Windows 10 is now nagging users with full screen Microsoft Edge ads
windowslatest.com
windowslatest.com
It's a similar story with his Antivirus software, which is constantly trying to convince him he needs to upgrade his subscription with useless browser extensions and other unnecessary features.
Windows is a fucking minefield for old people man.
And don't even get me started on how insanely impossible internet banking is for old people. His bank's idea of two factor authentication is to send him a TXT with a code, which he has to reply to with said code, as well as another code on his computer screen. He's got a flip phone for crying out loud! You know, one of those phones where you have to keep tapping 1 to get an A? His bank has literally made internet banking impossible for him. What's he supposed to do, get a taxi to the bank every time he needs to pay a bill? I realise protecting old people from bank fraud is extremely important, but did they ever test this crap with old people to see if it's workable??
That is called a T-9 phone. I have one and people can pry it from my cold dead hands. I paid $12 for it. It can do voice, text and simple jpg pictures. I would prefer it could only do voice and text. It can idle off the charger for weeks on end. Malware? It doesn't even know what to do with it. Just shows up as garbled text. Spam? Default ring and message tone is silent. Phone is registered to a fictional movie character.
I empathize with your grandfather. I hope Microsoft see your message and consider reflecting inward. The pessimist in me does not believe they will however.
Some people claim these are fraudulent. But some sellers have years and many thousands of sales under their belt. I have had my $10 license for windows 10 pro for 4 years now without so much as a blip.
The most prominent example is the full screen nags that, although can be skipped, use dark patterns to trick the user into changing settings.
Since I use windows with a local user account, instead of a Microsoft account, it often nags me to switch. Even when using a Microsoft account to sign in it still nags to set a pin to log in, instead of just using a password. I haven't found any setting to disable these permanently.
Windows 10 LTSC is probably the best option, although I haven't tried it personally.
This is unrelated to Edge, but among the most despicable things I've seen Microsoft do was to promote their "Your Phone" app by popping up a notification that reads "You Got A Message". I didn't just get a message, and there's no way they could know that because I hadn't even installed their crap on my phone! Its like they're just pretending its all connected and displaying message notifications on your PC to get people to click it, then go through the setup.
Microsoft is a big company, with many divisions that are doing really great work. Their Windows division is so unimaginably the opposite of this, and has been for near a decade, that I'm beginning to think their push toward services and the cloud is only to hedge against this division, like leadership knows left to their own devices they'll crash into the ground and take Microsoft with them and no one can stop it.
Are they really though? Github is slowly becoming less and less endearing with export regulations ICE contracts and lock-ins like github client. Minecraft was a confusing four-billion dollar purchase that left people scratching their heads in 2014. analysts said it would help get newer younger users into Microsoft products, but youtube and google trend data since 2015 shows interest had peaked by the time Redmond bought it. They tried shoehorning it into code camps for whatever that was worth. They bought Linkedin, a sterile wasteland of spearphishing and recruiter spam that (surprise) is export restricted as well.
Azure and office365 target the same locked in old-news customers: corporate and mega corporate IT shops that deploy COTS and do whatever their rep tells them to do when its time to pay the piper for the OS and server licenses. Neither of these services can seem to stay online for more than a few months at a time before a crippling outage.
and now they fold the edge browser into their competitors engine and flog it mercilessly like the '91 browser wars never ended. hardly "great work" from the company thats desperately trying to clean up Ballmers spiraling mess of myopic war drumming against the OS that clearly and definitively won.
I guess you could say "Xbox" is doing "great work." the console is fun, the games are fun, and the division in charge seems to genuinely care about and do things the customers want.
I think there's still lots of great low-level developers there working on things like the kernel, but it's mainly the UI/UX people who give the whole division a bad reputation.
The "Your Phone" app is truly idiotic; you can't uninstall it from the regular place (you need a PowerShell script to get rid of it) and it otherwise takes up ~2Mb of RAM all the time for absolutely no reason (I don't even have an Android phone to use it) - there are a couple of other unremovable apps, but at least they don't start at boot and use resources for no reason.
I have to kill the process in Task Manager. How many ordinary users know how to do this?
