The battle for control of the user. The pressure to create/preserve market share seems to be rising.
When e.g. you look how aggressively Google is trying to switch me to Chrome from my Firefox on all of their properties, a new low was set. But from my insider buddies at Google, that strategy is working well.
This here from MSFT dials it up another notch. With the anti-trust cases in the EU, they probably will be able to geo target this feature so that from the EU all will be fine and dandy, but the rest of the world will get scared into switching to Edge.
I wish Mozilla would include a default content blocker to block Google's attempts to steal Firefox users. But then I also wish Windows blocked automated Google Chrome installs that steal default browser included as bundleware with free antivirus apps, Java, etc. I'm tired of walking a parent through uninstalling Google Chrome (that they have no idea how it was installed) and getting Firefox set as their default browser again.
I hate to be negative, but that will never happen with the current leadership at Mozilla.
They are simply no longer willing to disrupt the status quo, even to help their users. They are far more motivated to be "popular", and have a big "audience", and a respected "brand", than about sticking up for their users. The fact that they even think about software development in terms of "building an audience(?)" shows that they are way off course. The most important software we use that is actively developed is made by people who are primarily concerned with making good software, not with this pseudo public relations cargo cult corporate speak.
Hint: Go back and look at what Firefox used to be like 10 years ago, and notice the difference in culture.
The fact is, if Mozilla took a proactive stand against Google Apple and Microsoft, that would greatly increase their popularity.
The old Firefox was "irresponsible" by including a popup blocker by default, and upset a lot of people. Firefox also refused to support any of Microsoft's early web DRM. People said that not supporting DRM would lock users out of content, but it actually probably contributed to the death of those systems.
Google has been slowly clamping down on user freedoms. Just one example, Google removed the option to save html5 video[1] (I'm sure users were begging for that "feature"). I would honestly not be surprised if the UX clowns at Mozilla remove that function from Firefox as well.
How long until they remove the "view source" option because being able to view source is confusing to people who have never used a browser and it is used less than 1% of the time or some other flimsy justification?
There have been people within Mozilla who just want to abandon their own code and simply release a re-branded Chromium. Because they only care about their precious brand and keeping the donations coming, and they are truly terrible stewards of the software they have inherited. Besides, once they stop actually developing their own software, they will have lots of money leftover to give themselves bonuses and throw expensive galas.
Disclosure: I work for Mozilla on Firefox. I can say, without hesitation, that we definitely give a damn about protecting the user and protecting the health of the web.
Do more to show it then. Firefox has consistently been clamping down on user freedom and aping Chrome as closely as possible, instead of actually focusing on doing the right thing. Google is not the health of the web. Helping Google is contributing to the largest walled-garden that exists.
> Firefox has consistently been clamping down on user freedom
Can you give an example? While I personally don't agree with everything Mozilla has done in the last couple of years (like the native pocket integration for example) I do not agree with that statement.
That's a recent part of it. Pocket integration, removal of about:config entries, moving to WebExtensions so that the user has less control over their browser both in terms of appearance and function, changing the appearance in a way the user has little way of altering to a more functional display, now removing Bookmark Descriptions, using random non-user-audited data transmitted from random Firefox installs to determine the focus and goals of the browser, etc.
The issue claimed by the parent is not just restricting user freedom, but not doing the right thing. Your points:
Pocket integration: not the right thing, at least not the way they rolled it out in Germany, but not a restriction on user freedom.
Removal of about:config entries: This changes in response to changes to the engine, and restrictions can make sense if they avoid mainstream users from being confused about their setup so they find it difficult to find help. The developers edition usually has a bit more flexibility here, for advanced users.
Move to WebExtensions: This massively increases evolvability of Firefox, which I expect will result in better security, better performance, and less interference between extensions.
Changing appearance: I guess things like this are a side-effect of moving to WebExtensions. Maybe they will be supported again as the API evolves.
Mozilla says[1] about the Developer Edition that it "replaces the old Aurora channel" (so it's like a rolling-release alpha version) and has "tools that aren't yet ready for production". I don't think advanced users should be expected to run an alpha-quality, experimental, non-production version as their day-to-day browser just to get their configurability back.
Setting the defaults to values that don't confuse mainstream users is fine. Removing the corresponding settings from the settings dialog or other easily-accessible UI ... maybe. But removing them even from "about:config"? That used to be the place explicitly for advanced settings for advanced users, settings that were too scary for the UI. These settings need to be somewhere. (What if mainstream users discover the Developer Edition? Mozilla will have to make a Secret Developer Edition to make sure only the real advanced users can find it!)
Also, where in that Bugzilla thread are bookmark descriptions mentioned as being an attack vector? I can't find anything about it.
> Also, where in that Bugzilla thread are bookmark descriptions mentioned as being an attack vector? I can't find anything about it.
I was wondering the same thing. The only relevant item I could find is in bug 1402890 [0] linked in the very last comment. It says:
> Websites dictating what goes in a user's bookmark without any way to change that would be a terrible idea. Doubly so if it's secretly stored without even being viewable.
To me that seems like a valid privacy concern, but it should be solvable without discarding the entire feature. The "it's too hard to maintain this, let's just drop it, some volunteer will implement this again if it's needed (yeah, it won't integrate with our own UI like the current solution does, so what)" mindset in both those bugs just reeks of CADT [1].
The removal of the description field in the bookmarks in the most recent version would be another example of how little they care about us users sometimes.
I read the issue where it was discussed and a few suggestions to handle it in a way that didn't break bookmarks for people who used the description feature were pretty much ignored by the developers. The only reason I could infer from the detractors is that it was inconvenient to implement. As a long time supporter of Firefox the way they disregard us users shown in that thread altered my opinion of Mozilla significantly.
> Helping Google is contributing to the largest walled-garden that exists.
They can't outright come out and take an adversarial position against google -- they rely on them for hundreds of millions of dollars. Mozilla would not exist if Google did not pay them to be their default search. Donations account for 5% of their revenue, maybe.
I disagree. Cutting away from, and taking an adversarial stance toward, Google is probably the only thing that would keep Firefox relevant in the future. If Mozilla Corp didn't exist as-is, I believe that Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, and other related programs would honestly be stronger and have more market share among users who are not the lowest common denominator, because they would be supported by a strong community making democratic decisions, not clamped down by whatever choices some marketing suit makes about a "brand" which is now almost meaningless.
Pale Moon is proof enough of that - the platform is viable, and people care about it. If Firefox were to discard the wrongheaded choices, I'm pretty sure sure that the PM community would fold back in. Rather than saying, "oh maybe there's a reason Mozilla Corp's not using the money for real advertising", users would still be going out like we did in the early '00s and building word-of-mouth to support a product worth supporting.
Corporations do not exist to "play nice". They exist to overtake, consume, and ultimately to destroy. Google has almost fully overtaken the Web for corp backers. Mozilla needs to develop the guts to take it back for the users.
I am sorry but this is HN idealism in full display yet again. People here time and time again vastly overestimate how little of a shit people give about their browser history, or that some company is showing them ads based on their profile, or that Google is building a walled garden (The richest company in the world is a massive walled garden). especially if you give them alternative: paying for things. The only thing keeping Firefox afloat is Google money. That's the only way they can continue to do anything. If Google stopped paying Firefox, they would cease to function. On the flipside, if Firefox took Google money for just one more year, that would equal 50 times the amount of yearly donations they receive.
"Pale Moon? What???" -- 99% of the world. It has 0.06% marketshare.
If you have a way for Firefox to make money without corporate support I am all ears, but fundamental idealism isn't going to solve anything for Firefox, it will just cause Mozilla to go extinct. I'd rather have them around than not.
because they would be supported by a strong community making democratic decisions
And close enough to zero top-tier developer hours as to make no odds, so the "democratic decisions" would make no actual difference to an app that would be suddenly dead in the water.
Yeah, I would love to see a fierce, wholly independent Mozilla both doing the technical ass-kicking it's been doing, and with a much freer hand in user advocacy. But if Mozilla's income were to be cut off, everyone would suffer: they would suddenly have zero momentum with which to continue either their technical excellence or their existing, worthwhile advocacy efforts.
I've never heard of Pale Moon until now, but if Google is so evil, and Mozilla is evil for using Google too, I can't help but notice Pale Moon still run Google Ads on their site. Just seems a bit hypocritical, especially with "We use responsible ad services to keep your visit to our websites a
safe and uninterrupted one." on there.
Not convinced, as following the links in GP leads to some sub par (as in the end user experience) home grown solutions.
Further, we are not exactly talking rocket surgery here, this is an extension anyone can install with a few clicks and as many can attest this is some serious bang for the buck all across the board (performance, privacy, security). Not to mention in the meantime they had the resources to auto install addons like Looking Glass
I believe you, and honestly with the latest improvements with Quantum I can see why.
I _am_ curious about the motivation behind Firefox Focus though. I use vanilla Firefox on Android and really enjoy it.. what was the motivation for using a Webkit base for Focus? Seems like the stripped down, privacy focused experience would have worked fine based on Firefox proper?
Firefox Focus first launched on iOS, where Apple's WebKit is the only web engine permitted. Focus on Android followed a similar approach using Android's WebView so the Focus team could focus ;) on the app's user experience and privacy features instead of the web engine.
However, Focus (on Android) is now moving to "GeckoView", Firefox for Android's Gecko engine repackaged into a WebView-like component. GeckoView will be available for app developers (Mozilla or others) to build new browsers. Watch Mozilla's Hacks blog for news coming soon! :)
Here are instructions for test driving Focus+GeckoView now:
> I _am_ curious about the motivation behind Firefox Focus though. I use vanilla Firefox on Android and really enjoy it.. what was the motivation for using a Webkit base for Focus? Seems like the stripped down, privacy focused experience would have worked fine based on Firefox proper?
I'm pretty sure the answer is quite simple, which is that the Gecko embedding story has been diabolical for a long time (i.e., it's hard to put Gecko in a new product), whereas the majority of WebKit ports and Chromium (through its Embedding Framework, or to a somewhat lesser extent its Content API) are designed to be easily embedded in new applications.
AIUI, the fact this led to this ridiculous situation is part of the reason for the renewed interest in embedding Gecko (and the emergence of GeckoView).
Firefox Focus developer here. Recent improvements in Geckoview (the componentized version of Gecko) mean that it will be much easier to integrate into your own browser projects. We have a whole suite of Android components being developed just for building browser-like software.
The work to make GeckoView offer a full set of functionality in Focus should also help other apps.
Also, don't forget that when Focus was released, Firefox on Android was very very slow. Despite myself being a fan of Firefox, I was using Chrome on Android for purely practical reasons. When Focus appeared, I switched to it, and then at some point to Firefox proper when it's performance became acceptable again.
I guess for many users Focus (despite not using Gecko) could've paved road to Firefox.
It dates from back when Mozilla seemed to be losing quickly, and actually rebranding Chrome (with their own changes) might have made sense. I'm glad they didn't, of course.
I have no reason believe he, or anybody else at Mozilla, currently thinks that way.
Gecko these days is pretty good, but that's only half of the story unfortunately. This is a web runtime with no successful product to power anymore. Firefox Desktop is still declining despite the Quantum work, and on Mobile Mozilla products are not registering on any chart.
Ironically, the only successfully growing Gecko-based product is KaiOS (see http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/india) but the current MoCo+MoFo leadership killed the upstream support a while ago to focus on Desktop. Maybe they will see the light...
Not the parent, but Firefox Quantum while an advancement in some ways, also killed XUL Extensions and Mozilla moved Firefox entirely to WebExtensions without the APIs to fully support existing popular add-ons. NoScript for example is a shell of what it once was, every vim keybinding extension was pretty much cutoff, TabMix Plus discontinued development since many of its popular features weren't possible with the WebExtensions API and there still isn't a great tree-style tab extension.
Most likely the parent used one or more of these, as they were some of the extensions you could point to that Firefox had but Chrome never really did, and without them Firefox arguably doesn't have the same appeal.
There's still plenty of reasons to use Firefox over Chrome, but there are also plenty of users bitter about the loss of their previously working extensions.
> killed XUL Extensions and Mozilla moved Firefox entirely to WebExtensions without the APIs to fully support existing popular add-ons
this. I was never a tree view tab convert, but definitely miss noscript and vim bindings, plus things like the selenium UI.
XUL sucked in many ways, I tried writing extensions with it and I have no illusions there. But coming up with a reasonable upgrade strategy for a huge swath of popular extensions was something that should have been done before deprecating it. Rather mozilla basically told people that if webextensions didn't do what they need now, then just hope for the best sometime in the future, and in the meantime too bad, your extensions are gone.
But honestly this wasn't the only thing, just the most recent. It's the general attitude of willingness to ignore the actual use cases of their actual users for some theoretical appeal to a mass market of "average users" that they've yet to convert. I felt much the same way after the Aurelius release broke a bunch of ui, and any number of other breaking changes over the last few years.
This being HN, I'm operating under the assumption that most readers are developers.
I'd suggest that you read my colleague's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15696184 to understand just how much friction the legacy addon ecosystem was creating. It just wasn't sustainable.
You won't find me arguing against Mozilla's decision to drop XUL extensions, I'm just stating a fact, that it was one of the primary differentiating factors between Firefox and its competition, for better because of the varied high quality extensions that you simply would not find anywhere else and obviously for worse.
Mozilla was also committed to a good browser experience that looked and felt like something that was not Chrome or Safari. Then Australis happened. And Mozilla was committed to XUL. Then WebExtensions happened. Mozilla is committed to Gecko today. Tomorrow, Blink/Chromium will happen.
I'd suggest that you read my colleague's comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15696184 to understand just how much friction the legacy addon ecosystem was creating. It just wasn't sustainable.
As a user of some of those "legacy" addons, I sincerely don't care about the upstream friction. I care that Mozilla has tried to cut my user experience off at the ankles more than once. The burden of having a thriving community & ecosystem is the responsibility of stewardship over that ecosystem. Mozilla has abrogated that implicit stewardship responsibility toward their community.
> I'm tired of walking a parent through uninstalling Google Chrome
That's why I installed Linux Mint on my parent's computer, it runs Firefox, Skype and Google Earth just fine, can download photos from camera, copy DVDs and that's basically all. No shitty antiviruses they can download and I can SSH to the machine to check what's going on. Nothing, if you're interested.
They have a new (and awful) linux build, so if you depend on it for anything I can recommend ghetto-skype, which is like the official linux build but actually works (it's a chromium wrapper around the web skype, with themes, which is exactly what the official one is these days, except the official one is terribly buggy).
Really I do not understand why Skype hasn't imploded yet with the number of awful builds they keep putting out for various operating systems. Surely the opportunity is there for someone with a good implementation of video and audio calling, cross-platform, to step in and take over.
I was looking at Google, but I no longer have any idea what the heck their strategy on Hangouts, Meet, Allo, Duo and whatever else they're producing these days is.
There is exactly one feature that keeps people on skype - it has a wide installed base and recognition and all the alternatives are fragmented. There's lots of good alternatives, they all suck because there's too many of them and the user base of each one is too small. a decade ago I would have said the solution to this is federation but it obviously didn't turn out that way.
> I'm tired of walking a parent through uninstalling Google Chrome (that they have no idea how it was installed)
Don't forget the bit where Chrome rams its fucking updater down your throat at every occasion and any way to disable it is only temporary.
And Chromium manages to be even worse at least on OSX: it apparently decides that being quit is unacceptable and relaunches itself hidden in the background.
Just to show how absurd such practice is - if Mozilla wanted to do the same, they should intercept requests for Google.com and Bing.com, advising users to use Mozilla's search engine instead. I doubt Google would keep paying them if they did that though.
Which is the real problem with Mozilla being dependent on money from Google. Google can do whatever they want against Firefox, but Mozilla is very limited in its response because they can't risk upsetting Google too much.
Hasn't Windows 10 essentially solved that problem by not letting any application change the default browser setting, instead only letting them open the correct settings panel? Or is there now a way around that?
