Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it more likely to be incompetence than malice? Perhaps the ticket said: "Implement Edge for Windows 11, make sure links will open in Edge." and not "screw some stuff up, then go play some golf".

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.

View on HN

> Implement Edge for Windows 11, make sure links will open in Edge.

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."

Or, another possibility, "special links, that specifically call for edge browser, are opening in unsupported browsers, causing apps to fail"

Mostly they're just Bing searches.

At the scale of Windows, "mostly" isn't very useful.

Do you have an example of a link actually needing Edge? And the point is whole categories don't. Search. Weather. News.

That's a bit too much speculation for me. If there was some technical detail that would show exactly that, sure, but in this case it just seems to be a missing option.

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.

The article explained the details. Microsoft apps put microsoft-edge:// in front of links to make them open in Edge since Windows 10. People worked around it by having another app handle the microsoft-edge protocol. Now Microsoft broke that.

That's what it explained yes, but that doesn't cover the protocol handler on the shell side at all. Either it's a protocol with a protocol handler or it isn't.

Your meaning is entirely unclear. It was a protocol users could configure like the rest. Now they can't.

Yes, that is the functional description, and I was writing about the technical implementation. User overrides work on protocols, but if it's not a user override anymore it makes sense that it wouldn't apply the settings since there is nothing to apply to.

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.

The details you dismissed established it wasn't accidentally hard coded. And Microsoft admitted it was intentional.[1]

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-doubles-down-on-its-...

I don't use Windows, but according to the article, this is a new update. Edge was already built-in a lot of shortcuts in Windows 11, but people used tools like EdgeDeflector to circumvent that. The new update prevented that from happening, resulting in an error message when trying to do it. Seems like a deliberate choice to me.

Maybe that would be true if they hadn't already been making it harder and harder to not use edge as the default in windows for the past few years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com