You can no longer bypass microsoft-edge:// links using apps like EdgeDeflector
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I do wish they used a more generic/portable solution, but this is for Windows-specific features, so it would require them to think through an open, stable & forever-supported API...
You mean like RFC1738?
On top of that, whenever Edge opens, it tries to set itself as your default browser, and excises all your other browsers from the desktop and dock.
So this is related to the garbage MS pushed earlier in the year (or was it last year?) where a news & weather widget suddenly appeared on your dock out of nowhere.
Now if you click on a link from that thing (and probably other locations, sibling comments mention web results from the search and cortana), it opens them in Edge instead of opening them in your actual web browser.
This is not "we're bundling a local web application developed specifically for edge so we're linking to that specifically to make sure it doesn't break", this is "we're wilfully and specifically bypassing the browser you configured to handle web pages when opening web pages".
At the same time, If I said I want all web links opened in Firefox and an MS app is forcing me to use Edge, well that's pretty shitty.
I've had no issues using Windows since the XP days they made some missteps but it did what I wanted. Windows 11 is forcing me off Windows. I'm slowing switching to Linux Full time.
Honestly wish I could just have Windows 7 as my OS forever.
If you want to use a browser other than Edge that's fine. Most of us do. But that's on you, not the Windows team. Microsoft has a long history of caring deeply about compatibility even when they aren't the party responsible for breaking something. Perception is everything to the average user.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/today/
That page has to work with browsers other than Edge because it's a public page. Someone else is dealing with that requirement already.
MS is forcing Edge in places where none of what you're calling out is true.
I'm sure you can image why this is annoying and user-hostile. You've just clicked on an ordinary-looking link, but instead of instantly opening a new tab in your favorite browser you have to wait for a new browser to load and dismiss the "do you want to set Edge as your default browser?" prompt, after which you get your page in a browser you never use with none of your extensions/settings/privacy features.
This is frustrating, and I'll simply turn off the panel instead of using it.
It should also be noted that almost every element of the windows UI which launches a browser does it using the Edge-specific scheme, so there is a substantial need to do this kind of interception if you are not an Edge user.
Then, when you go and use the competitor's search engine or video hosting platform you get multiple banners inviting you to install their browser (or it's flat out installed as a hidden checkbox in a popular utility's installer!).
Then, disgusted by these dark patterns and practices, you install an alternate browser that's not safari on your iOS device. Wait...
I can’t think of another reason in the windows UI to disable this. I’m sure there are some but at no point should those should require Edge. It’s a web page dammit!
This is basically devolving into the 90s again.
Is Chromium the way to go?
The pseudo protocol probably should have been better designed with a less specific name, and probably should have had a better fallback to default browsers when they aren't IE11, but one can also imagine the name was chosen because it was the easiest solution using existing pseudo-protocol support in Windows 10 and 11 than building a more complicated "trampoline", maybe.
Hindsight being what it is, we can all wish Microsoft had taken a different approach to IE 11 support in Windows 10. I don't think this microsoft-edge:// thing was the best answer either. It just sort of makes sense in terms of the ugly situation Microsoft created for themselves, maybe.
It's supported until next June on all Windows 10 channels.[1] Indefinitely on LTSC and older Windows. It was indefinitely on all Windows 10 channels until 6 months ago. And your guess doesn't explain why Microsoft just blocked 3rd party browsers from handling the microsoft-edge protocol.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/i...
Maybe there's some I haven't seen, but what I do see is stuff like opening a web page from a weather widget. There's nothing MS-specific about it, and the EdgeDeflector thing worked a few days ago. Clicking on html files in MS Explorer still opens Chrome, so I assume they know what to do.
> this is for Windows-specific features, so it would require them to think through an open, stable & forever-supported API
seems to directly disagree with the author's analysis:
> These special links only exist to force users into using Microsoft Edge. They serve no other purpose than to circumvent the user’s default browser preference to promote a Microsoft product.
Why do you suggest these are for Windows-specific features?
Where only would we find such a unicorn?
I copied Firefox to %programfiles(x86)%\Microsoft\Edge\Application and renamed its executable to msedge.exe.
