Hacker News Reader

Comment by plushpuffin | Hacker News Reader

You're not kidding, I just opened Edge to see if I would notice any prompts, and it immediately threw up a popup in the middle of my screen asking to set it as the default browser and change my search to Bing (with "yes" selected by default, obviously).

I use it rarely but I know that I've told it no before. It looks like it's configured to ask periodically.

View on HN

The other thing that cemented my decision to switch from Edge was when I went to set my default browser from the Windows settings, and upon selecting Chrome it gave me some pathetic, last-ditch prompt that said something like (extreme paraphrasing, but it was the idea): "Are you sure? Edge is much better now!"

If I was having second thoughts before, I'm definitely not now.

I hate software that begs.

Don't all browsers do this? Even Firefox asks to be your default browser when you first open it... and then every time there's an update it conveniently "forgets" this preference so you get asked again.

Chrome does the EXACT SAME THING, periodically, just like Edge, and no one gives Google any crap for it. no one gives Google any grief for the things they're doing. they're just as bad, if not worse, than MS was in the 1990s, when MS was at their absolute worst.

it's amazing how blind people are.

I think the catch is that if you installed chrome and use it, you won't see those prompts, and if Microsoft changed teh default away from chrome against your wishes, you probably do want to be notified of the change.

I can opt out of googles nags by just not installing chrome, I can't say the same for edge on windows.

I expect the prompt is there to neg more than nag. I presume the only people who click “no” on the “Are you sure?” prompt are unsure as a result of the prompt itself. In other words, the role of the prompt is to make them second guess themselves and feel inferior to the OS. “I better just not mess with it, I guess.”

I dunno, I see plenty of anti-google sentiment around (e.g., arstechnica, every government around the world, just about). I think the dirty tricks campaign perpetrated by MS against open source and linux was worse (from my point of view, anyway) than anything google has done. Their recent 'we love open source and linux' rings pretty hollow, judging by what their actual contributions have been. As a marketing campaign, it's a stroke of genius.

It could be on launch if not run in x time as well...

I used chredge for work only and occaisonal validation on personal side. And if i dont launch edge for a while ill see the prompts, but if i use it daily...i dont.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com