[HN Gopher] MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in E...
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MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT
admins are angry
Author : dustedcodes
Score : 894 points
Date : 2023-05-03 09:47 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| cuddlyogre wrote:
| Teams also adds links that gets sent between users to Bing, with
| no consideration to whether those links are intended to be public
| or not.
|
| I know this because I searched for a variation of a private url
| generated by our system only to find several live links to things
| we didn't intend for the public to see.
|
| I was able to correct that problem in about a day and there were
| no compromises, but I was intensely irritated with everyone
| involved that day.
| e12e wrote:
| This is an expected normalization of html email and the mostly-
| client-side-apps; Outlook (the desktop app) already renders the
| html email in a MS rendering engine (Edge? I don't know).
|
| If the email has a button (or a link) - i think it makes sense
| that the click event shows up "in" the mail client.
|
| I hate html email - but the last 20 years have been all about
| siloing hypertext apps in email systems - proprietary protocols
| (exchange, Gmail web - with IMAP/SMTP/pop3 as secondary
| citizens).
|
| This just a natural continuation.
|
| If you want to escape use a real MUA - and maybe a real mail
| provider.
|
| Unfortunately if you want groupware - there's no proper open
| solution (but props to Fastmail for at least trying - but until
| there are good independent desktop/mobile/console apps with JMAP
| support - and the equivalent for shared booking and calendar) -
| it's pretty much either proprietary crapware, or open solutions
| without feature parity.
| Forge36 wrote:
| Outlook renders the HTML in word. (It's a custom rendering
| engine)
| e12e wrote:
| I swear you can't make this shit up (i actually knew that,
| but the trauma made me forget).
|
| Thanks for pointing it out.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _This is an expected normalization of html email_
|
| I have two Macs running Microsoft Outlook. One is running a
| version several years behind the current one.
|
| The old machine can send e-mail as plain text. The one running
| the current Microsoft Outlook doesn't have that option, or a
| way to enable it that I've been able to find.
| e12e wrote:
| I recently changed to macOS, and macOS Outlook is a bit of a
| puzzle. On one hand an admission that the web app isn't good
| enough, on the other... It's not quite a proper port of the
| windows version?
|
| Thankfully i write mostly code and documentation - so far i
| don't have to care that 2023 Outlook is worse than 2003 Pine.
|
| On the other hand there's a shared calendar.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _It 's not quite a proper port of the windows version?_
|
| I don't think it's supposed to be.
|
| At a big tech conference about ten years ago, a Microsoft
| exec said that new Office features are tried out on Macs
| before getting ported to Windows.
|
| I don't know if that's still the strategy today, but it was
| around 2011.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I recently noticed I can only browse some parts of our company
| infra on Azure (e.g. Azure Devops) via Edge on iOS too. So I have
| to use that browser for some specific sites while I use Safari
| for everything else.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... and boy they sure want regulators to let them merge with
| whoever they want to. They should show a little humility.
| dathinab wrote:
| So anyone still thinking MS is now all good and it's not an issue
| that it own github + vscode + a endless list of other things
| relevant for especially smaller development companies?
|
| Microsoft will do whats best for them.
|
| Temporary this includes embrace open source to some degree and
| being reasonable nice to Linux. For example WSL can help with
| trying out Linux and help cross platform devs on Windows to
| develop for Linux which can help with a to Linux migration. But
| it removes the main reasons why a lot of students, scientists and
| server devs had to use it. So for now it's net-good for them,
| which can be good for Linux, too.
|
| But what will happen if it again is more profitable for MS to not
| act nice?
|
| How long will it then take to WSL to have features in a way which
| make it likely software only works on WSL Linux and maybe Azur
| servers but won't be available on normal distros.
|
| How long until GitHub will have some small but very usefull
| features which happen to only be available in some Windows GitHub
| client pushing companies to require Windows first desktop
| systems?
|
| How long until they will influence legislation around computer
| security in a way which have effects like being practical
| impossible for normal desktop Linux clients or require some
| proprietary Linux core component due to a combination of
| legislation and patents, which distributions for Azur or Google
| cloud surely will have for free, but the competition?
|
| Honestly I hope so long that you could say never.
|
| But I believe open source and free desktops are as much
| threatened by MS today as many years ago when people aware about
| it often treated MS as a evil company for good reasons. But today
| it's in a way more roundabout, very subtle very hard to pin down
| way. This gives them the chance to succeed where they failed
| before, but us the chance to both profit from them and while
| preventing them from succeeding. Optimally leading to some form
| of stalemate where both are profiting from each other.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I think this is down to the usual issue: what are you willing
| to give up in exchange for linux ?
|
| A decade ago you'd need to give up high DPI screens and capable
| laptops for linux. Today it's either the mac ecosystem with the
| iOS dev tools, or the Windows compatible newer form factors
| and/or the games/VR ecosystem.
|
| Apple will do what helps Apple, and Microsoft will do what
| serves Microsoft. Does a pure linux experience effectively
| serve you in your day to day work ? If yes, lucky you, it's
| still "no" fo many of us.
| ixwt wrote:
| Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Ummm, Github runs on Git. So any feature supported by git will
| work work with any client other than the official windows
| client.
|
| Vscode is a text editor/IDE, it has bajillion alternatives,
| again unless MS doesn't allow code not written in Vscode to
| GitHub, which is a suicide anyway. There is Bitbucket or Gitlab
| to fork to.
|
| WSL, is awesome, because Linux is not game friendly, yeah yeah
| proton blah blah. I own a steam deck I know how it works and
| for a casual user Linux gaming just isn't there unless you want
| to tinker a lot. Then there are products like Photoshop
| replacements for which Linux is sub par, no GIMP is not
| alternative, it's entirely different. But nothing is stopping
| other users to switch to Linux unless edge/windows 11
| blackholes insert_your_favorite_linux.com. WSL just clicked for
| a reason.
|
| MS as a company will fight for market share, no company after a
| certain size is moral, it's "free market" as US defines it.
| Change laws not companies. Regulate not ask nice. Feels like EU
| knows this and at least tries to twist the arms of companies
| where as in US it's seen as infringement of freedom.
|
| Ms gobbling up dev community is fear mongering towards the
| wrong entity.
| kps wrote:
| I suspect VSCode is a baited hook. Get enough developers
| dependent on it, then degrade it on Linux, and offer WSL as
| _close enough_ to have people switch their OS rather than their
| editor. With developers on Windows, cloud follows.
| scrollaway wrote:
| Linux desktop is such small fish to Microsoft it would be
| ridiculous for them to focus on it as competitor right now.
|
| If experience gets degraded it's because of limited testing,
| not malicious intent.
|
| It's like Oracle suddenly deciding that their greatest
| competitor is sqlite. The two live in different worlds.
| kps wrote:
| It's not about developer machines, it's about servers.
| There are are a lot of people who want to run the same OS,
| and even the same processor architecture, on their
| development and deployment machines. (I've almost always
| worked in a cross-compilation world, so this doesn't make a
| lot of sense to me, but whenever the topic of ARM or RISC-V
| machines comes up here, it gets a lot of attention.)
| martinald wrote:
| But loads of people develop on Windows and deploy on
| Linux. I would say that is the 'default' approach now for
| even Microsoft .net core apps; given how supported docker
| is, and the docker containers run linux?
| weberer wrote:
| They've already been doing this with Teams. Their native
| Linux client has less features, like screen blurring, or
| being able to view more than 4 users at a time. Thankfully
| you can get around this by using the web version, but who
| knows how long it will be until they do some user-agent
| shenanigans to mess with you again.
| anaganisk wrote:
| WSL is a literal VM now, that runs based on Hyper-V afaik, if
| Vscode degrades on Linux, I'm just not sure how it won't
| affect WSL too. Whatever happened to using vim,emacs,
| intelliJ, or tons of other Vscode forks. Vscode is not the
| baited hook, it's the exclusive integrations (extensions)
| like remote containers, remote containers etc that are nice
| to have features not workflow breaking stuff.
| eptcyka wrote:
| VSCode runs well on host and just uses SSH to have a remote
| Dev env in the Linux VM. At this point, a MS advocate might
| argue that we don't even need vscode to run on Linux at
| all.
|
| I think their next push won't be against Foss people, but
| to get people on the cloud so they get a recurring revenue
| stream and their customers are hooked deeper still.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Probably works in the US, but their biggest user bases
| will just switch to another editor. The user bases are
| coders from China, India and other developing nations.
| You have no idea how religiously people hate
| paid/recurring subscription software over there.
| npteljes wrote:
| The PWA version of Teams also doesn't open links in the default
| browser. Very annoying having to right click, copy, right click,
| paste and go for every single one of them.
| yrro wrote:
| Oh, I thought this was a decision made by my IT department.
| nstart wrote:
| Urgh. Did they forget the lessons of the Ballmer era that forcing
| choices doesn't give more usage. It's making sure you meet
| people's choices where they are. That was the big change that
| seemed to be in the air when Satya took over. Not entirely sure
| what is happening here.
| [deleted]
| wkat4242 wrote:
| It does give more usage by their own measurements so some
| internal VP gets to post themselves on the back and cash some
| bonus. While deprecating the image of the company overall.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Is that EU "Microsoft must give users a choice between web
| browsers" court decision completely expired now, or does that
| perhaps only relate to the OS itself and not apps?
| andylynch wrote:
| That consent decree has expired (in 2011?! Im getting old).
| oaiey wrote:
| Am I the only one who sees the technical aspect here: They
| literally write in this article that this is about embedding web
| pages next to the chat/email/whatever. That means in-memory over
| contracted hosting api etc. When I would own, e.g. MS Teams or
| Outlook, the hell I would love to have a dependency on the
| internal Firefox hosting API which can break any other day (just
| a example ... firefox is cool) or introducing unwanted side
| behavior.
|
| Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of
| documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset.
| Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make
| this a horrible thing to manage. Same also goes for App Store
| deploy to desktop: a stable html/css/js SDK is needed there as
| well.
|
| I would absolutely hate Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but
| this thing, IMHO, it is not. There are better example (e.g. what
| they do with VS Code or the .NET Debugger/HotReload) then this
| concrete case.
| kortex wrote:
| I hate this pattern, even if it's not monopolistic. If I want
| to open a link, I want it to go to _my_ browser, not some
| embedded pane. It completely breaks my workflow. I can 't
| bookmark, use password managers, any of my extensions.
|
| > Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of
| documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset.
| Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will
| make this a horrible thing to manage.
|
| Once again, MS with the browser balkanization. MS is on all the
| consortia, they can push for browser standards too.
| coffeeling wrote:
| It won't go to an embedded pane. What they're doing is this:
| Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is
| Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook,
| the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook
| sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have
| context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the
| dark pattern forcing it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the
| link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook
| sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have
| context. It's not a bad feature at all
|
| Maybe, but if I have the Outlook app, a browser, and a
| windowing desktop environment, it seems a little
| superfluous.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Yes. As a counterpoint, people are also absurdly tech
| illiterate.
| grishka wrote:
| How about only enabling this functionality when Edge is the
| user's default browser? We somehow managed without it for
| several decades.
|
| Force-opening another browser despite user-configured defaults
| is utterly disrespectful to the user. You're trying to frame it
| as something helpful but it's not helpful in any way
| whatsoever. It interferes with the user getting their job done
| using a tool you made.
| thatnerdyguy wrote:
| This is the correct take that should be at the top. They aren't
| opening the links in Edge, they are opening the links in an
| embedded window implemented using Edge.
| coffeeling wrote:
| As far as I can tell, what they're doing is this: Edge
| recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is
| Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook,
| the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook
| sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have
| context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the
| dark pattern forcing it.
| lozenge wrote:
| It's not an embedded window.
| lozenge wrote:
| The behaviour the user wants is to open a link. The idea of
| displaying the email again beside the webpage is valuable, but
| to the user their preferred browser is more valuable.
| Realistically, they already have their browser open, if they do
| anything other than read and close the web page their browsing
| is now split across two browsers without rhyme or reason. Say
| they switch to Excel and need to switch back to the webpage to
| double check something, it'll immediately be "oh, this one page
| is open in Edge, not Chrome where I first looked".
| maxerickson wrote:
| Aren't you sort of saying that it's okay because they have a
| vision where you use their products for everything? Hard to
| tickle that out from antitrust, no?
|
| The worst thing about the integration is that their safelink
| checker thing is slow as hell.
| can16358p wrote:
| The more childish MSFT plays, the more I love remembering
| ditching almost anything from Microsoft and never recommending
| anything Microsoft (other than Vscode) to anyone ever again.
|
| The more they act bizzare like this, the more they deserve to
| lose it all.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Whatever WinDev/DevDiv earns in developer points, marketing and
| sales kill it.
| jug wrote:
| It's not by force because there is a new option in the latest
| Outlook but this is still a dirty move because MS could just as
| well have simply rolled with the system default browser rather
| than let key applications have their own setting that just
| happens to default to Edge... It's obvious what Microsoft are
| doing here and how this new option is a preemptive defense.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Yes it's a passive aggressive way to get Edge's numbers up. You
| have to take action to make it obey your previously stated
| preference.
| [deleted]
| albertopv wrote:
| My respect for Satya Nadella is decreasing every day
| blazespin wrote:
| Verge seems to be only one covering this. Any sysadmins here with
| 1st hand experience with the change?
| Hamuko wrote:
| Have I traveled between universes to a world where Microsoft
| hasn't faced an anti-trust judgement against them over Internet
| browsers?
|
| How does Microsoft think that they can get away with all of this
| shit?
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| Sadly, because they're getting away with all this shit.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > How does Microsoft think that they can get away with all of
| this shit?
|
| People keep buying it, so they can get away with almost
| anything.
| thih9 wrote:
| > To help increase productivity while working online, web links
| from Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts and Microsoft (MSA)
| accounts in the Outlook for Windows app will open in Microsoft
| Edge in a single view showing the opened link side-by-side with
| the email it came from.
|
| What is single view? Does anyone have a screenshot or a
| screencast of that UX in action?
| henry2023 wrote:
| Yikes
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| I don't like MSFT as much as anyone else but this does feel like
| a misattribution of blame.
|
| On Linux, the "default web browser" is part of the XDG
| specification and available under the settings key `default-web-
| browser`. In the absence of such a standard at the DE level in
| Windows, it seems reasonable to me that developers would have to
| maintain a hardcoded candidate list of web browsers and their
| likely executable paths in the filesystem. And yes, of course
| MSFT would put Edge on the top of this search list, the same
| Apple would do Safari, or Google would do Chrome.
| stevehawk wrote:
| I know it's hard for people to take the time to read the
| article when they could just be typing inaccurate responses..
| but from the article:
|
| > While this won't affect the default browser setting in
| Windows, it's yet another part of Microsoft 365 and Windows
| that totally ignores your default browser choice for links.
| Microsoft already does this with the Widgets system in Windows
| 11 and even the search experience, where you'll be forced into
| Edge if you click a link even if you have another browser set
| as default.
|
| The issue is that O365 is going to launch the link within the
| app (say Outlook) which is going to be running it on Edge,
| which lets them completely ignore whatever browser you would
| rather be using.
|
| It's like every app on iOS that is shipping with a safari
| wrapper so it doesn't have to actually launch safari and give
| up its snooping abilities.
| Rhedox wrote:
| Windows has a configurable default web browser too.
|
| If you click a link in any other application, it will open
| whatever browser you've set up as your default in the system
| settings. Microsoft just went out of their way to explicitly
| always open Edge.
| Zeratoss wrote:
| On Android Microsoft Outlook refused to open links in Chrome or
| Firefox and made me install Edge from the Playstore.
|
| I couldn't even copy the links to paste them manually, as my
| organization disabled this. This is not OK.
| jve wrote:
| This experience needs more clarification on how it works. So if I
| single click a link it won't open a browser but render content
| within Outlook App? Okay, what happens if I middle click? I
| should preferably get default browser.
|
| As to having Edge WebView2 engine in Outlook and no other - well,
| that is understandable [1]. Albeit Internet Explorer and Edge
| Legacy are still used by addins [2]. Actually it was about time
| to ditch the old IE Trident engine from Outlook and Office apps.
| On Mac it uses Safari with WKWebView[2]
|
| So is this outrage caused by just introducing a feature where
| links open within app and it happens to use whatever rendering
| engine is there for that purpose?
|
| [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/deployoffice/webview2-inst...
|
| [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-
| ins/concept...
|
| Edit: I re-read the announcment and it is actually something
| different than an engine - yeah, opens in Edge and presumably
| shows your email in Edge Sidebar. So nothing to do with outlook
| rendering engines.
| [deleted]
| Pbhaskal wrote:
| All search with hyperlinks from windows button opens in edge even
| though Firefox being the default browser in my machine.
| layer8 wrote:
| I'm guessing that Microsoft is unhappy that Edge still hasn't
| reached the same market share that IE still had when the first
| Edge version was released in 2015. The strategy of breaking away
| from the seemingly tainted "Internet Explorer" branding didn't
| quite work out.
| crumpled wrote:
| The reasoning they are alleging is so unsound: "so you don't have
| to context switch"
|
| Going from my email into a browser that doesn't have any of my
| history or autofill stuff is going to result in a butt-ton of
| context switching. It's almost worse that they don't set it as
| the default browser.
| crumpled wrote:
| I only occasionally use Edge on a machine where I use Firefox
| because it has similar API support as Chrome. (I only need it for
| like one web site). I've never needed Edge on any machine where I
| have Chrome, but I'm not installing chrome on any new system.
|
| M$FT wants me to install a dev build of Edge if I want to try
| Bing chat on Linux? Dream on. No Google or Microsoft applications
| on my Linux machine, thanks.
| abraae wrote:
| Funny, I had the same experience the other day as I tried to
| get me my first taste of some AI.
|
| Knew nothing so thought I'd start with Bing chat. Immediately
| blocked by the need to run an MS browser on my fedora machine,
| so Bing chat lost me instantly likely forever.
| crumpled wrote:
| FWIW, There is a Bing app for Android. I trust a .APK
| install/uninstall more than a .DEB or .MSI install/uninstall,
| thanks to the security sandbox.
| crumpled wrote:
| Wait you said Fedora. Replace .DEB with .RPM, obviously.
| isanjay wrote:
| I am thankful that I don't use Windows at home anymore.
|
| While I use Fedora, I believe most frustrated people will look to
| Apple ecosystem.
| felvid wrote:
| I permanently switched to Linux because Windows was acting as
| the owner of my computer. The change took some work, but it was
| well worth it. Now I'm using Mint with KDE. My regret is not
| having done this sooner. I'm satisfied.
| nalinidash wrote:
| Linux mint with KDE? Kinteresting.But you may get some
| compatibily issue.
|
| I suggest using their default DE, it will give you more
| streamlined experience.
| can16358p wrote:
| Yup. I'm on macOS and while Apple has its own weird and hostile
| behavior, it's still much better than Microsoft.
| katbyte wrote:
| What parts of macos do you consider hostile behaviour?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| A simple and fundamental bit: downgrading the OS is a PITA
| (is it even still possible ?), and dealing with the T2 side
| of it makes it a million times more complicated.
|
| On more pet peeves level of hostility:
|
| Still haven't found a clean way to get rid of Apple Music.
| Every single time I accidentally click the play button on
| my headphones it brings up Apple Music.
|
| 2FA verification being bound to Apple devices.
|
| Phasing out kext support under the security reasoning also
| means decent low level extensions are now a dream of the
| past. Stuff like Karabiner are notably worse when system
| perfs degrade, and I'm not holding my breath for linux
| partition mounting.
| hosteur wrote:
| This: https://sneak.berlin/20201112/your-computer-isnt-
| yours/
| acomjean wrote:
| Been using Linux more and more. Linux tends to have less of
| this nonsense and respects the user more.
| isanjay wrote:
| I would say Linux doesn't have this type of nonsense at all.
