I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here:
Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser.
Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one way, continues to act that very way still.
> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1].
Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better product.
More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.
Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.
> there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.
Who doesn't like to talk about it? It's so much easier to integrate components on Linux over windows. Why would anyone willingly use windows for data analysis?
I like VSCode too. I use it for Clojure, Python, and C#, which I am working in this year and haven't for a very, very long time. I was pleasantly surprised at the progress it has made.
Ironically compared to Windows, MS has been willing to kill backward compatibility more to improve .NET to make it more cross-platform, something that must come from a very different part of the company, probably the one that got the "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" mandate.
I make no apologies for their history, but I like these tools and I like them much better than Java, which also has its place. (This isn't a throwaway comment, notice I said I use Clojure, it's my favorite, which runs on the JVM.)
VS Code is pretty great, and I agree the remote dev extensions (ssh) are hands down the best feature added. I also like that it had a directory tree and the integrated terminal early on, that's what got me hooked.
C# is nice, but the experience in VS Code is sub-par and I think it's the VS (not code) managers that are responsible for that state of being.
I'm not familiar with another code editor with an integrated terminal, at least not one as complete as VS Code's before VS Code. I could be mistaken though.
Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff".
Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.
The example is not .NET in general, but that specific event when Microsoft reneged on open development tooling[1]. For some people, that was the moment they stopped trusting "new Microsoft" to keep their word (though for me, it was when the Python language server was replaced with a DRM-locked, LSP-noncompliant one[2] a bit before that; unlike with .NET hot reload, they didn't backtrack there). I can think the company makes great open .NET tools and at the same time not trust them to close those down on a whim.
Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of MIDL[3] went, by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language grammar in the docs, because there is no language grammar in the docs[4].)
[4] I vaguely remember a GitHub issue where a Microsoft employee explicitly refused to provide one ("not a priority" or some such synonym for "we don't care, fuck off"), but I can't find it
I didn't pick .NET, parent did. And regardless if the ecosystem is nice to work in or not, Microsoft tries their true and tested strategy of EEE with that ecosystem as well.
The Core and Standard things was just there the aid the transition from Framework, which is now complete, any remains will soon be phased out entirely.
We often look at companies as a single monolith but that isn't conductive to productive discussions.
OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one.
One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.
A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means "tending to promote or assist" is 'conducive' with no 't', pronounced 'cundoosiv'.
> Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others are conducive to consumer spending. Notice that conducive is almost always followed by to.
Maybe if they stopped trying to become monoliths, people would stop considering them as monoliths?
What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith.
Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because one state does something you don't agree with. In a large organization different departments may do different things and have different incentives, and until they overstep too much may have quite a bit of autonomy.
Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
Eh, no. That's a reach. A company policy would be something that the whole company is expected to follow. If only the teams that coordinated on it follow it, that's not a policy in any way, it's just a choice that a portion of the company made, it could be something that the company doesn't care about one way or another or it could be something that wasn't addressed prior to release (if you think every decision a team makes gets complete review and is totally understood, I think you're wrong).
Even a monolith is made up of many atoms all sticking together.
Just because your particular outcropping isn't coated in digital blood doesn't mean you're not part of the problem.
If a company sent out two crews of people and one crew gave out flowers to strangers and the other crew punched little old lady's faces in, would you still crow about how you're only handing out flowers?
The relationship between VSCode and commercial versions of Visual Studio is the worst part of .net, especially the omnisharp debacle.
Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales.
VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work.
This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.
C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.
How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and made it possible to build for other platforms?
C# is a great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++ making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it any better: owning the devs.
VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs
Buy out of github, owning the devs
Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.
Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
This is standard business affairs for pretty much every big company. Apple, Google, Amazon, and many other fortune 500 companies, have all bought up dozens of businesses and their products and rebranded them as their own. Not sure why we're solely picking on Microsoft here...
Because Microsoft is the subject of this thread. We could pick on other corporation, MS isn't the only one, but whataboutism isn't an argument.
And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.
> Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
> And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?
Can't speak for GP, but the o365 Word is better than Google Docs as well. And while you can view Visio in o365, would be nice if you could edit the diagrams. Odd, but Visio is still imo much better than alternatives in that space.
I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget there are people who still code actual GUIs for Windows.
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
Nobody said that they have never made a good product. But in no way does this mean that the company focus has been on making good products vs strong-arming their way into things.
Uhm, I'm currently running abour 4 binaries that have that famous `exe` file extension on FreeBSD. C# runs on FreeBSD just fine. There is no bootstrap available for FreeBSD - must either cross-compile or use linux emulation.
Its interesting to look at their 'product' history b/c they have a few shining moments of 'getting it' as far as OP means. .NET especially realizing Linux was a real thing and to at least outwardly 'embrace' it..
Then there are moments like these the OP points to .
The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is:
> And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.
Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though.
Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of them did.
I agree with that too, and admitted to such in my previous comment. Still, being the first practitioner of this comes with a certain responsibility for its proliferation. It's not a sole responsibility to your point, but it is primary in a way. It's a lot easier for others to decide to copy what someone else did than to decide to be the first to do it.
To the same point, Google is arguably the reason it persists today given the popularity of Chrome. Just as Microsoft is arguably the reason it started. (I suppose I could have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment since "is so useless" could imply both but I don't think it's particularly egregious.)
One thing I have always wondered about the story - were servers in the mid-1990s really sniffing user agents to decide what pages to send through? I remember most sites were static .html files back then.
I think user agent strings were a terrible idea from the get-go, so I'm OK with Microsoft (and everyone else) fudging them this way. I think it'd be even better if everyone used the exact same UA string.
> "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft."
> Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades?
> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?
Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.
I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox.
Same with many other things - I can install whatever browser I want as long as it's a skin on their browser.
I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
I can install any app I want as long as it comes from Apple store.
Etc etc etc.
Yep, I vehemently disagree with your premise :). I think MS is looking at Apple's walled garden and saying "what if we could get away with some of that?"
(not disagreeing that dark patterns are despicable! My wife knows the scream that comes from my home office when I try to get iPhone or windows to do something I want! I just disagree that mobile os world is some paragon of user centric benevolence :)
> I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control over the keyboard UI and how each key (if it even has keys — your “keyboard” can be literally anything) interacts with text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to “skin” the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult and that’d reduce the workload quite a lot.
For many years the keyboards were only skins, and for many years after that they would periodically lose their default status and revert to the built in keyboard.
Now it seems that the keyboards randomly hang / crash and don't come up when requested on the first try.
Apple goes out of their way to screw with third party competitors.
I'm extremely interested in this; how come none of the keyboards I've tried depart from the same layout as Apple? Is it strict adherence to guidelines rather than technical restriction then?
To wit, some of the features that same-named apps/keyboards give me on android but not on iPhone include "hold key for alternative character" or button to "force" numpad. As well all keyboards I've tried have same layout and sizing as the original one.
I assumed it was imposed on them in some way I guess?
I don't think there's much, if anything, in the way of App Store guidelines for keyboards except that they do things with the text field the user currently has highlighted.
For instance the app Fantastical comes with a "keyboard" that inputs dates that are open on your calendar[0] and there exist a few rather nonstandard keyboards like Typewise[1].
Absence of features common on Android boards I would guess comes down to those patterns not being familiar to (and thus, not desired by) iOS users or in some cases software patents (there have been a few cases of keyboard devs receiving cease and desist notices from patent holders for using some UI pattern).
This is most likely due to developers of certain apps/inputs and not iOS/Apple themselves, there is a simple line of code to do this and from what I've noticed some overly-secure-wannabe-apps force system keyboard for certain inputs.
Yes, developers can disable third party keyboards throughout their entire app with an application delegate method[0], and when secureTextEntry[1] is enabled on UITextField the system automatically disables third party keyboards on both that text field as well as any immediately adjacent text field (likely for username+password combos).
The idea is that because keyboards can connect to the internet (with user permission), there's potential for data theft. It may also be possible to exfiltrate data from a keyboard extension by saving the data to an app container shared by the host app, which the host app can then send out with its network access.
Devs who don't know how or care to properly accommodate the variable height of third-party keyboards may use the app-wide opt-out to eliminate bugs relating to that, though I haven't personally encountered this.
Apple doesn't make it easy, but they don't make it impossible either, and at this point it's on the ecosystem to show Apple they want more of this by embracing what they have. So, sure, map links tend to open Apple Maps by default, but they can offer the user the choice to use other mapping apps, which they can check for by seeing if the OS will respond to their open url scheme. Harder? Sure. Impossible? Nope.
And for what it's worth, open a directions link from Google some time - for me, it opens Google Maps, which I do have installed, but don't prefer using. I choose Apple Maps because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive, but Google doesn't offer me that choice.
I’d personally like the choice to be enforced by the OS. I’m sick of Google’s popup for opening links in gmail. It confuses my partner into thinking she has the link open in her regular safari, but the option to actually do that is the only one with no icon. On top of that they’re really trying to railroad people into using chrome, and she’s accidentally hit that option a few times. I wish the justice department would treat that as anti-competitive.
If you're navigating with a watch on, it'll notify you of upcoming turns (either through vibrations or by making a turn signal-like noise) without ducking/pausing your music.
No I am not. The Watch taps my wrist as I drive with different patterns for left or right. If I can't tell which it's indicating, I can quickly look at my infotainment screen and see the map. But I am not driving while looking at my Watch, no. That would be very dangerous.
Is this true for Maps and most critically Voice Assistants?
How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? How do I replace Siri with a different voice assistant?
You can't for either of those questions.
Nevermind that changing the browser doesn't actually change jack because Apple doesn't allow competition in the browser engine space.
All in all, it is just hard for me to take seriously an opinion saying that Apple allows for unrestrained competition on its devices and Microsoft is the big bad in this space. Historically, maybe true - but not even close to true now imo.
You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
However, clicking an address in a message and being told to install Apple Maps is super aggravating and I'm not sure if there's a way around that...
> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
Yeah, and its easy to open the link from Outlook and Teams in Chrome - just copy the link & paste into the chrome URL bar.
> How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? .... You can't
> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
I've done a fair bit of trying over the years; based on your comment I retried today I still cannot find it under Settings -> Safari -> Default Browser App.
To be fair though, I did find it on my wife's iPhone, though under Chrome (she does not have it under Safari (or General either, where I would've expected it)). Still don't have it anywhere on my iPhone. I'll try to see if that's because she's ahead of me on OS updates or some other reason.
Oh yeah, I forgot that the default browser app, should be under the settings for a different browser. Putting that shit under the Safari settings is deceptive and hides it while keeping it in plain site.
You can also do it from the settings of whatever browser you want. It exists under Settings > Chrome, and Settings > Firefox, but only if you have those browser installed. The option is always under Settings > Safari, though.
They are the same, but Firefox on my iPad syncs with my real firefox on: linux, windows and android. I can send tabs to and from it, sync passwords etc. What rendering engine is used is completely irrelevant to me most of the time.
Yes, but Apple offers a neat well maintained garden that is the greatest thing as long as everything you need is there, and you don't eat any apples.
MS looks at it and thinks their frat party mansion (3 bedroom duplex) can do the same.
Apple gets away with it because that what their target audience want. MS target audience doesn't want it. If I wanted a walled garden - I would use Apple, they clearly know how to maintain it.
Actually I don't get how Apple always gets away with the sh*t they are doing.
All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.
Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
No, I am not a big fan of that Microsoft move, because I think they should respect the users browser choice. But I am even less a fan of Apple doing things nobody else is allowed (for good reason).
Uhm, I had pixel phone is the first Pixel. Once it started using wireless charging, I only use usb-c in three scenarios: I'm traveling and using a powerbank, I'm in a car and want to use Android Auto (for some reason my car has wireless Car Play, but not AA), or I'm on a couch and my phone is low on battery (never happened when I iPhone tho). For this reason, I travel with cables that have adapters for lightning. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
I realistically don't care what port is on my phone, but my wife's phone has USB-C and I have 9000 and 1 usbc cables at home.
> Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
This is due to security imposed on App Store apps: can't do JIT, and you can't have a reasonable JavaScript engine today without it. Frankly, I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses as long as everything synced.
I have plenty of annoyances with Apple, but what people usually bring up are from people just looking for reasons to hate on Apple for no reason.
Actually, I prefer wireless charging as well (started with my Samsung S3 around 2014), in part because I can use the same charger for Apple as well as for Samsung, but also because they have no wearout and I don't like cables. However, the point is, that all manufacturers had their own adapters in the past (pre-2007) and all but Apple switched to Micro USB and later to USB-C (because the law demands it). So if Apple would also have switched to USB-C we wouldn't have the discussion.
> I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses
Just to give one example from the top of my head: For years (5+), Apple did not implement a proper Push-API for Safari. All other major browsers had it, but because on iOS all browsers are just Safari, there was no way to have it on iOS, which is a pretty big market share. Push-API sound like some marketing stuff, but in reality it is pretty fundamental to a lot of use-cases like multi-user synchronization, chats, etc. So you might think that you don't care about the rendering engine, but in reality Apple can abuse the browser situation to control the whole JS ecosystem.
So I don't hate Apple for no reason. Instead, I hate them for very specific reasons. They also do good stuff (primarily for their users/customers), but for me the bad far outweighs the good, because it affects everybody who has contact with their customers and not just the people who decided they want to have an Apple device.
> All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.
The law you're talking about here specified that the charger itself must have a standard USB-C port. Apple gets away with it because 1. they don't even bundle a charger anymore, and 2. they ship a cable that allows the phone to be connected to a USB-C charger (Lightning to USB-C cable).
