Microsoft, this was not a nice thing to do to a user.
It turns out during the first startup after a feature update in Windows 11 (and 10) they sometimes show a bunch of new prompts, one of which is a very vague text with a big (default) "Recommended Settings" and a very small, differently rendered cancellation.
If you're one of the folks that just presses next / enter through a wizard without reading the instructions (which my friend was), you might have accidentally applied the "Recommended Settings".
And -of course- switching the browser to Edge is "recommended" by Microsoft.
Shitty dark pattern for sure but at least not forced settings change (yet).
I have two Apple machines. One is old and stuck on Catalina – three iterations behind the current macOS [Catalina -> Big Sur -> Monterey -> Ventura] – so for a long while I kept both on Catalina to avoid issues. Sadly, the older machine died a few weeks ago, so I decided to update the other machine to Monterey (because Ventura is still in the teething-troubles phase).
Now I get about 9 Mbps here, so I started the upgrade before bed, and left it overnight to do its thing. Next day I was presented with the garish boot Monterey boot-screen and logged in.
That’s it. This is a boring story.
There were a few small cosmetic differences, but otherwise everything was just as it was before. No clicks required. No dark patterns. Dare I say: it just worked.
There’s no reason Microsoft, or any other company, can’t do this. It’s simply respecting the user/customer.
I left the Microsoft universe about a decade ago simply because it felt too stressful. Nothing was concrete. It felt like the sand was always shifting beneath you. I have no love of Apple – I’ll move if they start playing games – but for now, they do most things – far from everything – well, and I never feel disrespected, even if my wallet is somewhat lighter every now and then.
If you file a bug in feedback hub under the Windows Update category it will collect the diagnostics required to fix this issue and prevent it from happening again.
If you also provide a link to the filed feedback to me I’ll be happy to triage it personally as I frequently work with the teams that are responsible for update migration.
Thanks!
Thanks for your apology. I can imagine this could happen to some random unknown software team but not to the supposed leader of the desktop. I believe this is honest apology but I am not sure I can trust that the issue was a bug and not a feature.
The nature of the process used for most Feature Updates requires user data and preference migration and transfer. Notably, an entirely new installation of Windows is created and then existing user data and preferences are migrated or transferred as appropriate. There a variety of good reasons for this from a technical standpoint, but it has certain complexity and performance trade offs so is only used for certain types of updates.
Other types of updates use an in-place upgrade methodology that doesn’t require user data and preference migration but has certain characteristics that make it currently less suitable for major feature updates.
Thanks!
I have learned over the years that constraints and complexity are often abused to force one's way.
Not necessarily even consciously but if the collective train of thought in a company predominantly wants to prefer one outcome (i.e. market share, world domination) at the expense of another outcome (making users happy), then it tends to be that it's really easy to do things that result in the former and really complex and difficult to do things that result in the latter.
https://tritondatacenter.com/blog/the-power-of-a-pronoun
I completed the second decade of my software development career just a few years ago and it already seems like the third decade is speeding by. The first 17 years were in the *nix world and the last five have been as part of the Windows development team.
There have been many times that I have incorrectly assumed why a particular outcome occurred only to find out later as I suddenly became responsible for that same scenario that they had good reasons for their choices, and it was either the best possible outcome at the time given constraints or very much an unintended one.
In short, I have been extremely fortunate to have a number of mentors during my career that have helped me realize that perspective and empathy are key to understanding the complexities of software development. Through those experiences I have come to believe that software development is just as much a social discipline as a technical one, especially at scale.
Thanks for your kind consideration.
Thanks for chiming in :)
Gamifying browsing habits, monetizing MSN celebrity gossip on stock widgets and built-in search capabilities… etc… how are we supposed to be productive with such childish garbage?
Your attitude is about fifteen years out of date. We live in a world where you have to turn off your wifi if you don't want to use a Microsoft account and any option Microsoft doesn't like us using is displayed in a tiny font that's almost the same color as the background. You don't think we can tell when we're being told to go fuck ourselves?