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Mmm, there's some of this stuff in Ubuntu, forcing people
| to use snaps.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Ubuntu also displays an advertisement every time I log
| in: Get cloud support with Ubuntu
| Advantage Cloud Guest:
| http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
| * Introducing Expanded Security Maintenance for
| Applications. Receive updates to over 25,000
| software packages with your Ubuntu Pro
| subscription. Free for personal use.
| https://ubuntu.com/pro Expanded Security
| Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
| isanjay wrote:
| My bad forgot about Ubuntu.
| manicennui wrote:
| I'm baffled by why MS still cares about their browser. It made
| sense in the IE 5/6 days when they were using it as a way to lock
| people into their platform, but that seems unlikely to happen
| again unless their browser offers some huge advantage (ActiveX
| support was arguably the advantage in the past). This seems
| especially unlikely given that they are irrelevant in the mobile
| space.
|
| Pushing Bing search as a replacement for Google search seems like
| a much smarter play with a much larger upside.
| balls187 wrote:
| I dislike applications ignoring my preferences.
|
| Like on ios, opening a link from the youtube app asks if I want
| to open the link in Chrome, despite not having chrome on my
| phone.
|
| Or that links inside Google Calendar first hit a google url
| before going to the actual url (Outlook has the same nonsense).
| cmsonger wrote:
| They are going to make me have a second computer. One for gaming.
| One more browsing. I'll just never open anything but Steam on my
| windows computer. Given how small and cheap Linux boxes can be, I
| guess I'll get on this pronto.
| eep_social wrote:
| Just buy a Steam Deck and run Steam on that?
| apexalpha wrote:
| I see Microsoft is again turning to the Foie Gras method of
| increasing engagement.
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| That's an amazing metaphor.
| mattferderer wrote:
| If Microsoft focused more on improving their browser & marketing
| it to every day people (outside of cramming ads in their OS) they
| might not need such dark patterns.
|
| Honestly, I like Edge more than Firefox & Chrome. The only thing
| I find missing is better default privacy features that Brave
| offers. I imagine you can get them with an extension. The Read
| Aloud & reader modes of Edge are fantastic. A majority of the
| rest is at par with Firefox & Chrome.
| cma wrote:
| Google does this too for their homescreen recommendation feed on
| android, even if your system browser is set to firefox, the links
| open in Chrome views (doesn't happen for Gmail and other apps).
| [deleted]
| stainablesteel wrote:
| i'd love to work at a place that has KDE installed as a default,
| even people with zero linux experience wouldn't have any problem
| picking it up
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Anyone tried installing Chrome on Windows recently? I got at
| least 3 "warnings" about how I didn't need chrome when I could
| just use Edge. Honestly, I imagine a lot of people who are less
| competent with computers just assume they are doing something
| wrong and give up.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Regulators need to slap these companies in the fingers again
| for these ugly practices, this time hard as hell. Otherwise
| it's just gonna get worse.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| The fact that they didn't in the '90s demonstrated to me that
| the regulators are basically toothless (worthless) in my
| opinion.
| nabilhat wrote:
| Windows is not unhackable. This one's easy. Deleting all
| instances of the msedge executable does not break Windows. Don't
| depend on settings, they're not reliable or comprehensive, and
| it's far more work to track them all down and maintain their
| value than it is to simply delete the problem. Some "features"
| will stop working. The article's example is one of many. Windows
| will now use your chosen applications if it can, or simply not if
| the only point was to push Edge.
|
| If you're stuck on Windows and have access to delete things from
| %programfiles% (and elsewhere), this is a zero risk thing to try!
| Every update reinstalls Edge, so the next time you have an update
| queued, delete Edge. If you don't like it, run the update and
| you're back to Edge Everywhere.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| Now do this, but at scale.
|
| I cannot fathom the number of support requests coming in as
| soon as some features stop working, in a fleet of _hundreds_.
| Dealing with thousands is a great recipe for disaster.
| user3939382 wrote:
| This is precisely what login scripts and GPO is designed for.
| Most people don't realize Windows is actually primarily
| designed as a corporate OS, home users are an afterthought.
| BYOD is a different story, but there are scenarios with
| thousands of desktops (i.e. VDI) where these kinds of changes
| are trivial.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| None of this prevents users from complaining about broken
| features.
| user3939382 wrote:
| It does because if you test your policies and scripts it
| shouldn't be broken. None of this negates the fact that
| we shouldn't have to be writing hacks to counteract MS's
| dark pattern games in the first place.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > It does because if you test your policies and scripts
| it shouldn't be broken.
|
| Removing Edge, like the previous poster suggested, _does_
| break certain features. Also, you seem to suggest that
| standard Windows deployments are permanently and
| continuously idempotent, but they definitely are not.
|
| The play is clear. Since this is a potential risky move,
| very few IT admins will try to remove Edge in the first
| place.
| user3939382 wrote:
| > Windows deployments are permanently and continuously
| idempotent, but they definitely are not.
|
| They can be. I've administered large networks personally
| where they are. If the GP comment would break something
| that's different, I agree. I'm commenting in the
| abstract, it is definitely possible to remove files or
| change the registry at scale. Windows is very good at
| that.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| > IT admins are angry
|
| Are they really? We dumped chrome for edge a year ago at the
| least...
| [deleted]
| swamp40 wrote:
| The pdf hijacking drives me crazy daily.
|
| They must have put an entire team on ways to re-enable Edge as
| default. And I'll bet they have some crazy logic to justify their
| hijacking. "Oh, you opened Outlook, that must mean you want all
| your pdfs opened in Edge again!"
| lostmsu wrote:
| I am starting to think the monopolistic behavior like this should
| get rewarded with jail time for all involved. Perhaps that would
| change their thinking.
| narenkeshav wrote:
| Nothing to be surprised. So typical of MSFT.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Ahhh MS became M$ again.
| kernal wrote:
| This isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to force users to
| use their products. Google should kneecap them by changing the
| Chromium license to prevent it from being used in commercial
| products without permission.
| angelomerte wrote:
| [flagged]
| cdme wrote:
| I've never understood why so many folks have been fine while they
| quietly gobbled up large parts of modern dev toolchains given
| their history.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| Because ease of use trumps all. People don't care about
| 'ethics' as long as they can install VSCode extensions with one
| click. Whatever you say about Microsoft their VSCode ecosystem
| is easy to use so people will use it and defend to the death
| their laziness under the guise of "My job is to provide value,
| not use my brain."
| tyingq wrote:
| I wonder if MSEdgeRedirect will work around this...
|
| https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect
| rozab wrote:
| The Google Chat desktop app (which is really just a chrome
| instance, but this is obscured from the user) only opens links in
| Chrome and ignores the system default. It's had this behaviour
| forever.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| Windows 11 does this too, and it's infuriating. If you click a
| link in settings, it will only open in Edge.
|
| As a Firefox user, I'd like to keep Edge as an alternative to
| check websites with. But this shady nonsense makes me want to
| burn every last bit off my system.
| szundi wrote:
| This makes me cry.
| nightpaws wrote:
| Starting to think MSFT have completely forgotten the days of the
| browser choice button. Wonder when we'll see that again...
| newjersey wrote:
| I just saw some clickbait article this week that said by some
| metric I don't remember, desktop safari moved to number two
| (presumably number one is Google Chrome) beating Microsoft
| Edge.
|
| I remember how reaction was relatively swift with Apple and
| book publishers' illegal collusion even though Apple was not a
| major player yet, or maybe I am just wrong on this which is
| possible, I didn't follow the news closely.
|
| In any case, I think Microsoft is doing a fine job by itself
| getting people turned off on edge by adding all sorts of
| bloatware that I doubt people will use edge as their only web
| browser.
| robocat wrote:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/02/safari-overtakes-
| edge-p...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35786080
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| My outlook is opening email links in their built-in Windows Mail
| app - which to me is the epitome of dumb and the one time I want
| them to handle it...
| skilled wrote:
| The problem Microsoft is creating for itself is that with these
| kind of antics, they will _never_ land any developers using their
| browser. That's hundreds of millions of users they're spitting in
| the face directly.
|
| Second, them constantly being in the news about peddling the Bing
| search engine also doesn't help. Most people like and prefer
| Google (and when I say most, I mean the 95% percentile), so if
| they read news like, "Microsoft is showing Bing ads on Google
| pages" - you can rest assured nobody is going to use Edge because
| at the back of they minds they will be thinking, "Hmm, does this
| mean my Google experience will be disturbed with this browser?".
|
| I think I lost some gray matter just typing that out and
| reflecting on how stupid Microsoft is.
| hnbad wrote:
| Apparently I'm not a developer as I've been using the new Edge
| ever since moving to Windows a few years ago when WSL came
| around. It's actually a remarkably good browser and at this
| point I prefer it over Chrome (in part because I'm already
| using Windows so Microsoft telemetry is a given and Google's is
| extra).
|
| It is however a shame that Microsoft keeps insisting to shoot
| itself in the foot. There's a very developer-friendly and
| professional and sleek side of Microsoft that is constantly
| sabotaged by the "used car salesman" side of the company that
| insists on adding noise like Microsoft Rewards to Edge or Candy
| Crush to Start.
| Spivak wrote:
| > they will _never_ land any developers using their browser
|
| I honestly don't think they care. They get the benefit of all
| the work devs do to support Chrome for free and get the much
| more lucrative "regular user" market.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Teams is just odd about wanting to do things in its bubble. For
| example if you click a pdf file it opens a preview. Then you
| click download button on the preview and you get a Teams specific
| notification (which has multiple layering and positioning issues
| compared to native notification) with a list of your recent
| downloads. Then you click the file and it opens a preview in
| teams again so you close than, go back to the downloads list,
| select to open it in a folder, then open the file and it actually
| opens in a real PDF reader.
|
| Bad enough in itself but that's only half of it. Instead of fix
| this behavior to just work the official path is to install a
| teams app for Adobe Acrobat that handles the redirection, but
| only for Acrobat. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoftteams/adobe-acrob...
| nnurmanov wrote:
| It sometimes impossible open Gmail on Edge browser, it resets to
| HTML version and I can't do anything. Last time I had to upgrade
| and restart Edge. Anyone has similar experience?
| isanjay wrote:
| If shit hits the fan and Microsoft gets sued for Anti Competitive
| behaviour (again) I suspect their main defence would be: Google
| doesn't even let users uninstall their apps and apple doesn't
| even let users install other browser.
| FeistySkink wrote:
| I don't use Windows, but can you fully uninstall Defender (or
| whatever it's called) in Windows 10/11, never have malicious
| software something scanner or updates run automatically?
| Karunamon wrote:
| Only with severe hacking and/or enterprise management via
| group policy.
| dubcanada wrote:
| By uninstall their apps I assume you mean play service? In
| which case you can you just need root. Same as you can't
| uninstall core Microsoft services.
|
| Apple not allowing other browsers is a bit much...
| isanjay wrote:
| I can't uninstall Google apps in my Android phone YouTube,
| Gmail etc.
| aembleton wrote:
| Have you rooted it?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Rooting a phone will lock you out of most financial and
| secure NFC applications.
|
| It can be a no brainer depending on your life style (I
| mean, some people are trying to get back to dumb phones,
| so why not), I personally see it as big nope.
| isanjay wrote:
| No but rooting is not straight forward is it ?
| worrycue wrote:
| > Apple not allowing other browsers is a bit much...
|
| Apple is paranoid about being dependent on other companies.
| If Chrome becomes a "must have" Google will have leverage
| over them by threatening to pull Chrome from the iPhone.
|
| They have been burned badly before:
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
|
| Instead of letting that happen, they use the iPhone's market
| share to push an alternative they control and pressure
| developers to support it (with its market share).
|
| Google is already using such tactics against Android phone
| makers. They keep them in line by threatening to not license
| them their services.
| devsda wrote:
| > He (Gates) knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of
| Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew
| Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying
| it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it.
|
| Not exactly EEE, but I see where the inspiration comes
| from. I always thought the mistrust of MSFT in the
| community started mainly because of how it pushed IE and
| its Windows OEM licensing terms, but it goes far beyond
| that.
| chakintosh wrote:
| Microsoft is shoving their software down people's throats with
| impunity. Just yesterday I had to install VS Code for a
| Homebridge integration, and out of nowhere they slapped a Bing
| search bar bang in the middle of the desktop.
| tehbeard wrote:
| The bing search bar is from an Edge update via windows updates
| as I understand.
|
| Still unjustifiable, along with the mess they made of changing
| default apps/browsers in Win 11.
| chakintosh wrote:
| Yep, that should be it, because among the dependencies there
| were a couple Windows updates.
| can16358p wrote:
| I hate Microsoft though I highly doubt that the Bing search bar
| came from a Vscode installation.
|
| Are you sure it is the case?
| chakintosh wrote:
| The dependences I was installing were for a plugin to control
| Xiaomi hygrometer through Homebridge to be able to use it in
| HomeKit. Among those packages there was VS Code (for some
| reason) some C++ redists, Python and some updates from
| Microsoft as well. But I can confirm the bar was official and
| from Microsoft.
|
| Upon uninstalling, those dependencies, the bar never appeared
| again.
| hnbad wrote:
| "bar" is an overstatement if you like me were reading that as
| one of those early 2000s era browser toolbars. A recent Edge
| update added a fairly large and persistent Bing icon to the
| right end of the browser's menu bar. It uses a speech bubble
| design and is likely part of the push for AI chat powered
| Bing search. It's obnoxious that you can't hide it but it's
| more of an eyesore than an actual problem.
| coffeeling wrote:
| You can hide it. Settings->Sidebar->Discover
| aaaronic wrote:
| Finally! It was only hidable via a registry hack when it
| first came out.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Your fault for using Microsoft products.
| chakintosh wrote:
| I usually go overboard with uninstalling anything related to
| Microsoft on my Windows installs (bar the OS obviously), but
| this time, I didn't have a say, the plugin required that.
| linuxdaemon wrote:
| I had been using Swiftkey on my iPhone and in the middle of
| typing something, my keys disappear and is replaced with, what
| is effectively, an ad to use "Microsoft Speech Recognition".
| Extremely annoying to be in the middle of typing something and
| having to say "no thanks" to extra MS crap they are trying to
| shove onto you.
|
| Previously, they also added a Bing AI button to the keyboard,
| but they did actually make a setting to disable that.
|
| Edit: Upon mentioning this to a coworker and digging into this
| a bit more, it may have been that I accidentally clicked the
| microphone to bring up that screen, and that it didn't target
| an ad. I'm not quite sure what happened though, so I'm leaving
| my comment as is :)
| croes wrote:
| Why not VS Codium?
| lifty wrote:
| Is there any usability difference between the two?
| npteljes wrote:
| VS Codium and other forks don't (maybe can't) use the
| official VSCode extension market. Because a lot of
| goodness, like the ability to refactor and debug PHP, is
| coming from the extensions and the extension ecosystem, it
| can be a big deal.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| However, one can still add that marketplace, if one wants
| to do so. So people could still have access to the same
| extensions (which might be a privacy and telemetry or
| spyware risk), but at least not have the in-built
| telemetry.
| npteljes wrote:
| That's good to know! I knew that MS forbids it, but it
| turns out that it's possible to still use the official
| Marketplace. Here's how:
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#
| how...
| easton wrote:
| From a random VSCode SSH session I have open:
|
| > Found running server...
|
| >
|
| > *
|
| > * Visual Studio Code Server
|
| > *
|
| > * By using the software, you agree to
|
| > * the Visual Studio Code Server License Terms
| (https://aka.ms/vscode-server-license) and
|
| > * the Microsoft Privacy Statement
| (https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/privacystatement).
|
| > *
|
| >
|
| Many of the interesting extensions (Microsoft's language
| plugins, the remote extension pack, the .NET debugger)
| are licensed only for use with Visual Studio Code. Even
| if you hook into the VSCode marketplace, they could sue.
| They probably won't unless you're rehosting VSCode
| externally or something, but the risk is something most
| companies probably don't want to take when the software
| is free as in beer anyway for the "real" builds. (And if
| you're telemetry sensitive... just block the domains? I
| know, easier said than done, but you can do it.)
| smcl wrote:
| There was something about some extensions (for debugging?)
| not working in Codium
| lozenge wrote:
| Initially you just didn't get Settings Sync as it uses a
| Microsoft account and you had to use a different extensions
| gallery (but the MS one still lets you download extensions
| as a file to install into Codium). Nowadays you also lose
| Remote Development, Codespaces, Pylance, some C# features,
| and various other MS authored extensions.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Not answering for the GP:
|
| There are so many people out there, who should know better,
| or even do know better. Yet, for whatever reason install VS
| Code instead of VS Codium. Even when you inform people about
| the existence of VS Codium, they still don't move and keep
| using VS Code. It is like they do not even care at all.
|
| That this is even allowed to happen in organizations is
| already an oversight. It should not even be allowed to
| install VS Code on organization machines or use it to ever
| view or work on the code of an organization.
|
| To me it looks very unprofessional. It is like a shiny toy
| has been dangled in front of their eyes and they reach for
| it, never willing to let go of it, even when they are being
| told that there is telemetry and non-reproducible builds and
| whatever other mistreatment of them as useds. Like children
| they stick to their shiny toy, even if they could have the
| same features, same UI, just without built in telemetry. (And
| they can still install any extensions they want later, if
| they trust that extension or marketplace of extensions.) It
| is very similar to people installing Chrome instead of
| Ungoogled Chromium. I have personally experienced how
| uninformed people at a university went wide-eyed, thinking I
| was talking crazy stuff, when I told them that it should not
| be installed on university computers, since it is spyware.
|
| I wish I could get people to get off their behinds and
| improve the situation. But it is of course very difficult to
| always create awareness and people are so damn ignorant.
| Often I am not even suggesting, that they should switch to
| free software tools yet. They could literally have the same
| experience, but no, most of the time you cannot tell them
| anything and they continue to take us with them into dystopia
| of our own making as a society with collective uninformedness
| and ignorance.
| aflag wrote:
| Can you use all extensions available for vs code in vs
| codium? I thought the best ones, provided by ms, were vs
| code only.
| sphars wrote:
| Some extensions by Microsoft are proprietary (such as
| their C# debugger and C++ extension) and can only be used
| with VSCode. For other extensions, you may be able to use
| them. See the docs at https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodiu
| m/blob/master/DOCS.md#ext...