It confuses Firefox whether it set as standard browser or not at first, but otherwise works like a charm.
Will probably be killed through the occasional update, but what isn't these days.
This is just horrible. They are so desperate to get back market share that they resort to "purposely bad ux in new versions" tactics. What is their goal? Get more users on Bing? Get more tracking data via Edge?
Beat their record fine from the EU? None of the others seems like a plausible result.
The reason they dare to try is because they know they might even get away with it.
I'm definitly not condoning it but the situation is very different from when they got fined. At the time Microsoft was fined smartphones weren't a thing. One might argue that this competes with Microsoft desktops marketshare. Also in notebook sales Chromebooks have on average (roughly) about a 20% market share [1]. On top of that Microsofts browser market share was 90+ % at the time of the fine, now it's almost non existant.
If it were up to me they would be fined into oblivion for this anti-competitive behavior but I think they might actually get away with it.
[1] https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/07/30/theres-no-stopping-...
1 - https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_20_...
2 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/639928/market-share-mobi...
This is probably it.
The people who thought this up, implemented it, QA’ed it and approved as well as their entire hierarchy up to Nadella are complicit with monopolistic practices again.
Why am I not surprised. Emperor only got new clothes.
It's sad, it's user-hostile and smells of desperation.
In other news, in the pandemic my parents (+70yr) switched to Xfce on Gentoo when their Win7s died. And are actually getting on quite well (they are pretty good with computers, we've had them at home since before Win3.1)
> blink monoculture
Oh Google rendering engine hmm
It would have been the same if it was gecko, webkit, netsurf or anything else being as dominant as blink has become. The operative word is "monoculture", not which engine it is. The web needs independent implementations to continue being about protocols and standards, not programs or libraries.
Worst case, 3-5% of home users switch to linux or apple but in exchange Microsoft gets all of that bing ad money for the 95% that stays.
Are there other fields so thoroughly invested in making the world a worse place to be a consumer? Why is big tech so obsessed with torching their long-term reputation in exchange for a few usage share points in the short term? How do engineers sleep at night, knowing their role is to be a malignant, user-hostile, value-destroying force in the world?
They sleep on their USD $200K/year bed (if college grad). Or if experienced with 5 years of experience, then their $400K/year bed.
Don't push the narrative that only "evil" people can do bad things. Then, since almost no one thinks they are evil themselves, no one will believe they're doing bad things.
If you can work for FAANG you can work somewhere else and make a comfortable living, it's not like we're talking about someone doing shady work to put food on the table. Why do we not hold people accountable?
If someone shills for big oil or the tobacco industry we have no trouble pointing out how unethical it is.
>You get in, make your coffee in a fancy Microsoft-branded cup, and then a PM gives you the “actively shit on our customers” ticket. Presumably the engineers on the windows team are either in golden handcuffs, or actually derive sadistic pleasure from making the world worse for users, and making the field of software engineering less trustworthy."
is what I was referring to.
The ticket would certainly not be named "Ignore user's default browser choice", but only an extremely naive developer would believe this is good for their users. A developer that finds this objectionable would ask to be transferred to another team, but most won't.
I'm not saying that developers should refuse the work, just that they're not innocent about what they're doing.
If you work for one of these companies, there is no clever self-justification. You can either lie to yourself or own the truth. Doesn’t matter if you’re on some VR offshoot division of Facebook. You are part of all the terrible damage and death they cause.
I think there is a 3rd and more likely possibility, namely, that they've either been brainwashed, or convinced themselves, that the actions they're taking are right & righteous.
They are right for their bank accounts.
Facebook with creepier services and dark patterns (e.g onboarding literal children despite internal data pointing to adverse mental effects)
Google + ads that favor their own services
Everything on killedbygoogle.com
Apple's on-device file scanner
Spotify forcing auto-play on connected devices as a feature
Amazon charging $10 shipping for whole foods despite whole foods already making a healthy profit
BMW charging for apple carplay (this changed last year to Free I believe)
Mercedes and Tesla charging for vehicle DLC
everything that's ever required a library of Congress dmca exception to work around
Etc.
....it's life, unless you can seize political power and not be corrupted by the many machinations of corruption that have evolved in the US in the last few hundred years.
