Apparently, MS didn't learn from its IE antitrust experience in the 90s. The FTC should take action now..
I have Chrome installed on my Windows machine but haven't launched it in months. I also have Edge installed and set as the default browser, but guess what? The other day, I needed to test some work related to web-sev on Chrome, and the moment I clicked its icon in the taskbar, windows showed up a pop-up notification that read something like: "use Edge instead, a fast, secure.. bla bla browser".
Edit: I definitely agree that Google is behaving the same, in a way or another but what pains me in the Microsoft’s case is that I already paid for my Windows license, so I expect some level of freedom unlike using Google for free.
Chrome and Google search have their own nudges right? I get many notifications from gmail telling me to install their mail app, or from google search telling me Chrome is better.
What's the legal argument that could apply to one but not the other? Chrome has a better case of being called a monopoly in the browser space.
As far as I remember, I only see "Install the Gmail app!" nudges when I'm using Gmail web. Same for Yahoo mail and other "free" services.
Searching in Chrome for "Microsoft Edge download" results in no nudges to keep using Chrome (on my MBP). Same for Safari - no nudges to keep using it when I search "Firefox download" or "Chrome download".
So, MS is using their dominance in the desktop OS market to drive use of their browser. And then adding friction (via nudges and surveys) to retain that browser marketshare.
They're doing this because they know regulators have been asleep at the wheel for decades. If they do wake up and make a fuss, they can roll it back and pay a small fine.
The FTC has been finally doing it's job recently, so unless the other side wins the next election and guts them, I think the tech industry might actually have a future that isn't just more miserable dystopia.
It’s not a switch campaign but Google just begged me to login before showing me my search results. Both of you, stop. It’s a desperate look.
I live in constant fear that the Arc team (my beloved browser) will start chasing revenue with these privacy invasive services. Can I please have the option to just pay for the software? I’m so tired of being the product.
Isn't the company behind Arc VC funded + the browser itself proprietary?
Both of those things together basically guarantees they'll try to squeeze out as money as possible from their users as soon as the "growth" phase has been completed.
GitHub has started showing me a persistent login pop-out on certain pages. Literally no way to dismiss it, so I just uBlocked the element. I don't really want to log in to GitHub in the first place. If I'm there its to check out a public repo. I haven't pushed anything in years, I use my own server now.
When trying to upload a file, one might expect a file picker. Instead, Opera pops open a small window with some pictures of earlier downloads. There's no option to navigate to the file you need. There's no evident path to exit the experience or even a window title to indicate what it's called (easy-files). In short, you're stuck.
That's so confusing lol I was just thinking about Opera after reading this earlier and having some youtube videos on where people keep telling me I need to use it. Again makes me wonder, why is people using a browser so important to these companies when they distribute it for free? I mean, the answer is clearly, at least my assumption is, they're stealing data and they all want that sweet sweet data.
But, what is the user supposed to feel is the reason? I feel like the only reasonable explanation is that they're trying to rope more product in to sell data but they don't even seem to be trying to hide it. I just feel like I can't think of an alternative reason any company would care if we used their specific browser.
The 7 tech companies are keeping the US economy afloat. They're also gigantic national and international surveillance operations. You're probably more likely to get suicided by the CIA for complaining than any kind of action being taken against Microsoft.
They did learn. They learned they could do it and it would take a long time before any action was taken and whatever fine came at the end would be an acceptable cost.
With how much Chrome "Oops"ed Firefox[1] I am fully in the "kick back and eat popcorn" mindset of this fight.
If only Chrome could do the same thing to Edge than people might be clamoring back for Firefox.
That said, Firefox would have the least ability to stop this... if it gets to all out mudslinging the only option that would be "safe" is Safari on MacOS using duckduckgo or something. As any other config someone can and would inject "nudges" to the other.
Its honestly amazing how much worse google maps runs on Firefox as opposed to Chrome. It wasn't always like that and I feel like across my devices between windows and Linux, google maps is barely usable in Firefox anymore. If I need to do any real map searching, I need to break out chrome if I have any respect for my time.
I'd be interested in reading a writeup by someone knowledgeable in web tech that would explain what on earth is happening between these two browsers when both are serving maps.google.com.
It's not just Google Maps. It's any webapp from Google. Youtube and Gmail run very poorly in Firefox compared to Chromium browsers. I don't use Google docs, but I'm willing to bet it has the same issues.
It's not very noticeable if you have a beefy PC, but on the mini PC I'm currently using, the difference is quite significant.