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > there is telemetry
|
| VSCode telemetry can be fully disabled.
|
| > and non-reproducible builds
|
| Who cares? Most users don't need a reproducible build of
| software they want to use, they need working software.
|
| > and whatever other mistreatment of them as useds.
|
| Calling people "useds" isn't going to help your case.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| > VSCode telemetry can be fully disabled.
|
| Well, how do you know that? How do you verify, that all
| telemetry is really turned off, without being able to
| reproduce the build? How many people truly turn it off
| after install? How do you know whether there are any
| other unwanted parts in the software you just installed?
| What about the next update? Do you want to run a package
| sniffer after each update, over the course of a month or
| so, checking all traffic in detail, to be sure that it
| only ever communicates to the outside world, when there
| was a justified purpose?
|
| You are giving away sovereignty of your own
| device/machine.
|
| > Who cares? Most users don't need a reproducible build
| of software they want to use, they need working software.
|
| It it this kind of mentality that is the problem. Your
| "who cares" is not going to fly, because it leads right
| into the abyss of surveillance and spyware. "who cares"
| is the basis for not being informed about ones tech
| choices. The basis for not being aware of issues
| regarding privacy. At a properly managed software making
| company it would also result in you being told, that it
| is part of your job to care. To answer the question, if
| there was any question: I care. Informed people care.
| People with ideals care.
|
| The issue with not caring is also, that organizations
| will draw the wrong conclusions. They might impose rules,
| which force me to use some tool I do not want to use,
| simply because "everyone is OK with it", while those
| people all don't even care. If they don't care, they
| should not get a say in the matter and should not be a
| decision basis or a point of reasoning for making a
| decision. This is how the collective uninformedness and
| carelessness results in bad decisions. Basically the
| majority drags down the minority, for the worse of all of
| us.
|
| > Calling people "useds" isn't going to help your case.
|
| Well, that is what we are, when we allow ourselves to be
| spied on. They use us and our data to drive data mining,
| profiling and ultimately profits. Besides, I wouldn't
| throw it into faces in 1-on-1 conversations, for the sake
| of a constructive conversation, even if it is the truth,
| because it runs the risk of the other person (a) not even
| understanding what it means, (b) thinking they misheard
| and replace with "users", and (c) risking them to be
| offended and turning deaf.
| [deleted]
| Kwpolska wrote:
| How do you verify that VSCodium has no hidden telemetry
| or other spyware features? Do you simply trust the
| anonymous people behind it?
|
| If you build it yourself, how do you verify that there is
| no spyware and no new spyware is added on every update?
| Do you have the energy to read every single new commit?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I am not using VS Codium myself (nor VS Code), but if I
| was using it, then yes, I would trust those people more
| than MS. For 2 reasons: MS people are working for MS, so
| at some point in their lives they must have made the
| decision, that working for MS is acceptable, with all the
| history MS has. The second reason is, that MS people
| built in the telemetry in the first place, and for a
| reason, so they have no incentive to remove or disable
| it, while others might.
|
| A having a reproducible build means, that the hidden
| telemetry would need to be hidden in the publicly
| available code. Whereas telemetry in VS Code can be
| bundled in and no one would ever see that code, except
| for MS. If I was using it, I might actually, in a
| motivated night, look at the code and try to grasp the
| general picture of where goes what. Or perhaps see the
| diff between VS Code code and VS Codium code, to see,
| whether they added anything and from where they removed
| things.
| [deleted]
| mxuribe wrote:
| I can't believe i'm about to suggest this...
|
| But, why doesn't Firefox start trying to curry the favor of large
| enterprises? By this, i mean, that maybe firefox could make a
| campaign to reach out to enterprise on how good FF could be for
| the enterprise...In essence try to win the hearts and minds of
| both IT admins and their senior leaders in the enterprise!?!
| (Instead of doing all manner of distractive efforts that may not
| be core to FF's web browser.)
|
| Yes, i know there is the FireFox ESR edition which some
| enterporises use, and yes, this might mean that FF devs might
| need to build up some added features to specifically help
| enterprises better manage profiles for users, etc...but, at
| least, Mozilla won;t be trying to shove things like Edge down
| users' throats. At the very least it would help diverse things if
| more Windows OS installations at large enterprises were a healthy
| mix of Chrom, Edge, and Firefox...
|
| /end-of-rant
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Large enterprises means, the people deciding what goes on the
| work machines aren't the people using them. And they'll have
| incentives that are fundamentally different from their users
| (MS offering a bundle price for all their service will help
| them more than firefox being cheaper to administer for
| instance)
| rvz wrote:
| Because they can do that. No surprises there and as I said
| before, Microsoft has not 'changed' as the methods are different
| but the strategy has always been the same and they have gotten
| very clever over the decades.
|
| As long as their stock goes up, techies are always last place.
| zuminator wrote:
| I wonder how many people who switched away from Windows for good
| actually wrote to Microsoft and informed them, "Hi I'm so-and-so
| lead developer for XYZ, and I and my entire team switched over to
| the Apple stack because your latest dark patters shenanigans were
| just the last straw."
|
| Corporations are like unhousebroken pets. Unless you rub their
| faces in the poop they won't know why you're upset they shit on
| the carpet.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the
| obvious thing here:
|
| Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could
| literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the
| experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark
| patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were
| competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to
| think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and
| users, because two people can play this game. I don't get
| Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great
| company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate
| software house who only manages to keep users through dark
| patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given
| up on making products which people enjoy to use?
| modo_mario wrote:
| >Have they just become
|
| Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed
| the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt
| like bait to me. They still tried to force trough their shitty
| open document format, still regularly pull layers of small
| anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous
| enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust
| they try to create but enough for me to be consistently
| reminded that generally their incentives and goals run counter
| to what I'd prefer.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| The whole stack of .NET Core, WSL 1/2, Windows Terminal, and
| Visual Studio Code has been an effort to keep Windows
| relevant as a development environment for web apps. Nothing
| more. It was desperation, but well done. Given their history,
| I'm quite sure that many people in their ranks pinched their
| noses at being forced into these moves, but the PR department
| did fine work in spinning this as a "kinder, gentler"
| Microsoft. The people who haven't been around since the 90's
| took the bait, but organizations don't change like that. Old
| timers are still there (looking at you, Brad Smith), and
| people who have left have invariably been replaced by similar
| people. That's how hiring works.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| > Were they ever different tho?
|
| According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and
| they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and
| Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace
| open source now" argument:
|
| * their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous
| attempt to discredit their competition that took over a
| _decade_
|
| * the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray
| patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu
| and other spyware with settings that reset after random
| upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS
|
| * if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on
| kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V
| etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux
| as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead,
| in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid
| problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize
| an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its
| boot menu.
|
| Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the
| changes are just superficial.
|
| *
| nottorp wrote:
| > According to many people on HN, they changed completely,
| and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer
| and Gates.
|
| Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?
|
| > Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first
| to avoid problems.
|
| You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put
| Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a
| separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux
| install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to
| install Windows?
| 0x457 wrote:
| I have rEFInd installed on window's EFI partition, and it
| boots either windows or linux (on separate drive though).
| It's been like that since skylake came out, and I never
| had issues with it.
|
| As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the
| same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues.
| If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing
| it.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to
| boot automatically. It won't mess with secureboot keys or
| anything. In my case, I removed the pc's default ones and
| installed my own and signed ms's key with mine. It works
| fine.
| nottorp wrote:
| > In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to
| boot automatically.
|
| In UEFI? If I have the OSes on separate physical disks
| I'm planning to use the bios to select what boots.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| There's still a "default", at least on my PC.
|
| But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between
| windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi
| partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated
| bootloader).
|
| If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed
| after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list
| and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it
| doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big"
| updates.
| speeder wrote:
| I had OSes on separate disks. Win7 and Arch, used UEFI to
| choose who to boot.
|
| Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux
| boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it
| wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux
| em-bee wrote:
| my understanding is that within microsoft there are different
| factions competing with each other for i don't know what,
| dominance maybe. it kind of makes sense since microsoft has
| several different strong products that can stand on their own
| (unlike google whose main income is from advertising so
| really all google products subsume to that), and some of
| these factions may well genuinely love FOSS.
| ourmandave wrote:
| They're FOSS friendly because they don't have a choice.
|
| They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in.
| Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees,
| becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that
| hosts a lot of open projects.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| You may enjoy these org charts:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonke
| r...
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become
| a great company?
|
| That might be their problem. They _are_ a great company. Where
| do they go from there?
| pjmlp wrote:
| They surely do, one of the reasons why Windows Phone failed to
| gain adoption was how Google blocked access to their apps from
| Windows Phone.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| But they didn't. There were PWAs of the most popular Google
| products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.
|
| Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs. Outlook didn't get
| an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to
| arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-calls-out-google-
| po...
| joshuaissac wrote:
| > There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that
| worked just fine in Windows Phone.
|
| No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time.
| User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google
| properties with Windows Phone IE.
|
| Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native
| YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be
| done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube
| apps for Android and iOS were native.
|
| > Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs. Outlook didn't
| get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few
| years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
|
| Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get
| degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the
| same with theirs.
| vel0city wrote:
| Google did user agent detection and would actively redirect
| Windows Phone users to degraded experience versions of
| things like YouTube and Maps even if the full versions
| would work fine.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > ... even if the full versions would work fine
|
| That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer
| didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction,
| until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of
| Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.
|
| Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out
| video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]
|
| It looks to me that the pain was self inflicted.
|
| [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-
| phone-8-1-fe...
|
| [1] http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24422_T
| hestate...
| vel0city wrote:
| I'm speaking from my own experiences. Proxying the
| requests to rewrite the user agent, the full mobile
| version of YouTube and Maps worked properly. Without
| rewriting the user agent I would be redirected to the
| minimal versions of the websites which had poor
| experiences.
| conductr wrote:
| I think it never broke past 5% of smart phone market. If this
| was a reason, I never heard. I feel like most people just
| were interested in something else and never even really
| considered it as an alternative.
| pjmlp wrote:
| "Why is Google blocking Windows Phone's YouTube app?"
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474516/why-is-
| google-...
| happythebob wrote:
| I can't believe this is the top comment on hacker news. Some of
| the replies are already covered but as much as I use my Android
| phone and Microsoft at work, I have never had anything other
| than Outlook 365 on Android. How is Google going to "literally
| destroy Microsoft"?
|
| And then there's no need to comment on the Apple portion in
| your comment, considering the critique is that Microsoft isn't
| playing nice because they try to default to Edge.
| hannob wrote:
| > Have they just become content to be an old corporate software
| house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and
| anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making
| products which people enjoy to use?
|
| I mean... yes. But that happened in the late 90s. Hasn't
| changed since then.
| golemotron wrote:
| The big difference is that Google and Apple are largely in the
| consumer space. MS, with Teams, is in the enterprise space
| where user experience isn't part of the buy decision.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| If CEOs, CTOs, CFOs all start having annoying issues with
| Teams, Office, Azure, etc. on their MacBooks and iPhones then
| you can bet your right arm on it that it will affect
| corporate buying decisions.
|
| Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to
| switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently
| better than another.
| GartzenDeHaes wrote:
| Things can change fast when executives start complaining
| about the software the IT department is making them use.
| golemotron wrote:
| I think Teams would be much better if that was the dynamic.
| KETpXDDzR wrote:
| There's even a Simpsons episode about it:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TANRRhdncHc
| neilv wrote:
| Google and Apple have to be careful not to sink to the
| historical levels of that other company.
|
| One nice thing about the last decade or so is that other
| company has had to rein in its historical behavior, and also
| care about PR a bit.
|
| We'll see how that plays out, given the increasing power that
| might come with the intimate relationship with OpenAI, and the
| frenzy of market interest around what's shipping there.
| ilyt wrote:
| > I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become
| a great company? Have they just become content to be an old
| corporate software house who only manages to keep users through
| dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have
| given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
|
| They were always that, thru entirety of their history they have
| used anticompetitive practices on any chance they could.
| criley2 wrote:
| > old corporate software house who only manages to keep users
| through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because
| they have given up on making products which people enjoy to
| use?
|
| I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with
| browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple
| forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured
| market they can brutally take advantage of. Even today, Apple
| has banned all browser competition on iOS, and only Safari is
| allowed to run. All competitors must just re-skin Safari to
| obey the monopolistic demands of Apple. Imagine if Microsoft
| banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we
| all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
|
| Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-
| competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
|
| But Microsoft, to me, barely has a drop of the anti-competitive
| evil of its competitors. Apple mints hundreds of billions by
| banning competitors, locking them out and charging 30% rent on
| their monopoly. Microsoft... just wants their re-skinned Google
| Browser to not die.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| One could argue that offering a walled garden from the outset
| is more honest than the Microsoft strategy of Embrace,
| Extend, Extinguish and ultimately the latter creates more of
| a monopolistic threat in practice since walled gardens almost
| definitionally can't capture most of the market.
| vetinari wrote:
| > Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It
| would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that
| and has for 10+ years.
|
| They tried; with different means, but they expected the same
| result. That's what the antitrust case was about.
|
| > Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and
| anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any
| more.
|
| While I have the same opinion as you wrt Apple behaviour,
| there is a difference: Apple doesn't have the market position
| like Microsoft did. You can function perfectly fine in
| society without any Apple product. That was not the case with
| Microsoft, they did everything they could so you had to use
| Microsoft system. Communicating with your bank or with
| government or public offices? Microsoft products were
| required. Apple has not such grip on the market and that
| makes the difference.
| AppleBananaPie wrote:
| I'm sure I'm biased but the old school pm culture at Microsoft
| is still alive and well. The new hires are forced to play the
| old stupid games of doing anything to get the metrics to show
| what they want in the short term and the cycle continues.
| Windows and Office both have this problem and I think will
| continue to until they get someone up top who's sole purpose is
| to root out this culture from middle management through low
| level execs.
|
| I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see
| only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)
| melling wrote:
| "Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to
| its competitors"
|
| They did decades ago in the last century. Embrace, extend,
| extinguish.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
| fredgrott wrote:
| Not entirely a correct narrative as both Edge, Safari and
| Chrome have had their own private link protocols embedded in
| their own browser products involving other dark patterns.
| charles_f wrote:
| > But they don't.
|
| What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari,
| the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you
| from collecting any sort of payment without passing through
| their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| "Microsoft" is not a person with emotions and desires. People
| too often anthropomorphize, and it is a natural thing to do
| imo, because we still think with human brains. Microsoft, like
| any other company, is a far more complex system than I think
| our brains are ever meant to comprehend, let alone create. Is
| it food to eat? A fire to warm up? Is it a leader to follow? A
| book to read?
|
| What even is Microsoft?
| chakintosh wrote:
| They aren't doing that not for the goodness of their hearts,
| but because Microsoft has them by the cojones when it comes to
| anything related to Cloud, OS used by millions of Android devs
| and productivity tools.
| dahauns wrote:
| >They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to
| hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and
| Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.
|
| Sorry, but Google _really_ isn 't a saint regarding degraded
| experience. The shenanigans around UX for example using Google
| services in Firefox have a long, well documented tradition.
| They just aren't as overt and clumsy with it as MS.
| malermeister wrote:
| I use a Firefox addon that spoofs the user agent for Google-
| owned sites so it delivers the Chrome version of things.
|
| Works without any issues and it's a much nicer product
| experience.
| kivihiinlane wrote:
| What is the name of this addon?
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| On Android, it's one of the very few allowed ones, Google
| Search Fixer[1].
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/android/addon/google-search...
| VHRanger wrote:
| tagging myself in here as well
| rocketbop wrote:
| You can favourite HN comments if you just want to come
| back to them.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| To clarify, since it's not obvious in the UI, you have to
| click the timestamp of the comment, and then you can
| favorite it.
| rocketbop wrote:
| Thanks, I should have mentioned that. A couple of
| features are hidden in the show comment view.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Damn, I've been here for years and never knew that you
| could favorite things!
| makiftasova wrote:
| afaik, pretty much any user-agent changer works. At least
| that's what one of my colleagues uses to join MS Teams
| meetings on Firefox. Simply switch your user-agent to
| Chrome, and it should do the trick.
| malermeister wrote:
| This is the one I use, i think:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-
| search...
|
| Afair there's also one for YouTube.
| VHRanger wrote:
| link?
| Avamander wrote:
| I'm not trying to excuse Google, but feature detection is
| really hard and browsers sometimes suck with their APIs.
|
| I just recently started using a modified version of the
| "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few
| extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites.
| With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the
| formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.
| dsr_ wrote:
| There's no excuse for not being able to read the user-
| agent strings of the top five browsers in the world,
| especially when 2 of them (at least) are your own code
| base.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Everything is hard if you don't want to do it.
| technology23 wrote:
| [dead]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| For a while downloading a lot of freeware would result in
| installing Chrome and setting it up as the default browser on
| Windows.
|
| Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to
| download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break
| for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed
| the issue).
| mrpopo wrote:
| Apple blocking iPhone browsers without Webkit (excluding
| Chrome and Firefox).
|
| Android not exactly making it easy to change the default
| browser for average users either tbh
|
| Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1118/
| dathinab wrote:
| yes on phones this has tradition to a point it started to
| got legislation involved
|
| but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least
| tried, and it wasn't a problem for years
|
| honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation,
| world wide
|
| and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging
| power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in
| monopoly (because with today markets you can have more
| power then a classical single market monopoly while not
| being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets
| you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a
| monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)
| refulgentis wrote:
| XKCD isn't relevant to the sentence before, as comic notes,
| it's about Apple.
|
| the "Android makes you tap something to change your default
| browser!" was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped
| spreading because it was generating backlash.
|
| Much like the "you have to confirm you enable sideloading!"
| alert in Android, it's not clear what people want
| otherwise, a confirmation isn't the same thing as making it
| difficult.
|
| I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it
| harder to have the real conversations needed to get things
| back on track
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > a confirmation isn't the same thing as making it
| difficult
|
| The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't
| accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to
| get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm
| before downloading each app. And then it will confirm
| before installing each app. And then it will confirm
| again because, well, I have no idea.
|
| One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult.
| Piles and piles of them is.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| Not entirely true on the latest version of Android. I'm
| not sure what the pattern is, but for most of the apps
| I've installed via Droidify, I don't have to confirm
| anything when installing updates.
| dehrmann wrote:
| My theory on this is it has something to do with battery
| life. I can't think of another reason they'd limit browser
| engines.
| zrobotics wrote:
| Apple has an ads unit, there have been multiple other
| times when they have shown that user privacy is a thing
| that really only applies to other companies.
| grishka wrote:
| Apple's reasoning is that browser engines need JIT to run
| JS with acceptable performance, but if they were to give
| apps JIT capabilities, that would significantly open up
| the attack surface.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Don't know if serious or not, but I'll bite.
|
| Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you
| needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's
| intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only.
| Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild
| grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser
| compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing
| people away from Macs.
|
| They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in
| the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts
| them in a similar position.
|
| Google has a slightly different issue, in that for
| instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser
| taking the android world by storm is nothing good for
| them.
| toyg wrote:
| Microsoft is actually the one reacting here. They were
| effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust
| cases; Apple and Google took advantage of that to build two
| walled gardens, which ended up dwarfing MS's own empire. It was
| inevitable that, sooner or later, MS would have gone "If this
| behaviour is now allowed, why should we not do it too?"
|
| This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices
| in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and
| Google for that. If you want something different, call your
| representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Apple is certainly a worthy competitor to the Microsoft
| empire, Google remains a cut below.
|
| >Monopolistic practices on mobile
|
| Most of my phones have shipped with Samsung Internet.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Simply put, people don't love Edge as much as they love
| Chrome. The browser bundled with Windows 11 is naturally
| Edge, but users who use Chrome install Chrome of their own
| volition, so forcing them to open links in Edge is extremely
| annoying.
| buran77 wrote:
| I doubt "love" for the software is involved here. I think
| many users believe Chrome is "the internet" just like they
| used to believe the Google search page was the internet, or
| Internet Explorer before that. This impression of Chrome
| was built on the fact that it's a solid browser but was
| enforced by Google with the same underhanded practices they
| applied for years.
|
| My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall,
| just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile
| devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for
| years, so people are used to that. The synergies between
| those devices and the Google services services makes it
| easy to stay and hard to leave.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's also the fact that as soon as you touch anything
| by Google you'll get nagged with adds and pop-up
| suggesting installing Chrome.
|
| Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!)
| option to install Chrome and make it the default browser.
| CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.
| nerdix wrote:
| People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome on a
| fresh Windows install. So I don't think anyone thinks
| that Chrome is the internet (that's actually something
| Chrome had to overcome when IE was dominant and installed
| by default).
|
| Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have
| been told and essentially trained to install a new
| browser if they want a good internet experience on
| Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a
| shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's
| why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It
| became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want
| to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early
| 2010s.
|
| Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a
| relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that
| the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not
| enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with
| Windows is crap" inertia right away.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I don't use either chrome or edge but why would I use a
| clone instead of the real thing?
|
| I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was
| a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with
| some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later
| scams.
| yason wrote:
| Writing a browser engine is a lot of unprofitable work
| just to get to harass your customers with popups, ads,
| and scams. Especially when you already wrote one and
| couldn't keep even that in pace with standards and the
| evolving web technologies.
|
| Taking an existing engine and building a malicious
| frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and
| scams has way better returns in comparison.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| In a corporate context, it's very different from Chrome.
|
| >It's more memory efficient in general
|
| >It supports the Edge Webview2 framework that MSoffice
| apps use further cutting memory use
|
| >It supports MDAG https://learn.mecrosoft.com/en-
| us/windows/security/threat-pr...
|
| To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see
| Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much
| of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled
| on a corporate network anyways.
| criddell wrote:
| > I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome
| was a good thing for adoption.
|
| It's all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft
| contingent that thinks it's the future or maybe they are
| just hedging, but for now it's important for stuff like
| Teams.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| Small correction: the new teams client (currently in
| preview) uses WebView2 (based on Edge/Chromium), not
| Electron
| JohnFen wrote:
| I'm disappointed that they're still going with a web-
| based thing, but maybe WebView2 will suck a little less
| than Electron. I'll take what I can get.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Edge was, initially, Chrome but degoogled and it had (and
| still has) a lot of great UI innovations, like a vertical
| tab strip that's just right. Their wide use of hovering
| menus that can be pinned to become sidebars is honestly
| good stuff.
|
| Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy
| than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the
| aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the
| world. The browser's never quite been free of dark
| patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of
| the more glaring examples).