This has happened multiple times on multiple machines.
People say if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. Well I paid for Windows, and still get this user-hostile treatment.
It's fucking outrageous.
How can anyone complain about Google's monopoly while Microsoft gets away with shit like this?
I've never seen this happen, and I have Chrome as default. I noticed the other issues you point out, but this never happened to me the years I've been dual-booting with Windows 10.
Google's Android "new-phone tunnel" is certainly no better.
The good news is such shenanigans are forcing more and more users to move to Linux which has improved so darn much in the recent years (especially Linux Mint) that the experience is far better than Windows.
Unfortunately a lot of games and programs like Photoshop still require Windows so I'm stuck with it (play on linux never worked for me), otherwise I would be happily get rid of Widnows forever.
What I don't get is people complain about nagging to convert to Edge, yet every time I open google related stuff on my phone, I'm nagged for Chrome.
On iOS, if you click a link on YouTube, it doesn't open in Safari, or ask to open in Safari, its like "hey, look at this great first option of Chrome which you don't have installed so I'll take you to the app store." For every...single...link.
Then on my desktop, every google service I use, "wanna use chrome instead"?
People forget the times before Chrome existed where google would sneak in the google-toolbar adware in internet explorer wherever they could (by paying everyone to default include it in other applications installers, among other sketchy avenues). It is amazing that they could uphold the image as the good guys at the time.
And apple sneaking in applications on windows when updating quicktime (if I remember correctly).
They all suck.
But it is even worse to do this on their own desktop operating system. It is another level of insanity that I just don't accept. And it's not like one can throw some money at the problem either, they are just ruining their platform.
OHHH Quicktime! Every time I put iTunes on my windows computer and auto-update would install Quicktime.
Thanks for reminding me of those dark days.
More like the telemarketer calling you at the most inappropriate times or pestering your grandparents to trick them into something they don't want nor need.
There is no silver lining to this. It is despicable behavior that should not be rewarded.
I genuinely agree and believe that Edge is in the best interests of Windows users, and while less so because it's non-native, also users on most platforms that they support. When they say, "the internet is better with Edge", it's actually true this time.
I get that Mac is a dodgy OS. Windows is pure gangsterism.
This was a growing annoyance I had with Windows: more and more of my computing could be done (and done pleasantly) in Linux, but as long as there existed just one application I couldn't replace and/or emulate, I'd be stuck with using Windows 100% of the time.
So this past year I invested some time and money into setting up a Linux-first workstation where Windows lives in a virtual machine with gpu passthrough, usb passthrough, etc. Now I can run games, proprietary applications, VR, etc. without issue and at full speed in the Windows VM, but otherwise stay in the Linux world as much as possible.
The results are fantastic now, but it did admittedly take a ton of time to get everything working. Search for 'VFIO' and read through https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/ if you're interested in something similar.
Definitely worth checking out this weekend. If I can play GTA and run Photoshop using this then it would be great for me!
I'm never looking back.
For games: the only game that doesn't work is Planetside 2. But everything on Steam works -- if maybe with some massaging. Blizzard's games work. I don't do Photoshop but it seems like "some" versions work alright [0].
Get rid of Windows and seriously try out Linux maybe with Wine.
[0] https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
So sounds like yet another win for LTSC to me. Too bad you can't buy it.
In all the windows store is unfortunately just an unnecessary dependency because I don't trust I want to use it tomorrow.
https://chocolatey.org/packages/microsoft-windows-terminal/
You can also schedule tasks that automatically update your packages
It won't update automatically. But if I don't misremember there is less telemetry.
I'm not sure if it's been done for Win7, and there's the whole driver-signing mess to deal with, but the community has been writing its own drivers for much older OSs (DOS/3.x/9x).
Unfortunately a lot of games and programs like Photoshop still require Windows so I'm stuck with it
I've heard WINE is getting pretty good.
In my opinion that would be very far from the best desktop experience.
Leave me alone to do my work for @#$% sake!
I just hit ctrl+alt+del and manually closed the program. She was already logged in. I don't understand what happened, but yeah, it was weird.