The new law that takes effect some time in 2024 for smartphones (amongst other devices) stipulates that the port on the smart device must be USB-C. Under this new law, essentially if a device is large enough then the port must be USB-C.
> Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
Another new EU law (the Digital Markets Act) takes aim at this specific issue actually.
I get where you're coming from, and yeah sure one could argue that giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft should do better, but in the end they are corporations who will do what is best for their shareholders, as such I am not in the least surprised over actions they take like the ones discussed in your comment and the article that started this discussion.
I think it's great that governmental regulation is finally coming to set the game rules for things like how general purpose operating systems must allow device owners the ability to install their own software (including real actual browsers with their own engines and everything), how communication apps must support cross-network communication upon request, and to standardise how we charge our smart devices.
For me it shows what kind of a company Apple is. Even companies like Sony (who install rootkits on your devices without your consent), comply with the spirit of the charging adapter law. But Apple tries to find a loophole, just to push their own agenda, at whatever cost for society.
But as you said, the other large corporations probably do it in some way too.
One could argue that the spirit of the law is an aim to reduce e-waste, and changing iPhones to USB-C will render literally billions of Lightning to USB-A/C cables useless within a few years. But there's obviously the argument that the existence of a need for those cables is in itself a source of e-waste production...
I swing both ways honestly, I love many engineering aspects of the Lightning port, and at the same time I recognise that having only USB-C to care about would obviously simplify my life a bit, even if I think for the purpose of a mobile phone it is an inferior port.
There all doing the same shit just in vary levels of degree and focus. If anyone thinks different, they are only fooling themselves.
Apple is the most user-hostile company I have ever seen from a individual freedom centric standpoint, but they are good at hiding it. They think everyone outside of the organization should follow their line of thinking. Apple wants to be the gatekeeper of everything and that doesn't work in a free society. Deep down, I think people want to be free of external influence. Microsoft only cares about maximizing profits and doing whatever it takes to get there. I guess there is no difference between the two except that apple tries to justify there behavior behind a superiority complex.
Email is the most annoying one. There's an old API that some apps use that always uses Mail.app, regardless of what my "default email client" is set to. SUPER annoying as I only have my work email in Mail.app and it's usually for things like bug reports or news article feedback, you know, things I do on my free time which have nothing to do with work.
The bug report ones is especially annoying as those emails are often pre-populated with a bunch of data that isn't so easy to just copy into a new email in a different mail client, like support attachments, etc.
For clicking addresses, I kind of get it: the author of the text didn't link it at all, so the OS (or whatever) gets to decide how to enhance the presentation which can include promoting a specific app. Not great, but fine.
For clicking links, it should definitely just use the browser unless an installed app's manifest has the domain registered.
>They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.
Sorry, but Google really isn't a saint regarding degraded experience. The shenanigans around UX for example using Google services in Firefox have a long, well documented tradition. They just aren't as overt and clumsy with it as MS.
I'm not trying to excuse Google, but feature detection is really hard and browsers sometimes suck with their APIs.
I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.
There's no excuse for not being able to read the user-agent strings of the top five browsers in the world, especially when 2 of them (at least) are your own code base.
afaik, pretty much any user-agent changer works. At least that's what one of my colleagues uses to join MS Teams meetings on Firefox. Simply switch your user-agent to Chrome, and it should do the trick.
For a while downloading a lot of freeware would result in installing Chrome and setting it up as the default browser on Windows.
Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed the issue).
yes on phones this has tradition to a point it started to got legislation involved
but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least tried, and it wasn't a problem for years
honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation, world wide
and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in monopoly (because with today markets you can have more power then a classical single market monopoly while not being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)
Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only. Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing people away from Macs.
They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts them in a similar position.
Google has a slightly different issue, in that for instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser taking the android world by storm is nothing good for them.
Firefox and Chrome accounted for a third of browser marker share when the iPhone came out. It came out with no App Store, and there was no guarantee MS would develop IE for iOS.
Apple's reasoning is that browser engines need JIT to run JS with acceptable performance, but if they were to give apps JIT capabilities, that would significantly open up the attack surface.
Apple has an ads unit, there have been multiple other times when they have shown that user privacy is a thing that really only applies to other companies.
XKCD isn’t relevant to the sentence before, as comic notes, it’s about Apple.
the “Android makes you tap something to change your default browser!” was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped spreading because it was generating backlash.
Much like the “you have to confirm you enable sideloading!” alert in Android, it’s not clear what people want otherwise, a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult.
I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it harder to have the real conversations needed to get things back on track
> a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult
The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm before downloading each app. And then it will confirm before installing each app. And then it will confirm again because, well, I have no idea.
One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult. Piles and piles of them is.
Not entirely true on the latest version of Android. I'm not sure what the pattern is, but for most of the apps I've installed via Droidify, I don't have to confirm anything when installing updates.
Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me.
They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but enough for me to be consistently reminded that generally their incentives and goals run counter to what I'd prefer.
According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace open source now" argument:
* their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous attempt to discredit their competition that took over a decade
* the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu and other spyware with settings that reset after random upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS
* if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its boot menu.
Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the changes are just superficial.
> According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates.
Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?
> Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems.
You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to install Windows?
In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to boot automatically. It won't mess with secureboot keys or anything. In my case, I removed the pc's default ones and installed my own and signed ms's key with mine. It works fine.
But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated bootloader).
If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big" updates.
I had OSes on separate disks. Win7 and Arch, used UEFI to choose who to boot.
Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux
I have rEFInd installed on window's EFI partition, and it boots either windows or linux (on separate drive though). It's been like that since skylake came out, and I never had issues with it.
As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues. If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing it.
The whole stack of .NET Core, WSL 1/2, Windows Terminal, and Visual Studio Code has been an effort to keep Windows relevant as a development environment for web apps. Nothing more. It was desperation, but well done. Given their history, I'm quite sure that many people in their ranks pinched their noses at being forced into these moves, but the PR department did fine work in spinning this as a "kinder, gentler" Microsoft. The people who haven't been around since the 90's took the bait, but organizations don't change like that. Old timers are still there (looking at you, Brad Smith), and people who have left have invariably been replaced by similar people. That's how hiring works.
my understanding is that within microsoft there are different factions competing with each other for i don't know what, dominance maybe. it kind of makes sense since microsoft has several different strong products that can stand on their own (unlike google whose main income is from advertising so really all google products subsume to that), and some of these factions may well genuinely love FOSS.
They're FOSS friendly because they don't have a choice.
They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in. Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees, becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that hosts a lot of open projects.
Apple controls the browser on iOS with an iron fist. Even if you are using a different app, its still Safari under the hood. And even though they control the rendering, they still open all links from Apple apps in Safari.
Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I choose to. That doesn’t stop Apple music from being the auto play choice even when I don’t use Apple Music.
If Apple’s products are so much better they should allow choice and bot be threatened by it.
Somehow they manage to control it with an iron fist but still allow apps to intercept links, opening them in their nasty embedded version with injected JS.
If you don't use Apple Music at all, you can uninstall it from your phone and it will stop being the default choice. I do this on my phone without any problems.
I don't have an extensive list, but Apple preferring their own apps on iOS is not hyperbole and evident in lots of places.
Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list.
And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to install Apple Maps...
I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.
Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.
URL types for geo locations are standardized. And even if they weren't or the standard isn't sufficient (which one could reasonably argue), you are talking about features made by the platform owner. Apple can trivially declare "this is the iOS geo share format, apps intending to share or handle shared geolocations should use this format" and expect the ecosystem to deal with it.
That’s a good point, although it seems that this kind of behavior, at least specifically to map apps, is quite common.
Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS, searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes straight to Google Maps.
I haven’t been able to find the correct MIME type or URL protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me suspect that there is more to it than it seems.
> I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.
Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others can?
Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do the same, if they wanted to.
Music settings like the Equaliser actually only apply to Apple Music. You can uninstall it but there is no systemwide equaliser, because why would you need one when you can use Apple Music?
Microsoft is actually the one reacting here. They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases; Apple and Google took advantage of that to build two walled gardens, which ended up dwarfing MS's own empire. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, MS would have gone "If this behaviour is now allowed, why should we not do it too?"
This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and Google for that. If you want something different, call your representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.
Simply put, people don't love Edge as much as they love Chrome. The browser bundled with Windows 11 is naturally Edge, but users who use Chrome install Chrome of their own volition, so forcing them to open links in Edge is extremely annoying.
I doubt "love" for the software is involved here. I think many users believe Chrome is "the internet" just like they used to believe the Google search page was the internet, or Internet Explorer before that. This impression of Chrome was built on the fact that it's a solid browser but was enforced by Google with the same underhanded practices they applied for years.
My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall, just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for years, so people are used to that. The synergies between those devices and the Google services services makes it easy to stay and hard to leave.
People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome on a fresh Windows install. So I don't think anyone thinks that Chrome is the internet (that's actually something Chrome had to overcome when IE was dominant and installed by default).
Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have been told and essentially trained to install a new browser if they want a good internet experience on Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early 2010s.
Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with Windows is crap" inertia right away.
> People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome
That's not been true for a while. IT preinstall Chrome in most companies nowadays, and obviously it's already on the phones and tablet you buy for the home.
Yes, MS dropped the ball after killing Netscape and being humbled by antitrust laws. But the current situation is as much a product of Google's "growth hacks" and mobile monopoly.
Maybe in a corporate environment. But not when it comes to personal devices.
Most tablets sold are iPads. They don't have Chrome pre-installed. In North America, most phones are iPhones that don't have Chrome pre-installed. Most personal laptops are either Windows machines or Macs which don't have Chrome installed. Its pretty disingenuous to pretend as if Chrome market share comes from devices with Chrome preinstalled. People go out of their way to install Chrome.
There's also the fact that as soon as you touch anything by Google you'll get nagged with adds and pop-up suggesting installing Chrome.
Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!) option to install Chrome and make it the default browser. CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.
I don't use either chrome or edge but why would I use a clone instead of the real thing?
I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later scams.
Writing a browser engine is a lot of unprofitable work just to get to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams. Especially when you already wrote one and couldn't keep even that in pace with standards and the evolving web technologies.
Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.
Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible with the modern web.
Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.
Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.
That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.
To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.
> I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption.
It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.
Edge was, initially, Chrome but degoogled and it had (and still has) a lot of great UI innovations, like a vertical tab strip that's just right. Their wide use of hovering menus that can be pinned to become sidebars is honestly good stuff.
Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).
As annoying as for Edge-loving people who then buy a mobile phone and are then forced to "open their links" in Safari or Chrome.
But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people live on phones, and when they have to interact with desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably, the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there is little or no choice in that world.
The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the force of the State.
You can set Edge as the default browser and links will open in Edge.
You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.
Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android is relatively open (certainly more open than any mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For instance, Microsoft added support for running Android Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done completely without any involvement from Google. That is unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets pushed around here is baseless.
Granted I haven't used Chrome in years, but I find that firefox integrates remarkably well from phone to pc. The menu of open tabs on other devices is invaluable to me (although idk if Chrome has this too)
Sadly it integrated even better before they rewrote the mobile browser and threw out every useful little feature that had accumulated over the years – with the old mobile Firefox, you were able to forward links from other apps directly by sharing them to Firefox without actually having to open them on your phone.
New Firefox is too dumb for that – you actually have to open that link in a new tab before you can send it to some other Firefox instance (and then close that useless tab again).
Android actually lets you live without even having a default browser. It's great since you can use multiple browsers in place of multiple browser profiles. Apps will just ask what browser to open the link in. It's great.
People seem to have forgotten how Chrome captured the desktop market to begin with.
For many many years it was effectively almost impossible to download freeware without accidentally installing Chrome. Sites like download.com and even sourceforge wrapped everything in custom installers that would automatically include free trial of an antivirus, maybe some adware, and Google Chrome, unless you were aware and clicked the secret hidden opt-out link that was almost the same color as the background.
Attributing Chrome's popularity to it being included in download.com bundles doesn't sound accurate at all. If anything, the "Download Chrome!" link on Google.com yielded far far more installations.
Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after release when they finally added extensions and themes around 2010.
People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps were moving to.
Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were great bets that were copied by everyone else.
> They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases
They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a factor until years after the fact.
The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that MS "won" with IE (95% market share!) and then pretty much lost the stomach (or focus/budget/etc.) to advance the web in any way.
The specter of further anti-trust action still hung around. It's only been relatively recently that it has become apparent that the country's leadership is not interest in trust breaking anymore. But now Microsoft is playing catchup.
The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine.
The equivalent Microsoft apps on mobile OSs aren't degraded - they aren't even allowed to exist in the first place.
Microsoft is bringing the desktop experience in line with mobile here. Doesn't make it less terrible but contrasting Apple and Google as better actors in this sense is an odd take.
Microsoft apps exist on Android and they're not forced to open links in Chrome on Android. If the user chooses, they can open on Microsoft Edge on Android.
The user can set their own browser preference - and Google doesn't force them.
Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but it's on them.
None of these bug tech corps are in the right here, but MS is being more anti-competitive than most.
I know I'm comparing a turd sandwich to a puke pancake here, but in what way is "Apple doesn't allow other browser engines" less anti-competitive than what MS is doing?
Umm, MS Teams on Adroid forced me to install Edge to open links. Even the copy action pushes "haha, we wont give away this link you moron" (in corp speak) to the clipboard.
I use Teams on my phone regularly and have never seen this happen. Clicking on a link takes me to the web page without any problems, even in my default browser which is Firefox.
