Windows 11 won’t give up on making it super annoying to swap browsers
inputmag.com
inputmag.com
Even their preferred development environment, .NET, has an equivalent development and deployment experience on Linux based systems.
Most of the people who were using Windows as their daily driver have shifted to a phone and for most consumers access to a web browser and a mobile app store is everything they need.
On top of all that, their server operating systems seem to get worse with each release (Powershell, you suck) and now they are determined to cripple their flagship desktop operating system against the relentless tide of open-ness. At this stage it looks like they will end up like DEC. Remembered sometimes fondly by people who use any other system than Microsoft in their daily work.
I do think they could have encapsulated their DCOM and registry stuff into Unix like utilities instead of the weirdness that is Powershell. Most people from a Unix background (like me) are used to bourne shell like shells and single function utilities and reflexively do things in a particular way.
Powershell seems like you have to have a browser open to accomplish anything. Inexperience sure, but nobody could learn enough Powershell and remember it to be productive.
edit: I also hate, hate, hate that Powershell ISE doesn't work exactly the same as a normal Powershell session. How can you build two things that are ostensibly the same underpinning but work differently? Absolute madness.
I could level exactly the same criticism against Unix shells, as someone who has used them for over 10 years. I usually either can figure out the command easily, or I have to Google for a Stack Exchange answer.
That said, I agree with your point about the GUI. It seems to me that at some point during the past decade, Windows has gone from an environment where everything is configurable with a GUI and maybe a registry key, to an environment so heavy on mandatory CLI usage for configuration that it's becoming indistinguishable from Linux in this aspect. To be clear, this is a bad thing for those who prefer the GUI approach.
I understand that you see PowerShell's divergence from Unix-ness as something weird, but really I think that an (optionally) structured data output format cannot come to Unix soon enough. Parsing things with tr, awk and cryptic command line switches is a notorious Unix weakness that PowerShell (and some native Linux shells) solves quite easily.
I still miss that GUI though, when I context switch between a Unix box and a Windows box and then I'm suddenly confronted with some Powershell task, it always make me sigh a little, not least because my old noodle has trouble parsing Powershell as readable. Here's a bit of Powershell I use to go through an Outlook mailbox to look for some stuff (just a snippet) and the where-object and new-object things with dashes in the middle instead of underscores just make it harder to understand. Especially when you have where-object and then you have -eq in the same line.
$account = $namespace.Accounts | where-object {$_.DisplayName -eq "smackeyacky@nowhere.com"}
Now that Edge is Chromium based, it's just like using Chrome minus all the tracking and data-mining...
Given the scale of the fine Microsoft received after breaking their agreement by breaking the ballot system and not showing it to users (over 500m EUR I believe), it seems strange to me that Microsoft is really so willing to get back into this area of making it harder to switch browser, given the ample past precedent.
Is user data gathered from the web browser under default settings really valuable enough to justify the risk?
The only question up for debate is what the base of the exponential function should be.
€500m to hire more bureaucrats...
The fight for free access to app stores has replaced the fight for browser bundling.
C'mon...Microsoft is trying to get you to use what they view as a superior product. It could certainly be A LOT worse.
Here's to dark patterns built into the OS! UI decisions matter.
For all industry pats itself on the back for accessibility, they still have absolutely no shame about this open and obvious UX manipulativeness.
I hope your grandfather comes to understand he's not at fault for this absolute bullshit. My father is almost afraid to ask me to fix his systems because he's too proud to keep coming to me with issues - he used to be the technical one!
This is a bit of tangent, but hear me out, if the user was blind, for example, and was using some specific accessible tools, it would be really bad if the OS decided to change the tools by itself. The end-user would have no way to use their computer anymore. At least until a healthy person could revert the system settings back to their old state.
Apparently, there's no option to set default app for common file types (Audio, Video, Browser etc...) in Windows 11. Instead, to change default apps, you have to track down all file types using that app and change it. Considering web browser can handle more than HTML, it's time consuming to change them all. Granted, it may be one-time change, but I find my default browser got reset quite often in Windows 10. If this happens in Windows 11, it will be a nightmare to fix.
So, c'mon, Microsoft is as anti competitive as ever.