Drug companies can be pretty user hostile. Epipens and their price hikes comes to mind.
Good example, especially considering the law was weaponized against only a relative newcomer to that game rather than all the existing players who'd been doing it for years.
Some days it feels like the whole field is premised on taking advantage of people, not trying to make the world better for them. I am values-driven, so it just really hurts to see so much bad behavior in my chosen field (software). I don’t like the irrational “tech bro” hate that’s popular these days, but I’m a little more empathetic when I realize that most consumers have probably faced technology that is actively taking advantage of them. Uncool.
> Some days it feels like the whole field is premised on taking advantage of people, not trying to make the world better for them.
Yeah, despite all the initial optimism, it seems one of the main consequences of connected software was to remove the technical barriers to whole classes of unscrupulous behavior that the market incentivizes.
Funny how these things give in shortly after the 2y warranty ends.
Disclaimer: repeat victim of headphone breakage. Looking at you, Sennheiser.
IIRC it was some ~70€ chat headset (perhaps dumb from me to even get those). The HD599 started getting electrical problems (asymmetric hearing).
I also had a bit longer ago a Speedlink Medusa (my fault).
Now have Meze 99 Neo and gonna get a pair of DT 990 and hope for the best.
It's very easy to just anthropomorphise everything and say "ha, that one is evil with evil intentions and sadistic joy", but it's far more likely that it either wasn't actually designed to work like that and it's simply some crappy default behaviour, or there is some marketing VP who went beyond his scope and forced an implementation detail 4 layers deep in the organisation. Then that one might be bad, (but still just incompetent - even just checking historical cases would have shown that to be a bad idea) but all engineers, all managers, all POs? Unlikely.
This was already done.
The new ticket would have said something like: "Stop users from being able to override the special links that only work in Edge. Make very sure that users have no way of working around this behavior even if they really want to."
A bit like:
- "openInBrowser(url)" (the mistake)
- "openInEdge(url)" (the malice)
- "openInDefaultBrowser(url)" (the one configured by the end-user).
I have no idea what they are doing under the hood, but I'm pretty sure some of it can be easily identified for being a mistake, malice or something else. But because I don't know, and apparently neither do most people here, speculation on the effect being the main intent or a side-effect alone is iffy at best. The functional outcome remains the same of course, and I'd rather start out with calling it a bug than anything else. If Microsoft then comes out calling it "works as intended" then yes, that's just nasty.
Just because it "looks" the same doesn't mean it is the same. There is a vague reference about a few KiB of added compiled code and the fact that it's an insider build, but other than that just an exploration of previously valid avenues that no longer apply, and the bundled outrage of assumptions based on a whole lot of nothing.
I don't know what the actual implementation is, the article on the website doesn't seem to know, and neither do you. So all we can do is speculate, and it appears some people choose unproductive outrage over technical exploration.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-doubles-down-on-its-...
Just last week I was reading about a court ruling proving a local bank overcharged interest on car loans, entire department knew, and they did this for years. Effectively stealing from people. The other day a retail store tried to get out of warranty obligation under the excuse that I don't have the receipt, even though I have the warranty card with serial number - a friend working in support said it was a common tactic to see if people would give up.
If you think this is an example of a morally questionable job I'd like to know what universe you live in.
I’ll also point out that in the case of the bank overcharging, it sounds like outright fraud (totally unacceptable) and the courts held them to account. It is shocking that fraud and corruption happen, but at least society seems to have a mechanism for dealing with it.
Software engineering isn’t morally questionable, if you aren’t going out of your way to make the world worse for people. There is no compelling reason to do that, so the vast majority of jobs should be perfectly reasonable. I love my job in part because I’m never asked to actively make my product worse, or work against users and customers. We’re imperfect and don’t always work as well as we could, but at least we’re working in the right direction.
All ethical upstanding folk, Monsanto, Nestle, by their standards Microsoft are saints.
> People who drive trucks.
An industry know for their honesty and reliability, no organised crime involved ever.
It's shocking to me how much people here get outraged over relatively trivial stuff.
