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Comment by deafpolygon | Hacker News Reader

I was with up up until your statement:

> Basically, if you want to have choice in a browser, don't use Apple products or a Microsoft OS.

I get the "Apple products" bit - Apple famously refuses to allow you to install your own browser engine under the hood on iOS. But Microsoft? Can you qualify that with some concrete examples?

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Just one example is forcing you to open links in edge regardless of your "default" browser: https://betanews.com/2021/05/07/force-web-links-open-in-defa...

As I see this is not about opening normal links

This is about opening link targeted to edge

"Copy the following test link:

microsoft-edge:https://www.betanews.com"

and exactly why should anyone be allowed to target their links to a specific browser instead of letting me use the browser of my choice?

For the majority of links there is no particular reason but for some specific cases where the link brings you to a App that the developer has build with that browser in mind it is useful. I want a way to force the opening of that app in the browser for which I have tested and don't want to receive support calls that the app is not working because you opened it in your obscure browser of choice.

such apps should not exist. it's a throwback to the old internet explorer days.

you will receive support calls from people who don't run windows and thus don't have edge

Well it's how the mailto:blabla@blabla works.

yes, but the target for each of those is user-configurable. any request to another browser would go back to my preferred one.

regardless, web-apps that depend on a specific browser should not exist.

If browsers had equal features support then yea

that's what the standards are for.

any feature that is not implemented in all major browsers should be considered experimental. it might go away. it's fine to use such features for experiments, but they should not be put into production and relied upon.

any differences in the implementation of the standard should be considered a bug. warning users about bugs is fine, but automatically redirecting me to some other browser that you deem working is not.

Uh what?

If one browser laggs behind then the rest shouldnt deploy?

This is crazy

depends how much your users matter to you. if a browser[1] lags behind on a feature, you should avoid using that feature on a production website, or provide a gracefull fallback. but by no means should you redirect the users to a browser that supports that feature.

[1] i am only counting major modern browsers here: chrome, edge, firefox, safari. you are welcome to support more, but these at a minimum.

If I have 20% FF users and 70% chromium users, then I shouldnt deploy a feature which will serve those 70% and wait who knows how long till FF catches up?

Wtf.

you are willing to anger 20% of your userbase? you can do whatever you want, just don't expect everyone to go along. but if i run a business and my revenue depends on my browser users, i'd be very hesitant at loosing even 5% of them, let alone 20%.

Why would all of them leave your service just because one thing is not available on ff?

Popular as hell services are constantly annoying users e.g reddit fb

Or arent or werent available on web at all - iirc instagram

If you have leverage then they aint gonna leave as hard as you make it sound

well, it depends on whether the site breaks if a browser feature is missing or not.

if it doesn't break then you have a graceful fallback which i did already suggest as an acceptable way to support new features in case they are not supported.

but if the site breaks in some way, it may prevent me to complete the objective on the site. if i wanted to buy something, and the site doesn't work because of that missing browser feature, then i will have to go buy somewhere else. it doesn't matter how much leverage the site has if i can't use it.

What? No, it's the exact opposite! If I set my system to open mailto links in Thunderbird, the link won't randomly override and open in Outlook. That's the whole point: The link specifies what should get opened, and then the application of the user's choice handles it.

Isn't that just using Application URL scheme? MacOS does this too.

Microsoft somehow keeps "accidentally" resetting my default browser (they love to do that on quarterly updates", they just threw an Edge icon on my desktop that reappears on every reboot and their default browser choice dialog is harassing you really hard to avoid changing the default away from Edge.

They're doing a huge amount of dark pattern stuff to avoid people from using other browsers these days.

I remember this happening to me I think 2 times back in the early days of Windows 10 and the initial push for Edge after getting rid of Internet Explorer. And yeah, they shouldn't do that.

But since then, I've used Windows 10 and now use Windows 11 on multiple devices, and in my immediate friends and family they all use it too, and this has not happened at all.

They absolutely do it on major updates when you get the fullscreen "Oh, we need to update your account again" form. If you miss the tiny links "Please don't" in the corner, it'll reset the browser and default search provider.

I've never got such a screen on a feature update. Perhaps it's because I've got local accounts?

The article talks specifically about the hoops Microsoft makes you jump through to install an alternative browser.

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