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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft doing exactly the same thing they were, twenty plus years ago, with the IE vs Netscape browser wars. At least they're consistent about being hostile. And now, of course, their main competition is Chrome and Google.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=netscap...

I would encourage anyone who doesn't use Windows 10 on a regular basis to take a look at what the 'defaults' are that Microsoft steers people towards on a brand new Win10 Home installation. Including the creation of a Microsoft account, bing, edge, all the telemetry turned on, etc. Just... Yuck.

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It's not just Windows 10 Home. I have Windows 10 Pro. The other day after rebooting my laptop, I was prompted yet again with that setup page that tries to enable useless shit like Office 365 and change my default browser to Edge. Honestly not sure how this can be legal after they got busted for something relatively mundane like setting the default to IE in the past.

Looking at past legislation/court rulings from the early days of the internet is pointless. They ruled that AOL had to allow other applications access to AOL IM, yet present day third party apps aren't given access to Apple's iMessages or Facebook Messenger.

> They ruled that AOL had to allow other applications access to AOL IM

Citation?

I tried to find it, but I can't. Years back I recall a case, I think involving an app like Trillian, where they sued and won on the basis that they should be allowed to handle AIM messaging with native or near-native API access. Sorry, wish I had a source, as now I'm unsure whether this is true or just something I'm mis-remembering.

It's actually the main reason I despise Apple for how it locks down iOS : it's not that I care specifically about that, but it creates cover for this kind of thing. The bar has been raised across the board now for what is tolerated.

Mobile OSes as a whole seem to have lowered the standard for PC OSes. "Android/iOS do it so it's fine if we do it!"

Here's the thing - there's an actual reason that is beneficial to 90% of their customers that they do this. Let's take my wife. She got her lenovo laptop because it was silver and really thin, and had a touchscreen. She doesn't know what specs are - the laptop is just a tool.

When she goes to do a google search, google's page keeps pushing chrome in her face. While she's trying to search for listings of gigs needing translation from Mandarin, Japanese, or Cantonese into English, the page she's on tells her she needs to click here and install chrome. She doesn't know what a browser or a Chrome are, so she thinks it's something she needs to do for the work search. Bam - she's now using Chrome. And he doesn't even notice the browser changed. Nor does she care. She never meant to install it or switch to it. Google is a bad player, and windows will check and once in a while ask if she wants to switch it back. Good. Me, a firefox user - I have literally zero issue clicking "no, leave my browser alone" twice a year.

She uses some office apps for spreadsheet type work, and msword. She uses some windows functions like copying files, and backing up her phone.

Telemetry lets microsoft know what she's doing, where she's getting confused or going into a loop pattern to do something, and when she tries something and gives up after it not making sense. They use that telemetry to improve their programs for people like her. Me - I turned that off. It's as easy as downloading winaero and clicking "disable telemetry" and "disable ads."

This is not illegal because it's literally what 90% of Windows users want. People who don't want that are technically apt, and it takes about 2 minutes for us to turn that off. It's just a default for 90% of the users - a correct one.

I hear this "Google is worse" talking point so much in defense of Windows 10 mucking around with people's settings that I'm starting to assume it's astroturfing.

You consider your wife a passive computer user who doesn't know what a browser is. Say you switched her browser to Firefox so she could more effectively block ads, and then MS switched it back to Edge with this mechanism. They are being malicious in the same way you say Google is, except it's worse because it's malicious behavior running on her own machine instead of malicious behavior running on someone else's servers.

I have spent so much time disabling all these ads on my Windows 10 Pro machine. And it did actually leave me alone through the end of 2018 I think, maybe early 2019. Then they started coming up with new bizarre ways to try to fuck with my system. I paid for this laptop, it should do what I say and otherwise leave me alone.

Google being a bad actor is not an excuse for Microsoft to be a bad actor.

This is a bit beside the point, but I have trouble understanding why someone who is willing to put some work into configuring their computer still uses Windows. Just use Ubuntu/Xubuntu/Kubuntu and stay away from those ads.

Compatibility with MS Office might be a plausible explanation, but even then you can throw it in a VM until you find a way to get rid of it.

Honestly I like the application selection of Windows better, although I don't use MS Office at all. The Adobe suite (particularly Photoshop, After Effects) is pretty unparalleled, despite Adobe's irritating behavior overall. I like Notepad++ better than other GUI text editors, I like Ditto better than other clipboard managers (although Klipper is pretty good). WSL allows me to do Linux style development reasonably well, handles about everything except systemd. I'm releasing a game (eventually, life got in the way!) for Windows and potentially some future games for Windows. They'll also support Linux of course, but Linux on Windows is an easier task than the other way around. Windows also has very good UI scaling and pen support in the form of their tablets.