One variable many people don’t consider is that Microsoft gives organizations an incredible amount of control over application behavior when trying to maintain a through line for rights protection of organizational data. Like not allowing organizational data to be opened in apps that aren’t approved, authenticated with user creds, and supportive of rights management (no printing, no saving, etc.).
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with GP’s experience with Teams, but just pointing out that when thinking about MS app behavior on any platform, it’s a variable that can be present in the corporate context which many “users” remain blissfully unaware of, or see it manifest as these weird rules and behaviors and not acting like other apps. But there can be an entirely different set of user stories at play beneath the surface.
I think they are using a dark pattern now. I opened a link in Outlook (Android) after a recent update and I got a popup to open with Edge. I didn't have Edge installed so I was confused for a moment. Just below the big colorful edge icon was (a much less visually prominent) option to open in my default browser.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought that they were forcing me to install Edge too.
So the correct iOS parallel is not Apple’s refusal to allow non-WebKit engines. But Apple’s hypothetical refusal to allow links to be opened in WebKit-flavored Firefox. Which, for the record, it does let you do.
To be precise: No, they don't. Their engines are based on the same codebase, but they still are running their own installed engines.
In contrast, Apple doesn't just refuse to allow non-WebKit engines. It requires everyone to use the pre-installed, Apple-provided engine. You can't use your own build of WebKit.
I have that setting set, and various links still open in chrome instead of firefox for me. In particular, links that are opened via gmail, maps or the "google" search widget.
Maps open links in Firefox for me; Gmail by default in-process with webview, but that is disable-able in settings and then it opens links in the default browser. For the google search widget, I don't use it, but after a quick check yes, it does use webview too, but also has the option to open in browser.
I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.
It is not chrome webview. It is android webview. Yes, it is similar to chrome engine, but it is not chrome. Just like edge is not chrome.
It is also per-app choice. If an app decides doing something in a particular way, it is not the system's fault -- some reddit readers do the same, for some reason. For now, apps do have preferences to open in browser instead, and that option respects the default one.
The equivalent apps on iOS aren't even allowed, Android allows other browsers (including their browser engines) just fine. Firefox is the only browser to bother though, as most of the chromium wrappers, including edge for android, are happy to just build a skin around the default web view.
> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
I disagree here. Despite me using firefox on my android device and it being set to my default browser, many apps will still open in chrome (usually google apps - maps, gmail, etc) despite me explicitly asking it _not_ to do that. It's also not clear that it's using chrome, as it's the "generic" browser modal. The way that google services are bundled together on android and have limited interop (Samsung and Google Pay regularly fight with each other on my device for "who is the default payment method", and google is _not_ happy to not be my default).
Google have been pushing manifest v3 despite massive objections, introducing undocumented "fair usage" limits [0], require third party cookies to use some of their services to download files (gmail, gdrive). Google are drowning in dark patterns.
Microsoft has been playing the vendor lock-in game for his entire life and they were and are very successful. It is an interesting exercise to think if this time is different. Again, Microsoft always compete with better technologies from other vendors.
One aggresive move that Google or Apple could do is to really help companies in the migration to their technology beyond saying RTFM and use our support. For example, augmenting these locked companies with Google staff. You cannot expect a big corporation to move all the gears alone to change their technology.
It is not the technology, it is the business execution.
Virginia Tech recently notified everyone that they are ditching Gmail in favor of outlook because of large cost increases coming. Google seems to be going backward in that regard:
“ A key factor in the decision was cost. Under the new Google license model, an equivalent amount of Google cloud storage would cost more than seven times what it will cost the university on the Microsoft platform.”
> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft
How? I mean, how does a degraded experience on android cause people to abandon windows desktops?
I just don't see the connection here: if Google, tomorrow, outright rejected any MSFT software on android phones, how does it hurt windows desktop deployment numbers? Maybe if everyone switched to Mac, but that would kill of android too...
This is what a working monopoly looks like. We've seen before this exactly how much crap users would put up with on the desktop, and still they didn't abandon windows.
There is nothing the mobile market can do that they haven't already tried to take windows market share.
In fact, there is nothing that the mobile world can do to Windows users that is worse than what Microsoft did to them, and yet those users are still chugging along happily paying for Windows every year.
> old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured market they can brutally take advantage of. Even today, Apple has banned all browser competition on iOS, and only Safari is allowed to run. All competitors must just re-skin Safari to obey the monopolistic demands of Apple. Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
But Microsoft, to me, barely has a drop of the anti-competitive evil of its competitors. Apple mints hundreds of billions by banning competitors, locking them out and charging 30% rent on their monopoly. Microsoft... just wants their re-skinned Google Browser to not die.
> Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
They tried; with different means, but they expected the same result. That's what the antitrust case was about.
> Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
While I have the same opinion as you wrt Apple behaviour, there is a difference: Apple doesn't have the market position like Microsoft did. You can function perfectly fine in society without any Apple product. That was not the case with Microsoft, they did everything they could so you had to use Microsoft system. Communicating with your bank or with government or public offices? Microsoft products were required. Apple has not such grip on the market and that makes the difference.
One could argue that offering a walled garden from the outset is more honest than the Microsoft strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and ultimately the latter creates more of a monopolistic threat in practice since walled gardens almost definitionally can't capture most of the market.
It probably decreases revenue. Like the Edge "enagement" manipulation with Teams.
Are there managers who has their pay tied to some KPI? I have such a hard time believing there is a from above decision to do all these user hostile changes turning their main product into a BS joke.
Microsoft’s stock price over the last 10 years has soared consistently. They have a lot of admins at small/medium companies very very willfully and loyally locked in to their ecosystem.
Microsoft does not care if they piss off most of these people because they not the ones signing the contracts and the lock-in is SO BAD that even if they piss off the right people, making any change is way more trouble than they are willing to deal with.
There is an entire side of the tech industry with admins who only want to learn powershell and still think you can’t “lock down” Linux and mac machines.
I would replace "learn powershell" with "click buttons in some wizard". I have rarely seen IT person that wants to "learn" something new or automate some process.
I've been fortunate enough work with some people who REALLY wanted to automate and do things "right" but believed so whole heartedly in microsoft they anticipated every powershell release.... But I've seen more of the "click button in some wizard"
But they didn’t. There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.
Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
> There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.
No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time. User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google properties with Windows Phone IE.
Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube apps for Android and iOS were native.
> Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs.
Google did user agent detection and would actively redirect Windows Phone users to degraded experience versions of things like YouTube and Maps even if the full versions would work fine.
That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.
Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]
I'm speaking from my own experiences. Proxying the requests to rewrite the user agent, the full mobile version of YouTube and Maps worked properly. Without rewriting the user agent I would be redirected to the minimal versions of the websites which had poor experiences.
I think it never broke past 5% of smart phone market. If this was a reason, I never heard. I feel like most people just were interested in something else and never even really considered it as an alternative.
> Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
They could not, because if they did that cartel suits would be opened within hours. I expect both the US and Europe have such suits ready to go just in case, and Microsoft (hypocritically) has amicus briefs on standby.
> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game.
I think this is already happening. Google pushes non-stop for you to use the Gmail app, then once you do all the links prompt you to open Google Maps, and all the rest. It's annoying and there's no way to change it.
I think Microsoft is just taking a step out of Google's playbook here. Doing exactly what Google does on mobile, but doing that same shitty behavior on desktops. "If you made the choice to use a Microsoft app, you're making the choice to be in the Microsoft ecosystem."
I hate it, it's trash, all the rest... but it feels like -- shocking -- Microsoft is just copying something they saw someone else doing.
Are you totally unaware of the history of Microsoft all the way back to the 80s?
Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom line. As long as they can increase revenues and market penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game since IE.
> Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
Until very recently you couldn't even change the default browser on iOS, I think the idea Apple are playing "fairier" than Microsoft is a lot more nuanced than you make it seem with this statement.
Even after adding ability to change default browser to iOS, there's still the limitation that only the webkit rendering engine provided by Apple can be used - Firefox and Chrome on iOS are wrappers around the OS level Webkit implementation - the rendering engine is still Safari/webkit - they aren't using their own rendering engines as they do on all other OSes.
There's also the agreement between Apple and Google for default search on iOS too, which absolutely costs Bing marketshare.
> I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
They were always that, thru entirety of their history they have used anticompetitive practices on any chance they could.
You're operating under the assumption that Microsoft is the only one doing this.
This sort of thing happens regularly on Android though it's perhaps more subtle. I don't know how many times I've had to set the default browser, photo viewer, pdf viewer, etc only to be prompted to choose how to open a file and Google's App is first in the list.
Certain features like STT for the entire operating system require Google Assistant. And image search or real-time translation require the Google Search App to be installed. So you have to choose between being harassed by Assistant and Search prompts at ever turn, or disabling core OS features.
> Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
I mean... yes. But that happened in the late 90s. Hasn't changed since then.
What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari, the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you from collecting any sort of payment without passing through their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?
Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office, and Xbox.
Sure, they tried to break into the mobile sector, but they seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in 2002.
Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room. Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".
I'm sure I'm biased but the old school pm culture at Microsoft is still alive and well. The new hires are forced to play the old stupid games of doing anything to get the metrics to show what they want in the short term and the cycle continues. Windows and Office both have this problem and I think will continue to until they get someone up top who's sole purpose is to root out this culture from middle management through low level execs.
I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)
Not entirely a correct narrative as both Edge, Safari and Chrome have had their own private link protocols embedded in their own browser products involving other dark patterns.
I mean, they actually do though. Apple and Google both do similar things, they just get less media coverage because they are seen as normal to the mobile ecosystem, while this seems abnormal because it's in a desktop environment. That's no excuse for Microsoft, I wish they'd stop doing some of this garbage, but to act like Apple and Google have clean hands is laughable.
Microsoft is a schizophrenic company. For each employee who tries to do things well, clean, and respectful of privacy, there is another one with the same amount of power who won't hesitate engaging in the worst tactics (dark UI patterns, fake/ambiguous statements, regular settings resets, etc.) to earn a few more points in a performance objective. Both crowds probably hate each other, but the working conditions are so great when you work there that the "nice" guys will probably always prefer to walk away, rather than engaging into a conflict to try convincing a moron that forcing a specific browser is a very very very bad idea.
This thing of forcing Edge for opening links, it's clearly an idea successfully forced by a small group of bullies upon other employees, and they probably get a reward from the increased Edge traffic/usage.
Ultimately, there is only one person responsible for this toxic culture and it's the CEO.
Well, it's more likely that it's because the greedy MBAs are unable to chase shareholder value, so they just pushed down the task into fiefdom leaders.
I mean, it's Edge that they are work so hard to push. What do they actually gain from doing that? It's stupid all the way down.
>Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
Change that from a question to a statement and it becomes one of the better single sentence summaries of the windows 11 design methodology.
Apple does plenty of dark patterns. You are locked into their store, they decide what programs you can run on your phone, they decide what browser you can use, all the other browsers are actually just skinned safari.
The entire crux of any discussion on Microsoft's behaviors hinges on one figure: What percentage of their Windows and Office revenues are coming from end users versus corporate sales? I mean, I think it's kind of obvious, but yet we still have arguments about why they would screw users with these sorts of decisions. It makes no sense to me. Further, (and deference to Tom Warren), but I would bet that a lot more IT admins are happy with this change than there are those who are angry.
Probably inherent because they'll fire you if you don't perform so you put dark patterns in or you get cut. I know they quit the official stack ranking... but I wonder
I can't believe this is the top comment on hacker news. Some of the replies are already covered but as much as I use my Android phone and Microsoft at work, I have never had anything other than Outlook 365 on Android. How is Google going to "literally destroy Microsoft"?
And then there's no need to comment on the Apple portion in your comment, considering the critique is that Microsoft isn't playing nice because they try to default to Edge.
Google and Apple have to be careful not to sink to the historical levels of that other company.
One nice thing about the last decade or so is that other company has had to rein in its historical behavior, and also care about PR a bit.
We'll see how that plays out, given the increasing power that might come with the intimate relationship with OpenAI, and the frenzy of market interest around what's shipping there.
"Microsoft" is not a person with emotions and desires. People too often anthropomorphize, and it is a natural thing to do imo, because we still think with human brains. Microsoft, like any other company, is a far more complex system than I think our brains are ever meant to comprehend, let alone create. Is it food to eat? A fire to warm up? Is it a leader to follow? A book to read?
> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.
I have been investing in MSFT under the assumption that they have completely abandoned these markets. What mobile market does Microsoft require when they have an increasing number of SMBs locked entirely into their death star?
> given up on making products which people enjoy to use
Building new apps in with .NET/Azure/GitHub is a dream. The laser focus of the tech community on principled Windows OS issues and other product concerns is completely missing the overarching universe that is being forged by Microsoft.
Azure in 2023 is like Disneyland for a SMB CTO/CIO. If you go all-in you can actually enjoy your weekends and auditors can't really figure out how to ruin your free time as much as they used to be able to. Sure, there are specific technological or economic things that might be better on-prem (or in a different cloud), but overall I have never seen something this unified, stable, confidence-inspiring, etc.
I believe that the first cloud which can be largely delegated out to non-wizards is going to be the one that wipes the floor with the others. I suspect Microsoft is already hard at work integrating the LLM features they acquired into their Azure administration use cases. Simply having a bot integrated into the portal that can provide suggested configurations in a few hotspots (e.g. make a VM like XYZ but with ABC changes) would be incredible.
Microsoft make a ton of products that are still great to use. Microsoft Flight Sim? No jokes, it's just good fun from what I hear. Their Visual Whatever IDEs? They built that by creating great things like the LSP.
And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind of walled garden incentive mechanism.
I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we get there, the journey, matters.
Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that. Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me towards a troll state.
But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into something else.
And I see that happening with other things I love too.
Sorry, just to add: Those new OSes and new languages and the entire growing ecosystem of computer engineering may be beautiful. And this statement can be viewed as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns. And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to different outcomes afterwards.
They aren't doing that not for the goodness of their hearts, but because Microsoft has them by the cojones when it comes to anything related to Cloud, OS used by millions of Android devs and productivity tools.
The big difference is that Google and Apple are largely in the consumer space. MS, with Teams, is in the enterprise space where user experience isn't part of the buy decision.
If CEOs, CTOs, CFOs all start having annoying issues with Teams, Office, Azure, etc. on their MacBooks and iPhones then you can bet your right arm on it that it will affect corporate buying decisions.
Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently better than another.
I think people care more about their phones than wether they use Goole docs or Word to put together a report at work which nobody is really going to read and if they do they'll ask for a PDF print out anyway and not the document itself.
Same for other products. If OneDrive or MS Teams was all of a sudden really annoying to use on iOS and Android, but Slack and Google Meet would work really reliably and smoothly then I think a lot of people would just starting to use the non Microsoft alternative because nobody likes to deal with annoyances on a daily basis. We have seen this already, when Zoom came about it captured a huge part of the market really rapidly because it did something so much better than Teams did before. It didn't even require a dark pattern, now imagine how many more would have left Teams if dark patterns would have helped on top of that.
You massively underestimate how much business world (corporate especially) depends on MS Office and how deeply integrated it is into companies eco systems.
You can't embrace open source, stand for freedom on the Internet, and simultaneously engage in dark patterns like this without destroying user trust. And trust with users is the currency of the 21st century as much as data is the new oil.
Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for. There was this incredible move towards open source, and embracing the modern web, and so many positive developments. I think myself, and many other technologists, were going, "Wait, is this is the same company that shoved IE down our throats for years and got sued for anti-competitive practices?" It was glorious, and shocking.
All of that is now at risk so that some product manager can look good by driving enforced but entirely fake adoption of Edge — that should be nipped in the bud and a clear message sent that this era is over — from the top executives.
Or I supposed they could do nothing, and then it truly is sending a clear message as well. But perhaps not the one Microsoft intends to send, or the one that would benefit the company in coming years in terms of staying inside the good graces they have managed to create.
Many of us kept our trust rating for MS right around zero despite their "embrace of open source"; it seems we were correct in recognizing it as nothing more than a recognition of market realities packaged up as a marketing ploy.
aren't all these providers-of-things hostile in about (all ways) or at least most ways than not hostile ways? MS, Apple, Google, Amazon, FB, Adobe, IBM... they just want money; where's the money? <insert stewie+brian>
I was surprised to hear this so I went searching. Yep. Wow. [1]
I use GitHub all the time but I never expected it to be mandatory if you wanted to publish a package for a popular open source language.
But as the top says, “If you are interested in helping with this work, please feel free to get started!” (Though only if you’re a contributor or open a duplicate issue)
Thing is, they embraced open source, not libre software aka copyleft. Non-copyleft as always been about taking from others and not giving back. Whoever has ever thought differently never understood that non-copyleft is a tool of liberalism, not community building
"Wait, is this is the same company that shoved IE down our throats for years and got sued for anti-competitive practices?"
Really though?
It was that easy?
On my shit-list it's definitely way above Facebook, Apple, and Google. A company which has on so many occasions made my life harder and caused me to suffer. I would qualify Microsoft as irredeemably horrible, I can't imagine what they would have to do to make me consider changing my opinion of them.
> Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for.
They stand for weary resignation. Same as Google and Amazon.
For most people, they're just there, and you can't not use them, so what can you do?
They can be as dodgy as they like, because when you point out what they're doing, most people will just be confused about why you're complaining, because you may as well be railing against the fact that rain is wet.
LOL, you are so right on that, average users do not understands the issues at hand about this, we need some kind of movement that better explains the issue.
I'm not sure they fled IE as such. They saw a link (advert) on Google that said “make your internet better” and they clicked it.
Yes, some techies actively chose Chrome knowing full-well what the alternatives were, but I'm pretty sure the advertising produced much greater numbers.
(Also, the techies who enthusiastically recommended Chrome were the same ones who enthusiastically recommended Twitter a few years later, and are now enthusiastically recommending Signal — which illustrates the quality of their judgement when it comes to monopolies.)
Obviously their dark patterns are not sufficient to drive away enough users and this has been the case for decades. Nothing new to see here, it's the same old Microsoft of yore.
> Interestingly SteamOS is quite nice, but will it be something outside of gaming on a Steam Deck?
Considering their website[1] still says it's Debian derived but they switched to Arch some time ago, I doubt it's in their plans to do more than enable their own hardware.
Maybe not enough, but certainly some. I'm not a software person, and yet my personal machine now runs linux, exactly _because_ of Microsoft's wankery with no local accounts, uninstallable Edge, Cortana, news on the fucking taskbar, and the shitty Windows 11 with its shitty taskbar. Fuck all that noise. Life is calm and great in linux land.
That's because they have backroom deals with the manufacturers.
Its impossible to compete when the manufacturers are actively hostile and don't provide the firmware/code/specs in a way that the hardware can be supported independently. Some even use this to spy under an umbrella of plausible deniability, there was an article just recently about Qualcomm chips that did this (checked in) at the firmware level.
> And trust with users is the currency of the 21st century as much as data is the new oil.
Is it? The cynic in me feels that the actual currency is "engagement" - how many consumers can you keep on your platform. Providing a great and trustworthy service is one strategy to archieve this, but by far not the most effective or reliable.
The big players very much seem to prefer a captive audience (through network effects, vendor-controlled hardware, closed ecosystems, etc) that cannot switch away no matter how much they personally dislike or mistrust the platform.
A proprietary software company never makes a "move toward open source". Microsoft released some things with source simply to sell more proprietary software that does not respect user freedoms.
Open source and free software is a philosophy and ideology. Microsoft is incompatible with it no matter what licenses they use.
Microsoft never embraced open source. You can't claim
that until and unless Windows is released with source as free software, which will Never Ever Happen.
MSFT is indeed embracing open source -- prediction -- a polluted and key-controlled Debian will be inside the next OS, filled with Azure management python packages and adware. Second, Canonical as indentured servent, will deliver anything that Redmond requests as snapd, with phone-home welded ON and more expiring keys.
You are not the customer here. You are a cog in an industrial machine. It is the executive management that has power, and you will know it every day. MSFT will sell your management the tools you are required to use every day.
That’s more of a free software mentality. Open source is just open source; Microsoft has some open source software, they use some open source software, but they are in the business of selling proprietary software and free software as Stallman defined it is antithetical to that.
> You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released with source as free software, which will Never Ever Happen.
That would wouldn't change a thing even it happens. No one except Microsoft is going to be expert on 50 million lines of windows code and contribute meaningfully to it. Add to that contributor's licensing agreement, community behavior, sheer capacity to make API changes and get it accepted. It will be impossible to create alternate certified Windows distribution even if all source code was available.
Microsoft is no better than an accounting firm at this point. The only reason they are still around is because of the data collection from spying on their users, and malign and coercive practices that are illegal but remain unenforced probably due to some backroom deal they made regarding the former.
They had a few good ideas early on, and now that open source isn't patent bound (not gonna get into the rediculousness of UI software patents that have been granted where they never met that bar of novel, useful, and non-obvious [grouping items is somehow non-obvious?]).,
> Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for.
Actually, they don't. People will continue to keep buying Microsoft regardless of how shitty their products and policies are.
Nobody was ever fired for picking Microsoft. When Microsoft products have issues, people blame Microsoft, but when anything else has issues, people blame the IT person who chose that product. The result is everyone picking Microsoft to shift blame away from themselves.
It’s impossible for an organization the size of Microsoft to behave according to a consistent set of values. Don’t rely on their “good graces” for an instant.
2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams.
I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read button. It also doesn't intuitively support filters with emails that have + in their name (each email ends up being unique instead of Google doing the more expected thing of letting the filter match all + variants). It also doesn't update its title bar with a count of emails in your inbox. That's things I discovered after using it for about 10 minutes.
Microsoft's calendar is designed so poorly, there's so many quality of life things that aren't there vs Google. There's too many to list but the biggest one is not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is doing what beforehand.
I'm not not looking forward to the day when we'll need to use all of MS' tools to replace Google docs + spreadsheet and Slack.
I think the worst part is their authentication, for some reason I have a personal account that was invited as a guest in an organization to use Teams. I can only access the Teams workspace if I click through a link in my emails and I have to login twice. It only works on the web version, I can't login the app at all.
But once you're in Teams, everything is so much worse, it's like using a hacked version of MS Word to chat. But where Slack actually shines is around the workflows, automation and bots, I don't think Teams has much of that.
I think most things you describe are just getting used to product difference / configuration options.
Clicking an email definitely marks it as read.
The calendar schedule not being revealed is a just a privacy option, each person must opt-in to share the exact meeting details.
Having used both gsuite and office I find that they both get job done fairly well
> The calendar schedule not being revealed is a just a privacy option, each person must opt-in to share the exact meeting details.
We've done this as far as I know. We also added each other to our directory. I can see the details of other team mate's calendars in the full view but this does not show up in the mini-view when you add a guest to an event.
With Google, when you create a new event and put in a user's email as a guest it immediately showed you a full list of their exact events with times and whether or not they accepted an optional meeting (an outlined or filled circle). It was great to see at a glance while you're in the process of creating the event.
With MS' calendar all you see is a red block of color around the times they are not available.
> Clicking an email definitely marks it as read.
It doesn't for me when using Chrome. When I click into an email the title remains bold and the inbox count doesn't decrease. Keep in mind this is the web app. I didn't install the dedicated app, but I also used the web version of all of Google's tools too.
The sharing aspect has already been done. It still doesn't show the details in the mini-view where you insert the person's name as a guest which is the most important time to see such information.
You just see a big chunk of red with no details. You don't even see things like "busy". It's just a solid red color.
The key is that there are 5 permission levels: (1) None, (2) Can view when I'm busy, (3) Can view titles and locations, (4) Can view all details, and (5) Can edit.
Is that too much control? Maybe, but it's helpful when you want to share more details with teammates than you do with others, grant admins edit permissions, etc.
The email gets marked as read once you click out of the email to view a different one (which I agree is unintuitive, but it is not true you have to explicitly click "mark as read").
The location for setting mail read on selected is settings-> mail-> message handling-> Mark as read.
Outlook also defaults to not marking messages as unread when the unread filter is on. I presume because profiles were setting the filter and then complaining their messages were disappearing? You can change rose on the same settings page
> Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read.
It absolutely does let you do that. I use OWA as my daily driver and that is the behaviour at least on my end. Settings->Mail->Message Handling should have the options you want.
The web experience of Word, Power Point and Excel, are appalling. Laggy, resource hogs. Excel & Power Point are damn near unusable on anything complicated.
And the group editing in those products...! Every time we've edited Excel sheets with more than one person it quickly restored in unresolvable merge conflicts and forked files. This has always worked beautifully in Google Sheets.
From what I've heard, the sync works well when everyone's using the same kind of client (eg. desktop, or web app). If they get mixed things become slowwe to update and have a decent chance to quickly go to hell.
They're nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewers. In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use the native apps.
> In my experience, for any serious work you'll want to use the native apps.
Don't you see how absurd that is in 2023? It's like me saying "Online shops are nice in a pinch, but I advise folks to think of them primarily as viewing goods. In my experience, for any serious shopping you'll want to visit the bricks and mortar shop"
I understand that POV, but I should temper my "serious work" statement by saying that the Office web apps are pretty great and keep getting better. However, the native desktop apps are just better.
It's hard to make a direct comparison with Google's web-app-only strategy since the Workspace apps are toys in comparison, more akin to Apple's iWork suite.
I haven't used Sheets as extensively as I've used Excel, and once upon a time I was a real Excel machine who knew all the alt menu navigation by heart (great precursor training for vim) but I have slowly become a Sheets convert.
Being able to write appscript between all the Workplace products was pretty painless.
I haven't tried to push Sheets to do million row fat sheets for crunching but wouldn't be surprised if it does ok
I am using Excel on windows again lately and it is reasonably smooth but boy do I miss Drive + Sheets + collaboration for a 2023 remote workflow
I can totally see that, and Sheets seems like the most capable app in the suite. And although I found myself frusted by Docs and Slides limitations, I know that they're perfectly fine for lots of (maybe most?) use cases.
> Web tools are always going to be weak vs. locally executing tools. I've never seen one that I prefer to a native equivalent.
Sure, that's a fact which I don't dispute, but that doesn't mean that writing a word document in your browser should be such a bad experience that you really just want to use the web version for viewing documents, which is the absurd thing to which I responded. See, what you say is true, but that doesn't necessarily negate my point if you can agree?
Word is not Photoshop, I expect the web version to be powerful enough to get serious writing done via it.
I don't. I expect MSFT to make a hash of it, and to do so in an environment (a browser) that I've never found equal to the task of "getting out of the way and letting me write."
The default configuration is: * Mark as read after selection changes
Which in my opinion is really weird. I've been using email for 20 years and no other client I've used works this way. It's so inefficient since you need to click into a previously read email to mark a different email as read.
But, I did switch things to mark it as read when chosen which fixes it.
Oh web outlook ugh. People where I work hate Outlook web. It's not intuitive. Shared mailboxes in web Outlook are a pain they dont show on the left sidebar they need to be opened in a separate tab. Terrible for efficiency. Except "out of office" which for shared mailboxes it can't be disabled in non-web Outlook you have to do it in web.