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand
| new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power
| compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible
| with the modern web.
|
| Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it
| was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the
| user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS
| gave up and forked Chrome.
| JohnFen wrote:
| If that was the reason, surely it would have been quicker
| and easier to change the default user agent string
| themselves?
| halflings wrote:
| > why would I use a clone instead of the real thing
|
| Has nothing to do with why people don't use Edge (they
| still didn't use Edge when it was using a custom engine;
| same for IE before it).
|
| And it's only the techy minority that even knows Edge is
| built on top of Chromium.
| zyx321 wrote:
| People seem to have forgotten how Chrome captured the
| desktop market to begin with. For many many years it was
| effectively almost impossible to download freeware without
| accidentally installing Chrome. Sites like download.com and
| even sourceforge wrapped everything in custom installers
| that would automatically include free trial of an
| antivirus, maybe some adware, and Google Chrome, unless you
| were aware and clicked the secret hidden opt-out link that
| was almost the same color as the background.
| muro wrote:
| Every site doing chrome downloads without a clear opt out
| (or opt in, I don't remember) was demonetized, IIRC.
| Andrex wrote:
| Attributing Chrome's popularity to it being included in
| download.com bundles doesn't sound accurate at all. If
| anything, the "Download Chrome!" link on Google.com
| yielded far far more installations.
|
| Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after
| release when they finally added extensions and themes
| around 2010.
|
| People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap
| over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at
| the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained
| their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything
| they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made
| perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps
| were moving to.
|
| Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome
| accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-
| updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were
| great bets that were copied by everyone else.
|
| 1. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
| toyg wrote:
| As annoying as for Edge-loving people who then buy a mobile
| phone and are then forced to "open their links" in Safari
| or Chrome.
|
| But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people
| live on phones, and when they have to interact with
| desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their
| phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably,
| the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there
| is little or no choice in that world.
|
| The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi
| for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile
| world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the
| force of the State.
| nerdix wrote:
| You can set Edge as the default browser and links will
| open in Edge.
|
| You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed
| by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.
|
| Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows
| Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android
| is relatively open (certainly more open than any
| mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For
| instance, Microsoft added support for running Android
| Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to
| Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done
| completely without any involvement from Google. That is
| unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to
| say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but
| the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets
| pushed around here is baseless.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Android actually lets you live without even having a
| default browser. It's great since you can use multiple
| browsers in place of multiple browser profiles. Apps will
| just ask what browser to open the link in. It's great.
| Eavolution wrote:
| Granted I haven't used Chrome in years, but I find that
| firefox integrates remarkably well from phone to pc. The
| menu of open tabs on other devices is invaluable to me
| (although idk if Chrome has this too)
| Andrex wrote:
| > They were effectively forced to let the web be an open
| field by antitrust cases
|
| They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a
| factor until years after the fact.
|
| The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that
| MS "won" with IE ( _95%_ market share!) and then pretty much
| lost the stomach (or focus /budget/etc.) to advance the web
| in any way.
| mywittyname wrote:
| The specter of further anti-trust action still hung around.
| It's only been relatively recently that it has become
| apparent that the country's leadership is not interest in
| trust breaking anymore. But now Microsoft is playing
| catchup.
| gowld wrote:
| MS built a walled mobile garden too. Nobody bought into it.
| cptskippy wrote:
| You're operating under the assumption that Microsoft is the
| only one doing this.
|
| This sort of thing happens regularly on Android though it's
| perhaps more subtle. I don't know how many times I've had to
| set the default browser, photo viewer, pdf viewer, etc only to
| be prompted to choose how to open a file and Google's App is
| first in the list.
|
| They also implement features in their Apps to avoid your
| defaults: https://i.imgur.com/9nzpTPG.png
|
| Certain features like STT for the entire operating system
| require Google Assistant. And image search or real-time
| translation require the Google Search App to be installed. So
| you have to choose between being harassed by Assistant and
| Search prompts at ever turn, or disabling core OS features.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Apple does plenty of dark patterns. You are locked into their
| store, they decide what programs you can run on your phone,
| they decide what browser you can use, all the other browsers
| are actually just skinned safari.
| DrThunder wrote:
| How could they destroy MS? The majority of MS's market is
| enterprise stuff.
| Xeamek wrote:
| Google doesn't have nearly as much control over android as
| microsoft has over windows.
| maccard wrote:
| > They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to
| hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and
| Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
|
| I disagree here. Despite me using firefox on my android device
| and it being set to my default browser, many apps will still
| open in chrome (usually google apps - maps, gmail, etc) despite
| me explicitly asking it _not_ to do that. It's also not clear
| that it's using chrome, as it's the "generic" browser modal.
| The way that google services are bundled together on android
| and have limited interop (Samsung and Google Pay regularly
| fight with each other on my device for "who is the default
| payment method", and google is _not_ happy to not be my
| default).
|
| Google have been pushing manifest v3 despite massive
| objections, introducing undocumented "fair usage" limits [0],
| require third party cookies to use some of their services to
| download files (gmail, gdrive). Google are drowning in dark
| patterns.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135
| aembleton wrote:
| Links from Google maps and Gmail open in Firefox for me. I'm
| on android 13.
| hyperdimension wrote:
| Not OP and unsure what happened to that link, but:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135
| maccard wrote:
| Thanks, I botched pasting it.
| code_runner wrote:
| Microsoft's stock price over the last 10 years has soared
| consistently. They have a lot of admins at small/medium
| companies very very willfully and loyally locked in to their
| ecosystem.
|
| Microsoft does not care if they piss off most of these people
| because they not the ones signing the contracts and the lock-in
| is SO BAD that even if they piss off the right people, making
| any change is way more trouble than they are willing to deal
| with.
|
| There is an entire side of the tech industry with admins who
| only want to learn powershell and still think you can't "lock
| down" Linux and mac machines.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I would replace "learn powershell" with "click buttons in
| some wizard". I have rarely seen IT person that wants to
| "learn" something new or automate some process.
| partiallypro wrote:
| > But they don't.
|
| I mean, they actually do though. Apple and Google both do
| similar things, they just get less media coverage because they
| are seen as normal to the mobile ecosystem, while this seems
| abnormal because it's in a desktop environment. That's no
| excuse for Microsoft, I wish they'd stop doing some of this
| garbage, but to act like Apple and Google have clean hands is
| laughable.
| balls187 wrote:
| Google and Apple do utilize dark patterns, as does Samsung, and
| Dell, and pretty much every other major device manufacturer.
|
| Microsoft just really abused it bundling in IE and was
| penalized hard for it.
|
| These other players have learned to push the limits of anti-
| competitive behavior while maintaining a plausible defense
| against government action.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Yeah... Imagine if in iOS every link opened in Safari and the
| only alternative browsers allowed were reskins of Safari.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to
| hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and
| Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft
|
| How? I mean, how does a degraded experience on android cause
| people to abandon windows desktops?
|
| I just don't see the connection here: if Google, tomorrow,
| outright rejected any MSFT software on android phones, how does
| it hurt windows desktop deployment numbers? Maybe if everyone
| switched to Mac, but that would kill of android too...
|
| This is what a working monopoly looks like. We've seen before
| this exactly how much crap users would put up with on the
| desktop, _and still they didn 't abandon windows._
|
| There is nothing the mobile market can do that they haven't
| already tried to take windows market share.
|
| In fact, there is nothing that the mobile world can do to
| Windows users that is worse than what Microsoft did to them,
| and yet those users are still chugging along happily paying for
| Windows every year.
| [deleted]
| trinsic2 wrote:
| It feels kind of like the have been taken over by some other
| organization actually.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could
| literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade
| the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with
| dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
|
| They could not, because if they did that cartel suits would be
| opened within hours. I expect both the US and Europe have such
| suits ready to go just in case, and Microsoft (hypocritically)
| has _amicus_ briefs on standby.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Google literally forced MS to fork Chrome by degrading the
| experience.
| kjrose wrote:
| Are you totally unaware of the history of Microsoft all the way
| back to the 80s?
|
| Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom
| line. As long as they can increase revenues and market
| penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game
| since IE.
| datadeft wrote:
| > Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to
| its competitors
|
| The last 30 years of MS shows that they are not interested in
| the non-hostile approach
|
| Few things:
|
| - Microsoft Java Virtual Machine scandal
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor.
| ...
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| The precursor to .NET being born. :)
| pjmlp wrote:
| .NET events, P/Invoke and Forms were born as J++ events,
| J/Direct and WFC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Foundation_Classe
| s
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#The_WFC
| jgerrish wrote:
| Microsoft make a ton of products that are still great to use.
| Microsoft Flight Sim? No jokes, it's just good fun from what I
| hear. Their Visual Whatever IDEs? They built that by creating
| great things like the LSP.
|
| And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind
| of walled garden incentive mechanism.
|
| I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to
| Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded
| to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we
| get there, the journey, matters.
|
| Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that.
| Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that
| silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me
| towards a troll state.
|
| But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into
| something else.
|
| And I see that happening with other things I love too.
| jgerrish wrote:
| Sorry, just to add: Those new OSes and new languages and the
| entire growing ecosystem of computer engineering may be
| beautiful. And this statement can be viewed as throwing out
| the baby with the bathwater.
|
| But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns.
| And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to
| different outcomes afterwards.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| "forced Candy Crush ad tiles in the start menu" is all the
| answer you need to your questions.
|
| I wonder how much money this shameful bottom of the barrel
| company behaviour makes them.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It probably decreases revenue. Like the Edge "enagement"
| manipulation with Teams.
|
| Are there managers who has their pay tied to some KPI? I have
| such a hard time believing there is a from above decision to
| do all these user hostile changes turning their main product
| into a BS joke.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Apple _and_ Google own the mobile market together. There 's not
| one player that owns almost all of it like that did with
| Windows (and still do really).
|
| One is a healthy market, the other is not.
|
| And Android respects browser choice, iOS will soon be forced to
| in the EU with the new sideloading mandate.
| rhamzeh wrote:
| Both monopolies and duopolies are unhealthy, the only reason
| they're acting better in Europe because, as you said, they
| are being forced to.
| capableweb wrote:
| > Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to
| its competitors and users, because two people can play this
| game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to
| become a great company? Have they just become content to be an
| old corporate software house who only manages to keep users
| through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because
| they have given up on making products which people enjoy to
| use?
|
| You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything
| differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused
| 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
|
| Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still
| have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft
| EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of
| their own browser.
|
| Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one
| way, continues to act that very way still.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > have they no pride or desire to become a great company
|
| Yes. But their definition of those terms are stuck in the 90s
| cobbaut wrote:
| > Since when have they focused 100% on just building great
| products and competing fairly?
|
| iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from
| Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in
| the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products
| themselves these days?
| nick_kline wrote:
| Like all big companies, when something comes along that is
| growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might
| choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some
| of them they might spend lots of time and money building
| huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of
| them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL
| Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase
| product had a pretty nice sql language with stored
| procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far.
| It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new
| database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots
| of new things over time - new execution system, new query
| optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't
| have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a
| lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy
| it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Encarta 96 was incredible.
| therein wrote:
| Spent countless hours on it as a child. I didn't even
| really know English.
|
| "Flight mode" was a lovely curiosity at that time. Example
| from Encarta 98, but I thought 96 also had it.
|
| https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131
| fs111 wrote:
| 100% agree, but it has been a while since that came out...
| atlanta90210 wrote:
| "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"
| oldgradstudent wrote:
| Speaking as a Lotus Notes survivor, it would have been
| really helpful if had prevented lotus notes from running on
| windows as well.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Lotus notes was like the ultimate in write-only software.
| rilindo wrote:
| That is not accurate, incidentally.
|
| > "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in
| general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote
| before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of
| its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product
| I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days
| (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test
| with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS
| and fixed by Microsoft."
|
| > Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3
| who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped
| working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their
| reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their
| solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS
| upgrades?
|
| [0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint
| _done...
| tralarpa wrote:
| > They been doing this since the very creation of their own
| browser.
|
| Before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
| tanseydavid wrote:
| To me, this is the proof that the dark patterns are a
| result of corporate culture that stretches all the way back
| to the DOS days.
|
| They simply cannot resist the urge to cheat in this manner.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| > You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything
| differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused
| 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
|
| They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
|
| But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and
| Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the
| same incentives.
| capableweb wrote:
| > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
|
| Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading
| would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't
| start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of
| course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".
|
| > But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and
| Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the
| same incentives.
|
| I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a
| way for employees to feel better about what their
| colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the
| company, I'm doing great stuff".
|
| Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're
| doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack
| on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their
| days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can
| from their users.
| gtirloni wrote:
| We often look at companies as a single monolith but that
| isn't conductive to productive discussions.
|
| OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and
| granular one.
|
| One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic
| behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different
| units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a
| tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my
| part but I welcome the perspective.
| capableweb wrote:
| Maybe if they stopped trying to become monoliths, people
| would stop considering them as monoliths?
|
| What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want
| GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously
| trying to do everything, via a centralized organization
| which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want
| to become, a monolith.
|
| Regardless of what other people in the organization is
| doing, the organization as a whole is represented by
| everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads,
| cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one
| area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
| kbenson wrote:
| That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because
| one state does something you don't agree with. In a large
| organization different departments may do different
| things and have different incentives, and until they
| overstep too much may have quite a bit of autonomy.
|
| Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching
| plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably
| are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones
| are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large
| corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a
| cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which
| doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because
| one state does something you don't agree with.
|
| It's more like condemning all of the US because it has
| implemented a national policy that only one state really
| wanted.
|
| It doesn't matter that only one state wanted it. It's
| still national policy and thus fair game to criticize the
| entire nation for.
| cumshitpiss wrote:
| [dead]
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Even a monolith is made up of many atoms all sticking
| together.
|
| Just because your particular outcropping isn't coated in
| digital blood doesn't mean you're not part of the
| problem.
|
| If a company sent out two crews of people and one crew
| gave out flowers to strangers and the other crew punched
| little old lady's faces in, would you still crow about
| how you're only handing out flowers?
| Eisenstein wrote:
| A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics
| term. The term which means "tending to promote or assist"
| is 'conducive' with no 't', pronounced 'cundoosiv'.
|
| > Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A
| cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed
| conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to
| more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are
| often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others
| are conducive to consumer spending. Notice that conducive
| is almost always followed by to.
|
| * https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conducive
| gtirloni wrote:
| Thank you. English is not my first language so I
| appreciate the correction. TIL.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| Pedantry around the meaning of words with common stems is
| against the code of conduct. In other words, do Conduits
| not conduct water?
| Aeolun wrote:
| What the hell? They're separate words?
|
| How did I go at least half my life without knowing this.
| trzy wrote:
| Wait till you learn that "deprecated" and "depreciated"
| are different words, too.
| JohnFen wrote:
| But "flammable" and "inflammable" are the same. English
| is fun!!
| tester756 wrote:
| You really picked poor thing to try to bash on since .NET
| ecosystem is one of the most sanest out of all ecosystems
|
| Give me something as sane, coherent and friendly as .NET
| ecosystem for C and C++ and I would be willing to pay for
| that
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| The example is not .NET in general, but that specific
| event when Microsoft reneged on open development
| tooling[1]. For some people, that was the moment they
| stopped trusting "new Microsoft" to keep their word
| (though for me, it was when the Python language server
| was replaced with a DRM-locked, LSP-noncompliant one[2] a
| bit before that; unlike with .NET hot reload, they didn't
| backtrack there). I can think the company makes great
| open .NET tools and at the same time not trust them to
| close those down on a whim.
|
| Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of
| MIDL[3] went, by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s
| MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language
| grammar in the docs, because there _is_ no language
| grammar in the docs[4].)
|
| [1] https://dusted.codes/can-we-trust-microsoft-with-
| open-source and links there
|
| [2] https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/4
|
| [3] https://github.com/microsoft/xlang/pull/529
|
| [4] I vaguely remember a GitHub issue where a Microsoft
| employee explicitly refused to provide one ("not a
| priority" or some such synonym for "we don't care, fuck
| off"), but I can't find it
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > since .NET ecosystem is one of the most sanest out of
| all ecosystems
|
| Is it? This is the same ecosystem that has .Net, .Net
| Core, .Net Standard, and .Net Framework as all different
| (and overlapping? who knows) products?
| CuriousSkeptic wrote:
| Its only .Net now.
|
| The Core and Standard things was just there the aid the
| transition from Framework, which is now complete, any
| remains will soon be phased out entirely.
| capableweb wrote:
| I didn't pick .NET, parent did. And regardless if the
| ecosystem is nice to work in or not, Microsoft tries
| their true and tested strategy of EEE with that ecosystem
| as well.
| [deleted]
| mikewarot wrote:
| >They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
|
| This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything
| other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it
| still works to this day. You can write Windows programs
| without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.
|
| C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something
| easy enough for domain experts to get working, without
| having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it
| very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean
| professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and
| hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate.
| C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or
| more of productivity.
| hirako2000 wrote:
| How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and
| made it possible to build for other platforms? C# is a
| great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++
| making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it
| any better: owning the devs.
|
| VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able
| telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs
|
| Buy out of github, owning the devs
|
| Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given
| gsuite was seriously taking over office use
|
| OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested
| elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the
| general users and to a degree professionals.
|
| Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to
| own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes
| it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days,
| at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
| capableweb wrote:
| Just to add more examples of markets they are trying to
| take over by not being better, but by buying up the
| competition:
|
| - Video games: Activision/Blizzard, ZeniMax, Double Fine
| Productions, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile
| Entertainment, Playground Games, Compulsion Games, Undead
| Labs, Ninja Theory, Mojang
|
| - Developer ecosystems: npm, Dependabot, GitHub, Playfab,
| Deis, Xamarin, Havok, HockeyApp
| porker wrote:
| > Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given
| gsuite was seriously taking over office use
|
| And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it
| for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In
| 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| 365 web apps are still shockingly terrible in 2023.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it
| for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In
| 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
|
| If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I
| know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if
| you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big
| difference to you?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Can't speak for GP, but the o365 Word is better than
| Google Docs as well. And while you can view Visio in
| o365, would be nice if you could edit the diagrams. Odd,
| but Visio is still imo much better than alternatives in
| that space.
| Rimintil wrote:
| Visio documents can be edited on ODfB and SPO within the
| browser.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-
| for-t...
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even
| when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget
| there are people who still code _actual_ GUIs for
| Windows.
| azangru wrote:
| > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
|
| And typescript!
| aksss wrote:
| And Azure. But aside from C#, .Net, Typescript, and
| Azure, what have Romans done for us?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, I beg to differ about including Azure in that list.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Nobody said that they have never made a good product. But
| in no way does this mean that the company focus has been on
| making good products vs strong-arming their way into
| things.
| Teever wrote:
| > But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and
| Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the
| same incentives.
|
| People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on
| HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to
| know squat about the internal org structure of some
| monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with
| this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap
| their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| > They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
|
| You mean the products Microsoft created when it became
| apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace,
| extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java
| implementation. And also had to cough up billions of
| dollars in a settlement with Sun [1].
|
| [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--
| micro...
| DownGoat wrote:
| I think he means the newer versions of the stack, from
| the release of .NET Core 1 in 2016 and onward.
| jsiepkes wrote:
| Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can
| tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision
| and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better
| product.
|
| More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not
| Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-
| Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic
| threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only
| runs on Windows.
| sn_master wrote:
| Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes
| small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a
| strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that
| nobody likes to talk about.
| lokar wrote:
| It's a preference, not a bias
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Isn't wanting to make a better product a business
| decision?
