Selecting “Don't update browser settings” still resets the default to Edge | Hacker News Reader

Selecting “Don't update browser settings” still resets the default to Edge

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40 pointsvord108011 comments

It's really saddening how common these dark patterns are becoming, it feels like you have to play some sort of intricate chess match to configure your software these days.

  [] Turn off annoying setting
  [x] I want to re-enable the setting after closing this dialog

  Additional settings:

  [] Really disable annoying setting

  Advanced:

  [x] Re-enable annoying setting after restarting the application

  Contrarian settings:

  [x] Ignore the above checkboxes if they disable the setting

  Other settings:

  [x] If by "disable", you mean "enable", then yes.

  Fill out your email address here and our team will contact you with information about how to disable the setting:
  [        ]

Linux doesn't change my settings for me, I don't know why people continue putting up with changed settings and advertising in a piece of software they paid for.

I use Linux and Windows heavily for both home and work. I'd say I spend more time tweaking settings in Linux than Windows. The difference is in Windows I'm spending more time tweaking it to stop doing certain things I don't want and in Linux I'm spending more tweaking settings to get it to do the thing I want.

For example with Linux and browsers I'm spending my time trying to get various types of hardware acceleration (be it rendering or GPU decode) working and Windows I'm spending my time decrapifying the Edge experience.

I genuinely like both but I also genuinely feel each has their own upsides and downsides. There are also exceptions to these rules, on Linux it's much easier to set up a build environment but I may have to work around some build stuff the OS set up for itself while on Windows I'll be manually tweaking much more to get to the same point.

The thing I get on Windows that seems rarer (although not unheard of) in Linux software is that sense that I'm fighting for control over the computer with some scooby-doo villain that has deliberately constructed an intricate obstacle course that is intended to annoy me into accepting other settings than I want.

"See, Mr Bond, after you kept postponing the updates and we replaced all the shut down and reboot buttons with install updates buttons, that just was a ruse. A ruse to get you to do a hard power-off, and you fell for it. Now you have no choice to sit back as we install the updates and forcibly pair your local account with your Microsoft account the next time you start your computer!"

Pure natural selection? Crap like this works, so it is inevitable that the more hostile your marketing is the more users you are going to get, and thus the more likely someone is going to submit it to HN.

And then every time Edge updates it displays a modal dialog that tries to bully me into changing the default search engine to Bing. It feels like Windows gets more user-hostile with every update.

All of the effort that Microsoft has put into things like WSL and Docker integration to make the platform compelling to web application developers is undermined by these tactics. I'm getting really tired of playing whack-a-mole with all of the shady growth hacking that is built directly into the operating system. It bothers me enough that I'm ready to either switch to a Mac or go back to Linux.

I switched to Mac for work and I hated it for a while. The Mac OS was maddening for a while! Swipes did random things, it took me some time to discover Command+Space, and so on.

I will never ever go back, now that I’m over the hump.

I'm genuinely curious how this happens. It seems impossible without a) extreme malice and/or b) extreme incompetence. Is there really a project manager authorized to say "make this checkbox a no-op and damn the ensuing anti-trust case"? Or, if it's a simple bug, did the programmer who implemented this really ship it without anyone even testing it once?

I also got this setup dialog after I did a Windows update last night, and I also clicked on "Don't update your browser settings". Just went back and checked - my default browser is still set to Firefox, and .html files are still configured to open with Firefox. So it's possible that the poster encountered some bug specific to his configuration rather than a malicious browser hijacking campaign by Microsoft. (I'm running Windows 10 Professional.)

At this point, I'm frankly done attributing to stupidity what can also be attributed to malice.

There have been so many errors with the default browser choice somehow resetting to Edge that it doesn't matter anymore whether it's the result of malice or sloppy QA. The result is the same and it's a net win for Microsoft. Inaction is also action.

It may not be universal, but it is hardly unique: https://twitter.com/Schouten_B/status/1459952197517684747?s=...

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