One big annoying thing is that when you mark an email as unread in Outlook on mobile, the default is to mark the entire email chain as unread. So if you have a long email chain, all of sudden there will be like 20-30 unread messages in your inbox. It should have the ability to mark unread from here or something like that.
Purely my subjective experience but the MS tools seem designed to keep the users that have been using Outlook on the desktop for decades. I get ornery when it doesn't work the way I'm used to.
I spent some time dinking around in Outlook once trying to find where some feature had been moved to. Ended up apologizing to the user... they were due to retire soon, and who knows where some UI twizzle had put the whatever in that manifestation of the mediocre malware.
IMO outlook calendar has the fundamental design flaw that it uses email to share (at least some) state, rather than entries in a central server. Things like inviting someone to a meeting I rejected are super hard to impossible. Group meetings while the host is out are a disaster.
> not being able to see the calendar details of team mates when inviting them to an event. All you see is a blocked out amount of time, you can't see their exact schedules even if they shared their calendar with you. This removes a huge human element to scheduling meetings because often times I'll avoid scheduling meetings when folks are just getting out of a long meeting, or I'll buffer it by 15-30 minutes depending on who is doing what beforehand.
This is configurable, you can make your calendars public and convince your teammates (and potentially the rest of the company) to do so as well.
Agree with some of the points, but why would the + in the email name be considered anything else than part of the name? This is a Gmail feature, not part of any RFC that I know of...or are you talking about something else, perhaps?
> I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago.
and then
> Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read.
Did it occur to you that maybe a few days of use isn't enough for you to understand how to use office? Everything you complained about works fine, even if you don't understand how to do it.
So anyone still thinking MS is now all good and it's not an issue that it own github + vscode + a endless list of other things relevant for especially smaller development companies?
Microsoft will do whats best for them.
Temporary this includes embrace open source to some degree and being reasonable nice to Linux. For example WSL can help with trying out Linux and help cross platform devs on Windows to develop for Linux which can help with a to Linux migration. But it removes the main reasons why a lot of students, scientists and server devs had to use it. So for now it's net-good for them, which can be good for Linux, too.
But what will happen if it again is more profitable for MS to not act nice?
How long will it then take to WSL to have features in a way which make it likely software only works on WSL Linux and maybe Azur servers but won't be available on
normal distros.
How long until GitHub will have some small but very usefull features which happen to only be available in some Windows GitHub client pushing companies to require Windows first desktop systems?
How long until they will influence legislation around computer security in a way which have effects like being practical impossible for normal desktop Linux clients or require some proprietary Linux core component due to a combination of legislation and patents, which distributions for Azur or Google cloud surely will have for free, but the competition?
Honestly I hope so long that you could say never.
But I believe open source and free desktops are as much threatened by MS today as many years ago when people aware about it often treated MS as a evil company for good reasons. But today it's in a way more roundabout, very subtle very hard to pin down way. This gives them the chance to succeed where they failed before, but us the chance to both profit from them and while preventing them from succeeding. Optimally leading to some form of stalemate where both are profiting from each other.
I suspect VSCode is a baited hook. Get enough developers dependent on it, then degrade it on Linux, and offer WSL as close enough to have people switch their OS rather than their editor. With developers on Windows, cloud follows.
They've already been doing this with Teams. Their native Linux client has less features, like screen blurring, or being able to view more than 4 users at a time. Thankfully you can get around this by using the web version, but who knows how long it will be until they do some user-agent shenanigans to mess with you again.
Their native linux client is an outdated version of their web client using a outdated version of electron (I think it was electron), i.e. it's not native do not use it, use the browser.
WSL is a literal VM now, that runs based on Hyper-V afaik, if Vscode degrades on Linux, I'm just not sure how it won't affect WSL too.
Whatever happened to using vim,emacs, intelliJ, or tons of other Vscode forks.
Vscode is not the baited hook, it's the exclusive integrations (extensions) like remote containers, remote containers etc that are nice to have features not workflow breaking stuff.
VSCode runs well on host and just uses SSH to have a remote Dev env in the Linux VM. At this point, a MS advocate might argue that we don't even need vscode to run on Linux at all.
I think their next push won't be against Foss people, but to get people on the cloud so they get a recurring revenue stream and their customers are hooked deeper still.
> VSCode runs well on host and just uses SSH to have a remote Dev env in the Linux VM. At this point, a MS advocate might argue that we don't even need vscode to run on Linux at all.
Intellij has been doing that since years. Including extensive language specific integrations to e.g. make remote python debugging nicer.
> I think their next push won't be against Foss people, but to get people on the cloud so they get a recurring revenue stream and their customers are hooked deeper still.
I agree, something something GitHub cloud editor. But that's perfect. Perfect for selling Chrome Books instead of Windows machines, as they are cheaper, less maintenance cost and often more secure...
Probably works in the US, but their biggest user bases will just switch to another editor.
The user bases are coders from China, India and other developing nations. You have no idea how religiously people hate paid/recurring subscription software over there.
If they try this it will likely fail very hard, because one of the selling point of it is that it's a thin IDE.
But this means most vscode users can easily switch away, e.g. to sublime.
Sure there is the plugin ecosystem, but at least how plugins work currently you don't want to install many of them for security reasons/trust.
And in my experience some of the best plugins are not only not from MS but they provide features vscode already roughly supports but in a lacking way.
MS might have some luck with remote dev features (which are also not in the open source version). But they will have a hard time on this vector, because I have seen upcomming new IDEs which do handles that better in ways I'm not sure vscode will be able to beat or get on-par with.
This leave their remote in-browser IDE dev setup thingy in colaboration with GitHub, that is a killer feature. But IMHO is one of this things which only will become a main selling point if people _only_ use this environment. But it's a in-browser interface so not OS specific so probably not so useful to lock people in.
It's not about developer machines, it's about servers. There are are a lot of people who want to run the same OS, and even the same processor architecture, on their development and deployment machines. (I've almost always worked in a cross-compilation world, so this doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but whenever the topic of ARM or RISC-V machines comes up here, it gets a lot of attention.)
But loads of people develop on Windows and deploy on Linux. I would say that is the 'default' approach now for even Microsoft .net core apps; given how supported docker is, and the docker containers run linux?
it's not about weather linux desktop is an issue or serious competition
it's about making sure it can't become one even if MS starts doing things which harm customer (accidentally and/or due to customers being dependent on them).
For example look at the steam deck, even with it's success it's neglible small compared to Switch, PS and Xbox, but it still implicitly forced Microsoft to start working on better support in their "windows manager/desktop US" for this kind of devices.
Or they would love to force their app store for apps like Apple did on Mobile, they tried getting there before. But now they can't really threaten Valve that well anymore because Valve can always argue: See gaming on Linux works without us strongly doubling down on it because you forced us. And there are people invested in Steam due to having large libraries, if most of their library works on SteamOs but Steam works no longer on Windows where would they go...?
I think this is down to the usual issue: what are you willing to give up in exchange for linux ?
A decade ago you'd need to give up high DPI screens and capable laptops for linux. Today it's either the mac ecosystem with the iOS dev tools, or the Windows compatible newer form factors and/or the games/VR ecosystem.
Apple will do what helps Apple, and Microsoft will do what serves Microsoft. Does a pure linux experience effectively serve you in your day to day work ? If yes, lucky you, it's still "no" fo many of us.
Ummm, Github runs on Git.
So any feature supported by git will work work with any client other than the official windows client.
Vscode is a text editor/IDE, it has bajillion alternatives, again unless MS doesn't allow code not written in Vscode to GitHub, which is a suicide anyway. There is Bitbucket or Gitlab to fork to.
WSL, is awesome, because Linux is not game friendly, yeah yeah proton blah blah. I own a steam deck I know how it works and for a casual user Linux gaming just isn't there unless you want to tinker a lot.
Then there are products like Photoshop replacements for which Linux is sub par, no GIMP is not alternative, it's entirely different. But nothing is stopping other users to switch to Linux unless edge/windows 11 blackholes insert_your_favorite_linux.com. WSL just clicked for a reason.
MS as a company will fight for market share, no company after a certain size is moral, it's "free market" as US defines it. Change laws not companies. Regulate not ask nice. Feels like EU knows this and at least tries to twist the arms of companies where as in US it's seen as infringement of freedom.
Ms gobbling up dev community is fear mongering towards the wrong entity.
IT admins have only themselves to blame for choosing Teams in the first place.
Yes, it is included in O365 and it makes it a no-brainer as far as additional costs and things go. But then there's the risk that Microsoft leverage their captive and lazy market to foist other undesirable things on users... like this. And crappy news / adverts in Windows 11's 'start menu' replacement.
Ready to get voted down on this, but my view is pretty robust: no need to self-host EVERYTHING but avoiding vendor lock-in and maintaining independence is valuable. It is a lesson that corporate IT admins seem to forget time and time again.
In my experience, in any company larger than 500 people at least, the IT admin has little say in the matter. These sorts of decisions are taken higher up, and the admin just has to live with it.
Same in a 7 person company. Got voted down in favor of Teams because the "learning curve" of anything else wasn't worth their time. This despite the confusing and ridiculous UX of Teams.
> because the "learning curve" of anything else wasn't worth their time
As someone on the other side of the divide who hates these products, this is accurate. A non-standard product is a non-starter in most fields unless it has a killer advantage.
Teams is a non-standard product to me who has used various chat programs over the years. It does some things okay, but I still want to go back to lync (skype for business). The features I use are worse than competition, and there are features I don't use that are annoying.
> features I use are worse than competition, and there are features I don't use that are annoying
I hate Teams. I hate Meet. But they work with basically zero training. You have to pick your battles, and successful businesses choose theirs in core competencies.
I must be a fucking idiot then, because no amount of engaging with it ever got me past "what the fuck, where did everything go, why is that there, how do I do X, why did it do Y when I did Z?" One of the most confusing programs I've ever used. Up there with some very-painful-learning-curve video games (think: Paradox games)
You lost me at 'they work'. They don't. To the point that I'm boycotting Teams, any customers that force us to use Team can take a hike, I'm not going to spend the first half hour (or more) of every meeting with a new set of people to get them all organized and solve a myriad of audio/video/networking issues. Teams is the biggest pile of junk MS ever released. And don't get me started on the linux client.
Possible, but none that I have been repeatedly exposed to. I axed Microsoft out of my life when they started their anti linux crusade and I haven't looked back but people keep pushing Teams on others.
The whole interop situation around video conferencing is ridiculous, there ought to be a common protocol and a variety of clients around this protocol, instead we have this utterly dysfunctional situation where there are five different walled gardens, each of which has their own set of problems and compatibility issues.
There are lots of other chat programs that work with zero training as well. All that is really needed is auto-start and auto-login when the user logs into the OS. If your chat program has those two: someone will figure out how to use it and everyone else will see the pop-up when a message is sent and start using it. Slowly everyone will learn features as they need them.
I have little sympathy for the IT folks, because not only did they make us switch from Slack to Teams because Teams was "free", but they actually drink the koolaid and think Microsoft products are better. They deserve to suffer for the pain they repeatedly cause the rest of us.
There's sadly a subset of IT folks, often in large corps or government, who tend to just drink the Microsoft "Customer Success Engineer" koolaid without thinking. When I worked briefly for a gov org, any time the IT staff came out of a meeting, we would always be worried about what "solution" they had been sold this time.
Most companies don’t have the resources and manpower to run their own chat and videocall service. A previous employer of mine did (using some open-source tools) and it was painful to use due to the tools’ wonky UX and networking glitches.
When trying to get GPT Bing, I let Microsoft set the defaults like they insisted.
It was such an awful experience.
>desktop ads
>Edge opens, edge ads
>Bing default browser, ads
>start menu ads
More on their products:
>Sharepoint, 3 different versions, terrible documentation. Impossible to develop for when you have forum posts describing different software with the same name.
>Power Automate, No I don't want drag and drop. Never ever. Further, we did do the drag and drop, only to run into issues and have to trick the software into showing some hidden ID that we could later copypaste. They even tease you with the actual code under the hood. I want to add a new line character, so easy in programming, (seems) impossible in power automate.
I have decided its urgent to make the full transition to Linux. Microsoft constantly seems to be fine with a terrible user experience. They are a giant. They remind me of Apple with their marketing/sales first mentality.
EDIT: (warning rage) Somehow edge opened up again. I lost my mind. I spent 5 minutes trying to uninstall without typing in some obscenely long version number. Nope. Impossible. Serious FU to M$.
This was their opportunity to drag people away from Chrome and Google search, I remember the craze of people making jokes about the death of google and how they are trying edge/Bing.
Anyone remember "Signature Edition" PCs[1] that would ship without vendor crapware? I can't tell if this was Microsoft trying to make room for their own crapware or they just gave up on this idea and decided "if you can't beat them, join them".
Microsoft is shoving their software down people's throats with impunity. Just yesterday I had to install VS Code for a Homebridge integration, and out of nowhere they slapped a Bing search bar bang in the middle of the desktop.
I had been using Swiftkey on my iPhone and in the middle of typing something, my keys disappear and is replaced with, what is effectively, an ad to use "Microsoft Speech Recognition". Extremely annoying to be in the middle of typing something and having to say "no thanks" to extra MS crap they are trying to shove onto you.
Previously, they also added a Bing AI button to the keyboard, but they did actually make a setting to disable that.