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Everything every public company does is a business
| decision
| [deleted]
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I hate Microsoft as much as your average Gen X tech nerd,
| but C# is good. I don't care what inspired them to do it.
| ohjfjfk wrote:
| [dead]
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| C# is great. If only they hadn't made it windows only
| from the get go there might be a huge ecosystem
| supporting it instead of java.
| seabrookmx wrote:
| C# is great. Also VS Code.. how many Microsoft haters on
| HN daily drive it? I'd have to assume quite a few!
|
| The Remote SSH extension has been a game changer for how
| I do development.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I like VSCode too. I use it for Clojure, Python, and C#,
| which I am working in this year and haven't for a very,
| very long time. I was pleasantly surprised at the
| progress it has made.
|
| Ironically compared to Windows, MS has been willing to
| kill backward compatibility more to improve .NET to make
| it more cross-platform, something that must come from a
| very different part of the company, probably the one that
| got the "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" mandate.
|
| I make no apologies for their history, but I like these
| tools and I like them much better than Java, which also
| has its place. (This isn't a throwaway comment, notice I
| said I use Clojure, it's my favorite, which runs on the
| JVM.)
| tracker1 wrote:
| VS Code is pretty great, and I agree the remote dev
| extensions (ssh) are hands down the best feature added. I
| also like that it had a directory tree and the integrated
| terminal early on, that's what got me hooked.
|
| C# is nice, but the experience in VS Code is sub-par and
| I think it's the VS (not code) managers that are
| responsible for that state of being.
| szundi wrote:
| Funny, they just bought an editor, i think it was called
| Atom maybe, and rebranded it as VSCode. Nice purchase
| though.
| vluft wrote:
| other than both being electron apps (and admittedly
| electron was made for atom), Atom and VS Code share no
| common codebase.
| pianoben wrote:
| Those are two separate products that were developed
| independently. Both use Electron and are text-editors,
| but that's where the similarity ends.
| therein wrote:
| You mean you don't care about Java?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Microsoft is terrible in almost every way, but I admit
| that I very strongly prefer C# over Java.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I also hate Oracle. Now what?
| flerchin wrote:
| OpenJDK, that's what.
| javcasas wrote:
| You think those licenses for Visual Studio and those Azure
| VMs sell themselves?
| ayewo wrote:
| > _They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core._
|
| And VSCode. One thing all three have in common is that they
| are all FREE to use--they don't make Microsoft any money
| _directly_.
|
| And, for the segment of the developer tools market that
| wrangles C# code, if VSCode _gets too good_ , it becomes a
| threat to a cash cow: Visual Studio.
|
| Start here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-
| vscode/issues/5276#is...
| giobox wrote:
| The relationship between VSCode and commercial versions
| of Visual Studio is the worst part of .net, especially
| the omnisharp debacle.
|
| Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now
| in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what
| future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that
| Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and
| just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive
| Azure/cloud compute sales.
|
| VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight
| from a github repo page - I don't think you need a
| crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine
| onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on
| their development machine - just pop a browser and get to
| work.
|
| > https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/gi
| thub-...
| shrubble wrote:
| The "portable" language that doesn't run on FreeBSD,
| Solaris, AIX, etc.?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Uhm, I'm currently running abour 4 binaries that have
| that famous `exe` file extension on FreeBSD. C# runs on
| FreeBSD just fine. There is no bootstrap available for
| FreeBSD - must either cross-compile or use linux
| emulation.
| stall84 wrote:
| Its interesting to look at their 'product' history b/c they
| have a few shining moments of 'getting it' as far as OP
| means. .NET especially realizing Linux was a real thing and
| to at least outwardly 'embrace' it.. Then there are moments
| like these the OP points to .
|
| I guess that's about .. literally.. average.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Arguably, Microsoft is why a browser's user-agent is so
| useless for determining supported features.
|
| https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
|
| The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to
| is:
|
| > And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for
| webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so
| Internet Explorer declared that it was "Mozilla compatible"
| and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself _Mozilla
| /1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95)_, and Internet
| Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but
| webmasters were confused.
| recursive wrote:
| Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why.
| You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain
| "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was
| caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that
| this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could
| see someone arguing the other way, though.
|
| Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any
| point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not
| limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with
| webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of
| "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support
| frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead,
| Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
| wolpoli wrote:
| Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up
| to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of
| marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had
| a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of
| them did.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I agree with that too, and admitted to such in my
| previous comment. Still, being the first practitioner of
| this comes with a certain responsibility for its
| proliferation. It's not a sole responsibility to your
| point, but it is primary in a way. It's a lot easier for
| others to decide to copy what someone else did than to
| decide to be the first to do it.
|
| To the same point, Google is arguably the reason it
| persists today given the popularity of Chrome. Just as
| Microsoft is arguably the reason it started. (I suppose I
| could have been more careful in the phrasing of my
| initial comment since "is so useless" could imply both
| but I don't think it's particularly egregious.)
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think user agent strings were a terrible idea from the
| get-go, so I'm OK with Microsoft (and everyone else)
| fudging them this way. I think it'd be even better if
| everyone used the exact same UA string.
| croes wrote:
| Didn't Google kill non-Chromium Edge with changes on YouTube?
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Probably inherent because they'll fire you if you don't perform
| so you put dark patterns in or you get cut. I know they quit
| the official stack ranking... but I wonder
| bitcharmer wrote:
| This is what happens when good engineering principles get
| replaced by greedy MBAs and chasing shareholder value
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, it's more likely that it's because the greedy MBAs are
| unable to chase shareholder value, so they just pushed down
| the task into fiefdom leaders.
|
| I mean, it's Edge that they are work so hard to push. What do
| they actually gain from doing that? It's stupid all the way
| down.
| coffeeling wrote:
| Bing adoption. Microsoft wants to get a bigger piece of the
| ad pie, and they hired a former Yandex exec to run it if
| I'm not mistaken.
| dismalpedigree wrote:
| Apple controls the browser on iOS with an iron fist. Even if
| you are using a different app, its still Safari under the hood.
| And even though they control the rendering, they still open all
| links from Apple apps in Safari.
|
| Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I
| choose to. That doesn't stop Apple music from being the auto
| play choice even when I don't use Apple Music.
|
| If Apple's products are so much better they should allow choice
| and bot be threatened by it.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| If you don't use Apple Music at all, you can uninstall it
| from your phone and it will stop being the default choice. I
| do this on my phone without any problems.
| jsmith99 wrote:
| Music settings like the Equaliser actually only apply to
| Apple Music. You can uninstall it but there is no
| systemwide equaliser, because why would you need one when
| you can use Apple Music?
| muro wrote:
| Same with MacOs and using it with a studio display makes
| the bass ridiculously loud.
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't have an extensive list, but Apple preferring their
| own apps on iOS is not hyperbole and evident in lots of
| places.
|
| Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for
| your various things, this will always use Apple Maps
| instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the
| "address" field in your contacts list.
|
| And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give
| you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to
| install Apple Maps...
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while
| geo or map ones are not.
|
| Meaning that it wouldn't be much of an issue to open an
| audio file with anything that isn't Apple Music, but
| FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats
| to work as intended.
| detaro wrote:
| URL types for geo locations are standardized. And even if
| they weren't or the standard isn't sufficient (which one
| could reasonably argue), you are talking about features
| made by the platform owner. Apple can trivially declare
| "this is the iOS geo share format, apps intending to
| share or handle shared geolocations should use this
| format" and expect the ecosystem to deal with it.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| That's a good point, although it seems that this kind of
| behavior, at least specifically to map apps, is quite
| common.
|
| Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS,
| searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a
| map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes
| straight to Google Maps.
|
| I haven't been able to find the correct MIME type or URL
| protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me
| suspect that there is more to it than it seems.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Google specifically handles all links in its apps so that
| they go to the corresponding google app if possible.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while
| geo or map ones are not.
|
| Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can
| show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an
| address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too
| technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others
| can?
|
| Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to
| open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google
| Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm
| not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do
| the same, if they wanted to.
| Avamander wrote:
| Somehow they manage to control it with an iron fist but still
| allow apps to intercept links, opening them in their nasty
| embedded version with injected JS.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to
| hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and
| Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.
|
| I have been investing in MSFT under the assumption that they
| have completely abandoned these markets. What mobile market
| does Microsoft require when they have an increasing number of
| SMBs locked entirely into their death star?
|
| > given up on making products which people enjoy to use
|
| Building new apps in with .NET/Azure/GitHub is a dream. The
| laser focus of the tech community on principled Windows OS
| issues and other product concerns is completely missing the
| overarching universe that is being forged by Microsoft.
|
| Azure in 2023 is like Disneyland for a SMB CTO/CIO. If you go
| all-in you can actually enjoy your weekends and auditors can't
| really figure out how to ruin your free time as much as they
| used to be able to. Sure, there are specific technological or
| economic things that might be better on-prem (or in a different
| cloud), but overall I have never seen something this unified,
| stable, confidence-inspiring, etc.
|
| I believe that the first cloud which can be largely delegated
| out to non-wizards is going to be the one that wipes the floor
| with the others. I suspect Microsoft is already hard at work
| integrating the LLM features they acquired into their Azure
| administration use cases. Simply having a bot integrated into
| the portal that can provide suggested configurations in a few
| hotspots (e.g. make a VM like XYZ but with ABC changes) would
| be incredible.
| stcroixx wrote:
| You must be young. Welcome to the real Microsoft. Now that
| you've seen it for yourself, don't fall for their tricks again.
| 3np wrote:
| Not to give Microsoft an out here but really?
|
| The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing
| opening links in a different browser and web view engine.
|
| The equivalent Microsoft apps on mobile OSs aren't degraded -
| they aren't even allowed to exist in the first place.
|
| Microsoft is bringing the desktop experience in line with
| mobile here. Doesn't make it less terrible but contrasting
| Apple and Google as better actors in this sense is an odd take.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| On Android I can install Firefox and have all browser
| activities forwarded there, even from GMail, and even for
| opening YouTube links.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Microsoft apps exist on Android and they're not forced to
| open links in Chrome on Android. If the user chooses, they
| can open on Microsoft Edge on Android. The user can set their
| own browser preference - and Google doesn't force them.
|
| Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but it's on them.
|
| None of these bug tech corps are in the right here, but MS is
| being more anti-competitive than most.
| nequo wrote:
| Edge and Chrome use the same engine, don't they?
|
| So the correct iOS parallel is not Apple's refusal to allow
| non-WebKit engines. But Apple's hypothetical refusal to
| allow links to be opened in WebKit-flavored Firefox. Which,
| for the record, it does let you do.
| dahauns wrote:
| >Edge and Chrome use the same engine, don't they?
|
| To be precise: No, they don't. Their engines are based on
| the same codebase, but they still are running their own
| installed engines.
|
| In contrast, Apple doesn't just refuse to allow non-
| WebKit engines. It requires everyone to use the pre-
| installed, Apple-provided engine. You can't use your own
| build of WebKit.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Umm, MS Teams on Adroid forced me to install Edge to open
| links. Even the copy action pushes "haha, we wont give away
| this link you moron" (in corp speak) to the clipboard.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Thats on Microsoft not Google
| SteveMoody73 wrote:
| I use Teams on my phone regularly and have never seen
| this happen. Clicking on a link takes me to the web page
| without any problems, even in my default browser which is
| Firefox.
| nerdix wrote:
| I think they are using a dark pattern now. I opened a
| link in Outlook (Android) after a recent update and I got
| a popup to open with Edge. I didn't have Edge installed
| so I was confused for a moment. Just below the big
| colorful edge icon was (a much less visually prominent)
| option to open in my default browser.
|
| If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought
| that they were forcing me to install Edge too.
| aksss wrote:
| One variable many people don't consider is that Microsoft
| gives organizations an incredible amount of control over
| application behavior when trying to maintain a through
| line for rights protection of organizational data. Like
| not allowing organizational data to be opened in apps
| that aren't approved, authenticated with user creds, and
| supportive of rights management (no printing, no saving,
| etc.).
|
| I'm not saying that's what's happening with GP's
| experience with Teams, but just pointing out that when
| thinking about MS app behavior on any platform, it's a
| variable that can be present in the corporate context
| which many "users" remain blissfully unaware of, or see
| it manifest as these weird rules and behaviors and not
| acting like other apps. But there can be an entirely
| different set of user stories at play beneath the
| surface.
| passwordoops wrote:
| I know I'm comparing a turd sandwich to a puke pancake
| here, but in what way is "Apple doesn't allow other browser
| engines" _less_ anti-competitive than what MS is doing?
| mrpopo wrote:
| For Apple, the wall around the garden is so high that you
| don't realize there is an outside in the first place. So
| no one notices it.
| IceWreck wrote:
| Never said it wasn't, thats why I used Android's example
| and then also called out Apple.
| kenjackson wrote:
| But you compared Microsoft apps on Android. This article is
| more analogous to Google apps on Android always using
| Chrome.
| Macha wrote:
| The equivalent apps on iOS aren't even allowed, Android
| allows other browsers (including their browser engines) just
| fine. Firefox is the only browser to bother though, as most
| of the chromium wrappers, including edge for android, are
| happy to just build a skin around the default web view.
| vetinari wrote:
| > The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing
| opening links in a different browser and web view engine.
|
| In Android, all my links open in Firefox. I don't see any
| issue there. Might serve as an inspiration to Microsoft ;)
| maccard wrote:
| I have that setting set, and various links still open in
| chrome instead of firefox for me. In particular, links that
| are opened via gmail, maps or the "google" search widget.
| vetinari wrote:
| Maps open links in Firefox for me; Gmail by default in-
| process with webview, but that is disable-able in
| settings and then it opens links in the default browser.
| For the google search widget, I don't use it, but after a
| quick check yes, it does use webview too, but also has
| the option to open in browser.
|
| I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if
| ever.
| maccard wrote:
| > I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if
| ever.
|
| Except for the things that you just said open in the
| chrome webview, right?
| vetinari wrote:
| It is not chrome webview. It is android webview. Yes, it
| is similar to chrome engine, but it is not chrome. Just
| like edge is not chrome.
|
| It is also per-app choice. If an app decides doing
| something in a particular way, it is not the system's
| fault -- some reddit readers do the same, for some
| reason. For now, apps do have preferences to open in
| browser instead, and that option respects the default
| one.
| jamespo wrote:
| What web view engine? MS are using chromium
| croes wrote:
| On iOS?
| jamespo wrote:
| I thought the argument was they were against using
| someone else's rendering engine?
| tpm wrote:
| Android allows this. Links from the gmail app open in Firefox
| in my Android phone.
| wslh wrote:
| Microsoft has been playing the vendor lock-in game for his
| entire life and they were and are very successful. It is an
| interesting exercise to think if this time is different. Again,
| Microsoft always compete with better technologies from other
| vendors.
|
| One aggresive move that Google or Apple could do is to really
| help companies in the migration to their technology beyond
| saying RTFM and use our support. For example, augmenting these
| locked companies with Google staff. You cannot expect a big
| corporation to move all the gears alone to change their
| technology.
|
| It is not the technology, it is the business execution.
| sseagull wrote:
| Virginia Tech recently notified everyone that they are
| ditching Gmail in favor of outlook because of large cost
| increases coming. Google seems to be going backward in that
| regard:
|
| " A key factor in the decision was cost. Under the new Google
| license model, an equivalent amount of Google cloud storage
| would cost more than seven times what it will cost the
| university on the Microsoft platform."
|
| https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2023/04/google-changes-
| announcem...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| The entire crux of any discussion on Microsoft's behaviors
| hinges on one figure: What percentage of their Windows and
| Office revenues are coming from end users versus corporate
| sales? I mean, I think it's kind of obvious, but yet we still
| have arguments about why they would screw users with these
| sorts of decisions. It makes no sense to me. Further, (and
| deference to Tom Warren), but I would bet that a lot more IT
| admins are happy with this change than there are those who are
| angry.
| seydor wrote:
| They don't because they can't. People use ms programs for their
| daily work , phones are secondary.
|
| And how is ms degrading googls products? They don't even have a
| mandatory app store in windows.
|
| When comparing them all, ms has been the most open one
| dustedcodes wrote:
| I think people care more about their phones than wether they
| use Goole docs or Word to put together a report at work which
| nobody is really going to read and if they do they'll ask for
| a PDF print out anyway and not the document itself.
|
| Same for other products. If OneDrive or MS Teams was all of a
| sudden really annoying to use on iOS and Android, but Slack
| and Google Meet would work really reliably and smoothly then
| I think a lot of people would just starting to use the non
| Microsoft alternative because nobody likes to deal with
| annoyances on a daily basis. We have seen this already, when
| Zoom came about it captured a huge part of the market really
| rapidly because it did something so much better than Teams
| did before. It didn't even require a dark pattern, now
| imagine how many more would have left Teams if dark patterns
| would have helped on top of that.
| Xeamek wrote:
| You massively underestimate how much business world
| (corporate especially) depends on MS Office and how deeply
| integrated it is into companies eco systems.
| wongarsu wrote:
| And how little they can care about user experience if
| something ticks all other boxes.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > They don't because they can't. People use ms programs for
| their daily work, phones are secondary.
|
| I suspect many, many more people globally (and in the US) use
| a smartphone than use a desktop with MS products on it daily.
| seydor wrote:
| Work puts food on the table though, Instagram does not
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I disagree with your premise.
|
| I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous
| how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've
| tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled
| Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to
| reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url
| links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox.
|
| Same with many other things - I can install whatever browser I
| want as long as it's a skin on their browser.
|
| I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin
| on their keyboard.
|
| I can install any app I want as long as it comes from Apple
| store.
|
| Etc etc etc.
|
| Yep, I vehemently disagree with your premise :). I think MS is
| looking at Apple's walled garden and saying "what if we could
| get away with some of that?"
|
| (not disagreeing that dark patterns are despicable! My wife
| knows the scream that comes from my home office when I try to
| get iPhone or windows to do something I want! I just disagree
| that mobile os world is some paragon of user centric
| benevolence :)
| eddieroger wrote:
| Apple doesn't make it easy, but they don't make it impossible
| either, and at this point it's on the ecosystem to show Apple
| they want more of this by embracing what they have. So, sure,
| map links tend to open Apple Maps by default, but they can
| offer the user the choice to use other mapping apps, which
| they can check for by seeing if the OS will respond to their
| open url scheme. Harder? Sure. Impossible? Nope.
|
| And for what it's worth, open a directions link from Google
| some time - for me, it opens Google Maps, which I do have
| installed, but don't prefer using. I choose Apple Maps
| because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive,
| but Google doesn't offer me that choice.
| capableweb wrote:
| > because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive
|
| Off topic, but you're not actually looking at your watch
| while you drive right?
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| If you're navigating with a watch on, it'll notify you of
| upcoming turns (either through vibrations or by making a
| turn signal-like noise) without ducking/pausing your
| music.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Uses different haptics for left and right turns as well.
| jkubicek wrote:
| And, the taps on your wrist are unique depending on which
| direction you need to turn, so you can theoretically
| navigate via the wrist-taps alone.
| modoc wrote:
| This is wonderful for when you're on a motorcycle going
| somewhere new. Absolute game changer!
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| I'd personally like the choice to be enforced by the OS.
| I'm sick of Google's popup for opening links in gmail. It
| confuses my partner into thinking she has the link open in
| her regular safari, but the option to actually do that is
| the only one with no icon. On top of that they're really
| trying to railroad people into using chrome, and she's
| accidentally hit that option a few times. I wish the
| justice department would treat that as anti-competitive.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > when I click a link or address
|
| A link to what domain?
|
| For clicking addresses, I kind of get it: the author of the
| text didn't link it at all, so the OS (or whatever) gets to
| decide how to enhance the presentation which can include
| promoting a specific app. Not great, but fine.
|
| For clicking links, it should definitely just use the browser
| unless an installed app's manifest has the domain registered.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a
| skin on their keyboard.
|
| As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is
| false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control
| over the keyboard UI and how each key (if it even _has_ keys
| -- your "keyboard" can be literally anything) interacts with
| text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to
| "skin" the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because
| building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult
| and that'd reduce the workload quite a lot.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I'm extremely interested in this; how come none of the
| keyboards I've tried depart from the same layout as Apple?
| Is it strict adherence to guidelines rather than technical
| restriction then?
|
| To wit, some of the features that same-named apps/keyboards
| give me on android but not on iPhone include "hold key for
| alternative character" or button to "force" numpad. As well
| all keyboards I've tried have same layout and sizing as the
| original one.
|
| I assumed it was imposed on them in some way I guess?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I have MessageEase installed as a keyboard.
|
| https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php
|
| Somewhat different from the original keyboard layout.
|
| (The paucity of alternatives is probably down to patents
| and licensing.)
