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Comment by ed_elliott_asc | Hacker News Reader

Part of the problem Microsoft have is that they just set the default to bing, people open it and don’t know what it is so search google.

These same people don’t know how to change their default search so keep searching for google.

If they wanted these people to stay they should get rid of their background image and just give a search box like google does - basically trick people into staying.

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Something I've noticed with my work machine. The homepage in Edge is some mangled mash up of Bing News tiles and my works' SharePoint activity, and is just branded 'Microsoft'. Non technical people stuck with this homepage are very likely to just type 'Google' into it to "get them out onto the Internet".

Yea, the Edge homepage is atrocious and looks like a spam site. I don't blame people for wanting to get away from it and to something that looks more trustworthy ASAP.

I finally got so fed up with Edge quietly changing my preferences back to their defaults I decided to completely stop using it. I have an MS account, Office 365 for work, etc. I thought, this is great, I'll continue using Firefox for personal and Edge for work, it integrates with my company account, that's neat.

But no, they can't leave well enough alone and just let me use my machine the way I want to. I don't want news on my work homepage, heck, even the weather widget bugs me because I can't turn it off.

So I found the Edge executable, added "off" to the end of the file name and now it's just sitting there, broken. I'm sure some update will come along and "fix" it for me but for now this slightly passive aggressive but mostly useless reaction on my part made me feel slightly better.

I'm not the same MS hater I was in the 1990's but sometimes they make it hard to forget that time, wish they would learn to get out of their own way and mine.

Why not switch to linux? Even if you can’t use an Office 365 alternative, there’s a browser version.

Browser office blows compared to desktop.

Linux teams also sucks

So does Windows Teams. Finally, parity.

Linux has all these driver problems... most things won't work with plug'n'play... I understand why people stick to Windows.

> Linux has all these driver problems... most things won't work with plug'n'play... I understand why people stick to Windows.

Linux of the early 2000s maybe. I've never had a driver problem with Linux, and it has been my primary OS on my desktop and various laptops for the past ~7 years, and I've installed it on computers for other people many times.

Is driver support worse than on Windows? Of course; hardware manufacturers usually only bother to make drivers for Windows.

But is it a problem most people will run in to? Definitely not.

It wants me to download some app to change my desktop background?!? What is MS teaching people about safe internet browsing.

And technical people might prefer faster loading lightweight pages to Bing’s. Target audience for bing is weird.

The target audience for Bing's homepage is a bunch of product owners in MS who want their crap on the homepage to try to increase their interaction metrics.

I used google maps the other day on my phone for the first in in ages (to see if they had anything for the fuel issues in the UK at the moment). I was amazed how full of junk I wasn't interested in getting in the way of the actual map.

I remember when google beat places like yahoo and excite because it had a simple clean interface.

It's not like Microsoft hasn't been trying to make Bing look like Google Search for years (see this 7 year old article: https://betanews.com/2014/10/14/is-microsoft-trying-to-confu...) - but they have apparently concentrated on copying the format and styling of the results pages, the actual search page which the user first sees is still markedly different. But the "Bing wallpapers" are their USP ("Experience beauty every day - make Bing your homepage"), so they're not willing to give them up...

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