Edit: Upon mentioning this to a coworker and digging into this a bit more, it may have been that I accidentally clicked the microphone to bring up that screen, and that it didn't target an ad. I'm not quite sure what happened though, so I'm leaving my comment as is :)
"bar" is an overstatement if you like me were reading that as one of those early 2000s era browser toolbars. A recent Edge update added a fairly large and persistent Bing icon to the right end of the browser's menu bar. It uses a speech bubble design and is likely part of the push for AI chat powered Bing search. It's obnoxious that you can't hide it but it's more of an eyesore than an actual problem.
Oh thanks! Frankly the most annoying parts of it were that it made it harder to reach for the overflow menu (which was previously the right-most icon) and that it auto-opens the sidebar on hover delay (which then requires clicking to dismiss).
The dependences I was installing were for a plugin to control Xiaomi hygrometer through Homebridge to be able to use it in HomeKit. Among those packages there was VS Code (for some reason) some C++ redists, Python and some updates from Microsoft as well. But I can confirm the bar was official and from Microsoft.
Upon uninstalling, those dependencies, the bar never appeared again.
There are so many people out there, who should know better, or even do know better. Yet, for whatever reason install VS Code instead of VS Codium. Even when you inform people about the existence of VS Codium, they still don't move and keep using VS Code. It is like they do not even care at all.
That this is even allowed to happen in organizations is already an oversight. It should not even be allowed to install VS Code on organization machines or use it to ever view or work on the code of an organization.
To me it looks very unprofessional. It is like a shiny toy has been dangled in front of their eyes and they reach for it, never willing to let go of it, even when they are being told that there is telemetry and non-reproducible builds and whatever other mistreatment of them as useds. Like children they stick to their shiny toy, even if they could have the same features, same UI, just without built in telemetry. (And they can still install any extensions they want later, if they trust that extension or marketplace of extensions.) It is very similar to people installing Chrome instead of Ungoogled Chromium. I have personally experienced how uninformed people at a university went wide-eyed, thinking I was talking crazy stuff, when I told them that it should not be installed on university computers, since it is spyware.
I wish I could get people to get off their behinds and improve the situation. But it is of course very difficult to always create awareness and people are so damn ignorant. Often I am not even suggesting, that they should switch to free software tools yet. They could literally have the same experience, but no, most of the time you cannot tell them anything and they continue to take us with them into dystopia of our own making as a society with collective uninformedness and ignorance.
Some extensions by Microsoft are proprietary (such as their C# debugger and C++ extension) and can only be used with VSCode. For other extensions, you may be able to use them. See the docs at https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#ext...
I didn't know about https://open-vsx.org/. Very nice! But besides those languages, they are also missing things like the remote ssh extension, which is a big deal breaker for me (and I assume many others regardless of language).
Well, how do you know that? How do you verify, that all telemetry is really turned off, without being able to reproduce the build? How many people truly turn it off after install? How do you know whether there are any other unwanted parts in the software you just installed? What about the next update? Do you want to run a package sniffer after each update, over the course of a month or so, checking all traffic in detail, to be sure that it only ever communicates to the outside world, when there was a justified purpose?
You are giving away sovereignty of your own device/machine.
> Who cares? Most users don’t need a reproducible build of software they want to use, they need working software.
It it this kind of mentality that is the problem. Your "who cares" is not going to fly, because it leads right into the abyss of surveillance and spyware. "who cares" is the basis for not being informed about ones tech choices. The basis for not being aware of issues regarding privacy. At a properly managed software making company it would also result in you being told, that it is part of your job to care. To answer the question, if there was any question: I care. Informed people care. People with ideals care.
The issue with not caring is also, that organizations will draw the wrong conclusions. They might impose rules, which force me to use some tool I do not want to use, simply because "everyone is OK with it", while those people all don't even care. If they don't care, they should not get a say in the matter and should not be a decision basis or a point of reasoning for making a decision. This is how the collective uninformedness and carelessness results in bad decisions. Basically the majority drags down the minority, for the worse of all of us.
> Calling people “useds” isn’t going to help your case.
Well, that is what we are, when we allow ourselves to be spied on. They use us and our data to drive data mining, profiling and ultimately profits. Besides, I wouldn't throw it into faces in 1-on-1 conversations, for the sake of a constructive conversation, even if it is the truth, because it runs the risk of the other person (a) not even understanding what it means, (b) thinking they misheard and replace with "users", and (c) risking them to be offended and turning deaf.
How do you verify that VSCodium has no hidden telemetry or other spyware features? Do you simply trust the anonymous people behind it?
If you build it yourself, how do you verify that there is no spyware and no new spyware is added on every update? Do you have the energy to read every single new commit?
I am not using VS Codium myself (nor VS Code), but if I was using it, then yes, I would trust those people more than MS. For 2 reasons: MS people are working for MS, so at some point in their lives they must have made the decision, that working for MS is acceptable, with all the history MS has. The second reason is, that MS people built in the telemetry in the first place, and for a reason, so they have no incentive to remove or disable it, while others might.
A having a reproducible build means, that the hidden telemetry would need to be hidden in the publicly available code. Whereas telemetry in VS Code can be bundled in and no one would ever see that code, except for MS. If I was using it, I might actually, in a motivated night, look at the code and try to grasp the general picture of where goes what. Or perhaps see the diff between VS Code code and VS Codium code, to see, whether they added anything and from where they removed things.
VS Codium and other forks don't (maybe can't) use the official VSCode extension market. Because a lot of goodness, like the ability to refactor and debug PHP, is coming from the extensions and the extension ecosystem, it can be a big deal.
However, one can still add that marketplace, if one wants to do so. So people could still have access to the same extensions (which might be a privacy and telemetry or spyware risk), but at least not have the in-built telemetry.
Many of the interesting extensions (Microsoft's language plugins, the remote extension pack, the .NET debugger) are licensed only for use with Visual Studio Code. Even if you hook into the VSCode marketplace, they could sue. They probably won't unless you're rehosting VSCode externally or something, but the risk is something most companies probably don't want to take when the software is free as in beer anyway for the "real" builds. (And if you're telemetry sensitive... just block the domains? I know, easier said than done, but you can do it.)
Initially you just didn't get Settings Sync as it uses a Microsoft account and you had to use a different extensions gallery (but the MS one still lets you download extensions as a file to install into Codium). Nowadays you also lose Remote Development, Codespaces, Pylance, some C# features, and various other MS authored extensions.
I usually go overboard with uninstalling anything related to Microsoft on my Windows installs (bar the OS obviously), but this time, I didn't have a say, the plugin required that.
Windows is not unhackable. This one's easy. Deleting all instances of the msedge executable does not break Windows. Don't depend on settings, they're not reliable or comprehensive, and it's far more work to track them all down and maintain their value than it is to simply delete the problem. Some "features" will stop working. The article's example is one of many. Windows will now use your chosen applications if it can, or simply not if the only point was to push Edge.
If you're stuck on Windows and have access to delete things from %programfiles% (and elsewhere), this is a zero risk thing to try! Every update reinstalls Edge, so the next time you have an update queued, delete Edge. If you don't like it, run the update and you're back to Edge Everywhere.
I cannot fathom the number of support requests coming in as soon as some features stop working, in a fleet of hundreds. Dealing with thousands is a great recipe for disaster.
This is precisely what login scripts and GPO is designed for. Most people don't realize Windows is actually primarily designed as a corporate OS, home users are an afterthought. BYOD is a different story, but there are scenarios with thousands of desktops (i.e. VDI) where these kinds of changes are trivial.
It does because if you test your policies and scripts it shouldn't be broken. None of this negates the fact that we shouldn't have to be writing hacks to counteract MS's dark pattern games in the first place.
> It does because if you test your policies and scripts it shouldn't be broken.
Removing Edge, like the previous poster suggested, does break certain features. Also, you seem to suggest that standard Windows deployments are permanently and continuously idempotent, but they definitely are not.
The play is clear. Since this is a potential risky move, very few IT admins will try to remove Edge in the first place.
> Windows deployments are permanently and continuously idempotent, but they definitely are not.
They can be. I've administered large networks personally where they are. If the GP comment would break something that's different, I agree. I'm commenting in the abstract, it is definitely possible to remove files or change the registry at scale. Windows is very good at that.
Good! This needs to go on, and it needs to hurt even more. This is what you will get for making yourselves dependent on a single monopolistic vendor. Just continue laughing about the Year of Linux on Desktops, and suffer.
Recall that Microsoft initially tried to make the hot reload feature of .NET 6 available only in Visual Studio. Their 3E strategy continues to this day.
I always saw it as Microsoft is clearly two (or more) companies now. Some of those companies are very much what Microsoft was always like. Some others aren't at all like microsoft in anything but name.
That might be a useful point of view if you happen to work at GitHub and you don't really want to wake up to the fact that you actually work for Microsoft now. But for anyone else, everything Microsoft owns is Microsoft, and they'll use the products and properties they owned to further the goal of Microsoft, which is maximizing shareholder profits, just like any other public company.
Companies compete like boxers in a ring. You win some, you lose some. MS is the boxer who would hit below the belt if no one is looking and will try to main/kill you if they can.
> maximizing shareholder profits, just like any other public company
Show me one of these big technology companies that doesn't act to benefit their shareholders?
Microsoft is Google is Apple is Amazon. They're all the same internally. The only difference is their optics when you're looking at them as an outsider. But really, they all work toward the same goal, increasing their stock price.
Yes, you said that Microsoft is "just like any other public company" but "Except way more mercenary".
I'm saying that no, Microsoft is just like the others. They're all like that. All of them would hit below the belt if the risk/reward calculation is correct for shareholders.
That might not be a good way to look at it, there might be some people that want to just deliver some good products, but the company itself is not something that should be given the benefit because of those few employees. Microsoft == Microsoft
The problem Microsoft is creating for itself is that with these kind of antics, they will _never_ land any developers using their browser. That's hundreds of millions of users they're spitting in the face directly.
Second, them constantly being in the news about peddling the Bing search engine also doesn't help. Most people like and prefer Google (and when I say most, I mean the 95% percentile), so if they read news like, "Microsoft is showing Bing ads on Google pages" - you can rest assured nobody is going to use Edge because at the back of they minds they will be thinking, "Hmm, does this mean my Google experience will be disturbed with this browser?".
I think I lost some gray matter just typing that out and reflecting on how stupid Microsoft is.
Apparently I'm not a developer as I've been using the new Edge ever since moving to Windows a few years ago when WSL came around. It's actually a remarkably good browser and at this point I prefer it over Chrome (in part because I'm already using Windows so Microsoft telemetry is a given and Google's is extra).
It is however a shame that Microsoft keeps insisting to shoot itself in the foot. There's a very developer-friendly and professional and sleek side of Microsoft that is constantly sabotaged by the "used car salesman" side of the company that insists on adding noise like Microsoft Rewards to Edge or Candy Crush to Start.
> they will _never_ land any developers using their browser
I honestly don't think they care. They get the benefit of all the work devs do to support Chrome for free and get the much more lucrative "regular user" market.
I wonder how many people who switched away from Windows for good actually wrote to Microsoft and informed them, "Hi I'm so-and-so lead developer for XYZ, and I and my entire team switched over to the Apple stack because your latest dark patters shenanigans were just the last straw."
Corporations are like unhousebroken pets. Unless you rub their faces in the poop they won't know why you're upset they shit on the carpet.
It's shit like this, hackerverse. It's shit like this.
This kind of behavior is why I (and many like me) will never consider Windows to be a legitimate alternate server platform or Visual Studio to be an alternative dev environment (perhaps only for coding a dedicated Win UI client). People walkin' around like the 1990s were ancient history. Well, here we go again.
A simple and fundamental bit: downgrading the OS is a PITA (is it even still possible ?), and dealing with the T2 side of it makes it a million times more complicated.
On more pet peeves level of hostility:
Still haven't found a clean way to get rid of Apple Music. Every single time I accidentally click the play button on my headphones it brings up Apple Music.
2FA verification being bound to Apple devices.
Phasing out kext support under the security reasoning also means decent low level extensions are now a dream of the past. Stuff like Karabiner are notably worse when system perfs degrade, and I'm not holding my breath for linux partition mounting.
I permanently switched to Linux because Windows was acting as the owner of my computer.
The change took some work, but it was well worth it.
Now I'm using Mint with KDE. My regret is not having done this sooner. I'm satisfied.
Ubuntu also displays an advertisement every time I log in:
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
* Introducing Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications.
Receive updates to over 25,000 software packages with your
Ubuntu Pro subscription. Free for personal use.
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Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
Anyone tried installing Chrome on Windows recently? I got at least 3 "warnings" about how I didn't need chrome when I could just use Edge. Honestly, I imagine a lot of people who are less competent with computers just assume they are doing something wrong and give up.
But, why doesn't Firefox start trying to curry the favor of large enterprises? By this, i mean, that maybe firefox could make a campaign to reach out to enterprise on how good FF could be for the enterprise...In essence try to win the hearts and minds of both IT admins and their senior leaders in the enterprise!?! (Instead of doing all manner of distractive efforts that may not be core to FF's web browser.)
Yes, i know there is the FireFox ESR edition which some enterporises use, and yes, this might mean that FF devs might need to build up some added features to specifically help enterprises better manage profiles for users, etc...but, at least, Mozilla won;t be trying to shove things like Edge down users' throats. At the very least it would help diverse things if more Windows OS installations at large enterprises were a healthy mix of Chrom, Edge, and Firefox...
Large enterprises means, the people deciding what goes on the work machines aren't the people using them. And they'll have incentives that are fundamentally different from their users (MS offering a bundle price for all their service will help them more than firefox being cheaper to administer for instance)
Because they can do that. No surprises there and as I said before, Microsoft has not 'changed' as the methods are different but the strategy has always been the same and they have gotten very clever over the decades.