It helps to some extent. But then again, Windows itself keeps changing my default media player and image viewer back to the Microsoft defaults, so I don't trust those settings to be as immutable as I would like them to be.
> Windows itself keeps changing my default media player and image viewer back to the Microsoft defaults
Same here, and it's maddening. That kind of bullshit, along with OneDrive ads in the freaking file browser, and now the subject of this article, have pushed me completely off of Windows.
Now that Steam Play exists and works with every Windows-only game I've thrown at it, I have absolutely nothing holding me to Windows on my gaming PC and workstations at home. I still have to deal with WSE 2016 and Windows 7 Pro at work, but that decision is not up to me and even if it were, we'd still have to stay with Windows for some of our software. The owner would absolutely love to make us a Mac house all the way but she understands why we can't make that move.
Yes, I've seen this on Windows 10 Pro since 1803. Hilariously, it fails to open PDF's on an SMB share, says the file can't be found while listing its path. And the Microsoft Store is still so shady that I don't trust installing anything from a non-recognized vendor, so I ended up going to Adobe's web site to get Acrobat Reader which can open PDFs whether local or on that same SMB share.
It's because "Feature Updates" are actually in-place OS upgrades. They're essentially reinstalling Windows and migrating applications and settings, but also choosing to not migrate some of them.
Perhaps you would - but somebody else's form filling just stopped working. Hey, no big deal: MS knows better than the user "where do you want to go today."
The design is slightly evil in that any unauthorized change of the registry keys doesn't just fail but instead invalidates a hash and makes windows revert to the default.
I don't know exactly how it's implemented, and feel free to tell us, but wongarsu is absolutely correct about the behavior. For a while, whenever I hit the button in firefox to change default browser, suddenly my default browser was edge. Not the old setting, not the attempted new setting. It was very clearly not designed with 'protection' in mind.
There's a hash of the registry key stored "securely" somewhere. Only the API the control panel default apps UI uses changes this registry key and updates the hash. When the application key is called to run and doesn't match the hash it's reset to the value from "C:\Windows\System32\OEMDefaultAssociations.xml"
What sorts of locks/permissions does this file have?
Maybe you could make a tool that lets you make changes, schedules a modification of this file on next restart, and after the restart it propagates the changes in the registry too.
Yes, "please reboot to apply your new mouse position^W^W^Wfile association changes", yay, but that'd work.
Which is bizarre if you consider that the original purpose of the registry (which appeared in Windows 3.1, I believe) was only to store file associations.
Looks like the beginning of another cat-and-mouse game... and if I'm reading that correctly, even if I open up regedit myself and edit the association like I am used to doing, if I don't update the hash appropriately it will make it turn to default? WTF.
The fact that his utility received AV false positives is also extremely disturbing --- what more effective a way of forcing your choices on others than to label all workarounds these others find as being malware? AV is like the ultimate in censorship.
Try working in an enterprise. I click links from emails to Jira/Confluence/Sharepoint all the time from Outlook. Do I want to use any of these tools? No, but I and tens of thousands of other employees have to on a daily basis in my workplace.
Mozilla probably have that info so readily available that it's not worth publishing it on Wikipedia as well, like on a postage stamp under a filing cabinet in a basement in their gran's next-door neighbour's house ...
Perhaps Moz Corp haven't heard of Wikipedia and so couldn't keep that page updated.
The Mozilla Foundation, being a charity, publishes their financial data on a fixed schedule. If they put the last released data on Wikipedia, something forbidden by Wikipedia for them to do, it would show most of their money coming from Yahoo.
When we are in the land of wishes, I rather wish, that OpenSource OS and software would be standard where the user controls fully what he wants and gets.
It would be so lovely, if Microsoft would include a default malware and advertisement filter into the browser. They are not relying on injecting malware into the web pages, so they actually can do it! User's experience without malware and advertisements will be better, this will create healthy competition in user experience, other browsers will have to follow.
Microsoft doesn't have to make tthe best browser, the inertia of having a "good" browser that is the default and hard to change away from gets many of their customers to use Edge until someone or something prompts them to switch.
They're on a six week release schedule. Some of them being underwhelming is expected. That's not a counterpoint, even though you're phrasing it like one.
I remember installing some random utility (but safe source that I'd used umpteen times before - but not recently) and getting chromium installed - without my permission. I forget what is was, or indeed where I got it from, but this is fairly irrelevant.
The effort trying to remove this was immense. The crapware installer also managed to install a scheduled task to a randomly named executable that when I tested it with Microsoft security essentials said it was 'ok' but virus total told me it was some bag of shit malware.
WORSE STILL, Microsoft security essentials USED to pick this up as a quick google of this crapware update engine linked to a microsoft malware page, which no longer exists. Reading further I noted that MS stopped identifying some malware because "users might choose to use the applications that it installs"
No MS. If it's been sneakily installed with dark patterns consent has not been given, and it needs to be destroyed with fire.
Thankfully ClamAV picked it up, so I now regularly scan with that. sigh
> installing some random utility .. and getting chromium installed
If you mean Chrome proper (not OSS Chromium) SourceForge was doing this for a while and it was all over hackernews. Mostlikely that's where it was from.
I would really, really like to know what the source was, and the program (and thus installer) was.
I'd also like to see if the Web Archive has a copy of the microsoft malware webpage.
What you're saying would be 1000x as interesting/relevant/headline news if it was citable with screenshots and so forth. I do believe you, but references create lots more momentum.
If you think you might come across the info sometime in the future, posting it here or maybe reddit whenever that is would be awesome.
> It proved very difficult to keep my mother on Firefox
Mine's on Debian. Seems to be working out pretty well. When other machines in the house are gunked up with who-knows-what, it's still there working reliably.
Genuine question: In what way does Microsoft benefit from people using Edge? It's a web browser. It's a rather neutral piece of technology. How can they make money out of it?
Make the default search engine bing.. most users don’t change it.
Put shortcuts to your other products. An Xbox bookmark/button is an ad for the Xbox.. increasing Xbox sales, but also reducing the money they need to spend to promote the Xbox
If users decide they want a completely Microsoft platform- they login to windows with their msft online password, use ms office, etc they’ll be more likely to pick a windows phone or other Microsoft products that integrate with the products they already use (saving them setup time, transferring settings, etc).
If they have more information about you, they can make ads in bing more relevant and perform better.. increasing the price of the ads, and the ctr
> In what way does Microsoft benefit from people using Edge?
Every installation of Chrome on Windows is an opportunity for their most dangerous competitor to siphon off future opportunities. Anything which reduces that number is a fundamental win.
They also get to direct some percentage of users towards their properties (e.g. Bing) which do make revenue.
Finally there's the opportunity cost of not being in the game: having users in their camp gives them moves which they would otherwise not have. (Similarly Bing—some might call it a relative failure, but it's a roaring success compared to never trying in the first place. It was a good decision.)
1) Information gathering. This one I think needs no explanation
2) Controlling a platform is incredible powerful in influencing your users. Lets say you control an OS. Then you can nag on your users to also use your browser! If you control the browser, you can nag your users to use you mail system. Perhaps someday they will nag on the users to use their marketplace, their movie distribution system, their whatever.
Newsflash: nearly every major tech company that has a large Internet presence would like nothing more than to extinguish the open web and user choice. Unfortunately for users, ecosystem lock-in is in everyone’s play book.
All the other comments here are also true, but this is the main reason. They directly benefit every time you open Edge. I wouldn't be surprised if some ad sales VP made this decision after seeing the numbers broken down by "edge new tab impressions" vs "everything else."
I don't use Windows, but surely the GDPR means EU users have a right to know how their data is used and who it is passed to, and how they use it ... so for EU users that info should be public already?
But it is a bit of a bait and switch, making a weird transition toward the very end into an advert for brilliant.org.
That fact doesn't negate the well-done informational portion, and brilliant.org sounds like a cool offering, but what a yucky tactic for such a high-ground video.
> Genuine question: In what way does Microsoft benefit from people using Edge? It's a web browser. It's a rather neutral piece of technology. How can they make money out of it?
Well for one thing, keeping people away from Google's browser keeps people away from their office suite, one of the biggest moneymakers outside the X-box division for Microsoft.
For me, Google has recently joined the ranks of FB and a pile of other adtech slimeballs and similar entities in my firewall config. The net is so much nicer when you delete the jerks.
Working well in the sense of "the amount of unwitting users switching is > the backlash and heat from being an dark pattern villain and turning some witting users off". Aka "helps browser marketshare".
Google does it with their apps too— clicking on links in Hangouts keeps prompting me to use Chrome instead of Safari. Honestly, I'm shocked Apple tolerates this.
Didn't they do stuff like this when they first made IE and it got them into a lot of trouble with an anti-trust lawsuit? Seems like they are doing the EXACT same thing again.
In threads about github etc, many were claiming Microsoft are a completely different, and better company, with a fine open approach to business these days.
Seems nothing much has changed in their approach in 30 years.
They've learned how to appeal to the easily-convinced crowd with all their "openness" and "modernity" (for lack of a better word.) They're opening up stuff that wasn't likely to be a source of revenue, and I bet they make even more from the non-obvious telemetry embedded in them. I see it as nothing more than another marketing attempt.
They've really done a number on these people, because not only are they using MS stuff again, but they've been turned into "New Microsoft" cheerleaders in many a comment thread, for a couple of years now.
In retrospect, I'm pretty sure that was astroturf.
The story of a how new, enlightened CEO was going to embrace open source, etc. was tailor-made for folks who want to believe they finally won over the last fight's great satan. The buzz seemed to be everywhere for a while, and then stopped. And it was timed conveniently around several open source releases that also made a splash - classic reenforcement advertising.
I was one of the cheerleaders ever since I learned about Scott Hanselman and others. The meta is that there are at least two camps about this at Microsoft.
This changed slowly over the last two years for me as I watch the dot net special interest group at Fedora struggle. Microsoft has not released enough of dot net core as free and open source software. It looks free and open source but it isn't. The programmers at red hat (almost all the dot net sig folks are red hat people) are too nice to raisea fuss over it.
I don't think Scott Guttrie's team is lying. I want to believe in their sincerety. However, I also understand likely nobody at Microsoft: from the bottom engineer to Satya Nadella or the board is nearly at all enthusiastic about free software. They may approve of "open source" but only as far as it helps business. I can't blame them for being practical. However, I can yell at their hypocrisy.
Microsoft, give the fedora people what they need. Release the sources please.
That's why pervasive "Does anyone else love the New Microsoft?!" style comments have seemed odd. People talking about how they like specific products is perfectly normal.
These days I assume by default the intentions of companies are not good (especially the big ones) but when I was younger, I used to think these companies play nice with others (generally speaking). I hate that I feel this way, but pretty much everything they do is towards one goal only - money and market share, everything and everyone else be damned :(
you know, there's a theory of this and I personally find it much more useful at explaining things than most other political/economic theories... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
And with that system, you trade the owner (capitalist) with a different owner (government). The proletariat are still in pretty much the same position.
And there's also the issue of communism the economic system, and communism the social control system. Economically speaking, does have some justifications. But the social control is more than willing to kill and imprison people for disagreeing with the economic system.
Capitalism also has similar types of flaws, and its own directly related deaths it causes. The difference is that capitalism the social control system blames individuals for systemic issues, including death and injury.
The problem is not mere ownership though. Who owns it matters, because different owners have different incentives.
The incentive of a private business owner is profit. Especially for a company that is publicly traded, where investors have the power to sue management for malfeasance if they don't get a return and the company has been particularly charitable. If it can be done, you must fuck over the customer to make profit for shareholders, or be replaced by someone who will.
The incentive of a nationalized industry is the good of the state and its voters. Management is incentivized to provide a good product at a fair price to everyone, or else they get voted out of their job.
ownership by "government" is not the same as ownership by the working class (which includes you unless you are very wealthy). part of the point of socialism is much more democratic control of government anyway.
>And with that system, you trade the owner (capitalist) with a different owner (government).
you're mistaking the economic law "Marxism" explaining why and how that stuff is happening for the actual political forces who advocate and force such a change. It like Newton's laws and the actual people shooting the guns which are working based on the Newton's laws.
Ah yes, this comment was bound to appear. As it always does when we find out that the people running Windows do something that's not a good idea.
They are more open with their development division, as they have to be. Windows is a completely different division, and more often than not, the notable members of the development division will call out their company.
Except they are not separate divisions. There are no subsidiary companies for Windows or Development, yet there are for Xbox, Mobile, Games and others.
Windows and development are subject to the same executive team, and same orders from the top setting corporate direction.
It was precisely that break-up that was ordered by the US court during the anti-trust case, and stopped with the arrival of the Bush administration.
Eventually all divisions roll up to the same executive team. The level at which Windows and the people responsible for this decision meet is far above where the decision is or was made.
Mobile and XBOX aren't subsidiary companies. Mobile rolls up closer to Windows than the browser team does which led to the mess that is UWP and the Windows 8 (and on) start menu.
I find I don't really care how Microsoft likes to divide up its stuff internally. Either this kind of nonsense is supported by the company or it isn't.
Good for you if this stance helps you. But ultimately the world is more complex.
Do you judge a given country population by the act of their leader? Because you have no reason to care how a given country divide its stuff. If a country does something that must mean that everyone in this country support this thing right?
If people act malevolently, encouraged by the leader of the country, then that leader is bad, and the country is bad because of that leader (and their associates who could stop the malevolence).
It doesn't matter that in some small corner of the country there's a grandad baking cupcakes for orphans, the country isn't saved from the malevolence (or ignorance) of their leaders by that.
You can give countries aid to convince them you're nice; but if your leadership is countenancing selling armaments to the Saudis -- knowing they're using them against civilians -- then they're corrupt.
All companies who want to do some evil for profit also take part in window dressing, it salves their own consciences and acts as PR.
Countries do not get to choose who their citizens are (and the ones we do are generally considered hellholes). But companies have the power to set policy, and the power to hire and fire. So yeah, I get to judge the company by what its parts repeatedly do.
Companies are just people though - the guys in charge of decisions are the ones we're ultimately evaluating. That the left hand of the company doesn't know what the right hand of the company is doing isn't much of an excuse, as ultimately the buck stops at the executive and board positions.
There's no way a decision like this one didn't get approval from the top layers of the company as it no doubt had to go through different levels of legal, product and everything in between.
On the side, I've owned some chain restaurants for 32 years. Mine have always been noted as friendlier, cleaner, fresher and all that. I like to say that it's cause it runs downhill and I care about the customer experience.
Three years ago, I sold one of those restaurants inside a mall while still owning one just two blocks away. People from the mall come into this restaurant. Just yesterday someone told me that they hated the mall one. "They're just so mean to everyone!"
I don't think that's necessarily true. The binary line at which we judge objects begins with the concept of sentience/self-awareness. If our cells work to do something bad, we can't blame them - they aren't sentient. If people work to do something bad, we can and have always judged the group - they are sentient and are capable of making decisions within a moral framework.
There are group effects for groups of people, just as there are effects that organised groups of cells have that collections of cells do not.
If someone hands you a cupcake and punches you in the face with the other hand then you don't think that the two actions are from separate "organisations" of cells (maybe, in cases of schizophrenia, or similar).
People in an organisation often lack agency to fully control actions based on their personal ethics. This is often exploited by controlling influences.
if the cells are sick, the person is sick. you don't just say you have a little cancer but on the whole you're chilling and are ready to goto the beach
They are legally people under the broken legal system of America. I will treat their crimes, their lack of morality, their low ethics, and their sociopathy the same as a human as long as they are "people".
Big companies employ a lot of people who can do both good things and bad things. Many teams and projects have nothing to do with each other. Treating a large organization as a single person for moral purposes is a category mistake.
It's entirely possible for Microsoft to do bad things like this while GitHub keeps doing its thing and Typescript and VSCode developers keep doing their thing.
With a company the size of Microsoft, I am certain that there are different factions/divisions/groups within the company that might have very different values, views, priorities, to the degree that they might as well be different companies.