Windows is increasingly incorporating these web-style nudges every day. If you open the Start menu, you get animated ads; if you search in it you get popups pushing you to join Microsoft rewards [1]. What a distressing shift.
1: https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/threads/microsoft-rewards-p...
Except you don't have to. I don't know what I did, I'm not running any third party software, but my start menu does not have any tiles. It's just a list of apps installed on my system
Perhaps, you know, not stoop to Google's level?
Like, why does Microsoft even care? Windows is the product for which its users (theoretically) paid, not Edge. If people want to run Chrome or Firefox or fucking NCSA Mosaic on Windows, then that's their problem, not Microsoft's. Microsoft got their money; they should mind their own business instead of bitching and moaning about "but but but the user doesn't want our shiny new browser!".
Microsoft's insistence on what seems to be a deliberate attempt to make Windows as horrible of a user experience and product as possible is precisely why I switched to Linux-exclusivity in 2012 and haven't looked back. I would much rather put up with the broken dumpster fire that is the Linux desktop experience than even pirate (let alone buy) an operating system that by every indication hates me and wants me to suffer.
And it's baffling because pretty much every other part of Microsoft seems to be figuring out how to make decent (or at least mediocre) products; it's just their flagship product line that they seem to have been actively sabotaging since it peaked as Windows 2000.
They're all terrible and one being worse isn't an excuse for the others to continue the trend.
Not have their OS take over the entire screen with a dark patterned choice dialog, that's for certain.
Yes. I don't want to sign up to Youtube to watch a video and definitely I'm still not a robot whether they ask me one or a thousand times, but apparently they keep using these dirty tactics (nagging for login and endless captchas) because they think I'm bending over if asked enough times.
Well, thankyou for the consideration, but no is no. The last Google related thing I use is email, which I'm already planning to ditch as I already did most of the times with their search engine and completely with Android phones.
Don't get me wrong, that is not a Google only thing, but rather modern businesses attitude to monetize everything to the smallest detail. All those companies are turning the Internet/Mobile/Desktop experience into crap in which users spend more time filtering out things they don't want. That is not going to end, until users won't send a strong message by ditching software that treats them like idiots.
(I’m not speaking of any particular current or past event, or trying to assign any moral values one way or another, I’m just attempting to show that your reasoning is unsound. In this particular case I don’t like what either party is doing.)
If MS are going to essentially force the switch on people who aren't able to - or don't want to take time to - understand the choice they should at the very least bring over your extensions (where possible) along with your bookmarks etc.
I've tried Edge and it's totally fine and feels more or less the same as Chrome. So why would I bother switching? Give me a reason!
Microsoft would love to remove the option to choose a system default browser entirely, but they can't, so tactics like these are the next best thing. That's just how big the difference is in supporting foreign software vs. a first-class package you can hook into.
1. Edge means giving up: Edge is rebranded Chrome, MS merely hopes to reap seigniorage from Bing as the default homepage
2. Edge means doubling down: MS wants to focus its efforts on differentiating features like privacy or Windows integration, where Google is at a disadvantage
They are pushing Edge hard so #1 doesn't seem plausible, but #2 would be a coup, and inevitably lead to a fork, like WebKit/Blink.
Same for Windows Server 2019. When you launch IE, Bing will immediately start recommending Edge however.
Seems like some serious corp miscommunication.
I have new edge as default browser and I still got this screen.
This screen appears if you have other browsers installed even if they are not default.
It seems that code quality in Microsoft products keeps dropping rapidly every year.
It has already been 5 years and UWP is still unstable and buggy compared to Win32.
2015 edge? I’d LOVE to support that instead.
This is just Google getting to taste it’s own medicine.
Seems like Microsoft's behavior is in line with the other platform vendors such as Apple and Google.
(Though it has too many users nowadays to do those kinds of shenanigans - a couple of years back with only a handful of users, I added some code to rotate all websites by 2 degrees or so on April 1st... fun times.)
(For the unfamiliar, search "I use arch btw")
Instead of your Google account, you can sync the profile to a Microsoft account. If you use profile management features, I find that it works much better on Edge.
The Android version is not bad either. And now that there's a version for Linux, I don't see myself ever switching back to Chrome.