As long as their stock goes up, techies are always last place.
The PWA version of Teams also doesn't open links in the default browser. Very annoying having to right click, copy, right click, paste and go for every single one of them.
Teams also adds links that gets sent between users to Bing, with no consideration to whether those links are intended to be public or not.
I know this because I searched for a variation of a private url generated by our system only to find several live links to things we didn't intend for the public to see.
I was able to correct that problem in about a day and there were no compromises, but I was intensely irritated with everyone involved that day.
I just saw some clickbait article this week that said by some metric I don't remember, desktop safari moved to number two (presumably number one is Google Chrome) beating Microsoft Edge.
I remember how reaction was relatively swift with Apple and book publishers' illegal collusion even though Apple was not a major player yet, or maybe I am just wrong on this which is possible, I didn't follow the news closely.
In any case, I think Microsoft is doing a fine job by itself getting people turned off on edge by adding all sorts of bloatware that I doubt people will use edge as their only web browser.
If shit hits the fan and Microsoft gets sued for Anti Competitive behaviour (again) I suspect their main defence would be: Google doesn't even let users uninstall their apps and apple doesn't even let users install other browser.
> Apple not allowing other browsers is a bit much…
Apple is paranoid about being dependent on other companies. If Chrome becomes a "must have" Google will have leverage over them by threatening to pull Chrome from the iPhone.
Instead of letting that happen, they use the iPhone's market share to push an alternative they control and pressure developers to support it (with its market share).
Google is already using such tactics against Android phone makers. They keep them in line by threatening to not license them their services.
> He (Gates) knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it.
Not exactly EEE, but I see where the inspiration comes from. I always thought the mistrust of MSFT in the community started mainly because of how it pushed IE and its Windows OEM licensing terms, but it goes far beyond that.
Rooting a phone will lock you out of most financial and secure NFC applications.
It can be a no brainer depending on your life style (I mean, some people are trying to get back to dumb phones, so why not), I personally see it as big nope.
I don't use Windows, but can you fully uninstall Defender (or whatever it's called) in Windows 10/11, never have malicious software something scanner or updates run automatically?
The only instance of Apple doing that I’m aware of is the “Search for (term)” in the terminal’s right click menu always defaulting to Safari. In every other instance, they’ve respected the defaults.
Microsoft on the other hands seems to have no boundaries, going as far as injecting ads on Chrome’s homepage[1] promoting their browser.
For the purposes of this discussion I don’t think the underlying engine really matters (I’m not supporting Apple’s rule here). 99% of users are going to be downloading Chrome or FF to have a consistent UX and sync their bookmarks, history and passwords. iOS respects the default browser and mail client in this case.
> I don’t think the underlying engine really matters
It is what makes all the difference here.
Many features that are a Web Standard are unsupported on iOS precisely because Apple refuses to allow alternative engines because they don't want those features on their platform (mostly to favor native apps under the pretext of security, like if Google is not capable of making a secure browser, at least as secure as Safari).
Chrome and Firefox on iOS are not the same Chrome and iOS that run on all the other platforms, they are basically Safari.
99% of users don’t care that it’s the same engine. They probably don’t even know. Looks the same, works the same, what does it matter? They just want to pick the browser name they trust, log in to its account and have all their favorites/bookmarks there. Whichever engine the browser happens to use is the least of their concerns.
it matters in the same way a Honda disguised as a Mercedes it's not a Mercedes. It's a Honda.
> Whichever engine the browser happens to use is the least of their concerns.
Not disagreeing with you on this, that's the way it should be.
OTOH, using simple logic, if it doesn't matter Apple would allow other browser engines on their platform, because it doesn't matter. But apparently it does matter. It matters so much that EU is trying to force Apple to permit alternative implementations of the software called "a Web browser".
Anyway, we have a precedent:
"Microsoft distributed its browser software, Internet Explorer, among consumers for free. It led to a concentration of the market share and the eventual downfall of Netscape, the company’s top competitor at the time. The DoJ case alleged that Microsoft was intentionally making it extremely difficult for consumers to install software by other companies on personal computers that ran on Microsoft’s operating system."
I don’t think that’s a good analogy. Mercedes and Hondas have tangible differences in performance and amenities. On the other hand, Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc. are built to operate to the same standard and work identically on approximately 100% of websites anyone ever uses.
So why is Apple scared of other browser engines that "work identically on approximately 100% of websites anyone ever uses"?
The point of my analogy wasn't to prove that Chrome is better than Safari, but that if I want an Honda, I do not want a car that looks like an Honda, I want an Honda (or a Mercedes or a Renault).
Android has the same problem with WebView, it's Chrome by default, but at least on Android GeckoView exists.
There must be a reason why Apple resists so much to making alternative engines available and nobody is buying that it is about security.
Because one is a clearly declared policy that anyone can look up (even though you, or regulators of a certain country, disagree with it). I’m sure there’d be a lot less outrage if it was Microsoft’s policy that other rendering engines (or browsers) were disallowed, instead of being sneaky and trying to fake error messages, degrading user experiences, and the like.
Further, it could be argued that dynamic code execution, whether through an app downloading additional modules on the file system with the executable bit set, or in memory, with the mmap(PROT_EXEC) syscall opens up potential avenues for abuse, and alternative browsers are an unfortunate collateral damage in such a policy.
Regardless, no action can be justified because another entity is also doing it; it only serves to cheapen the discourse.
Sure, but one week it's a first run screen recommending Edge, the next it's pop ups when visiting Firefox download page from Edge, the next it's a notification icon about "Microsoft recommended" settings, then it's a notice before running the installer, etc. There is no rhyme or reason besides their business interest and no timeline besides "let's boil this frog"
> Not allowing alternative browsers on their most successful platform: iOS
The huge difference is that this is the blanket application of a rule which has reasonable justifications. You can certainly criticise Apple for being a control-freak company, but that's not exactly a new trait.
And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new entrant. iOS started from the position of being completely locked down.
Quite different from the events of, say, US v. Microsoft Corp, which Microsoft seem to assume is not relevant anymore.
> - EU forced Apple to use USB-C like everybody else
Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
> - EU is forcing Apple to allow side loading of apps
> Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago. Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on iPhones, prior to the EU ruling. The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a fun little profit exercise, if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
> They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago. Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on iPhones, prior to the EU ruling.
Utter nonsense, which completely ignores the historical and third-party background: the replacement of the dock connector by Lightning was a huge shift as it was very common for devices to have built-in dock connectors which became useless pins overnight (there were literally cars with dock connectors). As necessary as the transition was in the long run, it basically made apple swear to keep lightning alive for at least as long as the DC was.
And there is a clear counter-example: they've been slowly inching support in from the devices least likely to use hard-set connectors: first the 3rd gen ipad pro in 2018, then the 10th gen ipad in 2020, 6th gen mini in 2021, 5th gen Air in 2022.
> The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a fun little profit exercise
More nonsense, apple literally doesn't want you to plug one into the other, they've been stripping wired phone-related features from macos as fast as they could be bothered to, moving them to either wireless (airdrop) or cloud.
> if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
Yes indeed, the anti-consumer and anti-environment move of letting users upgrading from one iphone to the next not have to replace all their cables.
> And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new entrant. iOS started from the position of being completely locked down.
Apple is absolutely trying to leverage their OS in order to drive usage in other markets. One big example of this is Apple Maps, which is being used as a default on iOS no matter if you like it or not. Both "Contacts" and "Find My" uses Apple Maps as the only option for starting navigating to another address, and if the application is not installed, but Google Maps or any other app, they still ask you to install Apple Maps instead of doing what everyone else in the ecosystem is doing, which is to ask which navigation app to use.
> Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
Yes, absolutely. The manufacturer who almost never use standard connectors were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
> The manufacturer who almost never use standard connectors
Except for all the times they do?
> were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
Yes? Or are you saying regulations forced them to use USB-C on macbooks, to the exception of every other port including the beloved but non-standard magsafe?
Or that regulations forced them to add type C to the ipad pro in 2018? The ipad in 2020? The ipad mini in 2021? The ipad air in 2022?
Hell, back in 1998 they released the iMac with essentially only USB support. Was that also regulations forcing them?
This experience needs more clarification on how it works. So if I single click a link it won't open a browser but render content within Outlook App? Okay, what happens if I middle click? I should preferably get default browser.
As to having Edge WebView2 engine in Outlook and no other - well, that is understandable [1]. Albeit Internet Explorer and Edge Legacy are still used by addins [2]. Actually it was about time to ditch the old IE Trident engine from Outlook and Office apps. On Mac it uses Safari with WKWebView[2]
So is this outrage caused by just introducing a feature where links open within app and it happens to use whatever rendering engine is there for that purpose?
Edit: I re-read the announcment and it is actually something different than an engine - yeah, opens in Edge and presumably shows your email in Edge Sidebar. So nothing to do with outlook rendering engines.
> To help increase productivity while working online, web links from Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts and Microsoft (MSA) accounts in the Outlook for Windows app will open in Microsoft Edge in a single view showing the opened link side-by-side with the email it came from.
What is single view? Does anyone have a screenshot or a screencast of that UX in action?
Urgh. Did they forget the lessons of the Ballmer era that forcing choices doesn’t give more usage. It’s making sure you meet people’s choices where they are. That was the big change that seemed to be in the air when Satya took over. Not entirely sure what is happening here.
It does give more usage by their own measurements so some internal VP gets to post themselves on the back and cash some bonus. While deprecating the image of the company overall.
Because ease of use trumps all. People don't care about 'ethics' as long as they can install VSCode extensions with one click. Whatever you say about Microsoft their VSCode ecosystem is easy to use so people will use it and defend to the death their laziness under the guise of "My job is to provide value, not use my brain."
Windows 11 does this too, and it's infuriating. If you click a link in settings, it will only open in Edge.
As a Firefox user, I'd like to keep Edge as an alternative to check websites with. But this shady nonsense makes me want to burn every last bit off my system.
Can you replace the edge executable with a symlink or a copy of your preferred browser ?
A common trick we used to use back in the day was to rename the microsoft executables that we didn't want to start automatically, it silently failed and everything was fine until next batch of updates which detected this and fixed it.
The more childish MSFT plays, the more I love remembering ditching almost anything from Microsoft and never recommending anything Microsoft (other than Vscode) to anyone ever again.
The more they act bizzare like this, the more they deserve to lose it all.
I recently noticed I can only browse some parts of our company infra on Azure (e.g. Azure Devops) via Edge on iOS too. So I have to use that browser for some specific sites while I use Safari for everything else.
I'm baffled by why MS still cares about their browser. It made sense in the IE 5/6 days when they were using it as a way to lock people into their platform, but that seems unlikely to happen again unless their browser offers some huge advantage (ActiveX support was arguably the advantage in the past). This seems especially unlikely given that they are irrelevant in the mobile space.
Pushing Bing search as a replacement for Google search seems like a much smarter play with a much larger upside.
If Microsoft focused more on improving their browser & marketing it to every day people (outside of cramming ads in their OS) they might not need such dark patterns.
Honestly, I like Edge more than Firefox & Chrome. The only thing I find missing is better default privacy features that Brave offers. I imagine you can get them with an extension. The Read Aloud & reader modes of Edge are fantastic. A majority of the rest is at par with Firefox & Chrome.
Am I the only one who sees the technical aspect here: They literally write in this article that this is about embedding web pages next to the chat/email/whatever. That means in-memory over contracted hosting api etc. When I would own, e.g. MS Teams or Outlook, the hell I would love to have a dependency on the internal Firefox hosting API which can break any other day (just a example ... firefox is cool) or introducing unwanted side behavior.
Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage. Same also goes for App Store deploy to desktop: a stable html/css/js SDK is needed there as well.
I would absolutely hate Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but this thing, IMHO, it is not. There are better example (e.g. what they do with VS Code or the .NET Debugger/HotReload) then this concrete case.
The behaviour the user wants is to open a link. The idea of displaying the email again beside the webpage is valuable, but to the user their preferred browser is more valuable. Realistically, they already have their browser open, if they do anything other than read and close the web page their browsing is now split across two browsers without rhyme or reason. Say they switch to Excel and need to switch back to the webpage to double check something, it'll immediately be "oh, this one page is open in Edge, not Chrome where I first looked".
How about only enabling this functionality when Edge is the user's default browser? We somehow managed without it for several decades.
Force-opening another browser despite user-configured defaults is utterly disrespectful to the user. You're trying to frame it as something helpful but it's not helpful in any way whatsoever. It interferes with the user getting their job done using a tool you made.
I hate this pattern, even if it's not monopolistic. If I want to open a link, I want it to go to my browser, not some embedded pane. It completely breaks my workflow. I can't bookmark, use password managers, any of my extensions.
> Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage.
Once again, MS with the browser balkanization. MS is on all the consortia, they can push for browser standards too.
It won't go to an embedded pane. What they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.
> The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all
Maybe, but if I have the Outlook app, a browser, and a windowing desktop environment, it seems a little superfluous.
Aren't you sort of saying that it's okay because they have a vision where you use their products for everything? Hard to tickle that out from antitrust, no?
The worst thing about the integration is that their safelink checker thing is slow as hell.
This is the correct take that should be at the top. They aren't opening the links in Edge, they are opening the links in an embedded window implemented using Edge.
As far as I can tell, what they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.
Teams is just odd about wanting to do things in its bubble. For example if you click a pdf file it opens a preview. Then you click download button on the preview and you get a Teams specific notification (which has multiple layering and positioning issues compared to native notification) with a list of your recent downloads. Then you click the file and it opens a preview in teams again so you close than, go back to the downloads list, select to open it in a folder, then open the file and it actually opens in a real PDF reader.