A better point of view might be this: Microsoft is a huge company, not all the people that work there are (what we might consider) ethical engineers, and some of the adherents to the sleazy business practices of their past are still around.
It’s not a good reason, but it’s possibly the reason. Ultimately it’s not really useful to attempt to paint an entity as large as Microsoft as all good or all bad.
I don't recall these being "beloved". This sounds like a troll to me.
Sure Intel do FOSS graphics driver development, but I doubt they've ever been beloved due to their constant scandals (ME and Meltdown recently, and further back there's ClassMate, Itanium/Itanic, etc.)
AMD promised open drivers. We're still waiting.
ARM systems are usually locked down and full of blobs (e.g. for graphics, etc.). Plus ARM don't make chips, they just sell licenses to their designs to third parties, which is completely anti-FOSS.
Google do support a lot of FOSS development, but their online monopolies and spying infrastructure have always kept people suspicious.
Apple has a habit of turning liberally licensed FOSS into proprietary software (e.g. OSX is based on Mach and BSD, Safari is based on KHTML, etc.). Their mobile OS also requires programs to be signed, and they charge a $99 fee for developers to get a certificate.
As far as I'm aware IBM have historically been the enemy. They certainly pushed Linux forward around the millenium, but since then I've not come across them outside bloated "enterprise solutions" that I doubt many in the FOSS world would consider relevant.
No, we aren't. AMD's promise was fulfilled quite a while ago. They officially contributed, and work on, a FOSS driver for the Linux kernel, and also for Mesa. One of their devs is one of the most active Mesa committers this year alone.
AMD are more committed than Intel is, it would seem, given that AMD's drivers are far better quality than Intel's.
ARM is an open company? When did that happen? They still don't provide architecture reference manuals for download (unless you are customer), unlike AMD or Intel.
They are doing very well about being open in the developers space.
Open sourcing libraries and tools that make the lives of programmers much easier and even porting them to run on linux.
This may be a selfish approach approach from Microsoft (win the hearts of developers and the regular users will follow), or it might be signs of actual positive change.
The one thing that is clear is this openness does not extend to regular users of windows.
I'm mentally making notes that I should really be switching back to linux for my core desktop computing, even if I continue to use Microsoft technology like vscode, typescript and dotnet core.
The world around Microsoft has changed though. Yea, they are still the same company even with their strategic realignment around open-source, but now they face healthy competition from arguably worse (at least just as bad) tech giants that makes Microsoft seem more benign.
Every now and then I hear some PR spiel or read some comment on HN about how great Windows is now and I try to run it, but I always run into some dumb thing like this that turns me off.
I think what has changed is that Microsoft is no longer the massively dominant force it was pre-Internet. In those days, it really was the 1,000lb gorilla. It is still a big company, but Google at least can certainly compete with it as an equal.
This annoys me, but in the end, I can click the "no thank you" button and it all goes away. I do think their claims to be the "faster and more secure" browser are dubious at best. But at least MS allows other browsers to be installed. iOS will give you a Chrome lookalike with a WebKitWebView engine, and no v8 JS engine. (I'm not calling JSCore bad). It's like saying, you can have any browser you want, as long as it's Safari. I get _why_ they do it, but it's an anti-competitive practice.
More like I don't truly consider ChromeOS a viable OS. I do own a Chromebook, and for me it's more like a dumbed down tablet (Like a Nook) with a keyboard. But you're right, it's not right that Google does it either.
It may actually be faster and more secure, it does well on artificial tests at least. But my issue with it is generally stability. More crashes and some sites don't behave as well. Video streaming in particular is iffy. Since Chrome is most tested against now, I just have the most stable overall experience with Chrome. Even if it had the worst performance I'd probably still be using it for that reason.
I didn't know that on iOS chrome is essentially safari. that sucks. like how can they get away with it? The EU should not let apple ban competing browser engines.
Well, you know, up until recently (don't know if still is) IE was a core part of the operating system, not just the browser itself. That meant that using IE alone will have for example less battery usage than using Firefox, or any other browser, "alone", as you would be running IE too.
Uh, theres no reason for IE to use less battery because it's 'part of the OS'. In the end, IE still has to do all the tasks to render a webpage which Firefox or Chrome have to do. It might be able to leverage some fancy hidden OS features to be slightly more efficient/use the hardware better in some way, but fundamentally it doesn't have much of an advantage.
I think you got me wrong. What I meant was that, when you're browsing the web with IE, it is IE which is draining your battery. However, when you're using Firefox, it's not only Firefox who drains your battery, but also this always-running IE process. My comment was mostly a joke, I don't know to what extent this might be a thing.
Like Google is doing on YouTube and their main site? What you'll say if GitHub loading times are 5x faster on Edge than on Chrome and Firefox [1]?
I don't want to be Microsoft apologist, but Google is doing this shit for years, and nobody says anything. One annoying popup in Windows and the end is near. Yeah, because we don't trust MS for things they did ten years ago. But we trust Google even if they're doing the same thing right now.
On purpose; remember they whitelist UAs. Hangouts and Meet both supporting Firefox now was a deliberate move, enabled by Hangouts/Meet moving to the current WebRTC draft protocol (versus some much older one) and by Firefox introducing supports for some further JS APIs to monitor the WebRTC connection.
I don't think they'll end up doing that for the same reason that Google didn't put the Dart VM in Chrome. Nobody wants to be the one to start the nuclear war.
Google has done this before. When they blocked Hangouts in non-Chrome browsers, spoofing your User Agent would allow it to load and, probably predictably since I'm making this comment, Hangouts worked absolutely fine in Firefox. Not sure if it still works these days, but I don't use Hangouts anymore.
There's also the whole Shadow DOM v0 stuff with YouTube that more or less artificially slows down rendering in non-Chrome browsers.
I have never had this problem with Hangouts in Firefox. Hangouts has a million bugs on its own, but it works similarly poorly in Chrome and Firefox and has for a long time as far as I can tell.
Let's talk about how with iOS you can't change the default web browser, email, or calendar apps? If you remove Mail.app, install something like Airmail, and then click on a mail link, you're prompted to reinstall Mail.app.
I don't like this move by Microsoft, but they called out on shit like this more than other tech companies it seems.
For comparison, my Pixelbook lets me switch the default browser from Chrome to the Android version of Firefox. Considering that Chrome is basically the operating system itself, that's impressive.
It works reasonably well, and will expand to a vageuly-desktop-like look and feel (tabs on top, for example) automatically on tablets (or in this case laptop/tablet hybrids).
It doesn't integrate quite perfectly with ChromeOS, but that's not surprising. Supposedly Pixelbooks have built-in support for running normal Linux apps, so I might end up trying the desktop version of Firefox at some point.
One slight pro of it is that at least Chrome doesn't have 80% of mobile traffic as well due to iOS users being unable to switch default browser. I mean, that's the only pro.
Sure, but things are improving on that front. For example, they used to do the same thing with maps. Recently though they changed it so clicking on a map link asks you which map software you want to open it in.
That’s a solvable problem, if anyone cared enough to solve it. Write a 3rd party browser (yes I realize that it would be a shell over WebKit) and allow the user to choose which app handles third party urls like mailto and maps links.
Chrome for iOS already does something similar but you only get to choose between gmail and the native mail client.
This would only solve the problem of clicking mailto: links in one particular app (the custom browser), but it wouldn't help for all the other 999.999 apps that try to openURL a mailto:
They only collect data of the installation process. Once installation is complete, no additional data is collected. They've even publicly released the results.
>The collected data is not-personally-identifiable. Meaning that a user cannot be singled out or tracked based on the data he/she provided. Here’s what Ubuntu collects
> Version and flavor of Ubuntu you’re installing
> Whether you have network connectivity at install time
> Hardware statistics such as CPU, RAM, GPU, etc
> Device manufacturer
> Country
> Installation time
> Whether you choose auto login, installing third-party codecs, downloading updates during install
You can disable that very easily. And as far as I remember when I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 on my VM, it asked me whether I was ok with sending anonymous usage data (I believe the default choice was yes which is not ideal but was easy enough to turn off).
Even if you answer No, it will ping to their servers so that it can count users that did not want it. At least Canonical are honest about it and I'm sure you could at least prevent it with your firewall settings or maybe even by editing the hosts file.
Ubuntu comes with a shortcut to Amazon on the sidebar. Clicking it just opens Amazon.com in Firefox. It doesn't spy on you or anything, it's just a hyperlink.
> It doesn't spy on you or anything, it's just a hyperlink.
You are incorrect. It's much more than a hyperlink. It's an application which was installed in Ubuntu. It specifically runs:
The unity webapps runner manual says (among other things):
Application Options:
-a, --amazon Launch amazon (with geoclue store selection)
-i, --app-id Launch a webapp with a specific APP_ID
-c, --chrome Launch a webapp in default browser
Look at that. Amazon and Google. The --amazon switch tells amazon where you're at ("geoclue"), at the very least. And, Chrome being the "default" browser? That's funny, because Chrome isn't even installed.
Guess what that script does? If you even accidentally click the Amazon "hyperlink", you've now associated the _machine_ to a user.
Okay, ignore that. What else is default installed as webapps? Looking around the
/usr/share/unity-webapps directory shows only Google and Amazon.
> Such as?
In Ubuntu 16.04, the "Search your computer" will also search "sources" such as "Applications", "Dash plugins", "Files & Folders", "Google Drive".
Dash plugins include things like Facebook and Google Drive (again?)
At least the search bar has more applications than just the proprietary garbage. There's things like Flickr, Shotwell, Yelp, Picasa... hmmm.
I'm not a fan of that either, nor do I use Ubuntu (for other reasons).
However, in what.. 10 mins? you've been able to discover exactly what causes the "spying" and an idea on how to disable it. Perhaps in less than an hour you'll have a good idea on exactly what data is being sent.
Compare that to say, Windows, there we have no idea on exactly what data is being sent out or how to completely disable it (beyond being a company with volume licences or using firewall rules).
It doesn't compromise the users privacy in any meaningful way. Back in version 12.04 there was a scandal wherein searches on the desktop could return remote results from Amazon. Canonical countered that all data was going through them and no personal info was leaked but nobody actually wanted to see ads in their desktop search or share data about their files with Canonical thus this was changed in 14.04 or 14.10 if I recall correctly.
Essentially this hasn't been an issue in about 4 years.
> It doesn't compromise the users privacy in any meaningful way.
I would have to disagree. The mere fact that it's there and visible by default means it can be accidentally clicked on. Doing that opens a native application which loads an Amazon-provided javascript file. Cards are off the table after that loads.
> However, in what.. 10 mins? you've been able to discover exactly what causes the "spying" and an idea on how to disable it.
True, but that's only because I've been using the OS for a while. A lot of this is accumulated knowledge. There were a lot of gotchyas over the past 4.5 years (approx time I've been using Ubuntu .. coincides with my current employment time) that have been... eye opening.
Yes, it's still better than Windows as far as inspectability for the reasons you just identified. And it's still better than OS X as far as usability (my opinion). But it's still be very disappointing on many levels. I'm sure there are other things which could cause additional disappointments in Canonical that I have yet to discover.
Honestly I use Fedora at home. Even that isn't ideal -- I very much dislike the default GNOME environment and have repeatedly encountered trouble upgrading to different releases. I've been seriously thinking of just building my own personal distro.
Pity that 18.04 is basically a steaming turd, with plenty of broken things ootb. It's hardly surprising, because "you get what you pay for", and you pay exactly zero for it. Don't get me wrong, Linux purely from the command line is awesome, but the desktop experience sucks balls.
I feel like I'm getting a better experience for free than any that I paid for with Windows.
You get what you paid for is what ignorant people say about software. The entire software landscape is absolutely littered with very very expensive turds. Cost and quality don't seem to be terribly correlated.
> 18.04 is a steaming turd [...] the desktop experience sucks balls.
Based on your vocabulary, I'm assuming you don't install Ubuntu using the network installer and expert mode, and then create your own desktop environment starting with a good window manager like i3. A person like you is definitely better off using macOS or Windows.
> A person like you is definitely better off using macOS or Windows.
I'm not necessarily going to disagree with this - I switched from desktop Ubuntu to Mac and have hardly looked back because I really don't miss constantly dicking around with config files playing UI glitch whack-a-mole. Mac UI certainly has its own healthy share of warts - in fact I find it practically unusable without Divvy and Moom, for starters - but on the whole it's polished, functional, aesthetically pleasing, and usually doesn't get in the way of doing work. Those are all very important qualities to me as someone who spends a non-trivial amount of time doing things outside of a terminal.
Just because I'm capable of rolling my own desktop environment doesn't mean I want to or that it's a particularly good use of my time, and I imagine a lot of potential/would-be Linux users probably feel the same way. Being dismissive of that perspective is counterproductive if you believe that the world would be better off with more FOSS usage (as I do).
You could probably buy a laptop that comes with Linux. Set it to update on some regular schedule. Install whatever tools make you happy and have as little trouble as your mac.
"Rolling your own desktop environment" takes all of a few hours. I'm pretty sure you made as much of an investment learning tools for your new mac when you bought it.
I used Linux for a good number of years more than I've been using Mac. None of the things you are describing are as simple and hassle-free as you describe. You can get most things working smoothly enough with customization, but there is a baseline level of UI glitchiness in most distros that is very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome completely. It's not necessarily terrible but by comparison Mac is more psychologically ergonomic for me personally.
i3 + nixos + the same desktop follows with all my machines. With a simple declarative configuration. Nothing changes, nothing breaks. Emacs + st + firefox and all the programming languages just work.
Nope, I've got more important things to do than waste time on a near vertical learning curve. Apologies for not being a l33t h4x0r like you, but the situation is dire for ootb desktop Linux, which is a shame.
Hmm, how/when does that trigger? Right after reading this comment I started a screen recording in hopes of capturing the behaviour then installed Chrome and Firefox downloaded via Safari on a new Mac recently set up from scratch and saw no such notification.
I agree with you there. For the general population, be it family, grandma, or individuals that tend to operate outside the mindset of the general audience here, the learning curve is going to be a bit steeper if you were to put Ubuntu in front of them. However, every one of their newer releases has made strides in terms of ease of use and stability. Personally I think https://snapcraft.io/ lifts a HUGE burden off making popular software available to a non power user who might be new to linux.
I couldn't disagree more. Linux is fine for the kind of people who only use computers to consume content, but then again any personal web kiosk (like a phone or tablet) can easily serve that role so it isn't exactly a high bar.
The real problem areas are when people who want a personal computer try to color outside the lines of whatever the distro developer intended as a use case ("Why would you want to do that?" is a common and annoying response).
The point is that your Windows 10 drivers from a year ago still work with the Windows 10 update you did today. This is not true of Linux driver binaries.
I'm okay with directing "why would you want to do that?" at people that want to deliver binary drivers to their customers, since that makes them a lot harder to fix later.
But unless it's a gnome dev speaking, I don't think it's something commonly aimed at users.
> Linux is fine for the kind of people who only use computers to consume content
Consuming content these days often involves DRM, which rarely works on Linux. For example, if the context is books, good luck dealing with Adobe or Amazon DRM to read them on your Linux desktop (you can strip it, but it's a lot more technical than just clicking and opening it on Windows or Mac).
Or how about music? How do you sync your iPhone with your Linux desktop?
Consuming content consists of either connecting to services like Hulu Spotify Netflix Pandora or opening your favorite pirate site and downloading torrents to be consumed in any multimedia app.
Both strategies work fine under linux. Did you not know that Netflix and Hulu work on linux just fine?
Regarding iPhones I would imagine most people who run linux on the desktop just don't bother buying them. Did you know that Apple's global marketshare is only about 15%? More people actually buy just Samsung's android phones than iphones.
This is cherry picking. Yes, there are some services that work on Linux. There are many other popular services that do not, and I even gave specific examples.
