When I see stories like this, I think about what it must be like to be an engineer on the windows team. You get in, make your coffee in a fancy Microsoft-branded cup, and then a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket. Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users, and making the field of software engineering less trustworthy.
Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer? Why is big tech so obsessed with torching their long-term reputation in exchange for a few usage share points in the short term? How do engineers sleep at night, knowing their role is to be a malignant, user-hostile, value-destroying force in the world?
It's the PM culture that everyone has adopted from Google for sure. Along with their grotesque hiring methodology and inordinate respect for the likes of Kubernetes. Clever mediocrity is not the same as genius.
Why dramaticize? It was probably someone assigned to "encourage user-retention". This was definitely a terrible, anti-competitive move, though.
Don't push the narrative that only "evil" people can do bad things. Then, since almost no one thinks they are evil themselves, no one will believe they're doing bad things.
how is OP dramatizing? It is making the world worse for users, and anyone intelligent enough to work on that team understands what they're doing, PR speak or not.
If you can work for FAANG you can work somewhere else and make a comfortable living, it's not like we're talking about someone doing shady work to put food on the table. Why do we not hold people accountable?
If someone shills for big oil or the tobacco industry we have no trouble pointing out how unethical it is.
>You get in, make your coffee in a fancy Microsoft-branded cup, and then a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket. Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users, and making the field of software engineering less trustworthy."
> It was probably someone assigned to "encourage user-retention".
The ticket would certainly not be named "Ignore user's default browser choice", but only an extremely naive developer would believe this is good for their users. A developer that finds this objectionable would ask to be transferred to another team, but most won't.
I'm not saying that developers should refuse the work, just that they're not innocent about what they're doing.
I despise this common attitude of letting “good people” off the hook.
If you work for one of these companies, there is no clever self-justification. You can either lie to yourself or own the truth. Doesn’t matter if you’re on some VR offshoot division of Facebook. You are part of all the terrible damage and death they cause.
> Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users,
I think there is a 3rd and more likely possibility, namely, that they've either been brainwashed, or convinced themselves, that the actions they're taking are right & righteous.
> Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer?
Facebook with creepier services and dark patterns
Google + ads that favor their own services
Everything on killedbygoogle.com
Apple's on-device file scanner
Spotify forcing auto-play on connected devices as a feature
Amazon charging $10 shipping for whole foods despite already making a profit
BMW charging for apple carplay (this changed last year to Free I believe)
Mercedes and Tesla charging for vehicle dlc
everything that's ever required a library of Congress dmca exception to work around
Etc.
....it's life, unless you can seize political power and not be corrupted by the many machinations of corruption that have evolved in the US in the last few hundred years.
Good example, especially considering the law was weaponized against only a relative newcomer to that game rather than all the existing players who'd been doing it for years.
Another example are perhaps printer companies? "Execute the jet some ink" protocol needs the exact inkjet cartridge they sell, other products are actively shielded.
The technology is completely different, the effect is quite similar.
Even the countermeasures are similar: changing protocol of weblinks to regular html can be compared to replying "am correct cartridge" signal.
Maybe I should clarify that I was referring to the field of software generally, which definitely includes Facebook and the software parts of cars.
Some days it feels like the whole field is premised on taking advantage of people, not trying to make the world better for them. I am values-driven, so it just really hurts to see so much bad behavior in my chosen field (software). I don’t like the irrational “tech bro” hate that’s popular these days, but I’m a little more empathetic when I realize that most consumers have probably faced technology that is actively taking advantage of them. Uncool.
> Maybe I should clarify that I was referring to the field of software generally, which definitely includes Facebook and the software parts of cars.
> Some days it feels like the whole field is premised on taking advantage of people, not trying to make the world better for them.
Yeah, despite all the initial optimism, it seems one of the main consequences of connected software was to remove the technical barriers to whole classes of unscrupulous behavior that the market incentivizes.
not doubting you, but what models? my 10+ year old 555s and 280pros are still going strong. want to be sure to avoid whatever you bought when I end up replacing them.