Every field. The seller-buyer relationship is supposed to be adversarial. This is why competition is so important, and why ignoring anticompetitive practices is so damaging: the only way to prevent companies from throwing punches your way is to be able to punch back.
In some cases, you find it highly objectionable, but because large corporate entities are authoritarian in nature and you don't want to risk getting fired, you complain but ultimately get the job done anyways. You don't get over it and keep it in a long list of things you find questionable before you decide it's time to change teams or companies. The "PM" in this equation likely feels the same as you, because no single PM at a large company like this has the authority to make decisions like this nor tell their dev team what to do (it's an influence role, not an authority role - authority is for folks with bigger paychecks).
Or you get paid and know about a more complicated/nuanced take that only people on the inside know about, so you do the work and move on because you probably don't care that much.
There usually isn't a "make the product worse" ticket. It's often more a matter of not having enough time to do it the interoperable way.
That's not to say "actively shit on our customers" tickets don't exist, just that it happens so often because of far less sinister, far more mundane reasons.
Health Insurance, look up the case of Allena Hansen. Her face was ripped off by a bear in the wilderness but somehow got herself to a fire station for an airlift. She said that dealing with Blue Cross Blue Shield afterwards was by far the worst part of the experience, because "having a face" is considered cosmetic.
I used to work for a smaller group insurer and I'll never forget how at every single all-hands meeting and innumerable company-wide emails for 5 years the CEO would dedicate 20 minutes to whining about pre-existing conditions getting deleted by Congress.
Long term value creation is a lot harder to prove, but I still always try to push for it. But most organisations can't deal with it, their decision making mechanisms are so broken that they need someone else (arbitrary data) to do the job...
I'd be interested to know if you assume the opposite, that companies in general act in the interest of their customers?
"I want to know everything about you and who you talk to."
"You can't leave me."
"I'll do what I want when I want to you."
No other company is as openly hostile towards its users, at least Google, and Apple and the likes have the decency to pretend they care.
But the confusing part with Microsoft is that there are a multitude of alternatives. There isn't nearly as much lock in as with some of the other companies.
It seems like enterprise is what keeps them alive and let's them get away with all of this stuff but it's not clear to me why big enterprise feels so locked in on Microsoft in 2021.
And also pretending those things don't exist on Linux.
As in, this kind of misbehavior existing on Linux distros? I'm not aware of any FOSS operating system trying to force one browser over another except for Chrom/ium OS (which isn't what most people mean when they say "Linux")
Cause they somehow like that "new Microsoft" that doesn't exist.
Problem is now Microsoft owns Github, and NPM so virtually Microsoft owns Node.js, and that allegedly open source ID called Visual Studio Code that isn't really open source.
Linux is not a realistic alternative for most people.
I don't buy this argument that the average person can't use Ubuntu. It's easier to use than windows in a vast majority of ways without ever touching a command line.
Not all software, especially in the office/at work is internet browsing and spreadsheets. It has nothing to do with easy, it's about, sometimes many decades worth, of software development and applications that don't run well on anything but Windows. I gave up trying to make everything work from my Linux box a long time ago and am happier because of it.
And, in the end, at home? I run OpenBSD because the most popular Linux distributions came along and forced me to use something called systemd and I don't care for it any more than I do Microsoft Edge.
And in no way am I arguing that what they are doing with Edge or Windows 11 is in anyway acceptable.
In practice stuff just tends to go wrong, fixing it is always complicated command line stuff, and that one bit of software you need only runs on Windows or Mac.
Apple is pretty close in some ways. They are against the loading of apps they can't control even though many want to sideload and they did that whole scanning thing.
Under the hood I still think Apple is better to users but maybe more hostile to developers?
And, because most of the software I need for my job still does not run on Linux.
I'm not an Apple defender by any stretch but personally it still never feels as agressively shitty as MS products
No, you're right: it's more passive-agressively shitty.
As a UX it's consistent, and very nice that for any app I'm using, I have a familiar menu I can navigate, and I can even hit Cmd+Shift+/ and hop into a search of every item in that consistent menu (which tends to include most major actions you'd want to do in that app).