Most people who run Linux on the desktop probably won't use iPhones, yeah. Which is because they're computer geeks. Which is to say, not the "kind of people who only use computers to consume content" at all.
In US, iOS market share is about 45% as of 2018. Globally, it's 20% (15% is counting smartphones only and ignoring tablets).
I'm not sure that's necessarily the reason to choose Android over iOS. Many use Linux on desktop because it is good enough or better than other choices, but might be ambivalent towards or disapproving of stock android. Android has its flaws and is far from being strictly better than iOS.
You can read amazon drm encumbered books with amazon cloud reader. You can run adobe digital editions via wine.
You can also read your ebooks on your nook, kindle, or tablet which would probably actually be a better experience.
You can buy dead tree books.
You can buy non drm encumbered books.
You can buy dead tree books and then go and download a digital version of the same work from library genesis knowing that you have supported the author but not drm. Then you can read on whatever device you like.
If you are poor you can skip the first step and just read the books.
Your local library still exists and is positively full of books.
Many libraries provide free access to technology books via Safari Books.
The claim that you can't enjoy books without windows is a curious claim when so many options exist.
"The real problem areas are when people who want a personal computer try to color outside the lines of whatever the distro developer intended as a use case ("Why would you want to do that?" is a common and annoying response)."
to be honest, put grandma in a XFCE distro with Windows 7/XP-like desktop and Chrome and she should be comfortable with anything.
Like Linux Lite distro[0], I'm running it right now and except for the inability of using super/windows key as part of multi-key shortcuts ala Windows 7, it's almost perfect as a drop-in replacement for the latter (for me personally and a couple of my friends)...
> to be honest, put grandma in a XFCE distro with Windows 7/XP-like desktop and Chrome and she should be comfortable with anything.
I did this awhile back. Grandma got upset that her library of Windows games, some of which she had been playing for over 15 years, weren't around anymore.
As more and more stuff has moved online, this is less of a problem, but my mother is still reliant upon Flash for certain online games.
Also those online experiences are, in general, inferior. They have lots of ads and pop-ups abound. The web pages are made as confusing as possible to try to entice viewers to click through to a "partner" and sign up for some service, etc etc.
Comparatively, the old Wheel of Fortune game my Grandma got 15 or more years ago (on a physical CD!) is better than anything available now.
Ha, that's what would happen with my dad. All he gives a crap about is his chess game. Hell, just moving to a new laptop with the latest version of Windows screwed up his access to that game for a bit and he had a meltdown.
If he weren't a grouchy old 85 year old man, not too receptive to fancy new technology, I'd buy him an iPad, put a nice chess game on it, and confiscate the PC.
Snap/Snapcraft is a perfect example of the pain points Linux ecosystem, because Snap and Flatpak are two different solutions to the same problem. What do you tell grandma if a Flatpak version of her application exists, but not a Snap one?
I've migrated multiple family members to Linux, and I've never had a single one ask how to install an apt. I just make sure all the applications they need (Libre office & Firefox mostly) are installed. This type of user isn't installing things on a regular basis, even on a windows machine.
IMO the real pain points are for more advanced users, I prefer to develop on a Linux box but I have always had to keep a windows installation maintained just for mech CAD software, there simply isn't anything decent avaliable for Linux.
What are the major annoyances offered by "the Linux Desktop"? That I have too many choices and what a headache it is to have to choose a working environment rather than have some particular paradigm forced upon me?
What model was it? Most manufacturers only test their hardware on Windows. Canonical maintains a list of devices that are certified to work with Ubuntu[1].
Be careful about trusting that certification. Note that the 3rd gen Thinkpad x1 Yoga[0] is "certified," however, there is a critical change in the BIOS that prevents the laptop from using s3 sleep mode, apparently to switch to some proprietary Windows sleep mode. Therefore, without any changes, when you close the lid, your battery will drain at about the same speed as if the laptop was running. This is obviously untenable.
The solution is to manually patch your BIOS, which doesn't always work and is extremely technical. It's also not a solution provided by Lenovo, so officially, there is no solution.
Ninjaedit: Hmm, it appears Lenovo may have finally issued a BIOS update to fix this issue.
I think the certification means, that all the hardware parts of the device are supported by the OS. The device itself might not even be tested to see if there are no other issues. Generally, it's a problem with newly released devices, that don't have many active users yet.
Sounds similar to my recent experience with Windows 10 - some of those things were fixed by manually installing vendor drivers, but one of them didn't work and figuring out why was a big challenge. On the same machine, GNU/Linux worked pretty much out of the box, you just had to configure the hidpi screen and install a daemon for automatic screen rotation (which was also something I couldn't get to work on Windows after a fresh installation).
> What are the major annoyances offered by "the Linux Desktop"?
Spend about 5 minutes poking around on the internet with your eyes open and you'll see. If you're too lazy for that, this guy has put together a convenient, but by no means complete, list [0].
> rather than have some particular paradigm forced upon me?
You have many paradigms forced upon you, they're just paradigms you happen to be comfortable with so you don't count them.
> Spend about 5 minutes poking around on the internet with your eyes open and you'll see. If you're too lazy for that, this guy has put together a convenient, but by no means complete, list.
Why don't you just say what they are, rather than trying to offload and displace the question?
> You have many paradigms forced upon you, they're just paradigms you happen to be comfortable with so you don't count them.
Such as what? Monolithic kernel vs microkernel? What paradigm is forced upon me?
> Such a Linux Desktop evangelist comment chain. Step one: ask what problems people are talking about. Step two: completely dismiss and downvote all responses.
Except what problems have you pointed out? You're just hand-waving and saying "Oh course the Linux Desktop is unusable. Just at random webpages - that proves it!"
> Why don't you try it instead of sealioning on HN about it.
I'll probably try searching for "sealioning" first.
> the Linux desktop UX
which is the Linux desktop UX? We're not talking about Windows Aero or Apple Aqua. There is no "Linux desktop UX". If you're thinking of Gnome in particular, I'd agree with you though, but there are lots of other viable choices.
On the other hand, I've never had my Linux desktop crash for decompressing a big ZIP archive. Of course, credit where credit is due, Explorer crashing isn't necessarily all that dramatic these days.
The funny thing is, even when decompression "works" on Windows 10 (that is, when you join hands in prayer and don't disturb the machine), you could theoretically just download the decompressed files faster over the internet. I can only guess the there's something fundamentally broken about Windows and file systems because many operations are so ridiculously slow no matter the hardware. It's perhaps my biggest gripe about modern Windows, aside from the actual desktop (working with multiple windows) being very bare and annoying to use, useless set of default applications, and that the built-in localized keyboard layout is obsolete and thus quite restricted as far as punctuation goes.
> On the other hand, I've never had my Linux desktop crash for decompressing a big ZIP archive.
Yeah but I have, on multiple occasions, installed updates through a Linux package manager and after a reboot been brought to the console.
> I can only guess the there's something fundamentally broken about Windows and file systems because many operations are so ridiculously slow no matter the hardware.
NTFS is bad handling a large number of small files.
> aside from the actual desktop (working with multiple windows) being very bare and annoying to use,
How so? I love the hotkeys for snapping Windows, and Windows also has hotkeys for moving windows between monitors.
Lots of third party utility apps exist that can extend this functionality out.
I haven't had any of those problems in the last decade.
I have, however, spent a whole day trying to install Windows 10 because of obscure "can't find drivers message" which turned out really meant "you should unplug your install usb and replug it into a different usb port and then I can find the drivers on it".
Or trying to work with students on a Swift project, only to find out that the MacOS file system pretends to understand Unicode file names, but really ignores them.
> Or trying to work with students on a Swift project, only to find out that the MacOS file system pretends to understand Unicode file names, but really ignores them.
Wait, really? HFS stores Unicode file names in (according to Wikipedia) the "Apple-modified variant of Unicode Normalization Format D)", but it really does store them, I think (unlike case, which it preserves but ignores, which basically means it guarantees wrong behaviour).
I recently tried to install antergos which is basically arch.
Graphics drivers didnt work during install, no big deal, I'll just use text mode. Except the text mode didnt work either for some reason. To fix the issue I would have had to compile my own image, or to trust some random guy on github that he didnt put a rootkit in his installer.
There are definitely annoyances like these which you dont have on windows/mac. You dont need to be a good programmer/hacker to fix issues like this, yet on linux, you sometimes do.
While I really love linux and its distributions, you cant expect endusers to run them without big issues
Who the hell would recommend an Arch flavor to ordinary users? Windows/MacOS should be compared to Ubuntu/Fedora(/Tubleweed). Arch is not ready for anyone who is not very interested in their OS.
I wouldnt recommend Arch to an enduser, that was me trying to install it and failing.
Can ubuntu nowadays install nvidia drivers or does that still not work? For an enduser "installing graphic drivers" is not particularely easy ("what is a driver, why do I need it", etc), yet something pretty basic ("why does this [linux compiled, opengl] game run at 1 fps?")
The work laptop I'm typing this on has NVidia graphics, but all the driver stuff was handled automatically in the installation process and I never even thought about it. I just checked and found the setting where I can stop using proprietary drivers but you have to go out of your way to find that sort of thing.
Arch is pretty much meant for people who are comfortable with this kind of failures. It even expects you it install it by yourself, with no installer, so well...
Such a Linux Desktop evangelist comment chain. Step one: ask what problems people are talking about. Step two: completely dismiss and downvote all responses.
Not really. The only problems I've encountered were problems with drivers for esoteric devices. Still really annoying, but whether that's worse or better than Windows' problems depends on what devices you use and what values you have.
The real problems for me are:
- outdated packages or unstable rolling-distro (OpenSuse Tumbleweed is surprisingly good, but not as well-supported as Ubuntu/Fedora)
- bad game support (few titles and shoddy Windows ports)
My only Apple computer is my iPad and I have the opposite complaint. I've never installed a browser and don't really want to as Safari works well enough for me. However, when an app goes to open a web page, it opens a dialog asking if the page should be opened in Safari or Chrome. I'll pick Safari and check the box that remembers this setting. Then, a few weeks later, it will ask me again.
Worse still, these options are a lie — it says Safari or Chrome but the "Safari" option doesn't actually open Safari, it just loads the requested page in an embedded web view. Assholes.
Are you sure it does that? I've always used Firefox and Chrome on my Macs and I can't remember ever seeing anything like that. This include my Mojave beta machine.
TBF, I automate my installs so both Firefox and Chrome are installed from the command line via brew cask. Maybe that's why.
Ah, right. Considering the first thing I do with a new mac is install Firefox and Chrome (front-end developer) then maybe it’s just been unlucky timing that it always pops the message up as I’m loading a competing browser.
Maybe Microsoft should address the reasons why people do not switch? Look, Edge is a fine browser - it's fast, stable, and easier (compared to IE) to build websites for.
But it's not cross platform. I use a Windows desktop, Debian laptop, and Apple phone. Edge is available on exactly one of those platforms, while Firefox and Chrome are available on all of them.
Until that is fixed I will not consider edge, despite how fast or "secure" it may be over the competition.
Edit: seems that Edge is available on the App Store[1], and Linux requires a Wine workaround. I prefer native support, without hacks or clunky install processes.
If I'm not mistaken safari is the only iOS browser, all other browsers are just a skin for it. So thanks to apple there is no cross-platform browser that works on all your devices.
Unless you count safari, if they still bother porting that outside iOS/OS X. In which case that wouldn't be preferable anyway.
There is nothing wrong with running different browsers on different operating systems.
It really doesn't matter if Firefox on iOS is just a skin around Safari if it integrates with the Firefox services and syncs bookmarks, history, etc. Right? Isn't that the value you're getting out of the mobile browser, not the rendering engine?
That's the ticket for me. I want a consistent experience. I want the same bookmarks, extensions, and history on all my devices, without worrying about it. And I also want great performance.
It's even worse. There's API for adblock apps and there are good apps, but it works only with Safari itself. Any other iOS browser doesn't support this API (I'm not 100% sure, but I think that it's Apple's restriction, not their choice), so if you want fast browsing experience with iOS, you must use Safari.
Yeah, all the browsers on iOS are reskins of Safari but to an end user that's all that matters since those reskins can bring things like synced bookmarks and history.
Funny, all that matters to me is that I can use the browser without signing in.
Chrome on the other hand, I discovered just yesterday, refuse to export bookmarks from android unless you sync. Yet another reason not to use chrome I guess.
Apple know that MS could steal customers by making a browser that works better than Apple's. Perhaps a built in .doc viewer to get installs from Word users -- then MS have chance to ruin the prejudice that "it's only Apple can make software that looks good and works intuitively".
> Maybe Microsoft should address the reasons why people do not switch? Look, Edge is a fine browser - it's fast, stable, and easier (compared to IE) to build websites for.
> But it's not cross platform. I use a Windows desktop, Debian laptop, and Apple phone. Edge is available on exactly one of those platforms, while Firefox and Chrome are available on all of them.
It's actually available on less than one platform, since it only runs on Windows 10, and only on desktop editions (so not on thin client desktops, which use Server).
The whole point of Edge for me is Windows-tuned browser. The moment they make any attempt at cross-platform, I won't consider it at all. I value native software tightly integrated with system. They should use latest DirectX APIs, they should integrate with drivers, etc, providing fastest experience on Windows. That's why Safari is good, for example.
What I don't understand is how companies with hundreds of deployments are still fine with crap like this? You can't disable updates. Computers are rebooted without asking. It's ridiculous.
I have a Windows 10 Pro in front of me and not a trace of it, and I don't think I changed anything relevant after the initial setup and setting policies to get rid of crap. I wonder what the missing difference is...
EDIT: I'm not using a Microsoft account, that might be it?
Oh how quaint. Do you have a Ryzen CPU? If so you're leaving performance on the table, because core complexes are internally implemented as NUMA nodes. Windows 10 Pro does not ship with a NUMA aware scheduler. If you want that you're looking at $300[1] for Windows 10 Pro for Workstations. -- Personally I would not consider Pro a "standard" option since it doesn't work w/ ~40%[2] of new CPUs sold.
Do you have any source that Enterprise (or Server versions or ...) is better than Pro with Ryzen CPUs? All benchmarks I've seen show all Windows versions having issues with the Threadripper CPUs in NUMA mode. Which is kind of embarassing, but not a market segmentation thing. Unless I missed something?
> Windows 10 Pro does not ship with a NUMA aware scheduler
Any source of that?
Link you provided only tells that Win10 pro for workstations support 4 socket configurations, nothing about numa
Lack of realistic alternatives mostly (surely someone will champion Linux here, that person is deluded). Someday, if MS keeps pushing this direction, the pain of dealing with another OS's shortcomings and differences will be outweighed, but we're not there yet.
And we're not fine with it, we just can't do anything about it because Microsoft does not listen to complaints.
I'll be that deluded person here: we completely switched to using Linux at my workplace and never touched windows 10. Granted we're a software dev shop, but from what I've seen, realistic workable alternatives do exist.
Clearly you're not developing software for Windows, though. I'm guessing you're a small web startup or something. You don't have to deal with the workflows of corporate offices that have existed for 20 years.
Small startup here as well, but we target 95% Windows (going back all the way to XP) and we recently transitioned to a WSL Clang-based toolchain (linking against MSVCRT) so it would be feasible for someone to use a pure Linux environment for serious Windows development, although inconvenient because it is untestable.
> Clearly you're not developing software for Windows,
that's a great point, though. You can live in a world where you can have a software business that does not depend on Windows. 20 years ago, that was pretty much a dream.
I am not exactly happy about this, but this isn't behavior that makes them stand out from the pack. Google constantly nags me about visiting their sites in Edge, and I understand that the situation is much worse on iOS.
But if Microsoft wants to convince people to use Edge, they should start by dumping a bunch of resources into sanding down the rough spots and applying some spit and polish. It's like 90% of a satisfactory browser at this point, maybe even 95%, but the remaining bits can be really, really frustrating.
I don't understand why so many of you highly intelligent people subject yourselves to this kind of stuff.