I've been facinated by microsoft in recent years, they are really putting in a jekyll and hyde performance imo. They are consistently great at developer relations in some areas, with things like generous contributions to hackathons, visual studio code, github copilot, visual studio etc. But seem to make decisions in other areas, in my opinion particularly around the OS team, that needlessly antagonize a lot of people.
If I were living in a place where they had offices, working for MS is something I might consider one day, if only to be able to contribute to such important things that so many people use daily but I feel like I bounce back and forth on this opinion when such confusing decisions come out with seeming silence from microsoft's end.
I laughed out loud - actually. "Pass the butter Edge...."
OneDrive, OneNote and many other Microsoft products have, I think, been much less successful they could have been because Microsoft worked really hard to kill them. I'd like to see a culture change at Microsoft where they stop doing this -- it's what I'd expect from that mobile OS that has a trashcan for a logo, not from the market leading desktop OS.
Allow me to be skeptical. This isn't the first time.
One user filing a bug will absolutely not "prevent it from happening again".
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-21684329
> It introduced a Browser Choice Screen pop-up in March 2010 as part of a settlement following an earlier EU competition investigation.
> But the US company dropped the feature in a Windows 7 update in February 2011.
> Microsoft said the omission had been the result of a "technical error".
> Microsoft has been fined 561m euros ($731m; £484m) for failing to promote a range of web browsers, rather than just Internet Explorer, to users in the European Union (EU).
I would believe this explanation if that this kind of "bug" would occasionally happen in the other ways, not benefiting Microsoft.
Computer owned by my sister and unfortunately using Microsoft was hit by something similar - massive slowdowns, request to upgrade some cloud drive (leading to credit card form).
Turns out that random local files were being deleted and moved into tragically slow cloud drive, and Windows in utterly misleading way claimed that space run out and demanded money for more space.
Hard drive had over 1 800 000 GB of free space and Windows claimed that she should pay for more space.
> If you also provide a link to the filed feedback to me I’ll be happy to triage it personally as I frequently work with the teams that are responsible for update migration.
That is an intentional user-hostile behaviour, not an accident. Or at least of pattern of not really testing for bug that increase some metrics (cloud drive adoption needs to be higher? lets show misleading message that will result in it being enabled!)
1800 Tb free? No wonder you were mad.
Sadly I cannot edit it anymore, so this typo will remain.
It was only 1 800 GB of free space
There is something deeply flawed with the culture at Microsoft / the Windows development team, and it has been that way the better part of a decade now. Stop milking your users for cents by turning Windows into malware.
If this bug is rare and your personal insistence on prioritizing this fix makes any kind of difference, that's a bug in the organization and a misalignment of individual and business priorities. If a team can be randomized by an isolated instance without taking overall impact into consideration, that's a warning sign about the health of the business and the product.
In college one of the most transformative assignments I was given was actually a term paper where I was required to study what were then considered the three major sociological models for society (as I recall, so forgive me as it's been quite some time): structural-functional, social-conflict, and symbolic-interaction. In studying each of those sociological models, the one that resonated the most with me was that of symbolic-interaction.
The core idea behind the symbolic-interaction model, as I recall, being that society is a result of the everyday interactions between people just like you and me. With that in mind, I continue to believe that there are often key individuals within any given group of people, whether that is a corporation, government, or otherwise, that can drive significant, positive change throughout that group and that can have a profound effect outside that group as well.
I'd like to encourage folks to stop and consider for a moment that there are more than 1.4 billion monthly active devices running Windows 10 or 11. Obviously not all of those devices run any specific version of Windows, but that should provide some useful perspective. As a result, I'm always looking at the data, checking for patterns, and trying to identify both positive and unexpected trends. Cases like this are another opportunity for growth and to help others, and I'm happy to do so when I can.
I have a pair of Bose QC35 headphones from 2016 or possibly 2017. They have bluetooth.