Even on a very beefy pc, whatever is going on in the firefox runtime can't keep up. My machine was built last year, high performing i7, 32gb ram, 3080ti, etc. Can run any new game at max settings without shuddering but maps and other google properties fall apart.
I'm not sure whether the problem is in the firefox runtime or in the way google optimizes for Chrome (and maybe even "accidentally" slows things down on firefox)
I'd be interested to hear what it was like on the dev team. I'm sure they don't super care about throwing elbows at Firefox now that that fight is won, so maybe the issues are just holdover from past decisions.
But 10 years ago... was it just "don't test on firefox"?
Or "heeey, we just made a brand new feature [that no one else uses] go ahead and use it in mail and maps!"
It's quite possible that they just try to optimize and only bother testing on chrome, so they're more or less passively conform to what Chrome is good at.
When an old employer required us to use windows, I just built a Linux VM that was always set to fullsceen. Surprisingly they were okay with it, so maybe you'll have the same luck?
The primary reasons I prefer to use Linux over Windows:
* No intrusive notifications or ads from the OS. For example, by using Linux, I no am no longer interrupted with a notification that Windows Defender just finished an entirely purposeless virus scan; containing a "see less of this" button that takes me to the settings page where I am informed that Group Policy is configured by my employer such that I am not allowed to disable this notification.
* No purposeless automatic virus scan wasting my laptop battery in the first place.
* The ability to use a lightweight tiling window manager
* The ability to mount filesystems other than NTFS and FAT, logical volumes, and soft RAID arrays.
* No mandatory updates interrupting my ability to shutdown and halt the system.
---
None of these is resolved by running Linux in a VM.
Erm? Preaching to the choir there. The Linux VM was only used because I wasn't allowed to wipe Windows from my work machine. It was the best alternative for the situation.
If nothing else, WSL is part of windows now, so it's trivial to get that set up and hard to argue against most places. You still get stuck with your UI being largely windows, but the guts all being over on linux is enough for me personally.
WSL is great but it does nothing against the invasive advertising, political messages, clickbait articles in the start menu, and surveillance - some of the main pain points of Win10/11.
Not political messages, but the first time I used the start menu in windows 10 after years away... They showed an MSN article for Kim Kardashian. Within seconds it completely validated my dislike of windows.
They are presumably talking about the MSN news feed that Windows thinks should create popup notifications in Win11, and you have to go into the settings and turn it off to stop having opinions about the House Speaker vomited onto your screen. MSN is factually biased one way in terms of how often they post from particular sources, but they post articles from all manner of sources (which is not always what you want[0]) and seeing an article from an extremely biased source will cause the user to assume MSN is somewhere near that biased themselves, since that heuristic is applicable to outlets themselves.
Connecting an IDE to code managed within WSL is certainly more complicated. I've also had my IDE freeze pretty regularly because of a three-way fight between WSL, my IDE, and corporate scans.
Only slightly kidding. I do most of my work on a System76 laptop, and I loathe every minute I'm forced by my employer to check my email through Outlook. The day they shut down my Alpine connection to my work email was the beginning of a long slide downward for the quality of this place.
I'm considering the same, especially as Apple has gotten quite heavy-handed in their push towards iCloud. Question: what kind of mobile phone do you use, and how's the OS integration? I am expecting it to be markedly worse than Apple's, but also curious what kind of integration does exist.
I recently jumped ship from Apple to Android after being a diehard apple user for 10+ years. So far I am enjoying no longer being constrained by Apple's ecosystem and way of doing things. Worth noting Android and OS integrations are significantly less polished, but any technical user would be able to recreate the same features. I'm now using a S23Ultra + Tab S9 Ultra.
Genuine question, I’m in a similar position (gonna replace my still mostly perfectly working iPhone 7). Do you think the tradeoff of shorter device support times and less polish which leads to occasional frustration worth it? I mean, I can’t roll out my own solutions to everything, I simply don’t have time even while I’m able.
For the life of me I can't get excited about my Tab S9, though it works nicely with s22 ultra. The bizarre 16:10 wide-screen decision makes it so bad for reading, way worse than you would expect the the relatively small jump to get to a square-er resolution.
Believe it or not this article does not cover everything. When you try to set Chrome (or any alternate browser) as default on Windows 10/11 a pop up appears suggesting you use Edge[1].
All trying to get you to use the same damned browser. Edge says it itself, "Edge is Chromium!" then why should I use yours instead of the one I'm familiar with?
Edge is Chromium, with the added trust of Microsoft, is what Microsoft is saying. At least according to the article. Not sure which devil I trust the most, probably have the same level of trust in both of them, almost zero.
