
Windows 10: Microsoft is looking to force people to use its Edge browser - oneeyedpigeon
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/19/windows-10-microsoft-force-people-edge-browser-windows-mail-chrome-firefox
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oneeyedpigeon
For example, "links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in
Microsoft Edge" regardless of any 'default/preferred browser' setting. Sounds
like a pretty hostile user experience, to me.

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walterbell
It is hostile. Sadly, iOS does this with Mobile Safari.

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seba_dos1
iOS is on a completely another level of lockdown, as you can't have third
party browsers at all there, only UI wrappers on Apple provided webview
widgets.

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walterbell
Even those wrappers can be useful, e.g. to isolate identity management. But
even those wrappers are not selectable at the OS level, only within apps that
allow you to choose the default browser/wrapper for opening links.

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Mikeb85
Yeah, I just bought a new laptop (Acer Swift with Ryzen 7/Vega chipset, great
Linux laptop btw!), and the hour or so I spent with Windows 10 was beyond
infuriating. From the voice assistant constantly harassing you to pop-ups in
every single app trying to make you use Edge, to the poor user experience that
Edge is itself. Also the default Windows installation didn't have the right
graphics drivers for the Ryzen/Vega APU, the pixel scaling was way off, etc...
It's amazing to me that people still use Microsoft products.

Even though I installed the alpha version of Ubuntu 18.04 (beta now), it's
already far more usable (and less buggy) than the Windows 10 that came on the
laptop. Ubuntu improved battery life (when does it ever do that?), had up to
date graphics drivers, and no shitty pop-ups.

Oh well, MS' increased hostility is a sign that they're scared for their
market share, and a sign that they're waning. I for one have had enough of
their crap.

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bitwize
Most of Hackernews seems to think that Windows 10 with WSL is a better Linux
than Linux. I think they need to put down the shrooms and start drinking milk
again, because I'm with you -- I just don't see it. I spent a good chunk of
the weekend nursing my one Windows PC along and it was a shitshow nearly from
start to finish:

* Disk I/O is incredibly slow. This is, in part, because Windows Defender intercepts all disk I/O routines, and all disk I/O goes through it so it can spot suspicious activity... like intercepting the disk I/O routines. Want to turn it off? _Too bad!_ Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time. If it hasn't happened already, Microsoft may disconnect this button from any useful function, making it a placebo like NYC walk-signal pushbuttons.

* At one point, while slogging through a Visual Studio install, Windows decided to nag me with a modal-over-everything dialog: "We have an update for you. Windows is a service, and updates are part of that service. So... yeah, if you could go ahead and restart now, that would be terrific." That last sentence is an exaggeration, but you get the idea. I don't want to be passive-aggressed to by a piece of equipment I bought with my own money. Oh, and the computer was thrashing so hard with all this derring-do that it took the better part of a minute with absolutely no response for the click to register and the dialog to dismiss. I felt like I was back on my old 386SX trying to make Windows 3.1 go in 2 MiB of RAM. Doubtless some bureaucrat who lives inside NTOSKRNL.EXE noticed that it took me longer than average to press the button -- and that I chose to delay the Windows Update while Visual Studio finished installing -- and made a note in my personnel file for further review by management. I'm expecting another dialog to pop up informing me that Windows has put me on an action plan.

* Somehow, the update process obliterated my Microsoft Office license, requiring me to "repair my installation" (meaning redownload and reinstall Office and reauthenticate in order to reregister and reactivate the reinstalled copy).

So no, I simply don't see how people live with this day to day, let alone
prefer it to Linux. Ubuntu could drop you into FVWM from 1995 and it'd still
be more productive than this. Even the rudest Unix environment is not this
_actively_ hostile.

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gruez
>Windows provides a knob, but it resets itself after a time

you can permanently disable this with a group policy setting

as for the rest of your issues, I never encountered them, but I think they can
be chalked up to no ssd (not that it's excusable to require SSD for your
computer to function smoothly), and not using LTSB.

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bitwize
Windows Home doesn't have group policy settings. Microsoft unchangeably sets
the policy for most of the consumer-owned computers out there. I know how to
change the (magic, undocumented) registry setting but most people don't.

My Linux machines run decently fast with spinning rust. SSDs are faster, but
last about four years before going completely kaput. I don't think it's too
much to ask that I not have to buy a $300 OS for my $300 computer (it was a
refurb), just to get the baseline levels of performance and non-obnoxiousness
that I get from Linux for $0.

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flukus
I don't know if MS still follow the dogfooding philosophy, but it's certainly
obvious that no one on the windows team has a spinning drive. An SSD is a
requirement for windows 10, not a nice to have.

I installed linux on my cheap dell and the performance difference is amazing,
it doesn't choke on basic things like opening the start menu.

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opencl
They even discontinued their own PDF reader (completely disabling it if you
already had it installed) in an attempt to make people use Edge to read PDFs.