And I think it being detached and stuck to the top of the screen at an OS-level is important for this to work. I certainly wouldn't want the OS to force design upon the window itself (i.e. having the same bar but attached to the top of every window), and if it was an optional, native UI component included in an SDK, a good amount of apps (read: most) wouldn't use it (that's basically the situation on Windows). But because it's essentially part of the OS, and an app would look weird if it didn't have that, it's created a very consistent experience across all apps.
With the CUA standards you also have a familiar menu you can navigate for any app; it just happens to be attached to the window it belongs to.
The same reason I vote for democrats: As much as they suck, the alternatives are even worse.
From personal experience I'd say ubuntu is imperfect but when I get on a windows machine I can instantly tangibly feel how much the OS is bugging me so I'd say it is noticeably worse.
And if Ubuntu isn't your thing than their or a million other linux OSes.
And that's before we discuss OSx which I still perosnally dislike but it would be hard for me to argue it is worse than Windows
Yes.
> From personal experience [...]
Let me stop you right there: I don't give a rat's ass what your experience is. Sorry to have to put it so bluntly, but literally every single time someone admits to not liking Linux Desktop a Linux Desktop user crawls out of the woodwork to tell them how great everything is for them like they're supposed to care. I care what my experience is when it comes to things I use.
> And if Ubuntu isn't your thing than their or a million other linux OSes.
Most of them are even worse than Ubuntu. The best ones are only slightly better.
> And that's before we discuss OSx
Which is exclusive to Apple hardware I don't like and has even worse software support than Linux, especially if you count games and I do.
Let me stop you right there: I don't give a rat's ass what your experience is.
See how dumb it is to yell at people for sharing their opinions about tech on an internet forum for sharing your opinions about tech?
It's OK to disagree. I disagree with you too. Maybe all these people come out of the wood works because they genuinely have had great experiences with Ubuntu/ whatever
Wow, a trifecta! :-)
Writing on mobile?
(Eat it, Nadella-fans -- this is what critics said he would do)
Don't forget their sabotage of DR-DOS before Windows even came onto the scene. They're old hands at playing dirty.
Luckily, Win11 is here. Maybe it's time to make a T-shirt?
Vista was good but wasn't optimized for the average hardware of the time.
7 was pretty darn good all around.
8 was bad. 8.1 was better than 8 but still worse than 7.
10 was better than 8.1 and almost as good as 7 until they started tightening the thumb screws on all of the telemetry and forced redirects to edge and bing, then they started blasting you with ads and foisting new services on you left and right and taking control of your taskbar layout against your will, nagging you to stay with the setup that serves their desires and not your desires.
Now 11 makes it twice as difficult to get your personal baseline setup, actively fights against user alterations, and disables crowd-sourced workarounds.
I'm guessing that Windows 12 will come with a drone that will taze you every time you open firefox and Windows 13 will require you to stare lovingly into the eyes of a bust of Bill Gates to activate the login prompt.
MS is making a fatal error of not realising that the job of an OS is to do whatever the user wants and then getting out of the way as fast as possible. A desktop OS is not a "lifestyle platform", or whatever it is MS calls it, it's a tool, like a screwdriver.
On of the appeals of the LTSC branch is that it doesn't have a lot of user-hostile feature kits in it to begin with, so you're not constantly fighting to keep them turned off.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/11/latest_windows_11_bui...
Eeeeaaaaahhhh!
Then Pete,John and Keith with the monster sound.
Also, that song mentions "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" which is apt for this post.
Seriously though this seems to violate the public trust given their dominant position. And moves like this make me more likely to go back to desktop Linux.
Most likely, someone found a legitimate Windows 11 bug that will be patched out within a month. Meanwhile, Apple premeditated releasing extensions for their own mobile browser while blocking FF/Chrome from doing the same until some point in the future. I know it's fun to hate on MS but Apple is far and away the worse offender here.
It would take a very weird bug to make the "select program for protocol" dialog ignore all entries except all versions of Edge; an even weirder coincidence to also ignore the relevant registry setting in favor of Edge when clicking links, and yet more so when when it only affects that protocol but not the other weird ms-specific ones.
Combined with how there was just a small burst of publicity over Firefox and Brave now also support capturing microsoft-edge: links, it feels like the "random bug" explanation is not the more likely one.