Bad enough in itself but that's only half of it. Instead of fix this behavior to just work the official path is to install a teams app for Adobe Acrobat that handles the redirection, but only for Acrobat. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/adobe-acrob...
This is an expected normalization of html email and the mostly-client-side-apps; Outlook (the desktop app) already renders the html email in a MS rendering engine (Edge? I don't know).
If the email has a button (or a link) - i think it makes sense that the click event shows up "in" the mail client.
I hate html email - but the last 20 years have been all about siloing hypertext apps in email systems - proprietary protocols (exchange, Gmail web - with IMAP/SMTP/pop3 as secondary citizens).
This just a natural continuation.
If you want to escape use a real MUA - and maybe a real mail provider.
Unfortunately if you want groupware - there's no proper open solution (but props to Fastmail for at least trying - but until there are good independent desktop/mobile/console apps with JMAP support - and the equivalent for shared booking and calendar) - it's pretty much either proprietary crapware, or open solutions without feature parity.
I have two Macs running Microsoft Outlook. One is running a version several years behind the current one.
The old machine can send e-mail as plain text. The one running the current Microsoft Outlook doesn't have that option, or a way to enable it that I've been able to find.
I recently changed to macOS, and macOS Outlook is a bit of a puzzle. On one hand an admission that the web app isn't good enough, on the other... It's not quite a proper port of the windows version?
Thankfully i write mostly code and documentation - so far i don't have to care that 2023 Outlook is worse than 2003 Pine.
The new policy is to ignore your default browser from Outlook and Teams and open Edge. There is an option to turn off this policy to use your default browser.
> Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT admins will be able to alter the policy, but those on Microsoft 365 for business will have to manage this change on individual machines.
I’m guessing that Microsoft is unhappy that Edge still hasn’t reached the same market share that IE still had when the first Edge version was released in 2015. The strategy of breaking away from the seemingly tainted “Internet Explorer” branding didn’t quite work out.
They must have put an entire team on ways to re-enable Edge as default. And I'll bet they have some crazy logic to justify their hijacking. "Oh, you opened Outlook, that must mean you want all your pdfs opened in Edge again!"
> Web links from Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts and Microsoft (MSA) accounts in the Outlook for Windows app will open in Microsoft Edge in a single view showing the opened link side-by-side with the email it came from
This looks like a simple embedded browser feature blown out of proportion. You can probably ctrl-click the link to open in whatever browser you've configured as default in a new window.
The knowledge gained from cases like that is never "We'll never do anything like it again" but "We pushed too hard, next time we need to push, but not as much".
They're trying to find the limit for what they can do, so they can be right next to the limit. If they get fined, they try to correct by either finding a different way of doing the same thing, or doing something just enough to not get fined.
This functionality is actually needed in highly regulated industries like banking or government.
Which is, you need a way to secure how your employees are accessing information.
And when everything is moving to becoming a cloud document (or document hosted on the cloud), not being able to have control over the browser in which that information is viewed with is a huge threat vector.
So I totally understand why they have to ability to launch all links with Edge, and then Edge have built in privacy controls.
So if you're an organization that need these higher level security controls, this is actually what you want.
What the article doesn't make clear is, is Microsoft actually defaulting to this to all customers.
I can tell you from personal experience that the only reason Google Workspace doesn't "work" on Firefox is because of user-agent sniffing and similar countermeasures deployed by Google. There's absolutely no technical reason that the disabled features cannot work on Firefox.
> So how is what Microsoft is doing, different?
It's in fact not.
> They are only fully supporting Microsoft Edge (much like how Google only supports their own browser)
No, they are only fully permitting Microsoft Edge (much like how Google only fully permits their own browser).
> So if you're an organization that need these higher level security controls, this is actually what you want.
I don't think that explanation makes sense. Let's say I'm an organization that needs these higher level security controls, but I want to push everything to be opened in Chrome instead. (Because I think that Chrome is more secure, or whatever.) Well, is this going to help me, or is it going to fight me? Can I make this work with anything, or is it Edge only?
I'm betting it's Edge only. And that makes the whole argument suspect.
If you are such an organization and want to force people to use Edge, you don't install other browsers and make Edge the default, instead of doctoring with every app that can contain links for it to use Edge.
Then banks should just prevent employees from installing browsers they didn't approve. There is no doubt in my mind that MS did this purely to push Edge.
They are going to make me have a second computer. One for gaming. One more browsing. I'll just never open anything but Steam on my windows computer. Given how small and cheap Linux boxes can be, I guess I'll get on this pronto.
I don't like MSFT as much as anyone else but this does feel like a misattribution of blame.
On Linux, the "default web browser" is part of the XDG specification and available under the settings key `default-web-browser`. In the absence of such a standard at the DE level in Windows, it seems reasonable to me that developers would have to maintain a hardcoded candidate list of web browsers and their likely executable paths in the filesystem. And yes, of course MSFT would put Edge on the top of this search list, the same Apple would do Safari, or Google would do Chrome.
I know it's hard for people to take the time to read the article when they could just be typing inaccurate responses.. but from the article:
> While this won’t affect the default browser setting in Windows, it’s yet another part of Microsoft 365 and Windows that totally ignores your default browser choice for links. Microsoft already does this with the Widgets system in Windows 11 and even the search experience, where you’ll be forced into Edge if you click a link even if you have another browser set as default.
The issue is that O365 is going to launch the link within the app (say Outlook) which is going to be running it on Edge, which lets them completely ignore whatever browser you would rather be using.
It's like every app on iOS that is shipping with a safari wrapper so it doesn't have to actually launch safari and give up its snooping abilities.
Windows has a configurable default web browser too.
If you click a link in any other application, it will open whatever browser you've set up as your default in the system settings. Microsoft just went out of their way to explicitly always open Edge.
The Google Chat desktop app (which is really just a chrome instance, but this is obscured from the user) only opens links in Chrome and ignores the system default. It's had this behaviour forever.
The relationship between Microsoft and larger enterprises is like an abuser and the partner who, no matter how long the abuse goes on, can’t seem to leave them.
So the justification seems to be that it's a special Edge feature that will open the browser side-by-side with the original email/Teams message.
But that's completely separate from users' default browser preferences. They're introducing a shiny new Edge feature... and not satisfied with letting Edge win on its own merits, they're overriding users' explicit preferences to shove it in front of more users.
I only occasionally use Edge on a machine where I use Firefox because it has similar API support as Chrome. (I only need it for like one web site). I've never needed Edge on any machine where I have Chrome, but I'm not installing chrome on any new system.
M$FT wants me to install a dev build of Edge if I want to try Bing chat on Linux? Dream on. No Google or Microsoft applications on my Linux machine, thanks.
Funny, I had the same experience the other day as I tried to get me my first taste of some AI.
Knew nothing so thought I'd start with Bing chat. Immediately blocked by the need to run an MS browser on my fedora machine, so Bing chat lost me instantly likely forever.
While Apple is far from perfect, I have zero motivation to ever go back to Windows (or go work at a company that primarily uses MS tech) for reasons like this.
Between these UX-hostile behaviors, ads embedded in the OS, the awful MSN news integration... it just baffles me that how much MS is sinking despite some rehabilitative moves a few years back.
It’s not by force because there is a new option in the latest Outlook but this is still a dirty move because MS could just as well have simply rolled with the system default browser rather than let key applications have their own setting that just happens to default to Edge... It’s obvious what Microsoft are doing here and how this new option is a preemptive defense.
The reasoning they are alleging is so unsound: "so you don't have to context switch"
Going from my email into a browser that doesn't have any of my history or autofill stuff is going to result in a butt-ton of context switching. It's almost worse that they don't set it as the default browser.
It's like there are two parts of Microsoft. The one is truly headed by Nadella. They focus on Microsoft 365, Teams and other revenue-generating stuff. And there's the old Microsoft, which still thinks Windows and Edge adoption matter.
Microsoft hasn't improved their company culture at all in the 30 years. Personally, I think they are a toxic entity and they should slowly vanish from the scene.
Then again, every other large entity in this field is toxic as well in some form or other...
This isn't the first time Microsoft has tried to force users to use their products. Google should kneecap them by changing the Chromium license to prevent it from being used in commercial products without permission.
Google does this too for their homescreen recommendation feed on android, even if your system browser is set to firefox, the links open in Chrome views (doesn't happen for Gmail and other apps).
Since Windows 11, reading anything about Microsoft has been tedious and exhausting. This company has completely gone off the rails. I now consider them to be an adware and malware company.
Is that EU "Microsoft must give users a choice between web browsers" court decision completely expired now, or does that perhaps only relate to the OS itself and not apps?
It sometimes impossible open Gmail on Edge browser, it resets to HTML version and I can’t do anything. Last time I had to upgrade and restart Edge. Anyone has similar experience?
I wonder what if other big companies invest in desktop Linux (aimed at regular users) to increase its adoption and therefore competition in the market. It seems to be worth it.
I worked at Microsoft back in the day when we got anti-trusted for not removing IE from Windows. Seems like there’s a lack of institutional memory over there.
Those of us who were computer nerds in the '90s know he and Microsoft were more akin to the Borg. Slashdot always used to feature Bill as Locutus on stories about him/Microsoft. This is completely on brand for microsoft.
The "reform" is entirely made up. He's the same oligarch he always was, and so are they.
Gates always was an asshole - nobody wanted to go to meetings with him because he was such a jerk. He set the example for the toxic nerd culture at Microsoft. A lot of the people at Microsoft were great but a lot of the leaders from that era, especially those promoted from the tech ranks, were downright abusive. I left near the end of the Ballmer era so I haven't gotten to see how things have changed under Satya Nadella but I hear good things from my friends who still work there.
I am starting to think the monopolistic behavior like this should get rewarded with jail time for all involved. Perhaps that would change their thinking.
Apparently everyone forgot about the Internet Explorer vs Netscape debacle, they're essentially doing the same thing again, trying to claw back their relevance in the browser world. This sort of behavior is exactly what Sony should present to the EU how Microsoft handles anti-competetive behavior.
Used to be good but they’ve crapped it up with shit like coupons, follow this creator (what the fuck?), the “smart” text selection menu and “rich” link copying.
I don’t set up a new Edge profile often but I have to remember to turn off like 5 or 6 things each time to make it somewhat usable.
I'm forced to use Edge on work PC and that context menu when selecting text is wildly unpredictable -- sometimes the only "Search for (selected text)" is Search Bing Sidebar. And its slow as molasses if you ever make the mistake of clicking it.
Well its great if you love being spied upon, Edge is filled with spyware tools which Microsoft tries to make you enable with dark patterns each time you update windows.
The issue is that it's the way Microsoft conduct business at all. The default should be opt-in not hard to find opt-outs for every patch.
I would say no, there is no way to make it more tolerable unless you run something like shutup10 or https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy but then again if you care that much you should simply just run Linux because in reality there is no real good solution since spyware is baked right into the product.
The only experience I have of edge is opening it on a new installation of Windows, seeing trashy clickbait with thumbnails of half-naked women to go along with it; after which I proceeded to promptly close the window and download Chrome via Powershell.
I don’t know how a company can take good products and turn them into tacky products that no one would want to use if they had the knowledge to download an alternative.
Sure, but for individual users business features things don't matter, it is users that need choice.
Myself, I just want a browser that doesn't close multiple tabs when I want to close just one when tapping on a touch screen. That is one thing with Edge that irritates me to high hell, and a reason for me to switch.
If you find Edge convenient, you can continue to use Edge. No one will deny that. But for those who use Chrome, Microsoft's pushing of Edge is annoying.
I'm an IT Admin with 15+ sites across my country. I'm not angry about this change.
Myself and most of the people I've networked with either have or are transitioning away from other browsers, towards Edge. As a browser, it's fine. It has good PDF viewing/editing features, performant and works well with organisational SSO.
Are you serious?
The best /useful things for you are PDFs and SSO?
Both of these features are not what makes a web browser super duper.
PDF viewing is available in all major browsers.
<rant> SSO works in all web browsers - unless you’re using Windows XP as your enterprise cloud server running java and oracle and your asp.net web app requires a microsoft browser running in internet explorer legacy mode. </rant>
I stated two things I like about it over it's competitors, I didn't brand them as the best or most important features on offer.
I specifically stated PDF editing, not just viewing PDF files.
SSO works better on Edge in a work environment, mainly as it connects to the Windows profile. This means that I do not need to make changes to additional browsers or have end users struggling to sign in to various applications. Specifically with Edge, I can simply provide each user profile a folder with shortcuts to the likes of email quarantine, support, Outlook etcetera and they will either see their account listed or only need to enter their email address.
Coupled with appropriate training, this has cut down on users signing into Microsoft login pages that have been designed to look like the legitimate organisation using logo's and other branding. When in doubt, the users can visit the shortcut provided to them.
I don't get the anger, at this point Edge is interchangeable with Chrome. The only thing I "miss" are my saved password and extensions which can be easily imported. Complaining online is an international pastime though.
It's not about the quality of the browser. The user has a setting to choose which browser to use, and they are disregarding it for their own convenience. It's anti-consumer and anti-competitive.
My daily driver is Firefox but I also have Chrome open (for Google products) and Vivaldi for personal surfing. Easy switch considering I'm already juggling browsers.
20 years ago this was a problem you could blame exclusively on MS. These days, they'd be negligent not to leverage their platforms to promote other products because the competition (Google/Apple) does so on a similar level.
Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?