Why? "The browser inserts itself into the browsing experience in a user-hostile way" is a bad slope to start down, even if the browser starts by inserting itself between one untrustworthy product and another.
This is two gang bands fighting on the street, there is no good guy here. Google is so annoying trying constantly to push you to use Chrome when you visit their websites
"Their" is an important word here. Google's website nags you when you visit Google's website. Microsoft's browser nags you when you visit Google's website.
You bought a house and now the bank demands you use Windows? What?
Assuming this is about "paying the bills" and using Windows at work; this is your employer/customer causing this issue for you by demanding Windows. Not Microsoft.
Google does this too, constantly harassing you to switch to Chrome if you use any Google product. Apple is constantly trying to show off their cool new music app if you use a Mac. Not saying it's good or bad, but we're way past that point.
I have serious doubts there are good technical reasons for this. For a few things maybe. But things as basic as Google Search itself have a worse interface on Firefox for no reason. There's an addon that "restores", so to speak, the Chrome interface, which works perfectly.
Windows is a bobsled on a long track, built on a mountain of anti-competitive, facing another mountain of anti-competitive we call Google. This feels like a drop in the bucket to me.
> Windows is a bobsled on a long track, built on a mountain of anti-competitive. This feels like a drop in the bucket to me.
Sure, but each drop fills more of the bucket. We'll never convert Microsoft into a user-friendly company, but there's no reason to give them a pass just because this drop of awful is part of a mountain of awful.
They don't need a pass from privacy/tech enthusiasts. They are fighting over users who are mostly indifferent, and anyone with concerns over Edge and this behavior probably shouldn't use vanilla Chrome unless they have to for work or whatever.
Hence the feeling that my personal distaste for this is pretty much irrelevant.
There are also personal computers that have no browser options. Ostensibly, Microsoft and Google are competing here, just abusing the horrible precedent of first-party control.
I use Windows (personally) only to play one game, which I hear runs under Proton. One day soon, I'm going to try setting it up.
When I was in 4th grade, I didn't understand the line in Star Wars, "The more you tighten your grasp, the more systems will slip through your fingers." Now I do.
Google constantly nags you to install Chrome whenever you first visit their properties. All of it is super annoying but I see Google doing it more than Microsoft.
Yeah, but google owns that domain and you chose to navigate to it, so they have every right to do so. Imagine if navigating to apple.com in Chrome displayed a hardcoded survey asking why you're not buying an Android phone. Over the line
> Imagine if navigating to apple.com in Chrome displayed a hardcoded survey asking why you're not buying an Android phone.
Plus, where's the limit in Windows? If they get away with this for Edge and it works, why not do the same for Dropbox vs OneDrive? Or how about getting Edge to nag you about Office when you go to Google Docs? Google could do the same with Chrome when you visit office.com.
There must be a point where having these massive companies delivering features that are objectively bad for users that are trapped in the ecosystem needs to be recognized as something that requires antitrust enforcement.
All 3 major platform owners should be broken up into dozens of smaller companies; Microsoft, Google, Apple.
“Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft.” - this begs the question: who actually trusts MS? and for what.
A person could coherently argue that if you're trusting Microsoft with the operating system you might as well trust them with the browser and not add another party to trust in the form of Google. (I'm not saying I hold that view, but I can see how a person could argue that.)
You can really feel the frustration of the Edge devs refusing to admit that Google got a culture victory when they spec'd into the science tree.
Edge being a better browser isn't going to sway anyone anymore. Every browser is good enough and so you need not just differentiating features but a differentiating ethos and Google/MS are the same
now. Firefox gets users because they're inde, foss, and built up a lot of community goodwill via their other community projects.
That must be the case. But I've seen it used online for a lot of years as well, so I don't think it's strongly geographical. It may have to do with what crowds you tend to run with.
This reminds me a lot of when my daughter was a teenager and started using terms like LOL, etc. She thought they were modern and was shocked to learn that they'd been in use from well before she was born.
"My reason isn't listed"
Because I'd rather use a different browser and that should be sufficient information. I don't care about their numbers or their desire to have people use their browser, I want to use the browser I want to use on the thing I paid a bunch of money for.
I'll be honest, I don't have a problem with this while Google is and was allowed to insert their own on pages such as Google.com
Everyone and their mothers thinks Google is the default internet, no different than people "forced" to use windows cause they don't know what Linux is.
If so then I have no problem with Edge taking market share away from Chrome.
If you want to criticize this then ban ALL advertisement for web browsers anywhere else it is in the real world, not fair and will just maintain Google's monopoly. And based on the recent years and trends of Google completely destroying the open web, is anyone really pro Chrome domination anymore?