Isn't it more likely to be incompetence than malice?
Perhaps the ticket said: "Implement Edge for Windows 11, make sure links will open in Edge." and not "screw some stuff up, then go play some golf".
It's very easy to just anthropomorphise everything and say "ha, that one is evil with evil intentions and sadistic joy", but it's far more likely that it either wasn't actually designed to work like that and it's simply some crappy default behaviour, or there is some marketing VP who went beyond his scope and forced an implementation detail 4 layers deep in the organisation. Then that one might be bad, (but still just incompetent - even just checking historical cases would have shown that to be a bad idea) but all engineers, all managers, all POs? Unlikely.
I don't use Windows, but according to the article, this is a new update. Edge was already built-in a lot of shortcuts in Windows 11, but people used tools like EdgeDeflector to circumvent that. The new update prevented that from happening, resulting in an error message when trying to do it. Seems like a deliberate choice to me.
> Implement Edge for Windows 11, make sure links will open in Edge.
This was already done.
The new ticket would have said something like: "Stop users from being able to override the special links that only work in Edge. Make very sure that users have no way of working around this behavior even if they really want to."
That's a bit too much speculation for me. If there was some technical detail that would show exactly that, sure, but in this case it just seems to be a missing option.
A bit like:
- "openInBrowser(url)" (the mistake)
- "openInEdge(url)" (the malice)
-"openInDefaultBrowser(url)" (the one configured by the end-user).
I have no idea what they are doing under the hood, but I'm pretty sure some of it can be easily identified for being a mistake, malice or something else.
The article explained the details. Microsoft apps put microsoft-edge:// in front of links to make them open in Edge since Windows 10. People worked around it by having another app handle the microsoft-edge protocol. Now Microsoft broke that.
That's what it explained yes, but that doesn't cover the protocol handler on the shell side at all. Either it's a protocol with a protocol handler or it isn't.
Yes, that is the functional description, and I was writing about the technical implementation. User overrides work on protocols, but if it's not a user override anymore it makes sense that it wouldn't apply the settings since there is nothing to apply to.
Just because it "looks" the same doesn't mean it is the same. There is a vague reference about a few KiB of added compiled code and the fact that it's an insider build, but other than that just an exploration of previously valid avenues that no longer apply, and the bundled outrage of assumptions based on a whole lot of nothing.
I don't know what the actual implementation is, the article on the website doesn't seem to know, and neither do you. So all we can do is speculate, and it appears some people choose unproductive outrage over technical exploration.
>Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer?
Just last week I was reading about a court ruling proving a local bank overcharged interest on car loans, entire department knew, and they did this for years. Effectively stealing from people. The other day a retail store tried to get out of warranty obligation under the excuse that I don't have the receipt, even though I have the warranty card with serial number - a friend working in support said it was a common tactic to see if people would give up.
If you think this is an example of a morally questionable job I'd like to know what universe you live in.
There are people who make food. People who drive trucks. People who fly airplanes. People who do customer service. People who fill cavities. People who cure cancer. People who fill potholes. People who clean floors. People who cook meals. People who maintain transmission lines. People who build houses. I’d say that most jobs are in fact doing critical work to make the world better for people, even if in small ways like improving the dining experience.
I’ll also point out that in the case of the bank overcharging, it sounds like outright fraud (totally unacceptable) and the courts held them to account. It is shocking that fraud and corruption happen, but at least society seems to have a mechanism for dealing with it.
Software engineering isn’t morally questionable, if you aren’t going out of your way to make the world worse for people. There is no compelling reason to do that, so the vast majority of jobs should be perfectly reasonable. I love my job in part because I’m never asked to actively make my product worse, or work against users and customers. We’re imperfect and don’t always work as well as we could, but at least we’re working in the right direction.
> Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer
Every field. The seller-buyer relationship is supposed to be adversarial. This is why competition is so important, and why ignoring anticompetitive practices is so damaging: the only way to prevent companies from throwing punches your way is to be able to punch back.
> When I see stories like this, I think about what it must be like to be an engineer on the windows team
In some cases, you find it highly objectionable, but because large corporate entities are authoritarian in nature and you don't want to risk getting fired, you complain but ultimately get the job done anyways. You don't get over it and keep it in a long list of things you find questionable before you decide it's time to change teams or companies. The "PM" in this equation likely feels the same as you, because no single PM at a large company like this has the authority to make decisions like this nor tell their dev team what to do (it's an influence role, not an authority role - authority is for folks with bigger paychecks).
Or you get paid and know about a more complicated/nuanced take that only people on the inside know about, so you do the work and move on because you probably don't care that much.
> a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket.
There usually isn't a "make the product worse" ticket. It's often more a matter of not having enough time to do it the interoperable way.
That's not to say "actively shit on our customers" tickets don't exist, just that it happens so often because of far less sinister, far more mundane reasons.
This is a pretty clear example of the "make the product worse" ticket, though. The interoperable way has been in use for decades—it's just "use an http:// link like everyone else"—but this is them spending extra time to deliberately prevent interoperability
> Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer
Health Insurance, look up the case of Allena Hansen. Her face was ripped off by a bear in the wilderness but somehow got herself to a fire station for an airlift. She said that dealing with Blue Cross Blue Shield afterwards was by far the worst part of the experience, because "having a face" is considered cosmetic.
I used to work for a smaller group insurer and I'll never forget how at every single all-hands meeting and innumerable company-wide emails for 5 years the CEO would dedicate 20 minutes to whining about pre-existing conditions getting deleted by Congress.
This is what happens when you do "data-driven" development. You need to improve the various metrics that telemetry gives you. I'm sure they have some "increase percentage of links opened using Edge" OKR.
Yup, in my experience any data driven goal setting steers teams towards short term wins, with potentially disastrous long term losses.
Long term value creation is a lot harder to prove, but I still always try to push for it. But most organisations can't deal with it, their decision making mechanisms are so broken that they need someone else (arbitrary data) to do the job...
To me it seems like many industries dominated by multinational companies are clearly not acting in the best interest of their customers. Tobacco, Pharma, Food, Electronics, Fashion to name a few.
I'd be interested to know if you assume the opposite, that companies in general act in the interest of their customers?
Note that this issue is specifically about microsoft-edge:// links (used in some internal Windows features). Not http/https.
I do wish they used a more generic/portable solution, but this is for Windows-specific features, so it would require them to think through an open, stable & forever-supported API...
So some MS apps are calling Edge specifically instead of the user's default browser. This seems less egregious than many users here are suggesting. Am I wrong?
It opens all internet hyperlinks anywhere in the operating system in Edge, from debug information to help forums to faqs, and also any Cortana responses that contain web links and web searches from the built-in non-user-configurable search bar.
On top of that, whenever Edge opens, it tries to set itself as your default browser, and excises all your other browsers from the desktop and dock.
> These “web experiences”, as Microsoft calls them, feature links to online news, weather, and other resources. Links sent to the device from a paired Samsung or Android devices are also affected.
So this is related to the garbage MS pushed earlier in the year (or was it last year?) where a news & weather widget suddenly appeared on your dock out of nowhere.
Now if you click on a link from that thing (and probably other locations, sibling comments mention web results from the search and cortana), it opens them in Edge instead of opening them in your actual web browser.
This is not "we're bundling a local web application developed specifically for edge so we're linking to that specifically to make sure it doesn't break", this is "we're wilfully and specifically bypassing the browser you configured to handle web pages when opening web pages".
The title makes it seem like HTTP(S) links are Edge only, which is probably why people are reacting the way they are.