Here we are complaining about Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla's behaviour. Arguing about openness, paying for software, market share. You control exactly two of those things. You control what you pay for, and your choices affect market share. Yet you're complaining about the level of open-ness of companies who aren't trying to be open, hoping that someday it will change.
They don't change because their customers arbitrarily WANT them to change. They change when their market share is threatened and they are FORCED to change.
You want to make the Windows team listen? Stop using Windows. You want Mozilla to stop using Google as their default search provider? Change your default search provider manually. You want Google to stop spying on you? Stop using Android.
A lot of people will argue that it's not practical, too much effort, too costly. That's fine, but don't expect anything to change. You're acting like sheep so you're being treated like sheep. In one breath you say "companies only care about their bottom-line!" and in the next you whine "Microsoft is upselling me, Googleplex is tracking me, Firefox is in bed with Google!"
Well, that's because Microsoft pushed Windows 10 in your face and you ate it. Google tells you they'll sell your info and you let them. Firefox tells you they're gonna hop into bed with Google and you said nothing about it. You're screaming, but they have headphones on that are made up of your cash. When you speak softly and carry a big stick, these companies will listen.
Every single time something like this comes up, without fail, someone makes a comment like this: one that says "just solve the collective action problem!"
The fact is, even if I go through the trouble to not use anything I find problematic, it's not going to affect those companies. "Here we are complaining" because getting others to be aware of the problem and to take action is the only thing that'll work.
Another example: is every person on HackerNews sorting their trash going to solve human-caused climate change? Obviously not. Shouting our heads off about what the rest of the people are doing is absolutely necessary to get results.
Suggesting that a vote alone is a reasonable level of political activity to get anything done is absurd in 2018. You have to tweet, write, call, march, etc. Votes are determined in such a mass number that as an individual your voice is effectively worthless if it's only a vote. Obviously, you should still vote, but it's not enough.
Hence, why we scream our heads off over things like this.
I'm unable to find a source right now, but I remember reading in like the New Yorker or something YEARS ago about how all throughout the 50s-90s, the TV content ratings and what appeared on television was functionally decided by an organization titled something along the lines of "Christian Mothers of America," who would mass-write studios based on a similar value set. Given that this was the most tactile feedback the studios were getting (bearing in mind they're also getting ratings and viewership numbers), this was the primary determinate of TV content for decades.
> I use the operating system my employer chooses. I have exactly zero influence over that. Believe me, I've tried.
You've missed a key line of what GP said:
> A lot of people will argue that it's not practical, too much effort, too costly. That's fine, but don't expect anything to change.
It's not practical, and it's a lot of effort, and it's too costly, but you could use a different operating system. Find an employer who doesn't use that operating system. The "cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face" option.
"Find an employer who doesn't use that operating system" might be a viable option if we lived in a world where healthcare wasn't tied to employment, teleportation made geographic realities feasible, and no borders existed. Free market solutions aren't feasible the vast majority of the time.
Well, that's why I yell about all those things too.
You don't have to become a mountainman. You can't solve children starving in Africa at the same time as you solve racial inequality in the American justice system.
It's fine to just pick a couple issues and do what you can. If your contribution to open source is pestering your boss about it regularly, well, there you go. Yell about it on Twitter a bit as well, maybe write your congressperson. There's options.
I'm pretty OS agnostic. I have systems running Windows 10, various distros of Linux and a MBP running MacOS.
Every single one of those operating systems comes with their quirks/pile of warts and I can't objectively say that one is so superior to the others that I'd want to run it exclusively.
While the Windows 10 kernel has had improvements over 7, things like this completely offset those improvements. I would LOVE to use current Windows, but instead I'm stuck on a 5 year old OS because Microsoft doesn't value my ownership rights over my own, hand built computer
For private PCs, it's like you say. For corporate PCs, Windows 10 Enterprise is sort of like "Windows 10: The good parts" because your IT department can disable all that shit via group policy.
At work, I've switched from a Macbook to a Lenovo and I vastly prefer Windows to macOS. It somehow manages to get out of my way better than macOS does, plus it has a window management UX that is not a hot mess like the one in macOS.
Also: Don't just stop at not paying for Windows or Android; put that money towards the software that makes you happy and productive. Mozilla only takes Google's money because they need it for their work. If you give a yearly donation, they'll be less beholden to Google.
I recently gave them several hundred dollars, partly to make up for lost time. Browsers are effectively operating systems now. What's a good OS worth to you?
I agree, I'm happy to give a few dollars to Canonical or Elementary every time I download an ISO from them. It's important to support high-quality software design.
Too bad the open source world has consistently failed to create a good UX... not because it can't but because the OSS community is still full of people who have a fetish for complexity and who actually look down on good UX.
When "good UX" (highly subjective, btw) means limiting your ability to control and optimize your own workflows, yes, some people reasonably choose control over a low learning curve pre-baked option.
Catering to people who want a super easy streamlined experience is hard. They want rigorous QA, tech support, and broad compatibility, all of which are very expensive goals to chase with diminishing returns.
I don't think the core of UX is really that subjective. It's all about consistency, polish, and most importantly cognitive load. Eye candy is highly subjective but that's not what I'm talking about.
I think you're being downvoted because there is an ambiguity in what "subjective" refers to here. The core criteria of good UX are not subjective, as you say. But whether a certain UX qualifies as good under those criteria depends highly on the audience.
A good video-editing UX for amateurs looks completely different from a good video-editing UX for professionals.
Long-time users of vim or emacs love their editors because of their UX, while many new users hate them for the same UX.
I think it’s more a result of lack of cohesion and direction. Open source companies with strong purposes and great lead produce good results. Projects that aggregate lot of contributors each with their goals wishlist and wants tend to be more disgregate not because love of complexity or because they look down good ux but because each coder work at the feature they need and cram it somewhere on the existing ux.
Doesn’t help that there are relatively few desiners that are contributing into open source projects compared to devs. It’s rare to find a designer contributing a cohesive ux to a project and when they do it’s hard to find someone that understand every piece of the program to actually swap out the interface.
Project with a good lead can at least mitigate that by gating new contributions and fixes to adhere to some general design, at least improving the app invrementally.
I actually find the opposite problem these days, at least in GNOME. Every release is less powerful, less customisable, and more filled with weird theory-driven bits of UI that just take up space on my screen and slow me down in the name of user friendliness.
Don't forget the parts of UX called "don't make users despise and fear you" and "don't spy on your users and sell their data". My user experience on Linux is more relaxed because I'm pretty sure there's nothing on my laptop I need to fight (besides systemd, lol).
The problem is that you don't really have choice, these company created monopolies that are difficult to avoid, I wish I could switch all my computer to Linux, unfortunately I have to use software that works only on Windows, I have hardware that on Linux doesn't work well, and so on.
It's like who says that if the price of gasoline is too high we should simply stop using cars for a couple of days and the oil companies will drop the price, sure but what if I need my car to go to work ?
The real deal is that these abuses of dominant positions should be punished, a company like Microsoft or Google shouldn't be allowed to do actions aimed at damaging other small concurrent companies or discouraging the use of alternatives.
I’m inclined to agree. For ten years we’ve seen companies have unfathomable growth, yet wages haven’t really grown. The public is being taken advantage in almost every industry—from pharma to tech. Anytime regulation is brought up, I see so many opponents. I think the United States is missing a healthy amount of regulation.
Things are moving so fast that companies know they can run from any lawsuits faster than they can be constructed. And yes, lawsuits are huge deals that require a lot of preparation, especially if initiated by the FTC/similar. And there isn't much appetite for regulation coming from Washington. Get ready for madness to increase.
A few months back, I had to log into my Windows partition, something I avoid as much as possible. I wanted to install firefox. So I get on IE, search for "firefox" on google.com. Above all the results, the top prominent ad slot is for Google Chrome.
I agree, I personally read this as very threatening. In general I find that Microsoft's messaging has lost touch w/ reality. Remember when MS used to say "please?" -- ever notice how nowadays instead of asking you they command you? "Don't turn off your PC", "We're getting things ready", "This may take a while."
I've noticed this trend since Windows 8, but it's gotten really bad in Windows 10. Their messaging has become very anti-user.
My personal favorite from more recent builds of 10: "Windows is a service, and regular updates are an important part of keeping it running." Oh really? A service? My mistake, I thought I had licensed an operating system.
True. Personally I didn't fall for their show and I have continued not to use many of their technologies. .Net Core? No thanks, I have Go, Java, Racket, even Haskell.
Remember getting downvoted on Hackernews for pointing out that you don't trust their new image of "openness" and what not a month ago? People praising the new line of the new CEO and analysing that there would be nothing to fear from Microsoft anymore (github contret) - That didn't age too well...
Microsoft has always been described as a bunch of fairly independend divisions that hate each other. You can also see the split between groups in their products (for example how Explorer and the Kernel/API can't agree on what's a valid path. Explorer doesn't let you create files or folders starting with a dot despite that being legal, and can't show long paths that are legal).
I think Microsoft isn't set up in a way that allows to judge them uniformly. Trust the typescript team or the VSCode team seem warranted. I personally quite like what the Kernel team is doing ever since Windows NT. But the User-facing layer of Windows has made dodgy decisions for decades and has always favoured pushing an agenda over user-friendliness, with some successful usabilty pushes in between.
To evaluate Github the real question is how much upper management was involved in this feature, and how that might impact Github. That doesn't seem clear to me at all.
What makes you "trust" Microsoft in the first place? They are spying on users constantly with Windows 10 telemetry, they were an early part of the PRISM program with the NSA, they have been known to abuse their market power to push away competitors. What's to trust about them?
>Using ChromeOS or Android with Googleplex as gateway for every mouse movement or click is tenfold worse than using Windows 10.
Is it?
Did somebody compile data on Android telemetry already?
Anyway, ChromeOS is a wash, but you can always remove Google software from an Android installation (well, more like flash a new AOSP installation but eh) which is 100% worlds better than any Microsoft software offering, in my opinion.
Yeah but that's the Firebase Messaging System, AKA Google Cloud Messaging, which doesn't exist in your phone if you flash a AOSP ROM.
Of course, for maximum privacy, an open source with minimal blobs ROM like Replicant would be much better. Shame 2011 era hardware in mobile land is so much relatively inferior to laptop land (e.g. X200 with Libreboot)
Again, you can't do this in Windows 10. The telemetry and "add-in apps" get installed again periodically after updates [0] last I checked
Why are you being so hostile? You're in HN, you're a geek too by default.
99% of Windows 10 users can't grok disabling telemetry and trawling deep into powershell script every update too.
(Well, at least Microsoft doesn't think disabling excessive features to be warranty disabling, for now...)
What I discussed was how a proactive, technically competent user can wrestle Android back into having 0 Google telemetry and spying, which... Can't happen in Chrome OS, or say for example Windows Phone 10 (RIP).
Because as someone with experience in UI/UX for the common man, I dislike the way many geeks present technical solutions that are out of reach to those people.
These kind of solutions is one of the reasons why desktop Linux never really took off, rather Android, ChromeOS, Tizen and such, where the presence of the Linux kernel is a mere implementation detail, as it could be changed by any other POSIX like kernel without any difference on the user experience.
We should strive for solutions that work for everyone, not the tiny percentage of proactive, technically competent users that know about HN and XDA.
I understand what you mean, but I think it would be more correct to say "I don't distrust them as much as ...". None of these companies deserve a positive spin on "trust".
I don't know what the proper term is, but there's a certain trust of necessity at play. You have to pick some OS vendor to trust, or at least trust more than the others, because you need an OS.
Is "openness" really a sufficiently specific attribute to either ascribe it or not ascribe it to one of those huge tech conglomerates?
They are all "open" where it suits them and closed where it doesn't. I think what we can observe is that these days it suits Microsoft to be open in more areas than it used to.
If they show that screen in Norway they will have to be able to prove that it is faster and safer than the others. If not it's misleading marketing according to the law.
They can say "one of the safest and fastest" browser though.
We've had a number of cases like this over the years where a company makes a statement like "the best pizza in town" and they can't prove it and have to change the text.
This is when you get tiny quotation marks added to signage -- "BEST PIZZA EVER" (according to A N Owner).
I'm actually OK with non-measurable claims, "best" is abstract, the best pizza is the one in your hand, or something.
Now, "biggest"/"fastest"/"$weight"/"$size"/etc. well they better damn well be just that, if you're "footlong" is ever less than a foot (not on average either!) then I want your company crushed until it bleeds money.
> This is when you get tiny quotation marks added to signage -- "BEST PIZZA EVER" (according to A N Owner).
Not sure that will fly in Norway.
Not really into consumer protection laws but I live in Norway and we had this[0] discussion 3 weeks ago about the use of the word "free" and I guess they might be equally picky about "best" as well (a good thing IMO).
Well that's just if they comply immediately. If MS resists the authorities will issue daily fines. Not sure how high they go though. It's enough so far that I haven't seen anyone else continue to market in that way after getting noticed.
Yesterday an old neighbor phoned me that after an update he lost everything and he could not connect to the Internet anymore. He spent most of his life without computers and clearly is not a tech guy, but he's also not an idiot and if some update warned of software deletion he would not allow it. Long story short and in his words because I wasn't there, at every boot a requester told him he had to allow an update, so he allowed it. The PC then kept making its own business for some time and when he logged in back, everything was gone.
I took a look at the machine in the evening and yes, the desktop was just like it had been freshly installed, with only the background and profile avatar and credentials exception. The system also left a file on the desktop containing a list of the deleted software; there were about 5 or 6 entries and both Firefox and Chrome were on that list. Luckily all his documents were still in their directory, but after reinstalling Firefox, all his bookmarks and saved passwords were gone without a single warning and no way to recover the profile data.
I won't go further describing how annoying then became Edge in remembering us it's the best possible web experience. Just no thanks, he'll stick with Firefox (Chrome has become suspicious as well), and the Migration to Linux is about one week away; he won't be the first 70+ years old user I convert.
I think your neighbours machine went into some issue and did an automatic restore to some working state, which probably was the first login state. The files remained but the rest of the software got removed that probably don't ship with Windows. So maybe this one was not MS trying to remove your open source browsers, but just doing a system restore using an image.
A system restore from an image would wipe everything, luckily all user documents were intact, including user login, password and desktop background. But all personal data pertaining to 3rd party browsers was gone (all passwords, all bookmarks) which suggests that an algorithm decided that something in the user folders had to stay and something else had to go.
Is this really so different to what Windows 10 has always done though? When you run Chrome/FireFox for the first time, it will tell you that Edge is amazing now and that you should consider using it instead. It seems they're just showing the recommendation earlier now.
Oh, wow, didn't know about those (still on Win7 on my gaming desktop). I really don't know how people can stand all these notifications, I can barely stand the actually useful ones.
I was going to say this. It seems no different to me than when was setting up a Win10 installation and searched "Firefox" on Google. It injected something to the effect of "Edge is the superior browser" into the page.
Which is exactly why Valve pours so much money in making Linux a palatable gaming platform. They want an exit strategy when something like this happens. Or when MS decides that the Windows Store is not only the safest, but now also the only way to buy Windows software.
Yes, I am clearly aware of that. This is why they are investing so much and they pretty much have a good plan now since Steam Play/Proton can already run many Windows games right from Linux.
Last night, on my new Windows 10 machine, I received a notification "You got a message on your phone; Want to see phone messages on this PC too?" I've never installed Microsoft's phone app, and there's no way it could possibly know I just got a message. In fact, I didn't just get a message at all, and hadn't for hours.
So, they're lying. They're straight-up, bold-faced, red-handed, lying to their customers to get us to install their spyware which reads and syncs your text messages.
I'm finished with Microsoft. They're such a garbage company and always have been.
"We want people to install our phone app. Lets tell them they just got a message, people get messages all the time so we'll probably be right, and it'll seem like the feature is already working so all users have to do is click a button."
A zebra doesn't change its stripes. This kind of behavior (in a general sense) is a good example of why people were so worried about Microsoft acquiring GitHub.
