Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

10 or 15 years ago, this behaviour would universally be called adware and shunned, yet now Microsoft does it too?

In addition to the Windows 10 alert, Microsoft Edge has also gained a new full-screen prompt that advises users to restore the ‘recommended’ browser and set Bing as the default search engine.

...complete with Corporate Memphis[1]. That screenshot sums up just about everything I hate about "modern" software: the infantilising "we know what's best for you" language, the intrusive nature of it, and the bland so-inoffensive-it's-offensive art. The message it gives is "you are not a user, you are the product, now be a good obedient little sheeple and do as you're told." No wonder the Win10 upgrade was "free", and they tried to force it really, really hard.

My personal fuckings go out to everyone working there who didn't stand their ground and say NO when asked to implement this shit.

I'm saying this as someone who actually uses Bing, because I get sick of Google's search results censoring and CAPTCHA-hellban too. But I wasn't forced (or "recommended") to do so, and I'd rather use IE11 than Edge just due to the UI alone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27107820

Google still promotes Chrome as much as it can from its services. 5-10 years ago plenty of freeware were installing Chrome if you did not pay attention to remove some hidden checkbox. Apple nags me about Music subscription almost every time I open Music app. I don't understand what's wrong when Microsoft promotes its software and services.

I think Google showing Chrome pop ups to users on the latest Firefox or chrome based edge is anticompetitive but we aren’t talking the law here. When we install something like Adobe Flash and it installed Google Chrome, I would be angry at Adobe Flash, not at Google.

On the Apple side, I find the “free” (continues as paid) Apple TV+ nagware on settings menu is much more offensive than the nagware on Apple Music.

The OS showing ads is worse than apps showing ads.

On Android I turned off the «play protect» because I'm sure what I'm doing, and every time I try to install something it asks me if I want to enable Play Protect™ with no way to turn off their reminders.

Also, some of my apps have some play store popups asking me if I want to update the app every time there's a new version, even though I explicitly turned off auto updates and update notifications, again, with no way to turn off their friendly reminders.

I hate modern «you better do what we think you should be doing» software.

I'm happy that I have LTSC version of Windows that just works and doesn't have those popups (but Windows Defender still has some annoying notifications that can't be disabled AFAIK).

Recently, Whatsapp forced me to update it because it refused to work if I don't. Meanwhile, there are open source IM clients that were made 10+ years ago and still work without any updates just fine. I wish all software was like that.

I haven't accepted the whatsapp update and am waiting to be kicked out

I don't get the hate towards Corporate Memphis. I'm not sure what would be better instead; a stock photo seems just as bad.

To me the problem isn't in what the ad looks like, but that the ad is there. I also don't like that the ad is shown to a particular group of people, i.e. ones who aren't doing what lies in the company's best interests.

Greedy corporations trying their damnest to be cutesy and humanlike just make me cringe. That's all.

I think the point is that it's not the design of it you (or I) hate, it's the infantilization. And like GP said, before that it was stock photos of three wonderful, beautiful people in front of a computer pointing and smiling and being happy and all, surely because of the crapware being sold by whatever you're looking at. It's just as infantilizing. IMO corporate memphis is just a new style and tbh, I find it a bit more honest than stock photos at least.

I think it's just the fact that it reeks of the kind of focus-grouped design language where all the edges have been rounded off so that it can't possibly be objectionable to anyone. When you pair this with poor corporate citizenship like this, it just creates a bizarre dissonance between a company which is trying to project a warm and human aesthetic, while they are mistreating users with their actual actions.

But at the end of the day, I don't think it's Corporate Memphis' fault - it just happens to be the design aesthetic which is often paired with this kind of shitty behavior which nobody likes. If somebody is constantly feeding you bitter medicine on a silver spoon every day, you might grow to hate the spoon.

Google has been doing this for years to many users when changing their search engine, and nothing has been made. They own the legislators.

To Microsoft's defense everyone does it. Everytime there is an OS update on iOS, I know I will have to go through a dozen of modals that nag me for apple services.

And what a poor defense that is. It's almost not worth mentioning.

Good point, bad framing. We should scrutinize Apple just as much. And they're doing it for much longer. At the same time Apple forbids Apps to push ad notifications (unsuccsesfully), which is even worse.

Fully agree. And it still tells me that my iPhone setup is incomplete because I haven't set up Apple Pay yet.

and if you visit google properties in edge, you get asked to install chrome, i think on youtube it calls it a browser "optimized for youtube" or something along those lines. To be clear, I'm not trying to justify microsofts behaviour, I think neither of these things should happen.

No. Neither my Mac nor my Linux pop up ads or promotions out of the blue during normal operation. So your statement that everyone does it is simply false.

Maybe if you already use the things that they are pushing on you, you won't notice anything. But every time I've updated my work laptop Apple have tried to make me opt-in to Siri after restarting with the new update -- they even add the obnoxious Siri button back to the touch bar even though I've removed it several times.

But for example, I set my default browser to Firefox once, and macOS has never nagged me about Safari since then. That's a difference isn't it?

I neither use Safari on the Mac nor any of their cloud offerings. No nagging. No ads. No promotions. The only thing I had to say no to is telemetry and Siri on the last major version upgrade (the dialog was already set to my previous choices).

> In addition to the Windows 10 alert, Microsoft Edge has also gained a new full-screen prompt that advises users to restore the ‘recommended’ browser and set Bing as the default search engine.

Can it be disabled / remembered?

Because I'm pretty sure every browser will prompt to set itself as default browser.

Microsoft has always done this. IE/Edge is there by default, you can't delay forever the machine restart after an update, and they've long since removed the TechNet subscriptions.

I don't see a problem with an OS bundling a browser by default. For so many people today the OS is anyway just some plumbing that runs their browser. But when it starts throwing popups at me to use this instead of that, or to reset my default "by accident" then I have a problem.

And for this I blame Google who was big enough to afford nagging everyone to use Chrome whenever they set foot on Google turf. Youtube, Maps, Gmail, Search? "Hey, try Chrome instead of whatever you're using now". They even went a step further and shot their competition in the foot on those Google owned domains in order to make the value proposition of Chrome feel better.

So I'm not surprised at all that other companies now feel comfortable with pulling the same stunts. Especially since there's no regulatory agency that didn't have it's backbone softened to mush by lobbying and bribery.

The "Good news, IE is now Edge" one was nice in the way it considered I wasn't doing anything of value when it appeared and I had nothing better to do than watch the sales pitch.

A real nice red flag.

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