At the same time, If I said I want all web links opened in Firefox and an MS app is forcing me to use Edge, well that's pretty shitty.
I've had no issues using Windows since the XP days they made some missteps but it did what I wanted. Windows 11 is forcing me off Windows. I'm slowing switching to Linux Full time.
Honestly wish I could just have Windows 7 as my OS forever.
It's a complete non-story because what many of the other commentors are failing to consider is that various browsers have subtle incompatibilities. Additionally, things that worked previously can break in future releases. It would become necessary for Windows developers or whichever team is responsible to then conduct extensive compatibility testing across a variety of browsers in perpetuity for the lifetime of the OS.
If you want to use a browser other than Edge that's fine. Most of us do. But that's on you, not the Windows team. Microsoft has a long history of caring deeply about compatibility even when they aren't the party responsible for breaking something. Perception is everything to the average user.
The same argument could be made to block any kind of third-party app that could replace a native feature. Why is it so unreasonable to expect a platform vendor to test compatibility with third party software running on their platform? It is the primary reason why the platform exists!
If I search for something in the start menu, and the OS insists on giving me a Bing search, it seems completely reasonable to expect that Bing, which is already supported in other browsers, can open in other browsers.
Most links in Windows are hard-coded to open Edge specifically instead of respecting the user's default browser preferences. For example, if you search from the Start menu it always opens in Edge with Bing. If you click a link from an email in the Mail app, it always opens in Edge. If you click a link anywhere in the built-in documentation, it always opens in Edge.
I'm sure you can image why this is annoying and user-hostile. You've just clicked on an ordinary-looking link, but instead of instantly opening a new tab in your favorite browser you have to wait for a new browser to load and dismiss the "do you want to set Edge as your default browser?" prompt, after which you get your page in a browser you never use with none of your extensions/settings/privacy features.
For example, clicking on a news article from the "News and Interests" panel force-open in Microsoft Edge while there is absolutely no valid reason why it shouldn't use the default web browser.
This is frustrating, and I'll simply turn off the panel instead of using it.
That was already the case -- the new behaviour being claimed here is that they have disabled previously known methods to intercept the Edge-specific calls.
It should also be noted that almost every element of the windows UI which launches a browser does it using the Edge-specific scheme, so there is a substantial need to do this kind of interception if you are not an Edge user.
Then, when you go and use the competitor's search engine or video hosting platform you get multiple banners inviting you to install their browser (or it's flat out installed as a hidden checkbox in a popular utility's installer!).
Then, disgusted by these dark patterns and practices, you install an alternate browser that's not safari on your iOS device. Wait...
This is specifically an apparently intentional regression from build to build that breaks this specific use case (and no others) of a pre-existing API for managing URL scheme associations, not a need for a new careful API to be designed.
Yes and no. I suspect the main feature this is used for is the start menu search feature to push traffic to bing. This appears to be unavoidable and really pisses me off on a regular basis.
I can’t think of another reason in the windows UI to disable this. I’m sure there are some but at no point should those should require Edge. It’s a web page dammit!
Sounds like some high level product manager from Edge forced this decision on the Windows team. It makes no sense why they wouldn't respect a user's default settings. People configure a multitude of addons and customizations in their default browser, to completely bypass that seems like a poor customer experience.
Sounds plausible. It can't be a fun job making a crappy spin- off of Chrome. And knowing that no one cares less about what you do and the whole purpose of your project is so that MS can say "we do that too". Edge exists to promote MS, not to serve customers, so it's not surprising if the Edge team don't care about UX or even the reputation of Windows itself.
It's a bit of a pain, but having used new chromium based edge for a while, it does work well, and it's not got Google crap in it... Yes, Microsoft replaced Google with theirs, but it's not a bad browser...
I wouldn't install Chrome on any of my devices. Google's approach to building a browser has been probably the most devious plan of the last decade. They started with these good intentions, but have completely destroyed my faith in browsers.