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I don't think there's much, if anything, in the way of
| App Store guidelines for keyboards except that they do
| things with the text field the user currently has
| highlighted.
|
| For instance the app Fantastical comes with a "keyboard"
| that inputs dates that are open on your calendar[0] and
| there exist a few rather nonstandard keyboards like
| Typewise[1].
|
| Absence of features common on Android boards I would
| guess comes down to those patterns not being familiar to
| (and thus, not desired by) iOS users or in some cases
| software patents (there have been a few cases of keyboard
| devs receiving cease and desist notices from patent
| holders for using some UI pattern).
|
| [0]: https://flexibits.com/img/help/fantastical-
| ios/en/f3-opening... [1]:
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/typewise-custom-
| keyboard/id147...
| CrimsonRain wrote:
| yet, 20% of times, apple loads their own keyboard instead
| of my default GBoard :)
| atraac wrote:
| This is most likely due to developers of certain
| apps/inputs and not iOS/Apple themselves, there is a
| simple line of code to do this and from what I've noticed
| some overly-secure-wannabe-apps force system keyboard for
| certain inputs.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| Yes, developers can disable third party keyboards
| throughout their entire app with an application delegate
| method[0], and when secureTextEntry[1] is enabled on
| UITextField the system automatically disables third party
| keyboards on both that text field as well as any
| immediately adjacent text field (likely for
| username+password combos).
|
| The idea is that because keyboards can connect to the
| internet (with user permission), there's potential for
| data theft. It may also be possible to exfiltrate data
| from a keyboard extension by saving the data to an app
| container shared by the host app, which the host app can
| then send out with its network access.
|
| Devs who don't know how or care to properly accommodate
| the variable height of third-party keyboards may use the
| app-wide opt-out to eliminate bugs relating to that,
| though I haven't personally encountered this.
|
| [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiap
| plicatio... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentatio
| n/uikit/uitextinputt...
| thesuitonym wrote:
| You sound like a person who never even tried. Open Settings >
| Safari > Default Browser App, and select the app you want.
| It's really that easy.
| somegent wrote:
| iOS 15.7.5, there is no such setting. Searching settings
| for "Default Browser" doesn't come up with anything.
| atraac wrote:
| There is literally no setting like that in path you've
| given, I just checked on personal 13 Pro with iOS 16.4.1(a)
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Is this true for Maps and _most critically_ Voice
| Assistants?
|
| How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? How do I
| replace Siri with a different voice assistant?
|
| You can't for either of those questions.
|
| Nevermind that changing the browser doesn't actually change
| jack because Apple doesn't allow competition in the browser
| engine space.
|
| All in all, it is just hard for me to take seriously an
| opinion saying that Apple allows for unrestrained
| competition on its devices and Microsoft is the big bad in
| this space. Historically, maybe true - but not even close
| to true now imo.
| WhipeeDip wrote:
| You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by
| appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for
| example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
|
| However, clicking an address in a message and being told
| to install Apple Maps is super aggravating and I'm not
| sure if there's a way around that...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps
| by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for
| example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
|
| Yeah, and its easy to open the link from Outlook and
| Teams in Chrome - just copy the link & paste into the
| chrome URL bar.
| drewbeck wrote:
| > How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? ....
| You can't
|
| > You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps
| by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for
| example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
| seydor wrote:
| I suppose you aren't aware that they are all the same
| browser because apple doesn't allow competing browser
| engines
| hbn wrote:
| The person above complaining about links defaulting to
| open in Safari was obviously talking about the app and
| not the rendering engine
| 0x457 wrote:
| They are the same, but Firefox on my iPad syncs with my
| real firefox on: linux, windows and android. I can send
| tabs to and from it, sync passwords etc. What rendering
| engine is used is completely irrelevant to me most of the
| time.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I've done a fair bit of trying over the years; based on
| your comment I retried today I still cannot find it under
| Settings -> Safari -> Default Browser App.
|
| To be fair though, I did find it on my wife's iPhone,
| though under Chrome (she does not have it under Safari (or
| General either, where I would've expected it)). Still don't
| have it anywhere on my iPhone. I'll try to see if that's
| because she's ahead of me on OS updates or some other
| reason.
|
| Thx!
| eppsilon wrote:
| If your phone is a corporate device, they may have set
| the default browser via MDM. Check Settings > General >
| VPN & Device Management.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Oh yeah, I forgot that the default browser app, should be
| under the settings for a different browser. Putting that
| shit under the Safari settings is deceptive and hides it
| while keeping it in plain site.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| >walled garden
|
| Walled garden is marketing speak. You should not use it.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Fair enough; what is the recommended term that is
| applicable?
| LocalH wrote:
| "jail"
| hospitalJail wrote:
| Here are some
|
| >Closed ecosystem
|
| >Restricted platform
|
| >Proprietary systems
|
| >Walled Prison/Jail(this has negative bias, but may fit
| depending on the context)
|
| >Curated platform
|
| I'm sure you can get objective phrases from chatgpt too.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| There all doing the same shit just in vary levels of degree
| and focus. If anyone thinks different, they are only fooling
| themselves.
|
| Apple is the most user-hostile company I have ever seen from
| a individual freedom centric standpoint, but they are good at
| hiding it. They think everyone outside of the organization
| should follow their line of thinking. Apple wants to be the
| gatekeeper of everything and that doesn't work in a free
| society. Deep down, I think people want to be free of
| external influence. Microsoft only cares about maximizing
| profits and doing whatever it takes to get there. I guess
| there is no difference between the two except that apple
| tries to justify there behavior behind a superiority complex.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Yes, but Apple offers a neat well maintained garden that is
| the greatest thing as long as everything you need is there,
| and you don't eat any apples.
|
| MS looks at it and thinks their frat party mansion (3 bedroom
| duplex) can do the same.
|
| Apple gets away with it because that what their target
| audience want. MS target audience doesn't want it. If I
| wanted a walled garden - I would use Apple, they clearly know
| how to maintain it.
| giobox wrote:
| > Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could
| literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade
| the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with
| dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
|
| Until very recently you couldn't even change the default
| browser on iOS, I think the idea Apple are playing "fairier"
| than Microsoft is a lot more nuanced than you make it seem with
| this statement.
|
| Even after adding ability to change default browser to iOS,
| there's still the limitation that only the webkit rendering
| engine provided by Apple can be used - Firefox and Chrome on
| iOS are wrappers around the OS level Webkit implementation -
| the rendering engine is still Safari/webkit - they aren't using
| their own rendering engines as they do on all other OSes.
|
| There's also the agreement between Apple and Google for default
| search on iOS too, which absolutely costs Bing marketshare.
|
| > https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/01/web-developers-challenge-
| appl...
| anaganisk wrote:
| Didn't Google intentionally break YouTube on IE to make users
| move to chrome?
| bearmode wrote:
| Anti-competitive behaviour runs deep in Microsoft. They've been
| doing it since their early days.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Lest we forget
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Anti-competitive behaviour runs deep in ~~Microsoft~~
|
| rampant capitalism, especially in the US of A
|
| the end goal is always to become a monopolist
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well on paper at least, the US has antitrust laws going
| back to the Sherman Act and Standard Oil.
|
| Microsoft was basically inches away from being broken up in
| the late '90s due to their anti-competitive practices.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| They absolutely should have been and if they were we
| probably wouldn't have the amazon or google we have
| today.
| justinclift wrote:
| I'm kind of hoping the EU decides to pick MS up on this,
| with a 2nd go around of "abusing their monopoly on the
| desktop".
|
| Maybe _this_ time they 'll break MS into small pieces. :)
| dbg31415 wrote:
| > Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to
| its competitors and users, because two people can play this
| game.
|
| I think this is already happening. Google pushes non-stop for
| you to use the Gmail app, then once you do all the links prompt
| you to open Google Maps, and all the rest. It's annoying and
| there's no way to change it.
|
| I think Microsoft is just taking a step out of Google's
| playbook here. Doing exactly what Google does on mobile, but
| doing that same shitty behavior on desktops. "If you made the
| choice to use a Microsoft app, you're making the choice to be
| in the Microsoft ecosystem."
|
| I hate it, it's trash, all the rest... but it feels like --
| shocking -- Microsoft is just copying something they saw
| someone else doing.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| You're missing some important context:
|
| Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That
| hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has
| been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office,
| and Xbox.
|
| Sure, they _tried_ to break into the mobile sector, but they
| seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move
| has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in
| 2002.
|
| Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room.
| Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it
| can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".
| jarym wrote:
| IT admins have only themselves to blame for choosing Teams in the
| first place.
|
| Yes, it is included in O365 and it makes it a no-brainer as far
| as additional costs and things go. But then there's the risk that
| Microsoft leverage their captive and lazy market to foist other
| undesirable things on users... like this. And crappy news /
| adverts in Windows 11's 'start menu' replacement.
|
| Ready to get voted down on this, but my view is pretty robust: no
| need to self-host EVERYTHING but avoiding vendor lock-in and
| maintaining independence is valuable. It is a lesson that
| corporate IT admins seem to forget time and time again.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Most companies don't have the resources and manpower to run
| their own chat and videocall service. A previous employer of
| mine did (using some open-source tools) and it was painful to
| use due to the tools' wonky UX and networking glitches.
| roydivision wrote:
| In my experience, in any company larger than 500 people at
| least, the IT admin has little say in the matter. These sorts
| of decisions are taken higher up, and the admin just has to
| live with it.
| dijit wrote:
| Hell, my company is just 35 people and I'm head of all things
| tech (CTO) and even I can't get Microsoft out of the company.
|
| It works "good enough" and change is really hard for many
| people.
| codepoet80 wrote:
| Same in a 7 person company. Got voted down in favor of
| Teams because the "learning curve" of anything else wasn't
| worth their time. This despite the confusing and ridiculous
| UX of Teams.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _because the "learning curve" of anything else wasn't
| worth their time_
|
| As someone on the other side of the divide who hates
| these products, this is accurate. A non-standard product
| is a non-starter in most fields unless it has a killer
| advantage.
| bluGill wrote:
| Teams is a non-standard product to me who has used
| various chat programs over the years. It does some things
| okay, but I still want to go back to lync (skype for
| business). The features I use are worse than competition,
| and there are features I don't use that are annoying.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _features I use are worse than competition, and there
| are features I don 't use that are annoying_
|
| I hate Teams. I hate Meet. But they work with basically
| zero training. You have to pick your battles, and
| successful businesses choose theirs in core competencies.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You lost me at 'they work'. They don't. To the point that
| I'm boycotting Teams, any customers that force us to use
| Team can take a hike, I'm not going to spend the first
| half hour (or more) of every meeting with a new set of
| people to get them all organized and solve a myriad of
| audio/video/networking issues. Teams is the biggest pile
| of junk MS ever released. And don't get me started on the
| linux client.
| jarym wrote:
| You're wrong, there are bigger piles of junk that
| Microsoft has released.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Possible, but none that I have been repeatedly exposed
| to. I axed Microsoft out of my life when they started
| their anti linux crusade and I haven't looked back but
| people keep pushing Teams on others.
|
| The whole interop situation around video conferencing is
| ridiculous, there ought to be a common protocol and a
| variety of clients around this protocol, instead we have
| this utterly dysfunctional situation where there are five
| different walled gardens, each of which has their own set
| of problems and compatibility issues.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are lots of other chat programs that work with zero
| training as well. All that is really needed is auto-start
| and auto-login when the user logs into the OS. If your
| chat program has those two: someone will figure out how
| to use it and everyone else will see the pop-up when a
| message is sent and start using it. Slowly everyone will
| learn features as they need them.
|
| There are many options that have those two.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > But they work with basically zero training.
|
| I must be a fucking idiot then, because no amount of
| engaging with it ever got me past "what the fuck, where
| did everything go, why is that there, how do I do X, why
| did it do Y when I did Z?" One of the most confusing
| programs I've ever used. Up there with some very-painful-
| learning-curve video games (think: Paradox games)
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Free with your fucking enterprise windows license vs pay
| slack is pretty fucking convincing to the c-suite.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I have little sympathy for the IT folks, because not only did
| they make us switch from Slack to Teams because Teams was
| "free", but they actually drink the koolaid and think Microsoft
| products are _better_. They deserve to suffer for the pain they
| repeatedly cause the rest of us.
| icepat wrote:
| There's sadly a subset of IT folks, often in large corps or
| government, who tend to just drink the Microsoft "Customer
| Success Engineer" koolaid without thinking. When I worked
| briefly for a gov org, any time the IT staff came out of a
| meeting, we would always be worried about what "solution"
| they had been sold this time.
| code_runner wrote:
| > captive and lazy
|
| This is my experience 100%
| rwalle wrote:
| Why go as far as self-hosting, they should be all open source
| and IT admins will be able to fix bugs themselves.
|
| (Of course this is sarcasm, just the way you want it)
| userbinator wrote:
| Worked at a company which used an internal IRC server for
| messaging, that was the best experience I've ever had.
| smolder wrote:
| I agree, this is the best. No one can flood the chat with
| stupid gifs to make it unnavigable.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Don't worry webdevs, it's still Chromium! Just the way you wanted
| :-)
| hospitalJail wrote:
| When trying to get GPT Bing, I let Microsoft set the defaults
| like they insisted.
|
| It was such an awful experience.
|
| >desktop ads
|
| >Edge opens, edge ads
|
| >Bing default browser, ads
|
| >start menu ads
|
| More on their products:
|
| >Sharepoint, 3 different versions, terrible documentation.
| Impossible to develop for when you have forum posts describing
| different software with the same name.
|
| >Power Automate, No I don't want drag and drop. Never ever.
| Further, we did do the drag and drop, only to run into issues and
| have to trick the software into showing some hidden ID that we
| could later copypaste. They even tease you with the actual code
| under the hood. I want to add a new line character, so easy in
| programming, (seems) impossible in power automate.
|
| I have decided its urgent to make the full transition to Linux.
| Microsoft constantly seems to be fine with a terrible user
| experience. They are a giant. They remind me of Apple with their
| marketing/sales first mentality.
|
| EDIT: (warning rage) Somehow edge opened up again. I lost my
| mind. I spent 5 minutes trying to uninstall without typing in
| some obscenely long version number. Nope. Impossible. Serious FU
| to M$.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| You can't uninstall Edge because it's deeply baked into the OS
| and even someone who knows what they're doing will probably
| bork their machine.
| lxgr wrote:
| I also recently installed Edge (on macOS) to give BinGPT a try
| and almost couldn't believe what I saw. Ads, coupons, rewards
| everywhere...
|
| It truly felt like being transported to the darkest times of
| the late 90s/early 2000s, with multiple adware toolbars
| cluttering the IE user interface.
| hospitalJail wrote:
| This was their opportunity to drag people away from Chrome
| and Google search, I remember the craze of people making
| jokes about the death of google and how they are trying
| edge/Bing.
|
| Then they shot themselves in the foot with ads.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Anyone remember "Signature Edition" PCs[1] that would ship
| without vendor crapware? I can't tell if this was Microsoft
| trying to make room for their own crapware or they just gave
| up on this idea and decided "if you can't beat them, join
| them".
|
| [1] https://www.maketecheasier.com/microsoft-
| windows-10-signatur...
| sporkle-feet wrote:
| Isn't this just the same as what Apple does? Why is there outrage
| about one but not the other? (genuine question)
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| When it comes to macOS, because Apple is not pushing their
| product as much as Microsoft is currently doing with Windows
| 11.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| The only instance of Apple doing that I'm aware of is the
| "Search for (term)" in the terminal's right click menu always
| defaulting to Safari. In every other instance, they've
| respected the defaults.
|
| Microsoft on the other hands seems to have no boundaries, going
| as far as injecting ads on Chrome's homepage[1] promoting their
| browser.
|
| [1] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-now-injecting-
| full-...
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > The only instance of Apple doing that I'm aware of is
|
| Not allowing alternative browsers on their most successful
| platform: iOS
|
| also:
|
| - EU forced Apple to use USB-C like everybody else
|
| - EU is forcing Apple to allow side loading of apps
|
| Apple is one of the worst offenders ever when it's about
| vendor lock in
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| You might be a few years out of date
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211336
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| that's not what you think it is.
|
| Alternative browser engines are still disallowed.
|
| They are a skin on Apple's Webkit
|
| see: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/07/mozilla_googl
| e_apple_...
| CrampusDestrus wrote:
| I replied in topic, your reply is off topic.
|
| GP was talking about how Apple does not force you to open
| links with Safari except in one case.
|
| The situation with webkit is a different thing.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > I replied in topic, your reply is off topic.
|
| It's always Safari.
|
| In a different skin, but it's Safari nonetheless.
|
| Do Firefox or Chrome on iOS support web apis that Apple
| does not support?
|
| No, they don't, because it's Safari.
|
| Sorry if I skipped a few steps and went straight to the
| conclusion, that's why it probably looked off topic to
| you.
| jamil7 wrote:
| For the purposes of this discussion I don't think the
| underlying engine really matters (I'm not supporting
| Apple's rule here). 99% of users are going to be
| downloading Chrome or FF to have a consistent UX and sync
| their bookmarks, history and passwords. iOS respects the
| default browser and mail client in this case.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > I don't think the underlying engine really matters
|
| It is what makes all the difference here.
|
| Many features that are a Web Standard are unsupported on
| iOS precisely because Apple refuses to allow alternative
| engines because they don't want those features on their
| platform (mostly to favor native apps under the pretext
| of security, like if Google is not capable of making a
| secure browser, at least as secure as Safari).
|
| Chrome and Firefox on iOS are not the same Chrome and iOS
| that run on all the other platforms, they are basically
| Safari.
|
| It does matters.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Because one is a clearly declared policy that anyone can
| look up (even though you, or regulators of a certain
| country, disagree with it). I'm sure there'd be a lot less
| outrage if it was Microsoft's policy that other rendering
| engines (or browsers) were disallowed, instead of being
| sneaky and trying to fake error messages, degrading user
| experiences, and the like.
|
| Further, it could be argued that dynamic code execution,
| whether through an app downloading additional modules on
| the file system with the executable bit set, or in memory,
| with the mmap(PROT_EXEC) syscall opens up potential avenues
| for abuse, and alternative browsers are an unfortunate
| collateral damage in such a policy.
|
| Regardless, no action can be justified because another
| entity is also doing it; it only serves to cheapen the
| discourse.
| tssva wrote:
| > Because one is a clearly declared policy that anyone
| can look up (even though you, or regulators of a certain
| country, disagree with it).
|
| Microsoft has now clearly declared this policy. The basis
| of the article is the message sent to IT admins clearly
| declaring it.
| lozenge wrote:
| Sure, but one week it's a first run screen recommending
| Edge, the next it's pop ups when visiting Firefox
| download page from Edge, the next it's a notification
| icon about "Microsoft recommended" settings, then it's a
| notice before running the installer, etc. There is no
| rhyme or reason besides their business interest and no
| timeline besides "let's boil this frog"
| jamespo wrote:
| Levered "most successful platform" in there as the most
| comparable OS, macOS doesn't do this of course.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Not allowing alternative browsers on their most
| successful platform: iOS
|
| The huge difference is that this is the blanket application
| of a rule which has reasonable justifications. You can
| certainly criticise Apple for being a control-freak
| company, but that's not exactly a new trait.
|
| And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't
| have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new
| entrant. iOS started from the position of being
| _completely_ locked down.
|
| Quite different from the events of, say, US v. Microsoft
| Corp, which Microsoft seem to assume is not relevant
| anymore.
|
| > - EU forced Apple to use USB-C like everybody else
|
| Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway,
| though we'll never know for sure.
|
| > - EU is forcing Apple to allow side loading of apps
|
| See (1).