One day, an update to Windows 10 prevented them from working with Windows. If I'm remembering right, they would still "connect", but they couldn't play anything other than the occasional glitchy click sound. This problem was never fixed. I verified that they continue to work with non-Windows devices, and they failed to work with other current Windows devices.
I'm not sure how this could have happened, but it dramatically lowered my opinion of Windows.
I still have the headphones; if you know how to generate a relevant log I'll look into it.
My theory is that the bluetooth hardware community doesn't have any rigorous testing suite for compliance with the spec. Instead implementors just test with a few other vendors' half broken implementations of the stack, and then they patch their own hardware just enough to make it work and release things.
I bought a bluetooth keyboard and mouse a few weeks ago (both from different vendors). Neither device works over bluetooth on my linux workstation. I can get the keyboard to work by running some random commands I found on the internet, but it stops working when I sleep my computer. (A suddenly broken keyboard is the worst kind of surprise). The mouse has never worked over bluetooth. It just spits errors into my kernel's bluetooth stack.
Both devices are just plugged in via USB cables now.
I suspect linux's bluetooth stack is spec compliant, but its missing all the dirty workarounds for broken hardware that exist in macos and windows.
Anyway, Microsoft shouldn't have broken your headphones. But Bose is probably just as much to blame.
As if it didn't happened AS intended, using a dark pattern by choice, and compatible with many other similar changes increasingly happening on Windows for the last 5 years or more?
"Whoops! I'm so sorry, Mrs. H. I guess this just isn't my week."
Why in the world would you develop at all a process for changing all my defaults over to MS's own products? That's a truckload of hubris, thinking that maybe I'd decide that every single one of the apps I normally use has suddenly been surpassed by Microsoft. I can't imagine why you'd even consider that anyone would want the change that was done to my system.
(Edit: Actually, when it comes to gaming, Linux is getting better and better)
80% of common tasks isn’t enough when part of the remaining 20% is absolutely necessary for work
if your cad software or whatever doesn't work with your OS of choice I'd take it up with the vendor
Seems like MacOS does not run on hardware that is not sold by Apple.
It was horribly slow but something more optimized like Rosetta might help.
It'll be a much harder game though for sure.
Many are MS-only shops, but a large and growing section are hybrid or in some cases Mac-only.
The rise of cloud (ie, OS-independent) solutions has had it's impact: Windows isn't required for the vast populace (MS still takes it's tax via Office365) of business workers.
The next frontier is Chrome as the overlord of the browser realm.
Almost made me spit out my drink
The very first MS-DOS also included a text editor - for free! Oh, the humanity! Those evil Redmondians!
1) the text editor shipped with the OS is extremely basic. It is not competing to be the world's favourite text editor, and is probably required to have a usable OS out of the box.
2) the web browser was essentially a competing platform to the OS itself for many user tasks. To leverage your monopoly on one platform to control another is against anti trust.
2. If it was doing essential OS tasks, then it was part of the operating system.
I hope we can agree a text editor is different that a browser, word processor, or an IDE (at least nowadays). Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable. Hell, they shipped Nodepad and Wordpad, and neither dented Word's market share.
Regarding 2, this is unbelievably naive. For such an important product, of course Microsoft would find a way to make it do "essential" OS tasks. Apple/iOS is obviously much worse in this regard. But for better or worse, iOS devices are a minority in the EU.
As if giving consumers free tools was harming them. As if Microsoft ever prevented any other browser from being installed.
Never mind that today nearly every OS comes with a free browser. Even my Kindle comes with one.
The Start Menu in Windows 10/11 is HTML/CSS. It's not a matter of "finding ways" to make it do things, HTML was pushed as being the document description / display technology, why wouldn't Microsoft use it for Explorer folder views and Active Desktop? Why shouldn't they be allowed to? You could embed web pages in the Win98 desktop background, that's the kind of embedded document thing people were researching and crowing about in the 60s and 70s in alternative OS's. It's the kind of thing users wanted with rainmeter and SysInternals' bginfo. IIRC you could edit the CSS and change the theme of Explorer folder views, give them new colours and background images.