Giving reasonable doubt to Microsoft here, many of these features using the microsoft-edge:// pseudo protocol also have Windows 10 back ports and it is reasonable to assume that it was a workaround intended to address the elephant in the room that some Windows 10 users (coughEnterprisecough) set IE11 as their default browser in a poorly thought out GPO somewhere they don't remember how to fix. (Probably because it was some big bully coughOraclecough that told them they needed to do that in the first place.)
The pseudo protocol probably should have been better designed with a less specific name, and probably should have had a better fallback to default browsers when they aren't IE11, but one can also imagine the name was chosen because it was the easiest solution using existing pseudo-protocol support in Windows 10 and 11 than building a more complicated "trampoline", maybe.
Because Microsoft stopped supporting IE 11 before Windows 10 was even released and only included it at all due to a desperate sense of backwards compatibility?
Hindsight being what it is, we can all wish Microsoft had taken a different approach to IE 11 support in Windows 10. I don't think this microsoft-edge:// thing was the best answer either. It just sort of makes sense in terms of the ugly situation Microsoft created for themselves, maybe.
They did not stop supporting it, they stopped developing it and deprecated it. They will stop supporting it in the future, but as it is a core component of windows 10 it will be supported as long as that OS is. The support schedule for windows 11 might be different since it is no longer included as a core component. The latest release of IE11 was less than 2 months ago (September 30, 2021).
> Microsoft stopped supporting IE 11 before Windows 10 was even released
It's supported until next June on all Windows 10 channels.[1] Indefinitely on LTSC and older Windows. It was indefinitely on all Windows 10 channels until 6 months ago. And your guess doesn't explain why Microsoft just blocked 3rd party browsers from handling the microsoft-edge protocol.
That explains the initial implementation, but then why this new development of blocking third party applications from using it? That's obviously not an issue for IE11, right?
>but this is for Windows-specific features, so it would require them to think through an open, stable & forever-supported API...
Maybe there's some I haven't seen, but what I do see is stuff like opening a web page from a weather widget. There's nothing MS-specific about it, and the EdgeDeflector thing worked a few days ago. Clicking on html files in MS Explorer still opens Chrome, so I assume they know what to do.
> this is for Windows-specific features, so it would require them to think through an open, stable & forever-supported API
seems to directly disagree with the author's analysis:
> These special links only exist to force users into using Microsoft Edge. They serve no other purpose than to circumvent the user’s default browser preference to promote a Microsoft product.
Why do you suggest these are for Windows-specific features?
It's not an analysis, it's an opinion. There is no possible analysis: there is a behavior, you choose how to interpret it. It's not like you decompile the code and the machine code spells out "screw you".
The people who thought this up, implemented it, QA’ed it and approved as well as their entire hierarchy up to Nadella are complicit with monopolistic practices again.
Why am I not surprised. Emperor only got new clothes.
It's not an isolated incident, either; they're playing a very similar game with Bing integration. Removing Bing results from the start menu search went from a supported UI toggle to a straightforward registry hack to a registry hack that also messes with local search.
No other company is as openly hostile towards its users, at least Google, and Apple and the likes have the decency to pretend they care.
But the confusing part with Microsoft is that there are a multitude of alternatives. There isn't nearly as much lock in as with some of the other companies.
It seems like enterprise is what keeps them alive and let's them get away with all of this stuff but it's not clear to me why big enterprise feels so locked in on Microsoft in 2021.
> And also pretending those things don't exist on Linux.
As in, this kind of misbehavior existing on Linux distros? I'm not aware of any FOSS operating system trying to force one browser over another except for Chrom/ium OS (which isn't what most people mean when they say "Linux")
Oracle might have the dubious distinction of managing to be worse; at least Microsoft isn't going around suing people (who weren't egregiously and intentionally pirating stuff, at least).
My opinion is that MS is again doing backroom deals with large companies, like they used to do in the 90s. Its the only explanation why companies are not treating MS products as toxic malware, which is what they actually are.