| capableweb wrote:
| > And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't
| have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new
| entrant. iOS started from the position of being
| completely locked down.
|
| Apple is absolutely trying to leverage their OS in order
| to drive usage in other markets. One big example of this
| is Apple Maps, which is being used as a default on iOS no
| matter if you like it or not. Both "Contacts" and "Find
| My" uses Apple Maps as the only option for starting
| navigating to another address, and if the application is
| not installed, but Google Maps or any other app, they
| still ask you to install Apple Maps instead of doing what
| everyone else in the ecosystem is doing, which is to ask
| which navigation app to use.
|
| > Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway,
| though we'll never know for sure.
|
| Yes, absolutely. The manufacturer who almost never use
| standard connectors were gonna start using standard
| connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them
| to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
| masklinn wrote:
| > The manufacturer who almost never use standard
| connectors
|
| Except for all the times they do?
|
| > were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no
| because regulation forced them to, but because that was
| in their timeline anyways...
|
| Yes? Or are you saying regulations forced them to use
| USB-C on macbooks, to the exception of every other port
| including the beloved but non-standard magsafe?
|
| Or that regulations forced them to add type C to the ipad
| pro in 2018? The ipad in 2020? The ipad mini in 2021? The
| ipad air in 2022?
|
| Hell, back in 1998 they released the iMac with
| essentially only USB support. Was that also regulations
| forcing them?
| eertami wrote:
| > Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway,
| though we'll never know for sure.
|
| They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago.
| Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on
| iPhones, prior to the EU ruling. The extra few years
| selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple
| laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a
| fun little profit exercise, if not comically anti-
| consumer/anti-environment.
| masklinn wrote:
| > They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago.
| Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on
| iPhones, prior to the EU ruling.
|
| Utter nonsense, which completely ignores the historical
| and third-party background: the replacement of the dock
| connector by Lightning was a huge shift as it was very
| common for devices to have built-in dock connectors which
| became useless pins overnight (there were literally cars
| with dock connectors). As necessary as the transition was
| in the long run, it basically made apple swear to keep
| lightning alive for at least as long as the DC was.
|
| And there is a clear counter-example: they've been slowly
| inching support in from the devices least likely to use
| hard-set connectors: first the 3rd gen ipad pro in 2018,
| then the 10th gen ipad in 2020, 6th gen mini in 2021, 5th
| gen Air in 2022.
|
| > The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug
| your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple
| phone was probably a fun little profit exercise
|
| More nonsense, apple literally doesn't want you to plug
| one into the other, they've been stripping wired phone-
| related features from macos as fast as they could be
| bothered to, moving them to either wireless (airdrop) or
| cloud.
|
| > if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
|
| Yes indeed, the anti-consumer and anti-environment move
| of letting users upgrading from one iphone to the next
| not have to replace all their cables.
| bastard_op wrote:
| Apparently everyone forgot about the Internet Explorer vs
| Netscape debacle, they're essentially doing the same thing again,
| trying to claw back their relevance in the browser world. This
| sort of behavior is exactly what Sony should present to the EU
| how Microsoft handles anti-competetive behavior.
| Pulz wrote:
| I'm an IT Admin with 15+ sites across my country. I'm not angry
| about this change.
|
| Myself and most of the people I've networked with either have or
| are transitioning away from other browsers, towards Edge. As a
| browser, it's fine. It has good PDF viewing/editing features,
| performant and works well with organisational SSO.
| Donckele wrote:
| Are you serious? The best /useful things for you are PDFs and
| SSO? Both of these features are not what makes a web browser
| super duper. PDF viewing is available in all major browsers.
| <rant> SSO works in all web browsers - unless you're using
| Windows XP as your enterprise cloud server running java and
| oracle and your asp.net web app requires a microsoft browser
| running in internet explorer legacy mode. </rant>
| Pulz wrote:
| I stated two things I like about it over it's competitors, I
| didn't brand them as the best or most important features on
| offer.
|
| I specifically stated PDF editing, not _just_ viewing PDF
| files.
|
| SSO works better on Edge in a work environment, mainly as it
| connects to the Windows profile. This means that I do not
| need to make changes to additional browsers or have end users
| struggling to sign in to various applications. Specifically
| with Edge, I can simply provide each user profile a folder
| with shortcuts to the likes of email quarantine, support,
| Outlook etcetera and they will either see their account
| listed or only need to enter their email address.
|
| Coupled with appropriate training, this has cut down on users
| signing into Microsoft login pages that have been designed to
| look like the legitimate organisation using logo's and other
| branding. When in doubt, the users can visit the shortcut
| provided to them.
| blazespin wrote:
| Yeah, unless you're a shop running outlook and teams, not sure
| you really have a say here. Maybe this is what customers want.
|
| Also, not entirely clear that verge isn't just knee jerk
| reporting. Any sys admins that have actual first hand
| experience with this and can confirm?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| donbrae wrote:
| Does that mean you ban users from using browsers that are not
| Edge?
| Pulz wrote:
| No.
| Already__Taken wrote:
| yeh, now maybe. Ruining something that works fine can't end
| poorly.
| ranting-moth wrote:
| So much for the "but Microsoft is a new company now".
|
| Remember "Microsoft loves open source" phrase from just few years
| ago? Guess what, Ike also loved Tina.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I always saw it as Microsoft is clearly two (or more) companies
| now. Some of those companies are very much what Microsoft was
| always like. Some others aren't at all like microsoft in
| anything but name.
| tommica wrote:
| That might not be a good way to look at it, there might be
| some people that want to just deliver some good products, but
| the company itself is not something that should be given the
| benefit because of those few employees. Microsoft ==
| Microsoft
| capableweb wrote:
| That might be a useful point of view if you happen to work at
| GitHub and you don't really want to wake up to the fact that
| you actually work for Microsoft now. But for anyone else,
| everything Microsoft owns is Microsoft, and they'll use the
| products and properties they owned to further the goal of
| Microsoft, which is maximizing shareholder profits, just like
| any other public company.
| worrycue wrote:
| > just like any other public company
|
| Except way more mercenary.
|
| Companies compete like boxers in a ring. You win some, you
| lose some. MS is the boxer who would hit below the belt if
| no one is looking and will try to main/kill you if they
| can.
|
| https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
| capableweb wrote:
| > maximizing shareholder profits, just like any other
| public company
|
| Show me one of these big technology companies that
| doesn't act to benefit their shareholders?
|
| Microsoft is Google is Apple is Amazon. They're all the
| same internally. The only difference is their optics when
| you're looking at them as an outsider. But really, they
| all work toward the same goal, increasing their stock
| price.
| worrycue wrote:
| You replying to the right person?
| capableweb wrote:
| Yes, you said that Microsoft is "just like any other
| public company" but "Except way more mercenary".
|
| I'm saying that no, Microsoft is just like the others.
| They're all like that. All of them would hit below the
| belt if the risk/reward calculation is correct for
| shareholders.
| worrycue wrote:
| Surprisingly, most of them don't, not to the level
| Microsoft does at least.
|
| Can you give an example of another company as mercenary
| as Microsoft?
|
| P.S. The Halloween Documents give a good overview of how
| Microsoft thinks.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > Show me one of these big technology companies that
| doesn't act to benefit their shareholders?
|
| The owners seems to be in a constant power struggle with
| executives and management. Also, future to be shareholder
| are ripped off by current.
|
| I companies would focus on (long term) profitability many
| of their problems would be solved.
| [deleted]
| aaaronic wrote:
| Or more, indeed!
| [deleted]
| weberer wrote:
| Who are Ike and Tina?
| ayewo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ike_%26_Tina_Turner
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| Recall that Microsoft initially tried to make the hot reload
| feature of .NET 6 available only in Visual Studio. Their 3E
| strategy continues to this day.
| Spivak wrote:
| I feel people just use EEE to mean anything bad MS does
| whether it makes any sense at all.
|
| Having exclusive features in a product they would prefer you
| to use because it makes them more money isn't EEE.
| SahAssar wrote:
| You are saying they are 3E:ing their own product? It sounds
| like what you are describing is a lot closer to open-core.
| croes wrote:
| They love OpenSource to train Copilot.
| felvid wrote:
| I wonder what if other big companies invest in desktop Linux
| (aimed at regular users) to increase its adoption and therefore
| competition in the market. It seems to be worth it.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| Is there a technical solution? Can't you replace your Edge
| executable by a hardlink to your preferred browser?
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| It's shit like this, hackerverse. It's shit like this.
|
| This kind of behavior is why I (and many like me) will _never_
| consider Windows to be a legitimate alternate server platform or
| Visual Studio to be an alternative dev environment (perhaps only
| for coding a dedicated Win UI client). People walkin ' around
| like the 1990s were ancient history. Well, here we go again.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I guess my muscle memory of "right click->copy link" will truly
| serve me well now!
| darthrupert wrote:
| Microsoft hasn't improved their company culture at all in the 30
| years. Personally, I think they are a toxic entity and they
| should slowly vanish from the scene.
|
| Then again, every other large entity in this field is toxic as
| well in some form or other...
| donohoe wrote:
| While Apple is far from perfect, I have zero motivation to ever
| go back to Windows (or go work at a company that primarily uses
| MS tech) for reasons like this.
|
| Between these UX-hostile behaviors, ads embedded in the OS, the
| awful MSN news integration... it just baffles me that how much MS
| is sinking despite some rehabilitative moves a few years back.
|
| I'm not even mad, just (constantly) disappointed.
| abdellah123 wrote:
| And vscode
| Cort3z wrote:
| Wasn't MS sued by the EU some time ago for doing something
| similar. Have they not learned?
| cultureswitch wrote:
| The only way for a company this size to learn anything from a
| fine is to bankrupt the company.
| capableweb wrote:
| The knowledge gained from cases like that is never "We'll never
| do anything like it again" but "We pushed too hard, next time
| we need to push, but not as much".
|
| They're trying to find the limit for what they can do, so they
| can be right next to the limit. If they get fined, they try to
| correct by either finding a different way of doing the same
| thing, or doing something just enough to not get fined.
| alberth wrote:
| I think this is being wrongly frame.
|
| This functionality is actually needed in highly regulated
| industries like banking or government.
|
| Which is, you need a way to secure how your employees are
| _accessing_ information.
|
| And when everything is moving to becoming a cloud document (or
| document hosted on the cloud), not being able to have control
| over the browser in which that information is viewed with is a
| huge threat vector.
|
| So I totally understand why they have to ability to launch all
| links with Edge, and then Edge have built in privacy controls.
|
| So if you're an organization that need these higher level
| security controls, this is actually what you want.
|
| What the article doesn't make clear is, is Microsoft actually
| defaulting to this to all customers.
| NicuCalcea wrote:
| Then banks should just prevent employees from installing
| browsers they didn't approve. There is no doubt in my mind that
| MS did this purely to push Edge.
| snoopen wrote:
| No, it's absolutely the right framing.
|
| This isn't a setting that allows admins to force a browser for
| security.
|
| This is obviously about MS trying to force the uptake of Edge
| and nothing more.
| alberth wrote:
| Let's compare this to Google Workspace.
|
| Google Workspace functionality is _only_ fully supports
| Google Chrome.
|
| Google Workspace doesn't support a number of key features on
| Firefox, Safari & Edge - as denoted below.
|
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864?hl=en
|
| So how is what Microsoft is doing, different? They are only
| fully supporting Microsoft Edge (much like how Google only
| supports their own browser)
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Let 's compare this to Google Workspace._
|
| Well, Google Workspace is a dumpster fire. Anything that I
| can't run offline is a dumpster fire. That's a hill I'm
| willing to die on.
|
| > _Google Workspace functionality is only fully supports
| Google Chrome._
|
| That's by Google's "choice". It's definitely not a
| technical decision.
|
| > _Google Workspace doesn 't support a number of key
| features on Firefox, Safari & Edge - as denoted below.
| https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864?hl=en_
|
| I can tell you from personal experience that the _only_
| reason Google Workspace doesn 't "work" on Firefox is
| because of user-agent sniffing and similar countermeasures
| deployed by Google. There's absolutely no technical reason
| that the disabled features cannot work on Firefox.
|
| > _So how is what Microsoft is doing, different?_
|
| It's in fact not.
|
| > _They are only fully supporting Microsoft Edge (much like
| how Google only supports their own browser)_
|
| No, they are only fully _permitting_ Microsoft Edge (much
| like how Google only fully _permits_ their own browser).
| detaro wrote:
| If you are such an organization and want to force people to use
| Edge, you don't install other browsers and make Edge the
| default, instead of doctoring with every app that can contain
| links for it to use Edge.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > So if you're an organization that need these higher level
| security controls, this is actually what you want.
|
| I don't think that explanation makes sense. Let's say I'm an
| organization that needs these higher level security controls,
| but I want to push everything to be opened in Chrome instead.
| (Because I think that Chrome is more secure, or whatever.)
| Well, is this going to help me, or is it going to _fight_ me?
| Can I make this work with anything, or is it Edge only?
|
| I'm betting it's Edge only. And that makes the whole argument
| suspect.
| rmm wrote:
| What's crazy is that edge is actually a really good browser. Some
| of the features they have wacked on top of chromium are awesome.
|
| Especially when deploying it for a small business. It allows for
| easy integration with azure, profile syncing etc.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Sure, but for individual users business features things don't
| matter, it is users that need choice.
|
| Myself, I just want a browser that doesn't close multiple tabs
| when I want to close just one when tapping on a touch screen.
| That is one thing with Edge that irritates me to high hell, and
| a reason for me to switch.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Used to be good but they've crapped it up with shit like
| coupons, follow this creator (what the fuck?), the "smart" text
| selection menu and "rich" link copying.
|
| I don't set up a new Edge profile often but I have to remember
| to turn off like 5 or 6 things each time to make it somewhat
| usable.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I'm forced to use Edge on work PC and that context menu when
| selecting text is wildly unpredictable -- sometimes the only
| "Search for (selected text)" is Search Bing Sidebar. And its
| slow as molasses if you ever make the mistake of clicking it.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Turn it off from the ... menu that pops up near it
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| If you find Edge convenient, you can continue to use Edge. No
| one will deny that. But for those who use Chrome, Microsoft's
| pushing of Edge is annoying.
| commitpizza wrote:
| Well its great if you love being spied upon, Edge is filled
| with spyware tools which Microsoft tries to make you enable
| with dark patterns each time you update windows.
| bobmaxup wrote:
| Are there ways to make this tolerable with policy settings or
| something?
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-
| edge-...
| commitpizza wrote:
| The issue is that it's the way Microsoft conduct business
| at all. The default should be opt-in not hard to find opt-
| outs for every patch.
|
| I would say no, there is no way to make it more tolerable
| unless you run something like shutup10 or
| https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy
| but then again if you care that much you should simply just
| run Linux because in reality there is no real good solution
| since spyware is baked right into the product.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| The last thing I want from a browser these days is more
| features
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| The only experience I have of edge is opening it on a new
| installation of Windows, seeing trashy clickbait with
| thumbnails of half-naked women to go along with it; after which
| I proceeded to promptly close the window and download Chrome
| via Powershell.
|
| I don't know how a company can take good products and turn them
| into tacky products that no one would want to use if they had
| the knowledge to download an alternative.
| [deleted]
| perlgeek wrote:
| I wonder what the EU's antitrust regulators have to say about
| this one.
|
| See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission#...
| for previous clashes on related matters
| happytiger wrote:
| You can't embrace open source, stand for freedom on the Internet,
| and simultaneously engage in dark patterns like this without
| destroying user trust. And trust with users is the currency of
| the 21st century as much as data is the new oil.
|
| Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and
| for all, what they stand for. There was this incredible move
| towards open source, and embracing the modern web, and so many
| positive developments. I think myself, and many other
| technologists, were going, "Wait, is this is the same company
| that shoved IE down our throats for years and got sued for anti-
| competitive practices?" It was glorious, and shocking.
|
| All of that is now at risk so that some product manager can look
| good by driving enforced but entirely fake adoption of Edge --
| that should be nipped in the bud and a clear message sent that
| this era is over -- from the top executives.
|
| Or I supposed they could do nothing, and then it truly is sending
| a clear message as well. But perhaps not the one Microsoft
| intends to send, or the one that would benefit the company in
| coming years in terms of staying inside the good graces they have
| managed to create.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Many of us kept our trust rating for MS right around zero
| despite their "embrace of open source"; it seems we were
| correct in recognizing it as nothing more than a recognition of
| market realities packaged up as a marketing ploy.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Embrace and Extend.
| javcasas wrote:
| Ya forgot Extinguish. Microsoft didn't.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| This "embrace of open source" is a confusing perspective. I
| guess it's not the same sort of open source as I get from
| UNIX-like projects. I have still yet to download and compile
| any source code from MSFT. Whether it's a basic utility, a
| kernel or an entire OS. I must be interested in the wrong
| software. There is nothing to _compete_ with the UNIX-like OS
| projects I use. Instead, MSFT promotes running Linux inside
| Windows.
|
| Incredible how the company could release source code for a
| few random projects and have this "Microsoft has changed"
| perspective take hold with HN commenters:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_and_open_source
|
| Microsoft has been funding surveillance advertising companies
| like Facebook (early investor), gobbling up personal data
| from acquisitions like LinkedIn and churning out software
| patent applications. Windows remains closed source. Sharing
| the Windows source with governments and other select
| organisations does not IMO mean it's "open source". I cannot
| download and compile Windows. I cannot remove the parts of
| Windows I do not like and re-compile. Windows 11 users are
| surely getting plastered with ads as I type this comment. Not
| open source.
| [deleted]
| beerpls wrote:
| It's not just about trust, MS is outright hostile.
|
| Hostile UI, hostile business practices, hostile legal and
| growth endeavors
|
| At this point i'm not hust distrusting MS i'm actively doing
| anything I can to support their demise
| out-of-ideas wrote:
| aren't all these providers-of-things hostile in about (all
| ways) or at least most ways than not hostile ways? MS,
| Apple, Google, Amazon, FB, Adobe, IBM... they just want
| money; where's the money? <insert stewie+brian>
| lallysingh wrote:
| So.. how does everyone feel about their stuff on GitHub right
| now?
| bsuvc wrote:
| They tend to lock issues frequently.
|
| Presumably it is to prevent people discussing problems at
| length. I don't know any other reason they would do that.
|
| It seems to go against how most other organizations use
| GitHub.
| doctor_lollipop wrote:
| ... or about needing a Microsoft (GitHub) account to
| publish Rust packages (on crates.io).