That being said, after I no longer need to do video editing so my Adobe Suite usage will be back to just Photoshop, I'll investigate switching back to Linux as my primary OS again with my next laptop.

I won't switch her browser to firefox. I'm not her tech support although I am in tech. Welcome to 90% of users.

If I was her tech support, and I wanted to prevent the browser being changed by the user, I would.. Explain it to the user. And if they still changed it after that - guess what, that's their choice. But I could, just like you, prevent that with group policy. And when you do that, you won't get prompted to change it, just like my work laptop doesn't prompt me to change it. So what is the issue? The fact that if you do your customization and don't complete the full power user process, the OS can't tell if it was a random web page that did it? Maybe MS should collect some more telemetry on your laptop and run a compute-heavy AI to figure it out?

>I have spent so much time disabling all these ads on my Windows 10 Pro machine.

and why in the world would you do that? it literally takes two clicks in many different pieces of software that are available.

for the 90% of users - guess what, they wouldn't know about 1drive if windows didn't display an ad for it. What you call an ad, my wife calls helpful suggestions. When you're grocery shopping and you see a banner "apples 10% off today" that is also an "ad."

Microsoft is not a bad actor. The "google is worse" talking point is one I never stated, and a strawman you made up.

What you call "Ads" are simply defaults. And you can disable them in about a minute with one click in an app. You don't like edge at all? Guess what - there are fifty things you can do to completely disable or remove it - like change security on its folder or run a single powershell command to uninstall it.

Windows is an OS that is tailored to its users. That's not you - don't use it if you don't want. Here in the real world though, any power user simply changes the defaults in a couple of minutes, and at work there's a corporate image with all those turned off already.

You justify Microsoft's actions because of Google's similar actions, you say "Google is a bad player," the implication is clearly "Google is worse." There is no strawman here.

I have disabled all the promotion for one drive and the browser and similar garbage. Yet no matter what, they change the OS to come up with new ways to advertise at me, even if it's only a few times a year. It's an ad even if MS claims they think it well help users. I've heard non-technical users complain about this shit too. They just want their computers to work and not bother them.

Given that people are annoyed by Windows 10's promotions, I would say they are mostly taking advantage of their situation. Some of their actions are helpful to their users, some are not-so-helpful. People tolerate ads if they have to, they do not like them.

Regarding apples 10% off, when I am home with my apples, the grocery store does not break into my house to tell me about more apples.

He never justified Microsoft's action because of whatever Google does, nor does he say that Google is worse than MS.

Saying it's beneficial to 90% of users in response to a complaint about how bad something is sounds like a justification to me.

> Google is a bad player, and windows will check and once in a while ask if she wants to switch it back. Good. Me, a firefox user - I have literally zero issue clicking "no, leave my browser alone" twice a year.

You left out the part where you explain what bad thing would have happened if your wife had kept using Google-Chromium-wrapped-with-Google-proprietary-stuff instead of Google-Chromium-wrapped-Microsoft-proprietary-stuff.

After all, Google-Chromium-wrapped-with-Google-proprietary-stuff uses telemetry to do some similar set of happy things you wrote above about Microsoft apps.

The solution is obviously for MS and Google to stop. And your wife isn't an excuse for my system sending telemetry about me to MS. I am not that naive that it is about usability instead of marketing.

It is a plain lie that users want to be surveilled in such a way, even the non-technical ones, let alone 90%.

That's fine, I don't think anyone has an issue with that. I think what people object to is that you can't turn that off fully.

You absolutely can, via registry, group policy, or 3rd party apps. Have you ever gotten any of the browser change stuff or ads on your work laptop? I have not, ever, at any company. You can do that on your home computer too.

The difference today is that dark patterns aren't monopolized.

Monopolies don't see themselves like a normal business, one that has to compete for customers by serving them well. Instead, their thinking is more like a cattle rancher: the users are their property, to pen and milk as they see fit.

Between hostile defaults, dark patterns in opting-out and unsubscribing, and persistent surveillance, a lot of consumer-facing tech these days is taking on what an obsessive abusive partner would do. I can't help but wonder if these systems are a reflection of who those designers are as people.