Enterprise to enterprise is much easier when they go through a Microsoft intermediary. SSO goes through Microsoft, calendar invitations go through Microsoft, office document interop goes through Microsoft, document sharing goes through Microsoft (via SharePoint).
Cause they somehow like that "new Microsoft" that doesn't exist.
Problem is now Microsoft owns Github, and NPM so virtually Microsoft owns Node.js, and that allegedly open source ID called Visual Studio Code that isn't really open source.
I don't really understand this one. When I want to use the internet on Ubuntu i click the internet picture. When I want to use a spreadsheet I click the spreadsheet picture. When I want to download non dev stuff I click the app store picture and then search for what I want.
I don't buy this argument that the average person can't use Ubuntu. It's easier to use than windows in a vast majority of ways without ever touching a command line.
Linux is great and so are most things Open Source. My company uses an Accounting/ERP System called Macola. That doesn't run on Linux. And I am not going to experiment with Wine when it comes to our ERP system. So what ERP system should I switch to that runs on Linux? I guess we could go cloud and use NetSuite. But I hate Oracle more than I hate Microsoft.
Not all software, especially in the office/at work is internet browsing and spreadsheets. It has nothing to do with easy, it's about, sometimes many decades worth, of software development and applications that don't run well on anything but Windows. I gave up trying to make everything work from my Linux box a long time ago and am happier because of it.
And, in the end, at home? I run OpenBSD because the most popular Linux distributions came along and forced me to use something called systemd and I don't care for it any more than I do Microsoft Edge.
And in no way am I arguing that what they are doing with Edge or Windows 11 is in anyway acceptable.
You're describing the happy path, where all your hardware works, and you only use basic software.
In practice stuff just tends to go wrong, fixing it is always complicated command line stuff, and that one bit of software you need only runs on Windows or Mac.
> No other company is as openly hostile towards its users,
Apple is pretty close in some ways. They are against the loading of apps they can't control even though many want to sideload and they did that whole scanning thing.
At least Tim will throw out some token email about how it's some vision for the future and peace and love for humanity or whatever other bullshit he says. But at least he pretends.
Under the hood I still think Apple is better to users but maybe more hostile to developers?
Because Apple's UI and "we will tell you what you want" attitude has always made my skin crawl. What kind of moron thinks detaching the menu for apps from the window for apps is a good UI design?
And, because most of the software I need for my job still does not run on Linux.
I feel like microsoft is the same but instead of them telling you what they want the OS will just forcibly switch states and just DO whatever it wants.
I'm not an Apple defender by any stretch but personally it still never feels as agressively shitty as MS products
> What kind of moron thinks detaching the menu for apps from the window for apps is a good UI design?
As a UX it's consistent, and very nice that for any app I'm using, I have a familiar menu I can navigate, and I can even hit Cmd+Shift+/ and hop into a search of every item in that consistent menu (which tends to include most major actions you'd want to do in that app).
And I think it being detached and stuck to the top of the screen at an OS-level is important for this to work. I certainly wouldn't want the OS to force design upon the window itself (i.e. having the same bar but attached to the top of every window), and if it was an optional, native UI component included in an SDK, a good amount of apps (read: most) wouldn't use it (that's basically the situation on Windows). But because it's essentially part of the OS, and an app would look weird if it didn't have that, it's created a very consistent experience across all apps.
From personal experience I'd say ubuntu is imperfect but when I get on a windows machine I can instantly tangibly feel how much the OS is bugging me so I'd say it is noticeably worse.
And if Ubuntu isn't your thing than their or a million other linux OSes.
And that's before we discuss OSx which I still perosnally dislike but it would be hard for me to argue it is worse than Windows
Let me stop you right there: I don't give a rat's ass what your experience is. Sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but literally every single time someone admits to not liking Linux Desktop a Linux Desktop user crawls out of the woodwork to tell them how great everything is for them like they're supposed to care. I care what my experience is when it comes to things I use.
