's members and I haven't had any of those problems your complaining about. Best thing about Apture was that you could attach your Amazon Affliates ID to your account and it would automatically insert your ID into any Amazon links. That's way more convenient than something like Viglinks which takes a percentage of what you make. I tried using Cloudflare's Highlight app but it isn't working so I turned it off.

Fair enough, though I'd wager those who disliked Apture would most likely hit the back button than send a complaint to every site owner that used it.

I didn't care for the fact that it sent all of my selections off to their servers. That is a gross privacy leak. Nor that it inserted random junk into my copy/paste buffers (I wish browsers would provide protected copy/paste). When I do select text to search, I want to use the search engine of my choice, not have Apture do it, poorly, on my behalf with the intent of keeping me on the original site.

Sometimes people click or select in a window to leave a visual indicator for themselves when they scroll or drag, Apture broke this work flow by popping up windows -- horrible UI/UX decision right there. These are just a few reasons people found Apture annoying, especially since there was no way to opt-out other than using <noscript>, ad block and other such trickery.

It may have been great for site owners, but not for visitors.
 
Oh okay. Apture never broke my copy-n-paste before. Sounds like you've had a really bad experience. I have Highlight working and it works pretty good so far. One thing of things they need to add that apture had was image and video search tabs. The only thing I did not like about Apture is that it automatically converted Twitter links.
 
Top Bottom