> "Nobody complains that Microsoft ships Nodepad or Paint, because they are the bare minimum and avoidable."
Nobody complains that Microsoft shipped the best CSharp compiler csc.exe (before .Net span off into its own thing), and didn't ship or encourage Mono or Xamarin compilers. Or PowerShell and not Perl. Why don't those things attract the interests of the courts? And now they can ship Edge, and that's apparently fine now?
And something even more annoying is: That pops up in the OOBE of every major update. If you accidentally click "yes", your settings fxxks up. Come on, I already click "no" last time, you shouldn't even ask me again about this.
This kind of behavior should be illegal, IMO.
...or as I like to call it whenever I run into one, "where's the 'Fuck Off!' button?"
I'm wondering how does this happen? I have Chrome as the default browser on my Win11 machine for a year now, and after all the updates, Chrome is still the default. The default apps for PDF, music and video play-back were also kept between updates. Updates never did anything funky for me, just added improvements and new features, which kept me contempt with it.
Really curious why this would happen to you but never happened to me. I have Win11 Pro edition, installed from scratch from the official ISO (not OEM), if that makes any difference. Maye OEM or Home editions behave differently?
And the dialog that nukes your app default pops up in OOBE of every win 11 major update. (To clarify, I don't think the dialog should be there at first place. A dialog that defaults to give user a big problem is just dumb)
These anti customer dark patterns are going to drive a wedge into the golden goose of corporate sales. At the same place as in my first statement, Macs are slowly showing up in places you'd never have guessed before. Clinics, law offices, regulated environments. IE corporate MS bread and butter. Someone over there needs to get their head out of their corporate ass and see the writing on the wall and turn the ship before it hits the iceberg they're heading at under full steam.
It was probably some manager's KPI at Microsoft to increase Edge market share so he decided that forcing Edge to default everytime would push him ahead and get him that sweet promotion.
Microsoft lacks a common vision for Windows and good leadership. As with the products of any massive corporation, Windows now feels like a product built "by committee", a result from various internal turf wars, where every manager or gang tries to push their agenda to gain visibility inside the org to show something at their next performance review and hopefully get promoted, at the expense of the end-user and the OS being universally hated by consumers and businesses. "So, what did your team achieve last year? Well, I was in charge of putting Candy-Crush and other partner-network ads in the Star Menu, giving us an extra 10 Million USD a year. Great, the investors and bean counters will love the extra revenue. HR will contact you about your promotion. Congrats!"
I think much of Apple's success was Jobs dogfooding every product being developed before giving the final go ahead for shipping. I wish Satya Nadela and other higher ups there would dogfood fresh installs of Windows (not the images provided by their IT department) and see the horrible mess they're shipping to their customers. Then Nadela and those execs should ask themselves, "Would I actually want to spend money on this and have to live with it every day? If not, what could I fix to make it desirable so that others would want to buy it?". This way of consumer first thinking allowed Jobs to make Apple what it is today.
Microsoft needs to put in charge of Windows someone who's in touch with consumers and business to guide this project with an iron fist instead of letting various committees and gangs sneak their own agendas in the end product. But I think Microsoft just doesn't care that much about Windows anymore and is instead focusing on Azure & cloud, OneDrive, Office365, Xbox and buying game studios, etc. so Windows is slowly rotting away unnoticed by those at the helm.
I wouldn't call it slowly, but you are right about your assessment. It is already quite some years ago, when evaluating the privacy and security measures of my machine, I had to conclude that MS *is* the adversary. I have a chuckle when people ask me what virus scanner they would need for their Windows machine. It is like asking how to prevent a deadly disease from catching a cold. It's not a hyperbole. All the opt-outs are illegal in the first place, but the damning fact is that MS does not allow you to switch of stealing part of your personal data anyway.
You should not run Windows. If you have to, because some legacy software does not have an alternative (and I find that has become increasingly rare), then run it in a vm with no internet access.