> And if Ubuntu isn't your thing than their or a million other linux OSes.
Most of them are even worse than Ubuntu. The best ones are only slightly better.
> And that's before we discuss OSx
Which is exclusive to Apple hardware I don't like and has even worse software support than Linux, especially if you count games and I do.
> I care what my experience is when it comes to things I use.
Let me stop you right there: I don't give a rat's ass what your experience is.
See how dumb it is to yell at people for sharing their opinions about tech on an internet forum for sharing your opinions about tech?
It's OK to disagree. I disagree with you too. Maybe all these people come out of the wood works because they genuinely have had great experiences with Ubuntu/ whatever
Given that your post begins with "Ubuntu is worse?", the whole thing comes off as presenting an argument why I'm wrong or should reconsider. Further: if you're not doing that, then why even bother to reply to my offhand comment? You like Linux Desktop, good for you, what the hell does that have to do with anything I said, unless you're attempting to present it as an alternative?
Wow! Windows is using internal links with the scheme microsoft-edge:// to make things (Windows things) open Edge so that then Edge can nag you to set the default.
It's sad, it's user-hostile and smells of desperation.
In other news, in the pandemic my parents (+70yr) switched to Xfce on Gentoo when their Win7s died. And are actually getting on quite well (they are pretty good with computers, we've had them at home since before Win3.1)
Would you believe that I would have preferred them pushing trident? For two, somewhat contradictory, reasons: 1. it'd help against the blink monoculture, and 2. if it was actually awful it'd make it easier for people to scream at MS about the issue.
Yeah my comment is about responsive development which thankfully I don't do much of anymore/try not to. I am not familiar with this will have to look it up:
Right; most browsers today (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, not Firefox) are just reusing Chrome's rendering engine. This is concerning for reasons that amount to "an adtech giant now de-facto controls the web".
It would have been the same if it was gecko, webkit, netsurf or anything else being as dominant as blink has become. The operative word is "monoculture", not which engine it is. The web needs independent implementations to continue being about protocols and standards, not programs or libraries.
Next step will be that any time edge is opened if it is not set as the default it will automatically set itself as the default and ingest all of your bookmarked links, history, and passwords so that it eventually becomes not worth the hassle to switch back.
Worst case, 3-5% of home users switch to linux or apple but in exchange Microsoft gets all of that bing ad money for the 95% that stays.
What is their thinking here? Lets annoy users by opening up a worse version of Chrome at every opportunity. They must be deluded to think that even non tech savvy victims won't notice that the navigation is different.
MS is making a fatal error of not realising that the job of an OS is to do whatever the user wants and then getting out of the way as fast as possible. A desktop OS is not a "lifestyle platform", or whatever it is MS calls it, it's a tool, like a screwdriver.
I’m not surprised Microsoft is pushing their platform in this direction. Apple has done this fairly effectively for years and people claim it as a security perk. The next step will probably be to only allow Edge-based browsers on the platform.
Microsoft even removed the default web browser setting from Windows 11. Instead of a single setting for the default web browser, customers must set individual “link associations” for the http:// and https:// protocols; as well as file associations for the .html file type.
This is just horrible. They are so desperate to get back market share that they resort to "purposely bad ux in new versions" tactics. What is their goal? Get more users on Bing? Get more tracking data via Edge?
> Beat their record fine from the EU? None of the others seems like a plausible result.
The reason they dare to try is because they know they might even get away with it.
I'm definitly not condoning it but the situation is very different from when they got fined. At the time Microsoft was fined smartphones weren't a thing. One might argue that this competes with Microsoft desktops marketshare. Also in notebook sales Chromebooks have on average (roughly) about a 20% market share [1]. On top of that Microsofts browser market share was 90+ % at the time of the fine, now it's almost non existant.