Remember, the scorpion ends up stinging the frog in the end, because that's it's nature.
Original submitter here. Yes, this was a thought/concern when I submitted the article. Upon some reflection I went with:
1. HN guidelines stating, "Don't editorialise titles," and
2. The article itself is quite upfront on the issue - it's not like they tried to bury it or mislead (arguably except for the borderline headline), and
3. It does tell us, in no uncertain terms, that at least some coterie within MS is thinking of doing this thing.
My guess is that this inside build functionality was deliberately leaked to test the waters, see whether anyone would care.
Could the headline have been better? Probably.
Should we be concerned when the veil momentarily pulls aside and we glimpse the real MS behind the New Shiny Friendly MS mask? Certainly.
Just for reference (and thanks for remembering the guideline about not editorializing—if only everyone would!) it's ok to edit a title to make it less misleading. That would be the guideline behind adding "insider build" in this case. When editing like that, it's best to use representative language from the article itself. We're good on that here too, since "insider build" appears in the first paragraph.
I don't actually know what an insider build is, btw.
"Insider build", afaik, is MS's term for "nightly build". Like a permanent beta-test program that you can opt into in the Windows Update settings dialog.
It's their current terminology for their widely-available, public early-access programs for all sorts of products. They are not completely unqualified builds like a a nightly build would be. That would break all the things.
Those customers signed up for it. It wasn't a random sampling. It's similar to running a Firefox Nightly or being part of an open Beta.
Microsoft's Insider program is an opt in where you get to try out potential features. There's a history of features being pulled from the channel, their Sets feature was pulled in June.
I'm not saying it's right, but there's a chance Microsoft is feeling emboldened to get away with it based on Google's success steering search users to their own products.
Interesting follow-up there is that Facebook, in lifting so much of Snapchat for use across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger, has been giving Evan & team a pretty terrifying karmic kick in the rear... and though there might not be a connection here, Microsoft does own 1.~% of Facebook, after all.
Disclosure: own shares of SNAP; probably not selling soon (it either wins by chance or I write the whole company off as a loss). I don't exactly have the best opinion of the company.
When I see things like this, it makes me wonder how they detect a specific installer, or if it's just something as mundane as hooking writes to change the default HTML file association.
Could it perhaps be done with executable signing? If an installer is signed as "Mozilla" perhaps, you might know you have a Thunderbird or Firefox install.
And then if you install chrome and don't see the edge pop up, you start to worry that maybe your msi has the wrong signature and may have been tempered with!
- the "downloaded from the internet" flag that IE and Edge set on downloaded files on the NTFS level (the one that causes the "Do you really want to run this program downloaded from the internet?" one-time confirmation modal)
The UI/UX is the war territory, everything that is behind doesn't matter. The browser is the new and more engaging TV. People engage in fierce discussions about centralization vs. federation vs. decentralization but every approach is killed by the final UI or aggregator where the user interacts.
"We know what you are up to... Please do what we want you to do instead."
That's kinda the impression I get, there is definitely no sense of "security" or "privacy" in this or in the first run of Chrome or Firefox messages that also tend to show up.
It sounds more like "if you follow our recommendations we won't be so obvious about us monitoring what you do."
Edge may well be faster in some cases but now way is it safer. It takes Microsoft weeks or months to fix bugs that Firefox and Chrome fix in days, or even hours.
Is the reason this matters to these companies because of the built-in search providers and the money that comes from guiding users to a particular search engine through those defaults?
Could have a lot to do with ecosystem adoption. A Windows 10 user could get used to Chrome and its apps and plugins, and thus pave the way for a Chromebook purchase over a PC with Windows preinstalled the next time they're shopping for a new computer.
I look at this crap and I think, good grief, this is just such a waste of developer time, user time, computer resources, etc. Think about this. Someone had to add code to the OS to specifically check for this and pop up this message. Wow. Our industry is taking a dump. It's truly sad.
Oh and not to mention that any code could potentially be buggy and lead to yet more malware infections. Not something Windows needs help with!
I particularly dislike marketing that uses terms like “safer”, “faster”...compared to what? If you dig far enough into the fine print, it is usually clarified as “...compared to our last crappy version” but the implication is that the product is superior to any alternative. That kind of phrasing is garbage and has no place in a user warning, much less anywhere else.
I think this sets a dangerous precedent. Till now it seemed that the desktop was the last mainstream open computing platform due to it's legacy rooted in standardisation, but that seems to be moving too. While iOS anyways treats users as clueless and prefers being their "savior" instead of giving them power, atleast their attitude can be justified in that mobile makes computing available to people who have no time for understanding computers and need to be protected. But I think even iOS doesn't intercept your downloads. Neither does Android, the business model of which is supposed to be forcing people to consume Google's services.
If an OS will intercept your download, and guide you towards a "better way", how will a competing product even gain marketshare.
> on a recent Windows 10 version 1809 Insider build
> While there is certainly a chance that Microsoft is just testing things in preview versions of Windows, it is equally possible that such a setting will land in the next feature update for Windows 10
Oh boo hoo. Windows asks you if you wouldn't rather use the installed Edge browser. Could it lead to them "intercepting" installs and disallowing them in the future? Yeah, maybe it could. I'll worry about it when it does.
I'd say this is defiantly unethical yet I feel like this can actually be considered a good thing to exist: the web being monopolized by just one major browser/engine (which is Chrome/Blink/WebKit nowadays) is obviously a problem so anything than can increase presence of alternative browsers/engines can be considered a contribution to the web ecosystem diversity (although, honestly, I wouldn't recommend any of my friends/clients to use a Microsoft-made browser as these have a strong history of being far behind the web standards progress and exposing system vulnerabilities via ActiveX).
Also, IE before version 6 had a history of being extremely innovative (DHTML, anyone?). That's part of how they won the first browser wars (that and pushing the browser through their OS).
> and exposing system vulnerabilities via ActiveX
Now that's just baseless fearmongering. Edge supports neither ActiveX nor Java Applets. That's why IE is still around: for legacy websites in corporate intranets that still require this junk. I'm not sure if IE is installed on non-Enterprise SKUs of Windows 10, but it would surprise me if it was.
Mozilla and/or Google would do well to figure out how their installers are being detected (filename? Verisign certificate?) and simply change them. It's harder to push an OS update than rename or re-sign a file.
A few days ago I tried to install LibreOffice because a (legal) copy of MS Word gave me trouble and I needed a fast solution. However max. download speed I could reach was ~50k/s, bringing download time to almost an hour. Net speed test on the same computer reached full speed with no problem. Download from another (Linux) computer from the same URL was a matter of minutes. All of the mirror sites I tried had a similar speed.
I thought it was just some weird misconfiguration, but now I wonder... Could MS be actively slowing down downloads from LibreOffice to discourage users from using it?
While on principle I think this is bad, I think overall MS should encourage more users to switch away from Chrome. Chrome has +80% marketshare and quite frankly, Google is abusing their monopoly on the browser market willingly, otherwise they'd push for a more diverse market.
While this is quite the abuse of marketshare in OS to push Browser marketshare, I don't think the EU will care that much considering that Edge is a niche product, they will care once they do have a sizable chunk of browser marketshare.
It's an issue because of Microsoft's share of the pc market regardless of their share of the browser market. Its abusing a monopoly that is an issue not how successful this abuse is.
In the EU how successful the abuse is does somewhat matter. The EU doesn't like it when you have two monopolies and use one to reinforce the other. They're generally fine with leveraging one to get an advantage in another market space as long as you don't fall in the above category, ie as long as you aren't a significant portion of the market.
I do sort of agree in this case because it creates more competition in the market (ie Chrome vs Edge) which is healthy.
The other browsers should counter with a message of their own: "Ignore Microsoft Edge's pop-up spam, our browser is really better. Tell Nadella to shove it."
They've been trying similar things for months. Still, Edge isn't taking off and IE11 sticks around.
IE11 is not going to die this way. Why can't they do what the Chrome Frame did years ago, and just offer Edge-inside-an-IE11 frame so we can finally move forwards JS-wise? I don't mind adding a dozen custom headers and meta tags this time around, but please, come up with a way so every-day-web-developers can get away from IE11's constraints
I wish they would just keep the IE UI, and have Edge be the rendering engine.
The only reason I like IE over other browsers is because its UI hasn't changed much and remains relatively un-dumbed-down and un-mobile-apped like a Windows application should. Its configuration dialogs are also standard ones.
This isn't much different that what both Windows and macOS do whem trying to scare users into using app store software only. Macs use some rather scary language (scary when you are not a "computer person") to dissuade people from installing binaries from outside of the app store ecosystem. Microsoft does the same thing, even worse if you have one of their Windows 10S versions which locks you to app store software only.
I use windows but not edge or IE, and putting my tinfoil hat on, my Chrome performance has taken a dump recently... MEANWHILE.. edge is blazing fast. I feel like something is going on. I don't want to use edge, but it's like my internet is broken if I try to use chrome. It literally takes 30 seconds to get to the page on Chrome, and instantly on MS Edge... IDK what to do about it though.
Chrome doesn't come packaged with very much software, and if it is then you're probably installing the wrong software or they're just checking yes to everything and you have bigger concerns.
I'm pretty sure it's some update. My guess is Avast.
Other then that, I have no problems. They use this laptop only for Skype. Even mails run only through another laptop with mint on it.
All these companies that use this, it's better, safer messages are really annoying. I thought Google's "get chrome" links and buttons everywhere are bad, but intercepting an installation is probably even worse. These companies really should just build better products. My main browser is Firefox, and that wont change.
While I don't like this tactics, especially relating to Firefox, when Google tries to install Chrome from its websites, I can understand why Microsoft wants to fight back. I've used Edge a few monthes and those Chrome suggestions were really annoying. Now Firefox is other matter and I think, Microsoft shouldn't touch it.
Just now Google decided that their News (or how it's called) app on my phone should show notification for an article, first time in two years that I have this phone. And who would have guessed - it was about this issue. Google is so afraid that MS and Mozilla may slightly sway Google's hold on the Internet? :)
It would be nice to have some views from those that keep claiming that 'Microsoft has changed'. All I see is a nicer wrapping around the exact same company. Not that Google is any better with their incessant pushing of Chrome (including fucking up the way their websites work with other browsers).
It is this kind of bullshit that makes me glad I switched to macOS a few months ago. Windows is a good OS but for all the progress Microsoft makes in other areas they fuck things up with this kind of crap that just make using Windows a crappy experience.
I don't like this behavior (deceptive assertions). However:
The user being actively steered away from an alternative browser, is unlikely to expose the user to 3rd party risk. It might expose them to personal data being collected by Microsoft.
Whereas, for example, Apple's latest hardware with Secure Boot, lacks both an Apple signing service for UEFI applications, and the Microsoft UEFI public certificate (which near as I can tell all non-Apple x86_64 hardware does have). Linux distros get their shim pre-bootloader signed with the Microsoft UEFI key, that's how they can leverage Secure Boot. But on the latest Apple hardware, no Linux for you unless you disable Secure Boot. I've found no support document how I can add enroll a key, either my own, my distro's, or Microsoft's public UEFI key.
I think the Apple case is provably worse, it does expose users to 3rd party malware.
Can someone who is part of a bigger organization describe to me how this might happen, and what is the ultimate intent? Who would make such a decision and why isn't there any push back along the way to implementing it?
Pointy-haired boss: "I've been looking at our numbers and they aren't great - Google is getting a lot of installs via their Chrome ads on Google properties. Is there anything we can do to stop them stealing users from Edge? We control the desktop, right?"
Engineering lead: "I'll ask the Edge team to add an overlay when the user visits a Chrome download URL, but that might change. The installers are signed though, so we could check the package name and author at install time..."
Boss: "Great! Go for it- give me a timeline, this has highest priority for the realease in N weeks"
Was just about to post asking the same question. If you look closely, is this just the result of some MSFT PM trying to meet some quantitative metric for Edge usage? Or is this the result of a coordinated decision, approved by multiple levels of management? Have never experienced a large corporate structure, so I'm quite curious.
It might as well say: "We monitor your every move, and highly disapprove... Click here to return into our good graces, and be fairly confident we won't mysteriously brick your system."
I have a laptop with windows on it for ONE program: Fusion360, which apparently does not run on Wine at this time. Windows 10 is so much worse than Windows 7. it's become, like a "phone," a personal consumption terminal.
I remember when my old job blocked my installation of Tor. "Unwanted software detected." Why wouldn't a company want people browsing with Tor? The surveillance is increasing. Not as bad as China, but I hope I go to the grave with something more positive to say than "not as bad as China."
> Windows 10 is so much worse than Windows 7. it's become, like a "phone," a personal consumption terminal.
How have the added convenience features added to Windows 10 that do make it more accessible like a phone, equate to a reduction in your ability to work on it?
I use Windows 7 as my primary workstation and I am constantly annoyed by the rough edges. I'm looking forward to my company migrating me to Windows 10.
Bluetooth support in Windows 7 is horrid. The stack is proprietary to the vendor and device support is unstable at best. Intel provides proprietary drivers to Lenovo but doesn't change the Device IDs so Windows Update tries to install the bog standard Intel Drivers. Their proprietary drivers don't support Bluetooth 1.0 devices and their standard ones don't support A2DP.
While the Win 7 Startmenu's layout is ideal, the implementation is crap. Pinned Apps and the quick access flyouts are the last thing to load (upwards of a minute after logging in). The search prioritizes documents over Apps and Control Panel so you're twiddling your thumbs waiting if you search for "Add remove programs".
File Explorer can't make up it's mind if it wants you to use Favorites or Libraries more. It enumerates Network Devices in the Navigation Pane just cause. The Libraries in the Navigation Pane doesn't show all of the libraries you have setup, it gleefully shows Videos and Pictures which I'm pretty sure no one has ever used but leaves out Documents and OneDrive.
Ever tell your laptop to shutdown or hibernate, waited for desktop to fade away to the throbber screen, then shut the lid? That's always fun because when you open it up later it wakes up from sleep and finishes shutting down or hibernating.
>How have the added convenience features added to Windows 10 that do make it more accessible like a phone, equate to a reduction in your ability to work on it?
Because they've implemented those features in a managed runtime that is slow as molasses. I have 64 GiB of RAM, a high-end enthusiast CPU (Skylake-X), an NVMe drive, a high end GPU -- and the start menu lags, and sometimes loses keystrokes altogether. Search was completely broken for me between builds 1607 and 1709 (the start menu would not find recently installed apps, it would not find any files at all, etc.)
This completely disregard for performance and consistency infects every part of the operating system they "update." -- The new control panel's VPN applet frequently gets out of sync w/ the actual state of the tunnel, and the connect/disconnect controls stop working. There are many things you can't even do with the new control panel. There are many instances where you have to wait for the control panel to fail it's happy path (e.g: printer auto discovery) before it just gives up and presents you a link to the old printer adding wizard.
Then let's talk about their updater: I've already told you I have what I consider to be an enthusiast-class workstation, yet the last major update took over an hour to complete. What is it doing w/ nearly an hour when it has 50,000 IOPS and 300Mbit/s of WAN at its disposal? Any Linux distro I have ever used can basically finish an installation as fast as it can do IO, meanwhile the Windows updater doesn't even in-flight a second download while the previous package is installing, and then it proceeds to waste my time with three to four reboot cycles.
Then, after these updates are finally finished, they pull stunts like in the OP. When it did the Fall Creator's Update (1709?) it reset my default browser to Edge. (Nevermind that part of my job is web development, and I'm very particular about the suite of browsers I have installed & how I have them configured.) -- I've had Windows tell me I'm running out of RAM when I have >30% left. (That's _20 gigabytes of RAM._)
This is absolutely insane, I have lost so much productivity to this pile of trash. I have never regretted an OS purchase from Microsoft before, but I regret this purchase, and that is coming from someone who owned Windows Me and Vista.
