Can no longer view websites on smart display

Re:Lenovo Smart Device websites don't with

I opened my cookbook and when I wanted to view on website I got the message : websites are turned off for this device. I have been searching all day I find no answers.  I even asked a computer tech who advised me to reboot the and redo my device.  I went to my internet security and it is not a problem with them.  I hope we find a solution soon. If you find one please post.

I'm being informed this has been the case for some time. They asked me to encourage you to send this feedback directly to Google. You will not receive a response, unless Google need more details from you, however the team are still reading the feedback.

Clearly they see this is a feature not a bug, and it has broken a lot of the functionality of Google assistant. I’d really love to know more about the reasoning behind this. Is it something legal? Is it yet another piece of fallout from the Sonos lawsuit (which has already impacted so many of the things that I loved about Google Assistant and Google home devices…)? Is it a business decision that pushes folks towards buying official Google hardware for their displays? Is it to do with the two different OS versions that Google push out for their smart display ecosystem? 

Whatever the reason though, we’ve lost a piece of core functionality that Google assistant users have had for years… To suggest that this kind of feature is minor is such a bloody stretch. The entire smart display experience has calls to action and buttons/prompts everywhere these days that are reliant on access to that web browser. all of which no longer do anything and just result in a broken experience that is the equivalent of a 404 page basically… it’s a terrible user experience. 

What is most galling though and kind of terrible, but shouldn’t be very surprising considering it’s Google. Is the complete lack of transparency around the removal of a core piece of functionality that people have had for years, and that has severely hampered the usefulness of third-party smart displays - which mind you cost a fair chunk of money. This is a really really terrible experience. 

I feel like they need to put big fat stickers on anything which is a non-official google smart display piece of hardware now before people buy them and say warning 30% of your experience will be broken pages telling you that you can’t do that, even though you’re tapping on elements within the official user interface. Anyway, let’s hope that this is just an accidental bug or something that they change based on feedback. But I am not going to hold my breath for that to happen, because I’m pretty certain I would die. 

what would be nice at the very least though is some kind of acknowledgement and explanation as to why it’s happened from Google because at the moment you could reach a lot of conclusions, with one of the one main ones being a very anti-consumerist and anticompetition perspective where they are simply trying to get people to buy their own hardware instead of other manufacturers. 

Would love to be proved wrong.

Actually, this has not "been the case for some time" Google broke our Lenovo smart displays just one week ago. I won't waste my time trying to contact Google about this. I have tried in the past and it was futile, even after spending many months. Why on earth would Google want to prevent Lenovo smart display users from accessing websites? We paid good money for these devices, and now they won't do what we paid for. Sounds like grounds for a great class action suit against Google. We the end users suffer the brunt of bad decisions made by billionaires. I'd rather just have our access right returned, which is the honorable thing to do. Google, please take care of the people who made you rich! Than you.

Can't wait for the inevitable class action lawsuit.

Hello Everyone,