If it were up to me they would be fined into oblivion for this anti-competitive behavior but I think they might actually get away with it.
I don't know, Apple are being investigated for anticompetitive behaviour in the App Store[1], while iOS market share is below 30% across Europe ( I can't find the numbers for the EU only), and no in no EU country is iOS at more than 35% [2]. (In both cases, market share in smartphones, not general computing devices). You don't need to be a (quasi) monopolist to be anticompetitive, and I'm glad regulators know this.
You know the problem. Some VP somewhere has his bonus and review structured around the growth of Edge. Like a dark pattern, but for employees, not customers.
The title is super misleading. It don’t not block other browsers from opening links, it prevents “microsoft-edge://“ links from being intercepted. While still hostile towards users, it is not as bad as the click baity title suggests!
And this is why I don't use anything MS (nor Apple, but that's a different story). Even with some of their apparent open-source friendliness, they're still the same MS of old.
I'm always amazed at people who believed that MS would change its ways. It is in the DNA of MS to make everything proprietary and controlled by them. In the last few years they have just prepared the way for MS 2.0: make every company of the world slave of their closed cloud products. It is already happening.
Most likely, someone found a legitimate Windows 11 bug that will be patched out within a month. Meanwhile, Apple has premeditated releasing extensions for their own mobile browser while blocking FF/Chrome from doing the same until some point in the future. I know it's fun to hate on MS but Apple is far and away the worse offender here.
Nah, I've looked at it alongside the author. It feels like extra work done for that single protocol (but none of their other weird ones) to handle it in a new and nonstandard way.
It would take a very weird bug to make the "select program for protocol" dialog ignore all entries except all versions of Edge; an even weirder coincidence to also ignore the relevant registry setting in favor of Edge when clicking links, and yet more so when when it only affects that protocol but not the other weird ms-specific ones.
Combined with how there was just a small burst of publicity over Firefox and Brave now also support capturing microsoft-edge: links, it feels like the "random bug" explanation is not the more likely one.
MS has had "software protection" systems, probably three different schemes by now, that check for this. It's more to prevent malware but also means it's incredibly difficult to patch out MS-approved malware without running afoul of the system integrity checks.
On of the appeals of the LTSC branch is that it doesn't have a lot of user-hostile feature kits in it to begin with, so you're not constantly fighting to keep them turned off.
People will come with ways to bypass it for sure, but Microsoft is hoping to make it as hard as possible, so that the average user doesn't bother to switch. And unless the government intervenes, it will work.
You can do that. But programs like EdgeDeflector can’t be distributed doing changes like that. Every antivirus vendor including Microsoft SmartScreen will rightly block it for doing destructive changes.
Vista was good but wasn't optimized for the average hardware of the time.
7 was pretty darn good all around.
8 was bad. 8.1 was better than 8 but still worse than 7.
10 was better than 8.1 and almost as good as 7 until they started tightening the thumb screws on all of the telemetry and forced redirects to edge and bing, then they started blasting you with ads and foisting new services on you left and right and taking control of your taskbar layout against your will, nagging you to stay with the setup that serves their desires and not your desires.
Now 11 makes it twice as difficult to get your personal baseline setup, actively fights against user alterations, and disables crowd-sourced workarounds.
I'm guessing that Windows 12 will come with a drone that will taze you every time you open firefox and Windows 13 will require you to stare lovingly into the eyes of a bust of Bill Gates to activate the login prompt.
Jokes on them. I'm building a extension to auto route links out of the usual browser info my preferred browser (per site or all).
Seriously though this seems to violate the public trust given their dominant position. And moves like this make me more likely to go back to desktop Linux.
You can rename EdgeDeflector.exe to msedge.exe and it works as-is. However, it will cause other problems with your system. The Edge background update system will also reverse the change within a day or so.
It’s not Edge that makes the decision on what program to use. It’s the Windows shell itself. I’m not aware of any third-party alternatives to OpenWith.exe.
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