It really sounds like you have a problem with your system affecting performance. I have encountered none of the issues you describe. I even have an Intel Celeron 2957U with 6GB of RAM and an integrated GPU doing CAM/GRBL related tasks over RDC that runs like a top.
I also get the impression that you're primarily a Linux user who has to use Windows and is just latching on to any reason to complain about it.
> Because they've implemented those features in a managed runtime that is slow as molasses.
To my knowledge the Windows 10 UI is written using the C++ Runtime, not a managed one. The use of XAML is not an indicator of a managed language, UWP Apps can be written in C++.
> There are many things you can't even do with the new control panel.
Microsoft is gradually migrating features from the Control Panel over to the Settings App. As such the Control Panel still exists and is readily accessible.
> There are many instances where you have to wait for the control panel to fail it's happy path (e.g: printer auto discovery) before it just gives up and presents you a link to the old printer adding wizard.
And for most people the happy path works and is significantly easier to deal with. Not everyone is comfortable editing CUPS config files.
> the last major update took over an hour to complete.
How long does an distro-upgrade take you? Because that's the equivalent procedure. It really sounds like a problem with your system because the Spring Creators update too about 15 minutes on my systems.
> meanwhile the Windows updater doesn't even in-flight a second download while the previous package is installing
Windows 10 downloads all of the updates prior to attempting to install any of them so... what are you talking about?
> I've had Windows tell me I'm running out of RAM when I have >30% left.
Again, that sounds like you have something else going on and you're just blaming the thing you despise for all your woes.
> Why wouldn't a company want people browsing with Tor?
You're supposed to be working on your work machine and "IT teams know best". Tor is usually a big red flag that your machine is attempting to evade corporate surveillance, which means that you're actively exfiltrating data or that you've been infected by something bad.
Sure, you probably don't want Google to know that you're studying the market for a specialized piece of software/solution. But Management doesn't care, so just use the Incognito Window, and be happy...
And I would highly suggest moving your CAD workflow to FreeCAD instead. Fusion360, being tied to the hip to Autodesk by being SAAS-like puts you in a very uncomfortable position if they choose to flip the "pay me or else" bit.
Most "free" tools like this aren't free, because they rely on data-trapping techniques. These programs are roach motels, with no good way to lossless way to take control of your own data. But that's exactly why it is "free" ; because your data is worth more. Thats the cost.
Yes, when I got started with FreeCAD, they were in a very rough spot, transitioning between internal engines of some sort. I tried hard with it for about 6 months, finding it extremely buggy to the point of unusable then made a donation and pledged to try it out in the future. I think it's time I gave it another look now.
Digikey also has almost all their parts in a KiCAD library. Clone the repo and import it... Its crazy complete, and combined with the BOM tool, even generates DK part number links. You can determine price easily....
Open source starts out rough, but the more work is accomplished, we get better than the commercials do :) We all build on each other - we're not competing in a death-math style competition.
Chromium is great and everything works... even Mozilla's old CEO and JavaScript creator switched Brave to Chromium. Not that it matters what their old CEO does, given his history.
But Microsoft is supposed to be this new hip amazing open source company, that now gives you .NET Core on Linux to build inferior applications with so you can complain about Linux being slow.
Does Windows still give you the popup with a choice of browsers to install in the EU? I remember seeing it some years ago, but since then I've only used Windows a few times with a business version in a VM, so not sure if that's still present.
Seems like if they were forced to do that, there's no way they would get away with this, but I'm not sure if that ruling still applies.
This is why computing is going off the rails, and computational literacy is critical.
The computer belongs to the User. It's sole purpose is to compute, FOR THE USER. If your software is running on someone else's machine. And you want data exfiltrated back to you, normatively speaking, you should ANNOUNCE your intention, EXPLAIN it, and ASK for permission, this includes honoring their decision if they say NO.
The industry has clearly been sliding down a slippery slope in which businesses have unilaterally decided that running THEIR software exempts them from having to respect the User.
This is madness. If a society operated on the types of practices that are considered "appropriate" in computing, we'd be liable to label them as savages.
Keep your interbusiness competition OFF MY MACHINE!
So you have. My bad. Seem to have filtered it out since it pops up in places where I'm usually mentally filtering for relevance to the issue in question.
#2) I stay away from Italics because they actually make reading more difficult for those of poor sight. This is counterproductive for making sure you can get the most important bits of your message across and if caught without my glasses, your italics are very difficult to see. Caps stand out, generally have thicker, or less visually ambiguous glyphs, and are immediately visually recognizable. I'd use bold, but the editor doesn't seem to support it through any syntactic convention I'm used to.
I consider capitalization to be a way of making sure text stands out, as I've been legally blind for most of my life, and while I'm not as bad anymore, I'm painfully aware of the challenges people with visual impairment face, Therefore, Italics generally take on a less meaningful role in the context of emphasis for me, due to their ability to be more easily mistaken when being looked at. So unless communication is something fairly trivial, or an out-of-band thought, I generally use bolding and capitalization imstead.
By the way, screen readers were not well known for reading out typographical characteristics, so often, a visually impaired person will have to figure out where it LOOKS like emphasis may have been in text. For more don't's to make your content consumable by the visually impaired, have a look at
Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines, it should be trivial enough to Google.
Or for that matter ANY guide on internet accessibility.
Furthermore, I don't understand why you thinking it's yelling takes anything away from the conventional point of yelling, which is to... provide an auditory form of emphasis via audio signal amplitude modification. The changing of typographical glyphs, draws the eye to content (when said change can be discerned), and primes the mind that Thar be a point to be made here. Perhaps that is my own brand of social ineptitude, nevertheless, I do make a habit of questioning anything that doesn't make sense on functional and aesthetic grounds due to an interest in minimizing overhead in communication and minimizing the number of restrictions on the myriad ways people may attempt to express themselves.
I don't want to derail the thread anymore, and despite this finer point of typography and content rendering in a way which is conducive to the visually impaired being a rather passion invoking topic for me, I assume everyone else is not here for that. I'd prefer not to have too continue, seeing as it breaks yet ANOTHER guideline.
I'd also like to direct your attention to
Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say face-to-face. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Both points which you (though you are doing it I assume in pursuit of the execution of your your duties to the best of your ability) are straying rather close to.
Instead of providing a reasonable and substantive reply to any of the content in my original comment, you have quibbled over the way it was delivered, detracting from the quality of the conversation despite knowing the typographic convention was being deployed in a way reasonably discernable as conveying emphasis.
So if you are a moderator, consider your message received. I will do my best to abstain from typographic conventions that offend your company's sensibilities to the detriment of my own personal readability without my glasses, and to anyone else's.
Thank you for the link as well. I hadn't noticed the Guidelines on the bottom, again, de-emphasized textual prominence, being a bit of an issue for me.
If you have any ability to escalate feedback, implement bolding and accessibility aids for the love of all the visually impaired.
If you'll excuse me, I'd like to see what I can learn from other's input, I have largely tried to keep comments substantive and on topic.
> If a society operated on the types of practices that are considered "appropriate" in computing, we'd be liable to label them as savages.
There are many industries with similar, parallel, practices that are directly at odds with serving the "user." For example, groceries. A typical grocery store presents a selection of products in a grocery aisle. This presentation is not optimized to give the shopper the best experience, lowest prices, or highest quality products.
The products, and product displays, are optimized to extract the most profit from the shopper, often resulting in inferior products. Grocery stores also collect and analyze reams of data about individual shoppers -- again, not for the purpose of providing better value for the shoppers, but for extracting maximum profit from them. Want that data back? Good luck!
Your razor does try to stop you from using a blade from a different manufacturer, and your printer tries to stop you from using ink cartridges from a different manufacturer, and your car will often strongly discourage you from getting it serviced by anyone other than an authorized dealer.
It really pisses me off that they use cryptography to make replacing keys so expensive.
My wife lost her purse with (it turns out) the master key to my minivan. The minivan is maybe worth $4k. (I'd have to fix it before I could sell it.) Getting the key replaced is $750. Because that is what Toyota wants to charge and nobody else can do it.
If I had an older car, it would be a cheap visit to the local Home Depot to duplicate the remaining key.
I haven't replaced the key. I don't value the threat model that they theoretically protect me from. I do value the convenience of being able to replace the key. But it isn't worth $750 to me. Instead that is just one of several things that are on my list of "replace if X happens".
"To be fair"? How does that qualifier change anything? The consumer can still make choices unfettered about using $brand of their choice when baking a cake. Unfettered, operative word here.
A better comparison would be walking to the checkout line with $brand_A sugar and watching the clerk put down $brand_B and start the motions of scanning the barcode forcing you to make the active move of stopping them to say "no, I know what brand I picked out, get out of my way and let me buy $brand_A"
Simply suggesting a what works best on the side of a box can't reasonably be compared to actively halting an operation deliberately initiated by the user.
Microsoft's ultimate goal seems to be to be able to manage your computer as if it was part of their cloud. And a fine goal it is
(for them). It's the best of both worlds, they control it but you pay for it.
Which actually sounds kind of OK to me. There are some users who can't manage their own machines and don't want to. There's a reason most companies have a central IT department.
The problem is twofold:
1. There should be a single checkbox that says "keep your grubby mitts off my machine." As it is now, users must proactively keep Microsoft out. Even then updates can give Microsoft the keys again.
2. Microsoft cannot be trusted to work in the user's interest. They always steer the user towards Microsoft products.
Checkbox seems unlikely, but this would be a reasonable way to distinguish between the "home" version of the OS for normies and the "premium" version for power users.
Corporations have more rights than individuals, and they have less responsibility. We as a society have decided that Corporations are more important than the individual and we made that determination because of jobs. We must treat corporations gently or they will move all of their jobs to other countries. What you are railing against is just a small piece of the puzzle.
As is what you say. We choose to do that because we live in a society that pressures people to value having jobs over having rights. And there aren't enough jobs to go around because technology has made production so efficient.
I beg to differ, especially in an atmosphere of rapidly intensifying sentiments of voter disenfranchisement and citizen unrest in the United States; particularly amongst many millenials.
I believe it to be accurate to say that there is a party with a vested interest in making sure that Corporations have more rights on paper. I do not believe it terribly fair to make the assumption however that EVERYONE is okay with that.
Don't thank God, thank the people that actually made it possible. RMS, for example. You don't have to use LFS to be free. You can use any other free software distribution.
They were there actually. Though in the older days the personal ownership of a machine was much rarer.
These types of practices only started when people started fighting over arket share once PC's started to become more popular, and most of the people who were working on them were either too busy making cool stuff to complain, or being ignored as geeks.
The Free Software movement, however, has been there for a long time. Just nowhere near as well funded.
> If your software is running on someone else's machine. And you want data exfiltrated back to you, normatively speaking, you should ANNOUNCE your intention, EXPLAIN it, and ASK for permission, this includes honoring their decision if they say NO.
Having rules this complicated and debatable as to when they've been violated is like having no rules at all. The rule that users should have complete read/write access to all of the software running on their own machine is enough.
It is a case of social etiquette. Do you go over to your neighbor's garage and use their mower without asking?
Reroute their water into your system?
Siphon off their power? (Which embedded cryptocurrency miners and unwelcome analytics and data gathering are a perfect example of.)
Or use their cellular data, for that matter?
I realize there may be a lot of dislike of this ethos as it may be seen as leaving money on the table, but fundamentals are only fine to skip over when you actually show a credible mastery of them in the first place.
The tech industry's ability to ask before doing has been far from proven. It's only now that people have started to understand enough to realize just how much has been going on out of sight.
I wish, but this hasn't been the case since 2005. LFS won't help if your firmware limits kernels to those signed by Microsoft, or help you decrypt the signal sent to your monitor with your monitor vendors pubkey, or stop TCPIP running on the proprietary copy of Minix that Intel installed for you.
It's still possible to avoid some of this. For example I've made a point to never use HDMI, and I've had no compatibility problems, e.g. I've always been able to use VGA when giving talks, etc. In fact it's usually the people with DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort/etc. scrambling to find an adapter.
I've also tried to avoid EFI and Intel processors. My previous laptop used OpenFirmware and a Geode processor, which I'm assuming never had a hidden OS/Web/etc. stack like Intel's. I eventually upgraded about 4 years ago, when the first laptop (a refurbished ThinkPad x60s) got the FSF's "respects your freedom" certification. It's not perfect, since it's got an Intel processor and I think there's EFI running underneath LibreBoot, so I've been keeping an eye out for a replacement.
I don't think we need to give up. There are some promising developments, with "bottom up" efforts like RISCV and "top down" mitigation efforts like those of Purism. 'Consumer electronics' may be a lost cause (without legal intervention, at least), but there are still options for those who prioritise digital freedom above convenience, price, etc. (e.g. Talos II)
> I've also tried to avoid EFI and Intel processors.
While your entire principled nature is worth admiration, may I ask what your objection to EFI is?
As far as I know it's an open standard, and there's nothing fundamentally bad about it.
I know lots of people have issues with UEFI Secure Boot (mostly based on FUD), but secure boot is strictly optional. Not to mention many UEFI firmwares lets you load your own keys: I.e. it respects your freedom.
Are you sure you're not accidentally conflating UEFI with Intel Management Engine (which is indeed spyware)?
> Are you sure you're not accidentally conflating UEFI with Intel Management Engine (which is indeed spyware)?
Pretty sure
> may I ask what your objection to EFI is?
> I know lots of people have issues with UEFI Secure Boot (mostly based on FUD), but secure boot is strictly optional.
I'm not the most knowledgable about this, but as far as I understand it secure boot is a hard requirement for Windows 8 hardware certification on ARM, although as you say it's optional on x86 (presumably for legacy reasons, like users expecting to have control over their machines). This is essentially the same strongarming of OEMs that contributed to killing OS/2, BeOS, etc. so the fact it's (currently) optional for certain machines doesn't quell my concern to having so much of the world reliant on Microsoft keys.
> Not to mention many UEFI firmwares lets you load your own keys: I.e. it respects your freedom.
That's not a feature I have any intention of using, and prefer to "vote with my wallet" by trying to avoid it and support alternatives.
> As far as I know it's an open standard, and there's nothing fundamentally bad about it.
Purely anecdotally/ranting, my only real experience with EFI was trying to boot from a USB stick on someone's machine (to try and recover some of their data, if I recall). I couldn't figure out how to even get a menu or anything, so I gave up.
In contrast, it didn't take me long to feel quite at home in the Forth prompt of OpenFirmware; despite never having used Forth before.
> That's not a feature I have any intention of using
Fair enough, but it is a security feature I can use to harden my system against attackers. Several Linux-distros support this OOB these days.
But if you're not interested, no pressure. Everything works fine without it.
> Purely anecdotally/ranting, my only real experience with EFI was trying to boot from a USB stick on someone's machine (to try and recover some of their data, if I recall). I couldn't figure out how to even get a menu or anything, so I gave up.
EFI is different for sure. I can't say I blame you for not wanting to read up all about it[1] when you had other stuff to do.
That said, EFI is conceptually and practically much simpler than traditional BIOS boot. It doesn't rely on magic bytes being written in specific sectors, it doesn't put a limitation on boot devices or types.
(Overly) simplified: It just says that if your medium of choice contains a file a \efi\bootx64.efi on a FAT-partition, your machine will be able to boot that thing with no further action required on anyone's part.
As such creating a bootable medium involves 1. having the right FS-type, 2. copying the files.
I haven't looked into OpenFirmware so I can't really compare, but compared to traditional BIOS I find EFI conceptually much simpler, much more manageable and to top it off much more secure.
>The computer belongs to the User. It's sole purpose is to compute, FOR THE USER. If your software is running on someone else's machine. And you want data exfiltrated back to you, normatively speaking, you should ANNOUNCE your intention, EXPLAIN it, and ASK for permission, this includes honoring their decision if they say NO.
I can literally pop open a dialog box asking for permission to browse your Documents and extract some 'interesting' data and I bet 70% of users will click "ok", since, well, that's what The Computer (like it's its own sentient entity) "wants me to do", and I need to get my work done.
