Windows 10: Microsoft is looking to force people to use its Edge browser | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10: Microsoft is looking to force people to use its Edge browser

theguardian.com

81 pointsoneeyedpigeon78 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

No, dynamic code execution is not allowed which is pretty useful if you want a performant javascript experience.

I didn't know you could change your default browser on iOS.

You can install other browsers, but the page rendering must be done by Apple’s iOS system version of WebKit. Basically it’s only good for things like bookmark / history syncing.

I know, I was pointing out waterbell's silly argument.

I'm referring specifically to the Mail app on iOS. Other apps, e.g. Wire for replacing iMessage and Mail, will let you choose which browser will open links.

Right, and even then, Apple isn't going to help you at all: links from other apps won't open in Firefox, so you jump through hoops to try to get your Firefox bookmark/history syncing support...

Unfortunately people are better at copying Apple on the annoying shit like this than at the stuff they're actually really good at.

You can't, but you can change your default browser in many apps (such as Gmail).

I think it's bad there, too, but it's maybe a slightly different situation: iOS has never pretended to be anything other than a very locked-down walled garden; Windows is supposed to add bit more flexibility. If iOS actually allows other browsers to be installed, then it's made some kind of 'progress', but Windows is moving in the other direction: there's a pretty undesirable average that they both seem to be heading for whereby you can install alternative applications, but the OS will make it much harder for you if you do.

Gmail does this a lot in the iOS app too - I feel like I'm always telling it to remember my choice of Safari over Chrome. It also links addresses to Google Maps instead of Apple maps without even giving you an option.

Yes, the Google Inbox iOS app never remembers your browser setting, even when you tell it to.

Actually, it remembers it only if you select Chrome instead of Safari. But you know, probably a "bug".

I have this same “bug” and it’s a big part of why I usually don’t use their app. Really crappy move by them.

Safari doesn't come with several tons of baggage though. It might be unfair, but as a result of IE I find it very difficult to trust a Microsoft browser.

No, iOS doesn’t pretend you can choose the default browser.

That makes it worse, not better.

You can change the default browser using the slider on the backside of the phone.

On the other hand, iOS (and early Android) gets a pass as they never had the concept of "default browser" to begin with.

Windows had this concept for a while (and still has) and is just intentionally ignoring it - that's definitely hostile.

It is pretty hostile, and is rather amazing that Microsoft has learned nothing since the Windows 95/IE days and the shenanigans they used to pull.

In the Windows 95/IE days they were stopped by government antitrust action, in the US and EU. I suppose the EU is still willing to look into such things.

Windows users may complain about it, but they remain a largely captive customer base, as far as I know. Especially organisations. They rarely consider switching to a different OS, regardless of what Microsoft does.

This tactic seems like a double-edged sword. I would think for many people, this behavior would annoy and dissuade them from continuing to use Windows Mail.

Do people actually use Windows Mail?

Probably more than use Edge.

It's actually a pretty serviceable app, at least for my personal mail. I generally want something heavier weight, like Outlook, for work mail, though.

It is hostile. Sadly, stock Android does this with Chrome in Google now and the home screen.

Google Now doesn't actually open Chrome, as far as I can tell; it opens an internal webview which acts like Chrome but does not appear to share things like the list of tabs etc.

Isn't it actually using the custom tab API? If so, it can be (and is) implemented by other browsers too.

Sweet, thanks to MS joining Apple we can debate philosophical questions like "is an ignored preference better than no option to set a preference." :|

Even third party apps that build in their own chooser in iOS tend to be only Safari and Chrome... :rolleyes:

I get that the market is drastically different than the late 90s, but isn't there already a direct legal precedent of Microsoft browser bundling as clear evidence of monopolist behavior? seems like a dumb idea to risk this here..

Is there an Add-On for Edge to open the page in another browser?

Sounds like another billion dollar EU investigation.

This already happens for me? Stopped using windows mail for this reason.

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.

Windows 10 uninstalled apps without telling me, I ended up wiping it and reinstalling Windows 7

Wow. I am so glad my work laptop still runs Windows 7. I thought about upgrading to 10 because of WSL, but coworkers that already run Windows 10 are fighting problems constantly, every update is a roll of the dice, stuff breaks randomly, it is like the "good" old days all over again.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

On top of some of those frustrations, the one that really boiled my blood a few times was, right at the end of the day as I was shutting down apps and packing up, Win10 decided now was a great time to install it's gigabytes of updates and I'd have to wait 30 minutes while it did it (I could presumably disconnect and pack up but who knows where that'd leave the install). Forcing when the updates install on you is absurd. Not to mention the umpteen issues with 4K display, still fscking problems with data access components and different versions of Access/SQL Server, spyware settings I can't change etc. They really don't seem to learn (I've since gone to Linux Mint full time and it's a breath of fresh air, with LibreOffice and Steam now offering a few decent titles I've got no need to dual-boot luckily).

"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."

I recently installed Windows 10 Enterprise on a clean laptop, and the thing that astonished me was the appearence of icons for applications that I had definitely not installed. Touch one of those icons, and the application would start installing. This is the Enterprise edition.

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.

I want preview (the app) on all my devices. Not just my laptop. Is there something out there for Windows that fill that niche?

Edit: The thing that has impressed me about preview is that I can use it for very basic image editing, filling out forms (with signatures), and reading books. And it is very good at all of those. So that is what I would want in a replacement.

I am not sure how close it comes, but for PDFs I use SumatraPDF: https://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/free-pdf-reader.html

It is relatively lightweight, can be used without a formal installation (i.e. no admin privileges required), and I like very much that it stores its state between sessions, so when I open it after a reboot, it has all the files open I had open before, and it also saves the position within the files.

Searching within files is not as good as with Apple's Preview.app, but most of the lengthy files I view have decent TOCs, so it is not a big problem for me.

Seconded. Despite the name it also handles things like EPUB and CBZ competently.

I just found out it handles djvu nicely, too.

Thanks, I'll take a look.

can't markup documents, which is why i moved from Sumatra to Foxit reader. bloated? sure. but I need markup

Chrome works well for PDFs.

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

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

On low end hardware though? My experience is that any browser based renderer (Chrome/Edge/Firefox) will choke in comparison to a native desktop program, e.g. SumatraPDF or Atril.

It's the first thing I disable.

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

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.

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?

> 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.

> "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.

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.

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.

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

Good way to commit company suicide though.

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

If you read the license agreement you’ll find that Microsoft has given itself the right to use every file on your hard drive. And nobody cared.

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.

Another antitrust lawsuit here we go!

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

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?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

MS should first concentrate on securing Edge.

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.

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.

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