[HN Gopher] Microsoft is blocking Google Chrome through its fami...
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       Microsoft is blocking Google Chrome through its family safety
       feature
        
       Author : chrisjj
       Score  : 33 points
       Date   : 2025-06-20 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
        
       | CM30 wrote:
       | Feels like a good case for an antitrust complaint if you ask me.
        
       | bitpush wrote:
       | > Microsoft has introduced a bug into Family Safety that
       | specifically targets the Chrome browser and prevents it from
       | functioning on Windows.
       | 
       | In isolation this is understandable. Bugs happen, and it happens
       | at the worst time. But Microsoft has a pattern on dark patterns
       | to pump up the Edge usage, and cant help but this this is
       | somewhat planned.
        
         | tdeck wrote:
         | Actually I think this is unacceptable even in isolation. Chrome
         | is one of the most popular Windows applications. If they aren't
         | testing for regressions with Chrome, they aren't testing
         | adequately.
        
           | neepi wrote:
           | Incompetence reins there. A few years ago I was working on an
           | MSI deployment for something and Defender decided to think it
           | was a virus. Turned out it was an MSFT DLL that we included
           | with it that was tripping it. Took a whole month for them to
           | sort it out.
        
         | AlienRobot wrote:
         | That's not a bug, it's a feature.
        
       | damnesian wrote:
       | I am blocking Microsoft through my personal data safety protocol.
        
       | akazantsev wrote:
       | Our product once suffered from a faulty Windows Defender update,
       | and as I remember, it took about two weeks for Microsoft to fix
       | it. During those two weeks, our product was barely usable for
       | many users because access to a file system was slowed down to a
       | crawl.
       | 
       | So, two weeks before the fix might not be that unusual for them.
        
       | tchbnl wrote:
       | I think this is a legitimate bug. But also that Microsoft is
       | taking its sweet time to fix it.
        
         | privatelypublic wrote:
         | Like google is any faster when they have issues. Oh wait.
         | They're worse.
        
         | Analemma_ wrote:
         | Google occasionally breaks YouTube in Firefox, and also takes
         | its sweet time to fix it. Just the nature of the beast in this
         | industry it seems.
        
           | neepi wrote:
           | The nature of the beast is I use yt-dlp and vlc as my YouTube
           | client. If they're going to be assholes, I'm not bothered.
        
       | McDyver wrote:
       | My family safety feature is called linux.
        
       | DoctorOW wrote:
       | > _Other browsers like Firefox or Opera appear to be unaffected,
       | and some users have even found that renaming Chrome.exe to
       | Chrome1.exe works around this issue._
       | 
       | How is this possibly unintentional?
        
       | abetaha wrote:
       | I wonder if this is related to the errors I saw this week, when I
       | tried to install Chrome on my kid's computer. Apart from all the
       | popups that discouraged switching to Chrome, the installer failed
       | to run with an obscure error message.
       | 
       | Luckily I recalled there is an offline installer, and when I
       | downloaded that, it worked like a charm.
        
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       (page generated 2025-06-20 23:01 UTC)