The psychopathy is not due to the developers nor the designers, but rather, the perverse incentives that bring profits to shareholders. You're looking too close at the end-result. It's the fact that it's legal to profit from these kind of behavior that is the real cause of all of this. But consumer protection online is all but absent, and the "strongest" effort so far, GDPR, was implemented so annoyingly and in your face that most folks' experience with it is a net negative, so future motions will be shot down more easily with wide praise.

No. Many bad things are legal that most people don't do. People taking the actions and profiting from them deserve the blame. That includes developers and designers, plus plenty more people.

It's really sad how quickly we all forget. I know people who are a bit younger than I am, and came onto the internet in the 00s, after the height of MS's anti-competitive behavior in the 80s and 90s. I occasionally will talk about how I can never trust MS again, but they're a lot more forgiving, and believe that MS has changed, especially after Gates and Ballmer stepped down and Nadella took the reins.

I remember a couple years ago when I bought a new laptop (with Windows 10 on it). I just wanted to get into Windows far enough so I could download a Debian installer and write it to a USB stick, and I was appalled at Windows' first-run setup experience, and the personal information it wanted me to give them, as well as the sheer volume of telemetry, ads, and other spyware I had to explicitly opt out of. And even then, MS was still pushing Edge and Cortana in my face all over the place.

My last serious use of Windows was Windows 2000, and man, things have gone super downhill since then.

I'm bummed that I was right to continue to not trust MS, but... well, there we have it.

> especially after Gates and Ballmer stepped down and Nadella took the reins

Which is strange, because Nadella's Microsoft is no better than Gates' or Ballmer's.

They're way better at PR. The Gates and Ballmer Microsoft sort of adopted the Slashdot evil Borg image, whereas Nadella has managed to somehow make Microsoft seem soft and fuzzy to the people that used to despise them. Even though their behavior hasn't really changed. It's quite incredible.

> Microsoft doing exactly the same thing they were, twenty plus years ago,

They never stopped, one big reason why Firefox restricts what plugins users can install was Windows installing plugins that could not be removed or disabled.

McAfee seems to have found a way around this. I picked up a new laptop for my parents a few weeks ago and found that the pre-installed crapware injects plugins to every browser you install.

As far as I could find Mozilla is signing at least one plugin by McAfee, but that at least seems to request permission to run and can be disabled.

Hmm, do you recall any details about those things? My impression was that the bad extensions mostly came from the antivirus vendors, but I may be missing something as I didn't daily drive Windows for a period, and I'm interested in the details. Thanks!

The case I recall was the integration of the .Net Framework Assistant. The initial version installed itself after a Windows update and couldn't be removed, later versions seem to have fixed that.

They are dangerously close and may be crossing the line with these moves

mostly unavoidable bing integration, mostly unavoidable edge integration, unavoidable teams integration, bing rewards in the start menu

I'd expect lawsuits to follow in the coming months and years if they don't take some steps back

the marketshare they retain in the desktop space still places them in the classical monopoly position ( > 75%)

Edge is messed up, in that you cannot change the default search engine. It only changes the search engine for the URL bar, not for the new tab page (which is likely used just as much). I'm not aware of any other browser that does this. It's so cartoonish that I couldn't believe it when I found out.

You can configure the start page to use the address bar for search. That takes the cake for the most-obfuscated-default-search-setting, but at least the start page will send queries to DDG.

And then Edge will pop up the "suggestion" to change the search engine back to Bing with regularity.

I really wish they'd focus on just making be best HW/SW that they can and respecting the user. For awhile I was rooting for them, they seemed the least bad of the tech giants. I was hoping they'd strategically differentiate themselves from the antitrust FAAG pack (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google).

>> I really wish they'd focus on just making be best HW/SW that they can and respecting the user.

They can't increase revenue any more without "monetizing" the OS and users at this point.

It just doesnt take a trillion dollar company to maintain a decent OS and office suite. It never did.

It just doesnt take a trillion dollar company to maintain a decent OS and office suite. It never did.

We'd all be so much better off if every trillion dollar company were replaced by 10,000 $100mil companies.

It’s such scummy behavior. Do better, Microsoft

To be pragmatic to an excess-- where is their incentive to? I agree this is an issue, and more than that a pattern-- but they seem to be any to continue unimpeded. I imagine when they push initiatives like this at meetings, they consider the risk- reward metric of such decisions. In this case, I don't think they'll see much real risk except for some grumbling as we are now

Just eroded trust. Go ahead. Support that kind of behavior

Choice over force

You mean rely and hope that whatever the user installed as the default browser will not mess-up help, documentation and other such links?

I'm quite certain that all those non-standard URLs are all for internal links to OS-related information hosted on the web. If they instead just popped a custom app that hosted an Edge webview nobody would rip their shirts. Doing that would be ridiculous given that Edge is just there and has been tested and vetted by QA.