Also, we should really stop the meme about the year of the Linux Desktop. KDE has far surpassed Windows already. I use both OSes and have to conclude Windows is beyond repair. Nobody cares about this sinking ship, and that is a positive end of this rant.
*EDIT* I even think MS thinks the same wrt win in a vm. I can imagine they will ship Linux one time and have win apps open in a legacy win vm.
Since Windows 10, it definitely feels more like a Linux distribution than a polished, paid product. A hodgepodge of garbage with differing (and sometimes opposite) UI paradigms, incentives and terrible quality.
This is something we tolerate in the Linux world because it's all done by mostly unpaid random people with different goals, skill levels and opinions, but seeing this from a huge, for-profit company that produces masterpieces such as Windows 7 is ridiculous.
I switched to Macs in 2004, and have loved the experience most of the time, but fear that it's not so much that Apple is above this sort of thing as that they're a little bit behind Microsoft in doing it. Already, do you want to use iCloud? Are you sure you don't want to use iCloud? Maybe now you want to use iCloud? And it's relatively easy to ignore, but of countless small such choices is Microsoft-style user hostility made.
1) Only let you login using a Microsoft account. No local account
2) If secure boot is enabled in the BIOS it will be locked to 'S' mode where it will only install and run software from the MS App store. You can not disable it without logging into the MS Store and downloading and running a tool to disable it. The only way I found around this was to go into the BIOS and disable Secure Boot. That immediately disabled 'S' mode. This was not documented anywhere.
No defaults changed for me. I wonder what the bug is. Note: I'm using Pro, not Home.
At the same time windows does drive me nuts with it's darkpartterns. The worst for me on Windows 11 was all the keyboard shortcuts that try to launch MS Office, MS Teams and related crap. The only way to turn them off is via PowerTools and even then they're not off on remote desktop.
- I lost the ability to use my trackpad without having to wait for 1 second, holding my finger on the trackpad. This is palm-rejection. And there is NO way to turn it off. Rebooting the laptop temporarily sets the wait-time to 0 seconds, until I close the lid and sleep the laptop, then wake it again. There is a "sensitivity" feature, which uses words like "low" and "highest" .. and this does nothing to fix the issue, perceivable to me.
- I lost the ability to use my game-pad with built-in trackpad. I don't know why that feature disappeared. Clicking and swiping now does .. things .. but not moving the mouse nor right/left-clicking the button.
- I somehow failed to "update and shutdown." I chose that option, which said it should take 3 minutes. After 15 minutes, and multiple reboots, I was left BACK ON not shutdown, and the "update and shutdown" menu was still present. I don't know what Windows 11 even needed to update in the first place.
Overall Windows disrespects the user. Its "run all the drivers, on all PC configurations, from the beginning of time" is no doubt the culprit. That kind of complexity is impossible for humans to manage. (garbage-can emoji)
My only real annoyance so far is that all my old context menu items are now tucked away into an additional context menu, such that I now have to right-click -> "Show more options" -> old context menu. A bit of an odd choice.
Sounds like Douglas Adams - mostly harmless
I don't use windows at all but it is just giant pit of advertisements targeted towards the very basic computer users
I don’t own a Windows device (and haven’t since Win98) and have had dislikes about it since the early 90s, but I’ve also supported it professionally and would never recommend someone avoid updates. Buy a Mac, perhaps, but until you’re ready to switch you should stay current.
Microsoft used to be the "trust us with your workflow" company. The one that would go out of the way to make sure your badly coded DOS games still worked.
They've gone so far in the other direction-- blowing up user settings and workflows to push whatever KPI-of-the-week they're chasing-- that the trust is gone. People are afraid to accept even necessary security fixes because they no longer trust Microsoft not to break their experience.
Remember when the upgrade script started showing a friendly "all your files are right where you left them?" That's freaking TABLE STAKES. Your customers expect that. You shouldn't have to reassure them of that. It's like saying "our hamburgers don't give you genital warts."
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/07/windo...