Firefox and other competing smaller player who depend on Google money aren't looking to compete either, it is beyond obvious, so.
> I'll be honest, I don't have a problem with this while Google is and was allowed to insert their own on pages such as Google.com
I think that there's a big difference between a company putting ads on a page they own, and a company hijacking an app that they own. For better or worse, the expectation on the web is that wherever you browse to might try to pull all kinds of shady tricks on you, and we more or less learn to tune it out (and hopefully also to run some sort of appropriate protection). I think that the expectation, especially from a reputable software maker, is that the browser itself will not get in your way. Maybe things are moving in the direction that that's not the expectation, either, but, if so, then I think it's good to make that process as high-friction as possible.
Also, even if there's not a difference, "I'm OK with Microsoft pulling user-hostile tricks because Google does" may be a decent rebuttal of "Microsoft is worse than Google", which is not a claim I saw here, but it is not much of a rebuttal of "Microsoft is doing some shady tricks."
Your argument, to me, feels like this one: "Target puts a lot of pro-Target advertising inside Target stores, therefore it's fine that Walmart decided to put a lot of pro-Walmart advertising inside Target stores."
> I'll be honest, I don't have a problem with this while Google is and was allowed to insert their own on pages such as Google.com
You're going to get DV'd to hell but you're absolutely right. At the end of the day, Microsoft injecting ads for Edge when it detects you're downloading another popular browser is literally no different than Google advertising Chrome on damn near every website they run.
Google has somehow managed to maintain this image as this scrappy underdog entity and it's absolutely ridiculous the mental gymnastics some people will engage in to excuse all their anti-competitive behaviors.
Edit: I suppose it's technically different because they are injecting content into a website that wouldn't otherwise be there, and one can make the argument that a web browser should only render what is served. But also I have literally a dozen extensions that all alter content in the browser (many of which are for Google owned websites!) not the least of which is an adblocker. I have a hard time saying Microsoft adding a blurb about Edge being good to search results for Chrome or Firefox is the end of the free internet.
> Google has somehow managed to maintain this image as this scrappy underdog entity and it's absolutely ridiculous the mental gymnastics some people will engage in to excuse all their anti-competitive behaviors.
But nothing about this story is about Google, except that the nastiness that Microsoft is doing involves a Google product. What Microsoft is doing is wrong because it's wrong, not because they're doing it to a Google product, and my moral position on Google (also untrustworthy and shady) doesn't come into it.
You can definitely say it's annoying, but it isn't wrong. It's advertising, and of a category far, far less malicious than most advertising on the Internet.
Hijacking my browsing experience to try to direct me away from my goal definitely shows me the added value of "the trust of Microsoft." (Also, I think that I understand its meaning, but 'thirstily' seems like a weird adverb here … and, while I'm on language, does Microsoft really misspell "its" in "Make Microsoft Edge work it's best"?)
If I was Microsoft, I'd wanna know too. After all, it's a race for every single one of our data points, and then some.
Either way, you gotta admit it's ironically funny that Microsoft wants to keep/poach Chrome users into their own... wait for it... Chromium-based browser.
I mean, the fact that they had to use Chromium as the underlying framework for a browser, considering how much resources MS has... feels like a monumental failure at being able to make a decent browser.
I'm sure they don't see any value in maintaining a browser. The attitude nowadays seems to be that good software is simply a means to deliver ads and paid up-sells while sucking up as much personal information as possible.
Why bother building something when you can just slap some lipstick on an existing pig and get to the same level of user exploitation with far less effort?
Speaking of injecting things... every time I, when using Chrome to read GMail emails, switch email accounts, iPadOS prompts me to use Apple's Mail app. I can't turn it off. I will never use their app.
They also added a search box to my task bar after the last Windows update (albeit with a "do you want to keep it?" prompt). Guess what browser the search results open in? Hint: it's not my default browser
The year of the Linux desktop could come not through the Linux desktop getting better but just by waiting for MS to get bad enough that it starts repelling people.
Of course you also probably hear some chuckling coming from Cupertino...
I have Chrome installed on my Windows machine but haven't launched it in months. I also have Edge installed and set as the default browser, but guess what? The other day, I needed to test some work related to web-sev on Chrome, and the moment I clicked its icon in the taskbar, windows showed up a pop-up notification that read something like: "use Edge instead, a fast, secure.. bla bla browser".
Edit: I definitely agree that Google is behaving the same, in a way or another but what pains me in the Microsoft’s case is that I already paid for my Windows license, so I expect some level of freedom unlike using Google for free.