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I was surprised to hear this so I went searching. Yep.
| Wow. [1]
|
| I use GitHub all the time but I never expected it to be
| _mandatory_ if you wanted to publish a package for a
| popular open source language.
|
| But as the top says, "If you are interested in helping
| with this work, please feel free to get started!" (Though
| only if you're a contributor or open a duplicate issue)
|
| [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| A proprietary software company never makes a "move toward open
| source". Microsoft released some things with source simply to
| sell more proprietary software that does not respect user
| freedoms.
|
| Open source and free software is a philosophy and ideology.
| Microsoft is incompatible with it no matter what licenses they
| use.
|
| Microsoft never embraced open source. You can't claim that
| until and unless Windows is released with source as free
| software, which will Never Ever Happen.
| waboremo wrote:
| Open source and free software are separate things, despite
| how much they're used interchangeably.
| SllX wrote:
| That's more of a free software mentality. Open source is just
| open source; Microsoft has some open source software, they
| use some open source software, but they are in the business
| of selling proprietary software and free software as Stallman
| defined it is antithetical to that.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| MSFT is indeed embracing open source -- prediction -- a
| polluted and key-controlled Debian will be inside the next
| OS, filled with Azure management python packages and adware.
| Second, Canonical as indentured servent, will deliver
| anything that Redmond requests as snapd, with phone-home
| welded ON and more expiring keys.
|
| You are not the customer here. You are a cog in an industrial
| machine. It is the executive management that has power, and
| you will know it every day. MSFT will sell your management
| the tools you are required to use every day.
| m463 wrote:
| embrace -> embrace and extend
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis.
| ..
| geodel wrote:
| > You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released
| with source as free software, which will Never Ever Happen.
|
| That would wouldn't change a thing even it happens. No one
| except Microsoft is going to be expert on 50 million lines of
| windows code and contribute meaningfully to it. Add to that
| contributor's licensing agreement, community behavior, sheer
| capacity to make API changes and get it accepted. It will be
| impossible to create alternate certified Windows distribution
| even if all source code was available.
| LocalH wrote:
| Not _immediately_ , no. But what about in 25 years?
| than3 wrote:
| Microsoft is no better than an accounting firm at this point.
| The only reason they are still around is because of the data
| collection from spying on their users, and malign and coercive
| practices that are illegal but remain unenforced probably due
| to some backroom deal they made regarding the former.
|
| They had a few good ideas early on, and now that open source
| isn't patent bound (not gonna get into the rediculousness of UI
| software patents that have been granted where they never met
| that bar of novel, useful, and non-obvious [grouping items is
| somehow non-obvious?]).,
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| No, the reason they're around is because probably 95% of
| businesses in the US rely on their software in one form or
| another.
| grey_earthling wrote:
| > Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once
| and for all, what they stand for.
|
| They stand for weary resignation. Same as Google and Amazon.
|
| For most people, they're just there, and you can't not use
| them, so what can you do?
|
| They can be as dodgy as they like, because when you point out
| what they're doing, most people will just be confused about why
| you're complaining, because you may as well be railing against
| the fact that rain is wet.
| jmartrican wrote:
| Add Adobe to that list.
| staunton wrote:
| Add every single big company in the world to that list.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| LOL, you are so right on that, average users do not
| understands the issues at hand about this, we need some kind
| of movement that better explains the issue.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| "Wait, is this is the same company that shoved IE down our
| throats for years and got sued for anti-competitive practices?"
|
| Really though?
|
| It was that easy?
|
| On my shit-list it's definitely way above Facebook, Apple, and
| Google. A company which has on so many occasions made my life
| harder and caused me to suffer. I would qualify Microsoft as
| irredeemably horrible, I can't imagine what they would have to
| do to make me consider changing my opinion of them.
| xg15 wrote:
| > _And trust with users is the currency of the 21st century as
| much as data is the new oil._
|
| Is it? The cynic in me feels that the actual currency is
| "engagement" - how many consumers can you keep on your
| platform. Providing a great and trustworthy service is _one_
| strategy to archieve this, but by far not the most effective or
| reliable.
|
| The big players very much seem to prefer a captive audience
| (through network effects, vendor-controlled hardware, closed
| ecosystems, etc) that _cannot_ switch away no matter how much
| they personally dislike or mistrust the platform.
| tempodox wrote:
| Obviously their dark patterns are not sufficient to drive away
| enough users and this has been the case for decades. Nothing
| new to see here, it's the same old Microsoft of yore.
| helmholtz wrote:
| Maybe not enough, but certainly some. I'm not a software
| person, and yet my personal machine now runs linux, exactly
| _because_ of Microsoft's wankery with no local accounts,
| uninstallable Edge, Cortana, news on the fucking taskbar, and
| the shitty Windows 11 with its shitty taskbar. Fuck all that
| noise. Life is calm and great in linux land.
| than3 wrote:
| That's because they have backroom deals with the
| manufacturers.
|
| Its impossible to compete when the manufacturers are actively
| hostile and don't provide the firmware/code/specs in a way
| that the hardware can be supported independently. Some even
| use this to spy under an umbrella of plausible deniability,
| there was an article just recently about Qualcomm chips that
| did this (checked in) at the firmware level.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I mean with desktop OS systems you've got
|
| * macs, which cost an arm and a leg and aren't necessarily
| better if you've got an axe to grind against corporations
| with dark patterns
|
| * chromebooks, where you have even less choice over the
| matter
|
| * various flavors of Linux, which have never quite gotten to
| 'grandma uses it and it just works with the apps she likes'
|
| Interestingly SteamOS is quite nice, but will it be something
| outside of gaming on a Steam Deck?
| stinkytaco wrote:
| > Interestingly SteamOS is quite nice, but will it be
| something outside of gaming on a Steam Deck?
|
| Considering their website[1] still says it's Debian derived
| but they switched to Arch some time ago, I doubt it's in
| their plans to do more than enable their own hardware.
|
| [1]: https://store.steampowered.com/steamos
| l0b0 wrote:
| > Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once
| and for all, what they stand for.
|
| Money. How would it be possible for an absolutely gigantic
| company to stand for anything else?
| panic wrote:
| It's impossible for an organization the size of Microsoft to
| behave according to a consistent set of values. Don't rely on
| their "good graces" for an instant.
| username3 wrote:
| Is everyone misreading the article?
|
| The new policy is to ignore your default browser from Outlook and
| Teams and open Edge. There is an option to turn off this policy
| to use your default browser.
|
| > Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT admins will be able to alter the
| policy, but those on Microsoft 365 for business will have to
| manage this change on individual machines.
| aqme28 wrote:
| > There is an option to turn off this policy to use your
| default browser.
|
| They should add a new option to ignore this one that is also
| turned on by default. Default overrides all the way down.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| > There is an option to turn off this policy to use your
| default browser.
|
| First time playing this game? Here's how it works:
|
| 1) Change the default behavior, but have the old behavior be an
| option
|
| 2) ~Everybody switches to the new behavior
|
| 3) Telemetry says ~nobody uses the old behavior, so remove the
| option in order to "streamline the experience"
| pavon wrote:
| 1b) Revert the setting every time there is a system update.
| dmichulke wrote:
| In Teams, there is also an option to switch off notifications
| and another one to use Windows notifications.
|
| Guess which ones of the two don't do shit.
|
| Here's a hint: I'm using Teams via browser to get rid of
| notifications.
| efitz wrote:
| I worked at Microsoft back in the day when we got anti-trusted
| for not removing IE from Windows. Seems like there's a lack of
| institutional memory over there.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Zoomers these days seem to think Bill is a benevolent do-gooder
| due to Gates foundation propaganda:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjHMoNGqQTI
|
| Those of us who were computer nerds in the '90s know he and
| Microsoft were more akin to the Borg. Slashdot always used to
| feature Bill as Locutus on stories about him/Microsoft. This is
| completely on brand for microsoft.
|
| The "reform" is entirely made up. He's the same oligarch he
| always was, and so are they.
| efitz wrote:
| Gates always was an asshole - nobody wanted to go to meetings
| with him because he was such a jerk. He set the example for
| the toxic nerd culture at Microsoft. A lot of the people at
| Microsoft were great but a lot of the leaders from that era,
| especially those promoted from the tech ranks, were downright
| abusive. I left near the end of the Ballmer era so I haven't
| gotten to see how things have changed under Satya Nadella but
| I hear good things from my friends who still work there.
| josefresco wrote:
| I don't get the anger, at this point Edge is interchangeable with
| Chrome. The only thing I "miss" are my saved password and
| extensions which can be easily imported. Complaining online is an
| international pastime though.
| can16358p wrote:
| It's not a technical problem.
|
| It's more of an ideology about Microsoft forcing whatever they
| want on users.
| josefresco wrote:
| 20 years ago this was a problem you could blame exclusively
| on MS. These days, they'd be negligent not to leverage their
| platforms to promote other products because the competition
| (Google/Apple) does so on a similar level.
| cultureswitch wrote:
| That others are doing it too is correct and irrelevant.
| thomond wrote:
| > at this point Edge is interchangeable with Chrome
|
| Then why would MSFT release Edge at all? maybe they should
| default to Chrome.
| josefresco wrote:
| Why does Google develop Chrome? Why not just support
| Chromium?
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _Edge is interchangeable with Chrome_
|
| Okay. What if I want to use Firefox though?
| josefresco wrote:
| My daily driver is Firefox but I also have Chrome open (for
| Google products) and Vivaldi for personal surfing. Easy
| switch considering I'm already juggling browsers.
| AraceliHarker wrote:
| For example, Bing Chat is not available without using Edge,
| right?
| josefresco wrote:
| I have no problems with MS making Bing Chat a "feature" of
| Edge.
| wheybags wrote:
| It's not about the quality of the browser. The user has a
| setting to choose which browser to use, and they are
| disregarding it for their own convenience. It's anti-consumer
| and anti-competitive.
| josefresco wrote:
| I agree, it's just "more of the same" for me and thankfully
| Edge isn't terrible like IE 6x etc.
| mcenedella wrote:
| It's sad and foolish. Strong-arming users into a product is a
| 1990s playbook, wholly out of step with modern end user
| expectations.
|
| Playing rough in the sandbox hurts all their products. See what's
| happened to Bing since they won't let you use it in Safari or
| Chrome.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Alienating the entire customer base, that's the Microsoft I know!
| summm wrote:
| Good! This needs to go on, and it needs to hurt even more. This
| is what you will get for making yourselves dependent on a single
| monopolistic vendor. Just continue laughing about the Year of
| Linux on Desktops, and suffer.
| nickjj wrote:
| Interesting timing.
|
| 2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar
| + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams.
|
| I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are
| compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until
| a few days ago.
|
| Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to
| mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read
| button. It also doesn't intuitively support filters with emails
| that have + in their name (each email ends up being unique
| instead of Google doing the more expected thing of letting the
| filter match all + variants). It also doesn't update its title
| bar with a count of emails in your inbox. That's things I
| discovered after using it for about 10 minutes.
|
| Microsoft's calendar is designed so poorly, there's so many
| quality of life things that aren't there vs Google. There's too
| many to list but the biggest one is not being able to see the
| calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event.
| All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their
| exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This
| removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often
| times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting
| out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes
| depending on who is doing what beforehand.
|
| I'm not not looking forward to the day when we'll need to use all
| of MS' tools to replace Google docs + spreadsheet and Slack.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when
| inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount
| of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they
| shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human
| element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid
| scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long
| meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is
| doing what beforehand.
|
| This is configurable, you can make your calendars public and
| convince your teammates (and potentially the rest of the
| company) to do so as well.
| coffeeling wrote:
| > Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to
| mark it as read.
|
| It absolutely does let you do that. I use OWA as my daily
| driver and that is the behaviour at least on my end.
| Settings->Mail->Message Handling should have the options you
| want.
| [deleted]
| vxNsr wrote:
| Let me preface this by saying, I don't work for Microsoft but
| have used their suite for a long time.
|
| Nearly everything you're complaining about can be changed in
| settings. Either by you or the IT Admin.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Do you know what setting I need to use to enable deleting
| emails without first archiving and un-archiving them?
| vxNsr wrote:
| That sounds like something your admin enabled. I've never
| seen that.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| Purely my subjective experience but the MS tools seem designed
| to keep the users that have been using Outlook on the desktop
| for _decades_. I get ornery when it doesn 't work the way I'm
| used to.
| tolciho wrote:
| I spent some time dinking around in Outlook once trying to
| find where some feature had been moved to. Ended up
| apologizing to the user... they were due to retire soon, and
| who knows where some UI twizzle had put the whatever in that
| manifestation of the mediocre malware.
| snarfy wrote:
| > I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
|
| and then
|
| > Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to
| mark it as read.
|
| Did it occur to you that maybe a few days of use isn't enough
| for you to understand how to use office? Everything you
| complained about works fine, even if you don't understand how
| to do it.
| bearjaws wrote:
| The web experience of Word, Power Point and Excel, are
| appalling. Laggy, resource hogs. Excel & Power Point are damn
| near unusable on anything complicated.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| And the group editing in those products...! Every time we've
| edited Excel sheets with more than one person it quickly
| restored in unresolvable merge conflicts and forked files.
| This has always worked beautifully in Google Sheets.
| coffeeling wrote:
| From what I've heard, the sync works well when everyone's
| using the same kind of client (eg. desktop, or web app). If
| they get mixed things become slowwe to update and have a
| decent chance to quickly go to hell.
| lbwtaylor wrote:
| >Excel [is] damn near unusable on anything complicated
|
| There are billion dollar financial decisions with the most
| sophisticated financial models being made (rightly or
| wrongly) using Excel.
|
| I'm sure you have had a bad experience, but saying excel
| can't handle complex things is not reality.
| bearjaws wrote:
| The web experience specifically.
| lbwtaylor wrote:
| Yes, that is very true, Google is web first/only and MS
| Office is web kind-of.
| CharlesW wrote:
| They're nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them
| primarily as viewers. In my experience, for any serious work
| you'll want to use the native apps.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| > In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use
| the native apps.
|
| Don't you see how absurd that is in 2023? It's like me
| saying "Online shops are nice in a pinch, but I advise
| folks to think of them primarily as viewing goods. In my
| experience, for any serious shopping you'll want to visit
| the bricks and mortar shop"
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Don 't you see how absurd that is in 2023?_
|
| I understand that POV, but I should temper my "serious
| work" statement by saying that the Office web apps are
| pretty great and keep getting better. However, the native
| desktop apps are just better.
|
| It's hard to make a direct comparison with Google's web-
| app-only strategy since the Workspace apps are toys in
| comparison, more akin to Apple's iWork suite.
| djtango wrote:
| I haven't used Sheets as extensively as I've used Excel,
| and once upon a time I was a real Excel machine who knew
| all the alt menu navigation by heart (great precursor
| training for vim) but I have slowly become a Sheets
| convert.
|
| Being able to write appscript between all the Workplace
| products was pretty painless.
|
| I haven't tried to push Sheets to do million row fat
| sheets for crunching but wouldn't be surprised if it does
| ok
|
| I am using Excel on windows again lately and it is
| reasonably smooth but boy do I miss Drive + Sheets +
| collaboration for a 2023 remote workflow
| CharlesW wrote:
| I can totally see that, and Sheets seems like the most
| capable app in the suite. And although I found myself
| frusted by Docs and Slides limitations, I know that
| they're perfectly fine for lots of (maybe most?) use
| cases.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| That's an absurd comparison.
|
| Web tools are always going to be weak vs. locally
| executing tools. I've never seen one that I prefer to a
| native equivalent.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| > Web tools are always going to be weak vs. locally
| executing tools. I've never seen one that I prefer to a
| native equivalent.
|
| Sure, that's a fact which I don't dispute, but that
| doesn't mean that writing a word document in your browser
| should be such a bad experience that you really just want
| to use the web version for viewing documents, which is
| the absurd thing to which I responded. See, what you say
| is true, but that doesn't necessarily negate my point if
| you can agree?
|
| Word is not Photoshop, I expect the web version to be
| powerful enough to get serious writing done via it.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I don't. I expect MSFT to make a hash of it, and to do so
| in an environment (a browser) that I've never found equal
| to the task of "getting out of the way and letting me
| write."
| mats852 wrote:
| I think the worst part is their authentication, for some reason
| I have a personal account that was invited as a guest in an
| organization to use Teams. I can only access the Teams
| workspace if I click through a link in my emails and I have to
| login twice. It only works on the web version, I can't login
| the app at all.
|
| But once you're in Teams, everything is so much worse, it's
| like using a hacked version of MS Word to chat. But where Slack
| actually shines is around the workflows, automation and bots, I
| don't think Teams has much of that.
|
| @geerlingguy had a way worse experience recently.
| foepys wrote:
| The only thing MS Teams has going for it is that it is
| included in Office 365 subscriptions. That's it.
|
| It's a garbage product that's slowing even the fastest
| computers down to a crawl. And don't get me started on all
| the bugs. Horrible.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| >All you see is a blocked out amount of time
|
| You CAN share your calendar details, but most people don't want
| to. I see this as a feature.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| IMO outlook calendar has the fundamental design flaw that it
| uses email to share (at least some) state, rather than entries
| in a central server. Things like inviting someone to a meeting
| I rejected are super hard to impossible. Group meetings while
| the host is out are a disaster.
| themoop wrote:
| I think most things you describe are just getting used to
| product difference / configuration options.
|
| Clicking an email definitely marks it as read. The calendar
| schedule not being revealed is a just a privacy option, each
| person must opt-in to share the exact meeting details.
|
| Having used both gsuite and office I find that they both get
| job done fairly well
| nickjj wrote:
| > The calendar schedule not being revealed is a just a
| privacy option, each person must opt-in to share the exact
| meeting details.
|
| We've done this as far as I know. We also added each other to
| our directory. I can see the details of other team mate's
| calendars in the full view but this does not show up in the
| mini-view when you add a guest to an event.
|
| With Google, when you create a new event and put in a user's
| email as a guest it immediately showed you a full list of
| their exact events with times and whether or not they
| accepted an optional meeting (an outlined or filled circle).
| It was great to see at a glance while you're in the process
| of creating the event.
|
| With MS' calendar all you see is a red block of color around
| the times they are not available.
|
| > Clicking an email definitely marks it as read.
|
| It doesn't for me when using Chrome. When I click into an
| email the title remains bold and the inbox count doesn't
| decrease. Keep in mind this is the web app. I didn't install
| the dedicated app, but I also used the web version of all of
| Google's tools too.
| [deleted]
| hra5th wrote:
| The email gets marked as read once you click _out_ of the
| email to view a different one (which I agree is
| unintuitive, but it is not true you have to explicitly
| click "mark as read").
| topkai22 wrote:
| The location for setting mail read on selected is
| settings-> mail-> message handling-> Mark as read.
|
| Outlook also defaults to not marking messages as unread
| when the unread filter is on. I presume because profiles
| were setting the filter and then complaining their messages
| were disappearing? You can change rose on the same settings
| page
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _With MS ' calendar all you see is a red block of color
| around the times they are not available._
|
| Only by default, which I believe your org can change. You
| have complete control over this for your calendar, as does
| everyone else.
|
| https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/share-your-
| calend...
|
| > _When I click into an email the title remains bold and
| the inbox count doesn 't decrease._
|
| Also configurable.
| nickjj wrote:
| The sharing aspect has already been done. It still
| doesn't show the details in the mini-view where you
| insert the person's name as a guest which is the most
| important time to see such information.
|
| You just see a big chunk of red with no details. You
| don't even see things like "busy". It's just a solid red
| color.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _The sharing aspect has already been done._
|
| The key is that there are 5 permission levels: (1) None,
| (2) Can view when I'm busy, (3) Can view titles and
| locations, (4) Can view all details, and (5) Can edit.
|
| Is that too much control? Maybe, but it's helpful when
| you want to share more details with teammates than you do
| with others, grant admins edit permissions, etc.
| nickjj wrote:
| All of us have it set to (4) to view all details.
|
| But nope, it doesn't show any details in the mini view
| when inviting someone to an event.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| >> When I click into an email the title remains bold and
| the inbox count doesn't decrease.
|
| >Also configurable.
|
| Bless you! I had been angsting over this at work for
| years. I can't believe I didn't think to check the
| settings.
| [deleted]
| xaerise wrote:
| It is marked as read when you are reading it. When you are
| switching to another mail, it displays it as read.
|
| No need to manually mark it as read.
|
| *EDIT*
|
| Just noticed that there is a setting for this:
|
| Under Options in the webmail you can switch this between:
|
| * Mark as read as soon it has been choosen
|
| * Mark as read after delay in seconds
|
| * Mark as read after selection changes
|
| * Do not mark as read automatically
| nickjj wrote:
| Thanks. That was the issue in my case.
|
| The default configuration is: * Mark as read after selection
| changes
|
| Which in my opinion is really weird. I've been using email
| for 20 years and no other client I've used works this way.
| It's so inefficient since you need to click into a previously
| read email to mark a different email as read.
|
| But, I did switch things to mark it as read when chosen which
| fixes it.
| 1980phipsi wrote:
| One big annoying thing is that when you mark an email as
| unread in Outlook on mobile, the default is to mark the
| entire email chain as unread. So if you have a long email
| chain, all of sudden there will be like 20-30 unread messages
| in your inbox. It should have the ability to mark unread from
| here or something like that.
| dghughes wrote:
| Oh web outlook ugh. People where I work hate Outlook web.
| It's not intuitive. Shared mailboxes in web Outlook are a
| pain they dont show on the left sidebar they need to be
| opened in a separate tab. Terrible for efficiency. Except
| "out of office" which for shared mailboxes it can't be
| disabled in non-web Outlook you have to do it in web.
|
| My day and job are based on Microsoft weirdness.
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