Don't forget that these things need to work on all versions of the OS and in all locales. You're asking MS to trust that any 3rd party app will give proper user experience for any locale when presenting such links.

It's not as-if MS was hijacking normal URLs. But ripping shirts is soooo much fun.

> I'm quite certain that all those non-standard URLs are all for internal links to OS-related information hosted on the web.

You definitely shouldn't be certain of that. If I go open a folder and hit F1, I get an edge bing search for 「get help with file explorer in windows」. The special embed at the top is a blog post on a site I've never heard of explaining that the question mark in the top right is for help. If I click that icon, it opens another bing tab with the same search. Below that embed is completely normal search results for 「get help with file explorer in windows」. It's actively worse than ddg and google.

They're not all for internal links to OS-related information hosted on the web, though. The start menu search will always open a Bing search in Edge, for example - doesn't matter what your default search is set to.

Why are you writing with certainty about things you apparently have no firsthand experience with?

This. It's absolutely infuriating. Honestly my browser defaults were broken for so long I assumed it was just that.

They are OS-generated links. Kinda funny that you claim I don't know what I'm writing about when the very example you give is an OS-generated link.

The start menu search is very much integrated with the OS and even gives you result right in the menu. Would be weird if the result shown in the menu would not be the same as the ones shown when it opens a web-browser?

But I guess you did not stop to think about such minor details.

You said "internal links to OS-related information hosted on the web".

Changing to "OS-generated" is a completely different meaning.

So the claim is that if I make up a URL scheme, it should be untouchable by other developers and only my software should respond to it?

> Don't forget that these things need to work on all versions of the OS and in all locales.

You are confusing Microsoft with their users. Microsoft needs that. No user does, and very few need more than one version and one locale.

> But ripping shirts is soooo much fun.

Right, there is no competitive aspect at all to see here, just hardworking monks trying to ensure the absolute best Windows experience with no other motives whatsoever.

No, I claim that if you write an OS that you need to support, you need to ensure that some of its basic functionality have been tested and can be vouched to always work for all users.

And also, you have misunderstood my claims about locales. Not all alternative browser support all locals that Windows support. Would you like to have help page from the OS or search result from the OS open in a browser with a UI in another language. Don't forget: not every computer is your own, so people can get in a situation where a browser they have chosen is installed.

If you cannot fathom why this is necessary, it mostly shows you haven't work on large software, with a large install base and support personnel. And yes, search from the start menu and F1 from the explorer are exactly the type of things where you need to guarantee some baseline of functionality and testing and support. Do you want to be the guy in support on the phone trying to explain something about a web browser you know nothing about?

It's not like I'm too dumb to understand the line of reasoning people are using. But people are clearly unwilling to admit there are also good reasons why things are the way they are. Just adamantly repeating that Microsoft does thing for one single reason is just being close-minded for the sake of being right.

As for the competitive aspect: you'd have a leg to stand on if we were talking about how Microsoft makes it harder to switch browsers in Windows 11. But, unfortunately, that is not the subject at hand. It's about specific links that are generate right inside the OS. There is no competition around showing help and OS search result. The browser competition is not about the microsoft-edge: URL schemes. In what world do you live where it is the relevant competition?

It's a link to a web page. Microsoft is in no position to assert that it knows best about how to display a web page. It has never been, in fact. So, this argument, frankly, holds no water. Literally every one of the major players has implemented a better web browser than Microsoft. Microsoft's own browser was implemented by someone else.

If Microsoft cannot create a page that can be displayed properly in other browsers, then the problem lies not with the other browsers.

That's some straight bullshit right there.

MS can't fucking keep updated office documentation, but suddenly they're hijacking URLs for quality assurance reasons!

BULLSHIT!

Apple does the same, no?

Apple is fine on macOS — changing your default browser is a simple setting. Their behavior on iOS, though (outright preventing installation of other browsers) should be illegal, IMO.

I think the OP was referring to the practice of "encouraging" users to sign up for iCloud, buy an Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade... and use Apple Sheets, Apple Mail, Apple News, Apple Maps, iMovie, Garage Band, etc.

I'm sure they would argue they're just providing a seamless experience for users, but I imagine there's a tiny bit of business interest in there as well.

Apple tries to sell you, but I feel like they are better on dark patterns. Whenever I use Windows, I feel like I have to be actively on-guard against the OS subverting my intentions. There are a lot of problems with the Apple ecosystem, but that isn't really one of them.

