Without respect to the facts, it's funny as hell to see this called "a new low" when browser bundling is what got them sued by the United States 20 years ago.
There's a Simpson's episode where Homer has a business that Bill Gates wants to buy, and he refuses. So Bill tells his bodyguards to 'buy him out' and walks away. They proceed to smash all of his equipment to bits. You don't get done by Matt Groening like that by simply bundling software.
I'll be honest, I think most popups with user information are useless and annoying. The majority of people think "I didn't ask for a pop-up" and click the x without reading, not even knowing what cancel does.
Despite normally thinking "info" popups do more people bad than good, completely stopping all os interaction for a full screen "the blue e is changing to a wave" is absolutely necessary. How many people only know the internet as "the blue e" or "google"? After 25 years of a blue e, it's a staple of computer interaction, one you can't just quietly yank away.
With old edge going away, they obviously have to ship a replacement.
The fight between these companies to be set to default is ridiculous, and they are both abusing their positions because people can't be depended on to know how to undo a defaul protocol handler change. Microsoft's "are you sure" pop-up when trying to change your default PDF viewer, should be illegal. If you're in the menu changing it, is not the time for a weird passive aggressive manipulative popup. But. But, it's also not good for Microsoft to just cede full control to Google.
It's also a bit ridiculous for people to be conflating pinning an icon to a taskbar with violating people's privacy. If you know what it is, un pin it. If you don't know what edge or new edge are, the pin is probably useful.
EDIT: I can see now that I wrote carelessly. By "This is worse" I meant "This is more blatantly illegal." Not "This is more detrimental to the world." The '90s browser bundling was probably much more detrimental, but not unexpected behavior. But the recent behavior was very unexpected to me. I had to use Task Manager to kill it. I can't believe Microsoft would be so bold as to not even give me some small, hard-to-read "no thanks" button somewhere.
People with 10% market share are allowed to do a whole hell of a lot of things that become illegal when you have 90% market share. I suspect this is part of why monopolies are so uniformly recalcitrant. From their perspective, we didn't have problems with them doing this 10 years ago, why are we upset about it now when they have assets worth taking away as a punishment? It's just a money grab. They're just winning and we're just jealous.
If I own a grocery store, I'm selling formula for below cost to get people into my store. It's called a Loss Leader. If I'm the biggest formula maker in the world, and I sell formula below cost, that's called Dumping and I will be fined and punished if anyone can prove that I am 'too big' and that this is driving competition out of business.
That's the crucial difference. You can easily get native firefox on mobile if you want (even if it means giving up iOS). It was much more difficult for desktop users to give up Windows in 1998.
WP also doing slowly well, the whole technical stack was rebooted multiple times, and thus it lost the developer love that got fed up with so many reboots.
Also the reason why Win32 and WinRT are now being merged via Project Reunion, confirming the trend that started with MSIX and XAML Islands introduction.
If you are halfway competent ISV, you don't have a problem. Sure, there is no polished SDK that contains the entire world, but everything needed is available in respective repos.
You also do not need to support every release of Kali and Slackware. If you focus on the most used distribution(s), you won't have a problem with support. Even Microsoft can do it today.
> Also the reason why Win32 and WinRT are now being merged via Project Reunion, confirming the trend that started with MSIX and XAML Islands introduction.
Causing collective yawn. But don't worry, other desktops have exactly the same problem, because again, it is not a tech problem.
I will never ever forget the time they considered closing a nag popup (that they installed through security updates) by hitting the X in the top right as consent for an operating system upgrade. That was depraved.
To this day, I don't know how people could forgive them for that. Like... look at this incident in comparison. They installed a browser. That's nothing.
Do you also want Apple and Google to be sued for "bundling" their browsers on iphone/osx/android/chomebook etc?
A browser is a basic necessary OS component (heck, you need one just to download another one).
What is objectionable is the in-your-face nature of this update.
Ever heard of wget?