Opening it now just says "Microsoft Edge is the new home for PDFs!"

Edge is unsurprisingly not a very good PDF reader.

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seanmcdirmid
Chrome works well for PDFs.

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TremendousJudge
so does Sumatra, and it uses a couple orders of magnitude less ram

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seanmcdirmid
I love Sumatra when I’m writing papers since it auto reloads PDFs without
losing page context. However, I usually have chrome open anyways.

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ilamont
Forcing Cortana results to be displayed in Edge (and Bing) is the main reason
I don't use Cortana.

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blinkingled
This makes sure I won't use Edge _and_ Windows Mail. The browser war is still
not a zero sum game - if Edge just plain didn't suck maybe more people would
use it. But MS hasn't been able to get Edge to be usable for intensive
browsing.

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thriftwy
I remember Windows 10 begging me not to un-default Edge the last time I've
tinkered with it.

It's a pretty pathetic of them, but then again they think their users owe them
the second chance, or indeed the first, on the product they never wanted in
the first place.

It may be good. It may be bad. Buy some Facebook ads already! You should not
get any leverage on users of your OS and didn't antitrust cases teach you
that? Why would you expect to get a 5 minutes evaluation from users, for free?

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dspillett
_> I remember Windows 10 begging me not to un-default Edge_

The first time I run Chrome of Firefox after a reboot, Windows begs me to use
Edge instead.

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delibes
> "It is clear Microsoft needs to do something to stimulate use of Edge, but
> the change is likely to be extremely unpopular with both testers and regular
> users"

I think if it has the side-effect of pushing users still using IE8-11 onto
Chrome or Firefox (or even Edge), the testers will probably be happy.

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starsinspace
After what they did to push Win10 itself on people using earlier Windows
versions... does this surprise anyone?

Solution is simple too: get rid of Win10.

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mnm1
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft decides which apps to
install and run and when. I wouldn't be surprised if they're imaging hard
dives and secretly sending contents back home for analysis or recording every
keystroke, message, etc. The shocking thing is that somehow people still trust
Microsoft even though they have proven over and over again to be
untrustworthy. I wonder what it'd take for people to question that trust.

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AstralStorm
I'm pretty sure enterprise customers will have MS head on the pike if that
happens.

Good way to commit company suicide though.

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Jonnax
Well there's an enterprise version of Windows. They can turn all those
features off whilst the ordinary user needs to accept it.

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starik36
Instead of this, they should port Edge to Windows 7 and 8 and force people to
get off IE 11.

So that I don't have to visit caniuse.com a dozen times a day.

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AstralStorm
Another antitrust lawsuit here we go!

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superzadeh
Humm, that would just make me stop using the mail app then.

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fencepost
If I was actually using Windows Mail for anything (it is linked to an
Outlook.com account that I don't really use) this would be a good motivation
to stop using it, but for the vast majority of users I'm not sure they'd have
a clue about how to change. In addition the range of non-browser email clients
seems to have narrowed quite a bit in the past decade - what besides
Thunderbird is still around?

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BrandoElFollito
I always wonder how it is to work in the Edge team.

They probably feel that this at least an exotic tool in the MS ecosystem, and
I guess they never know how long it will be supported (by management)

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Digit-Al
I dunno. Seems to me that the main source of users of the default mail app are
people who will just use the default browser anyway. Surely most people just
use online mail such as hotmail / gmail these days anyway.

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qwtel
I think this is a good thing.

the web landscape needs more than one large browser, otherwise the company
behind that browser ends up dictating web standards.

also, IE Edge is a fantasic browser. from a consumer perspective, nobody is
missing out.

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cdblades
It's never a good thing to ignore a user preference that you've exposed.

Also, Chrome is less dominant right now than IE was at its height. There are
more browser options now than there ever have been.

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gcb0
apple did that for over a decade on ios and fanboys loved it for the
"security".

google still does that, since every android webview is a chrome instance with
default setting (i.e. send tons of info to google) that you can't configure
yourself. and to add ofense to the injury, first class apps like gmail or
google search app wont even allow you to use other browsers in some cases.

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gruez
>with default setting (i.e. send tons of info to google) that you can't
configure yourself

source? what is there to send? the only thing I can think of is third party
cookies, but it's not like most people regularly clear cookies anyways.

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jacksmith21006
MS should first concentrate on securing Edge.

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dingo_bat
Since Apple does the same and hundreds of millions of people don't seem to
have a problem with it, I'd say Microsoft is stupid if they don't do it. Edge
is a very capable browser and if it drives people away from the monopolistic
mess that is Chrome, I'm all for it.

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Piskvorrr
You were not around during the first and second Browser Wars, and the Dark
Ages, were you? Yours is, word for word, the exact argument "from-Navigator-
to-MSIE." What we got from _that_ was, eventually, the monstrosity called IE6.