'Fine' is generous I would say, Big Sur likes to throw up notifications inviting me to 'try the new Safari' because FF is my default browser. That's not miles from the way MS is behaving with Edge.

Have you tried changing the default app for .docx files? It just does not work. Right click on a .docx file in Finder. Hold down the Option key and you'll see "Open With" change to "Always Open With". Select LibreOffice or whatever you want. OK, that file now opens with LireOffice. But no other. WTF?

This is no "simple setting" and is the same BS that MS does.

Select a file in Finder. Open the Inspector panel for that file ("Get Info" in the context menu, or Cmd-I). If necessary, expand the "Open With" section. Observe the presence of a "Change All..." button.

It's not particularly discoverable, but I think that's mainly because Apple's own UI designers have all but forgotten the NeXTSTEP UI heritage, so doing a Cmd-I on things is not as useful a habit as it once was.

If you right click and go to the open with menu and scroll to other, there's a checkbox with the finder window called "Always Open With". This way you don't need to remember which button to hold down.

Yes.

Ultimately though regardless of who is doing it, it is user hostile and needs to stop. Apple restricting browser engines on iOS doesn't somehow make Microsoft's steering and suppression of other browsers on Windows acceptable.

The US needs much better consumer protections.

Not really. In the Apple ecosystem, stuff either works or it doesn't. iOS doesn't let you install alternative browser engines. macOS does. Both of them let you use a browser shell of your choice.

None of this "you can install a browser, but we're going to lie cheat and steal to stop you" dark patterns nonsense. As a user, Apple just tells you No, and you get to decide if you want to live with that or not.

That same dark pattern exists on MacOS, even though it's less widely used https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748596

I've never had any url open in Safari instead of the default browser on macOS.

see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28748596

Not quite, no.

As a user, Apple allows you to change your default browser in both iOS and macOS quite easily.

As a developer you can build a browser on top of whatever rendering engine you want, as long as you want to use the built-in WebKit.

Crucially, they are plenty clear about what is, or isn't allowed (well, mostly — plenty of app review horror stories around here), and all of that happens in the interaction with developers. The user experience is always pretty decent, and you don't have to deal with this whole "do this in 10 locations" nonsense.

Oh, well, in that case it’s okay.

I'm not aware of any links that force open in Safari?

Go to the Finder and choose "See What's New in macOS" from the help menu. Always opens in Safari regardless of what the default browser is.

Confirmed. On my mac it opens https://help.apple.com/macos/big-sur/whats-new/ in Safari.

a recent macos installation fresh configuration does try to steer you towards using safari several times with popups and reminders.

Steering and forcing are two different things

On iOS, all links open in Safari because Apple doesn't allow any other browser. The "alternatives" are just wrappers.

So Apple is actually worse than Microsoft.

Third party browsers on iOS use the same web engine as Safari (WebKit) but critically, do not wrap Safari itself. In principle third party iOS browsers are no more wrappers of Safari than fully independent desktop Linux browsers built with WebKit like Epiphany/GNOME Web and Midori.

The various Chromium based browsers are much closer to being Chrome wrappers than, say, Firefox for iOS is a Safari wrapper because the latter has totally unique code for UI, interactions, password management, etc whereas the former is literally just Chromium with a few surface level changes.

Apple could stand to allow third party web engines either way (perhaps with strict performance requirements, to not destroy user batteries), but I think the distinction matters.

You get to choose which app is default app in iOS 15 and 14 as well I believe and maybe even before that. Not forced, just the default.

I may be mistaken but I recall reading several times that even though you can choose another app as the browser, all those apps are forced to use WebKit as the engine.

That’s correct, but the engine restriction doesn’t force people to use Safari and it’s possible to use either Chrome or Firefox front-ends. Apple wants to control the browser engine for a couple reasons:

- if you’re charitable: security.

- If you’re uncharitable: blocking the ability to undermine the App Store.

I know. I simply wanted to highlight the likely cause for parent's message downvotes, as none of the downvoters did it and things went quite sour in the sibling thread.

I don't think they created microsoft-ie:// protocol links. In some ways, this feels worse.

Well, seeing that Google and Apple do the same on their OS they might even get through with it. iOS doesn't even allow alternative browser backends, so the bar is not even reached for MS.

Well, seeing that Google and Apple do the same on their OS they might even get through with it.

I find it hilarious that HN assumes that MS or any company should devote effort to supporting users who hate all their core products and only use Windows begrudgingly. Why even bother, if you could leave you already would have.

Because they paid for it?

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