This is almost certainly a response to Google nagging Edge users to switch to Chrome. What else do you want them to do?
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.
(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.)
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.