Your suggestion simply cannot work, because 99.9999% of users don't hack their own .vimrc and have no idea what the heck those annoying boxes are asking of them, but they do know that by clicking "OK", the box goes away.
What you can get away with does not change ownership. If you ring the doorbell of all apartments in a 20 unit block someone will open the door for you. That you can then walk in to the hallway and take whatever is there does not give you the right to do so.
That computer is there for them to not do with as they please, as another poster mentioned.
Yes, there are a LOT of defaults people will just "go with" on the basis of path of least resistance. That does not absolve we programmers and software engineers to write well behaved, principled software that respects the sanctity of the user's digital sovereignty.
A computer is a tool, not a playground for the first person to throw code at it. Attitudes in the vein of your comment aren't uncommon, but that doesn't make them right.
The fact it has taken so long for technical literacy to get to where it is at is because most people have grown accustomed to the machine making decisions for them because it didn't occur to the programmer to present the option to think for themselves. Or, that saintly programmer wanted to, but got shot down in the name of UX and quick KPI boosts rather than creating an experience of the computer as a tool a user can do something with.
I really wanted to try out Edge. But there are no extensions of any sort. With out the password/bookmark managers and all, how can anyone get started in this thing.
I switch back and forth between firefox and chrome because of the cross platform extensions. Microsoft should pay developers to bring their products to edge. At least the popular ones.
most windows 10 users don't realize its even possible to use windows 10 without a microsoft account... and eventually, it probably won't be possible except for enterprise users.
All while they subsidize the cost of the OS for spyware from their manufacturers, or flat out pay for it with enterprise licensing. Something something... customer experience makes it necessary to require a cloud account to login to your OS.
Edge didn't have extensions when it first came out, but it does have them now, including: uBlock, Adblock, LastPass, RES, Tampermonkey. Still nowhere near what Firefox or Chrome has though.
I can't tell if you're joking. Why would you want to use a single-platfrom, closed-source browser? We've been there, done that. You say you use Chrome and FF for cross platform features so you must have cross platform concerns. Anything they do to encourage developers and users to support it would be a huge step backwards for the world.
closed-sourced problems aside, a common plugin ecosystem is really all most users would need to feel at home (if those plugins sync data between installations). if i have my password manager available in two browsers, it doesn't matter much that the "back" button looks a little different on my phone versus my laptop.
i still won't use edge personally, but for other reasons.
Who cares, really? Windows is mostly used in the offices, and at that, the places too cheap to afford Macs. The home user and all semi-advanced tech companies have long switched off Windows. Windows is irrelevant at this point.
Perhaps. But then again, I'm using my iPad to draw with Procreate, and it's the best experience I've had (both software and hardware). I'd argue in this case Apple is quite innovative.
If only Linux users would pay for desktop software, maybe we could have a Year of Desktop Linux someday, instead we got Android and ChromeOS with their stores.
Right now is it not worthy to build a business selling desktop software to Linux, unless we are talking about enterprises, movie studios and a few other niche markets that migrated from UNIX workstations to Linux desktops.
I pay for IDEA Ultimate, I pay for games, I am not a sucker to pay for crap like Youtube downloaders, Windows cleaners or other software that has a better and open source alternative.
If you want to make honest money with software then you need to solve a problem I have and help me do more work with less effort, for such a software most people will pay.
I would like to support gaming on Linux, but do not want a game sniffing /proc as I suspect some do, or will shortly do. The equivalent practice under Windows is common as an anti-cheat measure.
If you want to game, I recommend dedicating a separate Windows machine to the task.
No tutorial, just organically grown (thus ugly) scripts for games, that I own.
The gist is to prepare the directory structure, icon, .desktop file, flatpak metadata, appstream info, add dependencies not provided by flatpak runtime (for games, libGLU for example), put everything into ostree repo (flatpak build-export ...), and then either install from that, or export the content into .flatpak file (flatpak build-bundle ...).
The last step can take a while, .flatpak files are lzma compressed and the compression during export uses only one cpu core. For 20GB game, that isn't exactly quick, to be diplomatic.
I had a Windows partition for gaming but since Wine got better, more Linux games are available and setting up a proper dual boot with Windows become a pain I deleted windows.
As a fallback if some new game appears and I really want to play it I can get it on my kids console.
Microsoft Word is a more complex piece of software that delivers more value to more businesses and individuals than (virtually?) anything that anyone on this site has ever made.
It amazes me how little people value other people's work on this site.
You are right, Word is impressive in the same way a big factory that assembles complicated products is impressive. It's an impressive amount of work, it's complex, and it gets a lot done. But looking in the factory, you can see some things it does in house that are better left to other facilities, some machinery that is overcomplicated or inefficient, it pollutes more than it needs to, etc. But we need to hit those production targets. Changing things up would be expensive, so on we go... providing value to those who depend on it.
It doesn't matter how much value Word delivers when Libreoffice Writer delivers more, for less (zero) cost. For most people, Writer is enough, and so they won't buy Word. Its just free market and competition working the way it should.
Libre can't even reliably update Word documents, which is literally the only thing I ever asked if it. I don't think MS is threatened by it, and I have no idea why you're going off on a free market tangent.
Somehow the openess of graphic formats does not make Gimp a better proposition than Photoshop, specially when handling color workflows on digital agencies.
An image format mostly stores the end result of what you made.
An office document format is basically source code.
That's why the openness of a graphic format doesn't matter, but clear specifications on how to interpret an office document make an enormous difference.
Somehow you missed the point that openness of graphic formats has not helped to make Gimp better than Photoshop, likewise even if Office formats were 100% open, Libre Office features wouldn't match Word.
I didn't miss the point. I'm arguing that the two kinds of format are completely different. A graphics format is a side-effect of the actual editing, an afterthought. With an office document, the format itself is the core of the experience.
No, but it would allow LibreOffice to work with them cleanly which was the criticism I replied to (and probably allow Word to break itself less often or have 3-4 fewer implementations embedded in itself).
็Really? I have had more OpenOffice crash/freeze on me in 2 years of using it (on Linux) than MS Office for over 10 years (including 2 years running in VM)
I would seriously fork money over if MS would ever build Linux version.
The last MS Office I paid for was 2007. The last time I used Word 2007 was 2010 or 2011 maybe. I am 100% lacking in any experience in Word features, at least since then, and I hardly remember anything from Word 2007.
As a lawyer, I deal with other people's Word products all day every day. What Word features am I missing out on? I am genuinely curious and not trying to be snarky in any way.
Microsoft Word (and word processors more generally) are horrible environments for creating any sort of content in. They're great for bureaucrats who like to "do lots of work" without producing anything of use.
I cringe every time I have to deal with a Word file.
> Imagine if someone said "I cringe every time I have to deal with a command line."
People do say this though. People have personal preferences for the software they have to use all day, and most of the time people don't agree on what that software is. And most of those decisions are driven by the type of work people do. I don't expect a lawyer or a business analyst to use command line interfaces, and I don't think they expect software engineers to code in Word...
Yes, but when I use the command line, it has absolutely no effect on other users who don't like the command line. When someone sends me a .docx, they've made a choice which affects someone else.
A well-executed command line is a precise and efficient way to get work done. It is invaluable, and its value is unrelated to problems present in other interfaces.
I customized Word with a bunch of Macros, wrote a 300 page educational book in it. I had no issues and was quite productive. I may have been more irritated if I had needed to do a bunch of complicated layout work.
But aside from that, Word is great for short and medium length documents, especially ones that need group editing. Put a Word file up on Sharepoint, and now there is user friendly change tracking and commenting.
I've written multiple technical specs in Word, it serves as a great way to collaborate, so long as everyone has bought into the ecosystem.
If you are at a company that uses Sharepoint, everyone already has bought in.
The same argument can be made for any piece of software. People have to buy in, even free software requires taking time to learning it vs whatever existing workflow is in use (if any).
OP points out LaTeX, but for non-technical and non-academic people, this is a non-starter. Word has an extremely low barrier to entry so it makes tons of sense for the general public and K-12 education markets.
There's a reason it's so popular and why LibreOffice and GSuite have emulated the bulk of it's feature set.
A study on Linux users found that they wouldn't pay for Photoshop or other Adobe products either, expecting them to be free. Which is why Adobe never bothered.
A cursory google search couldn't find what you mention. Can you cite the source please?
I know another example that goes in opposite direction, of Humble Bundles, where Linux had consistently higher average payment than Windows, but that may have changed in recent years.
It was a long time ago. But some searching today, official response from Adobe (2010):
> Again, we've done the research. The profits aren't there -- very few Linux users are willing to pay for commercial software. And the cost of entry is still high because of the fragmented Linux landscape. The Linux world has to change before commercial software will have reason to invest in Linux ports. And we haven't seen much real change in the Linux market in several years.
> At the height of the Dot-Com era, dozens of startups tried selling proprietary applications for Linux -- and not one survived more than a couple of years. Even Adobe, after releasing a popular beta of FrameMaker, withdrew it from circulation after a poll suggested that users were unwilling to pay for applications.
Flash was awesome. It created the interactive multimedia web long before HTML5 existed. Many animators, game developers, and other artists started their career as teenagers working in Flash and posting to Newgrounds.
It wasn't perfect software by any means, but perfect is the enemy of good anyways.
"The height of the dot-com era" was 18 years ago, Linux has come on a long way since then - not to mention the (perceived?) quality of Windows and macOS going downhill.
Even fewer people in my extended group of friends and family are aware of Linux now than 18 years ago, and that is saying something. The only people who know anything about it are geeks, and we are a minuscule amount of the population.
I think fewer people are aware of underlying software generally. Presumably there are at most four categories for lots of end-users: "PCs", "Apples/Macs", "iPhones", "Androids". (Of course, more people are using Linux in some form or other now than they were 18 years ago, whether they know it or not.)
For one thing there are a lot more distros, two different display servers, and several more packaging formats. Not exactly countering their point about fragmentation are we? At least we got that sound situation mostly sorted out.
Because I'm not willing to pay for Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop (because I don't use them) doesn't mean I don't pay for software. Lots of the software I use I don't have to pay for, but that's not the reason I use it. I use it because it's better than anything else out there. So I contribute money to projects instead. And I pay for services (like Newsblur rss reader) that run on open source stacks. And I buy plenty of games (but only if they run on Linux).
The thing I don't understand is what does operating system have to do with paying for software? If I had need for professional level software that costs money, I would pay for it whether I'm using linux or windows.
But, lot of software I need to use doesn't need to be that high level and for what I need plenty of high quality open source options exist. I have no problem paying for software, whatever os I use, if it's the software I need. But if an open source alternative with comparable or sometimes better features exists why wouldn't I use it?
And games honestly, There are plenty I would spend money on if they supported linux and i've purchased ones that have interested me.
I paid for MS Office in 2003 and in 2007. Apart from games, that's the only software I ever paid for (other than the Windows license presumably incorporated into the price of the handful of already-built computers I bought).
I used open source software on Windows, and I carried that habit over when I switched to Linux. I have only ever paid for games on Linux, because everything I have needed has a satisfactory FOSS alternative.
Hell, I bought a macbook a couple years ago, and I have never bought a piece of software for that either.
It's not because of the OS.
My gut sense is that open-source/paid-support model is an ideal, which also provides an incentive for the publisher to produce as good of software as possible. I don't know if Red Hat or Canonical are profitable doing that, but it would be nice if that were the way that everything could work (maybe, I haven't really thought that much about it and am open to rebuttal).
I am averse to paying up front for something that I don't really know whether it'll be what I want and won't just be a pile of shit.
I don't buy many phone apps either, for that reason.
Its a complicated situation, really. The last thing that Linux needs is an incentive for every little app to have its own profit motive. I mean, Android and ChromeOS have stores, but would they be successful without a solid foundation of built-in functionality?
Having said that, I haven't really observed a difference in Linux users willingness to pay for large functional applications. I don't think there are objections to paying for IntelliJ or Photoshop grade applications in general.
But why only pay for software once? Why not make it a subscription model? Oh and while you're at it, why not add tracking and adware to your linux app as well?
I think the way the software economy works today has a lot of malincentives. I don't think simply transplanting that same economy to linux would solve any of the problems.
> If only Linux users would pay for desktop software
Selling Free Software doesn't tend to work very well, since every customer is free to resell it and undercut the developer. Still, I do spend a lot of money on Free Software since I have a bunch of automatic donations to affiliated organisations (FSF, WikiMedia and Open Rights Group in particular).
(I don't use proprietary software due to ethical concerns; see, for example, this HN submission)
Just going off of the AAA game market your statement is obviously incorrect. That doesn't get into productivity software, engineering applications (CAD, 3D modelling, etc), or the very large variety of enterprise desktop software to name just a few markets.
Not everything is a web app these days and many people still prefer to own their software instead of being a recurring revenue source for the same functionality month after month.
People pay for games and specialized professional software -- indiscriminate of platform. Outsize of those sectors you'll be lucky to sell a piece of software not attached to a service.
When you have a company wining/dining and paying kickbacks, or when Microsoft hires erotic dancers for their events, then the top executives with no technical knowledge are happy to sign multi-year contracts that lock them into those vendors... if they don't, then Microsoft can always release their blackmail files.
> or when Microsoft hires erotic dancers for their events,
I worked at MS for a long time. I can say that sort of stuff hasn't happened for quite awhile, and people involved in it happening were fired, some of them rather publicly.
Now days, expense reports are gone over very carefully. Everyone at Microsoft attends yearly ethics training, which covers all manner of topics, including what is and is not acceptable to do to win sales.
Realistically, when it comes to cloud based productivity systems, the choices are Microsoft or Google.
> then the top executives with no technical knowledge are happy to sign multi-year contracts that lock them into those vendors
Any half decent company is going to have at least a CTO in charge of these decisions. The CTO should have multiple people working for them that are capable of making engineering decisions.
If a company sends a bunch of non-technical people to a technical presentation to make a technical decision, that is the company's fault.
> I worked at MS for a long time. I can say that sort of stuff hasn't happened for quite awhile, and people involved in it happening were fired, some of them rather publicly.
2016 isn't that long ago, and that's just one that was badly-judged enough to have made the news:
> Microsoft has fallen in the market-share of OSs, can no longer be considered monopolist move.
That's not how anti-trust works. Just because a player does not hold as much of a market they used to, does not mean they do not have a monopoly or cannot abuse it.
Microsoft absolutely has a monopoly on the desktop OS market. And even without that monopoly this is abuse. With monopoly, this becomes abuse of their power in addition to being abuse of their users.
Every time someone mentions anti-trust, someone else comes in and starts claiming it's not really a monopoly, so antitrust doesn't apply. The thing is, market manipulation doesn't require monopoly power: an excessive difference of scale between the largest and smallest participants in a market is enough.
For example, the consumer choice feedback loop breaks down when scale gets large enough that market signals from individual decisions are smaller than the amplitude of the noise, making it easy to neutralize them with marketing. We are heading in a direction where market breakdown occurs long before monopoly power, and cartel-like behavior is more likely. The largest players are so large they have more incentive to cooperate to keep everyone else down, while maintaining only nominal competition with each other.
That doesn't mean anti-trust is no longer relevant, but that people arguing for it need to revise their position. Antitrust has never been about monopolies, but about abuse of power in the market. It was only a historical coincidence that that lined up with monopolies when the total economy was smaller. Corporations have now become so large that market failure begins long before monopolies, and our trust-busting strategies need to adapt to that.
Although despite Android not requiring you to just wrap the native browser, Edge on Android just wraps the native browser (unlike Firefox for Android and like Chrome for iOS)
When e.g. you look how aggressively Google is trying to switch me to Chrome from my Firefox on all of their properties, a new low was set. But from my insider buddies at Google, that strategy is working well.
This here from MSFT dials it up another notch. With the anti-trust cases in the EU, they probably will be able to geo target this feature so that from the EU all will be fine and dandy, but the rest of the world will get scared into switching to Edge.