The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
thomask.sdf.org
thomask.sdf.org
But by now they've shoved their core consumer products so chock full of crap that even I am starting to look for a way out.
I got my son a new laptop recently and it has Windows 11. Did you know that Windows 11 has a feature called “widgets”, a popup from the left bottom which has weather, traffic warnings nearby etc? It makes a fair bit of sense, except that it’s filled to the rim with terrible clickbaity news headlines and you can’t turn it off! Someone at Microsoft decided that the entire Windows install base, ie nearly everybody, must really read news about foreign celebrities doing questionable things.
The only way to get rid of it is a Powershell incantation that removes the entire Widgets feature. Better than terrible news, but still nuts.
Edge has this too. There’s now a Bing button in the toolbar full of “discover” and “suggest” type features that nobody wants.
I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. The core of both Edge and Windows 11 are tastefully designed. You can really see that it’s been built by people who want to ship great software. Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work? Who at Microsoft benefits from me seeing the latest Taylor Swift gossip when I just want to know when it’ll rain? Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)?
You are right about one thing: I refuse to purchase a Windows computer, and have been refusing for a decade.
I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
Personally, or at work? Personally, the first steps are actually pretty easy: install an operating system that doesn't do this stuff. And then deal with the fallout as best you can without going back — e.g. finding replacements for software that only ran on $OTHER_OS. Source: did it decades ago. No regrets.
At work? Good luck. We have no credible professional bodies that enough workers are involved in for them to have much relevance, and employers that actually have any kind of values relevant to this discussion are vanishingly rare.
I think the most productive thing would be to start conversations about ethical choices in the computing professions. Start local (friends, colleagues, local meet-ups). Find existing groups with similar values, and share experiences. Then _federate_. Set up regular inter-group meet-ups. Over time, formalise a union out of the federation.
Edit: oh, and don't be an extremist. Keep your policies lean and well within the Overton window. Pick your battles carefully. Compromise isn't weakness — it's just realistic. As long as you're moving things in the right direction, it's still good.
To Microsoft, that isn't considered to be a revolt or an intervention. When receiving consumer input of such a nature, the preferred terminology is "Positive user experience report."
> because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS.
IT departments in huge corporations have purchasing requirements specs. Require any software that you pay money for to run on at least one non-Microsoft operating system. As a second source requirement.
If more than a trivial number of large corporations do this, developers make sure their software runs on other systems, which is what allows users to switch. Large IT departments are in a position to actually move the needle here.
This also has the side benefit of being a heuristic that excludes primarily low-quality software, because most higher-quality software is already portable.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
Also another company we are related to tried a roll out and found they couldn't get Apple to deliver anything other than crap off the shelf configs in any quantity. Dell could. So the trial was ended.
I wouldn't draw any assumption that higher quality software is portable. I've seen monocultural genius (Keysight Genesys) and cross platform garbage (libreoffice) for example.
Smart move. Truly sucks that we have to do this nowadays, but this is what Microsoft has become. Back in the day I would format a machine I purchased from a vendor due to all the added garbage; Microsoft is becoming just as bad.
Or maybe use VirtualBox or VMware?
As for VirtualBox and VMware, that means I have two operating systems instead of one :(
I still use Windows on my personal machine due to gaming still not being comparably good on Linux across all of the titles I want to play - sometimes native releases aren't available, other times even Proton has issues running stuff on Steam. Apart from that, there is actually very little holding me back, since a lot of things on Linux are just better (mostly development related) and in general most of the popular distros feel good enough as a daily driver.
I wrote about my experiences before: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... but I don't think that in regards to gaming (or other software) all of the titles will ever be supported, so a Windows VM with GPU passthrough might be an okay choice in the future for entertainment and running some specific software packages, with some Linux distro on the host for the rest of my computing needs.
Which is a shame, because on a technical level Windows is okay and has lots of good software built for it in the past. Even the Edge browser is an improvement upon what they did previously (IE and the old Edge, though I'd say the old Edge was reasonably okay too). It's just the project management aspect of it that's annoying - the OS being taken in a direction with mainstream appeal (which is debatably not an issue to many), but without ways to always turn those customizations off and do it easily.
The game output is pushed out of the GPU exactly as if you were playing on bare metal. Streaming assumes some form of processing and pushing bits down a pipe.
I wiped the disk and installed Ubuntu.
I think this strategy is going to kill them in the long run. I was a pure Windows user, until I was forced to spend some time on mac for a job. What do you know, its just way more pleasant.
You'll see what I mean when the OSX updates start undoing changes you've made to settings and things like that. For your own good, of course.
Arbitrary UI changes aren't "making things easy for me," either.
Neither is forcing me into value-added services like iCloud.
I also recently downgraded from Windows 11 to Windows 10. Windows 11 was just too intrusive and many non-configurable features. Windows 11 is also slower, has more bugs and more unstable than Windows 10.
I'm guessing that we need to abandon Microsoft's products when Windows 10 reaches end of life, not something I looking forward too because I'm not a big fan of Linux desktop nor the Mac desktop.
Right there with you. Somewhere in my comment history here six years ago was my suggestion for Microsoft to give up on Internet Explorer and create their own fork of Chromium.
They could’ve gotten massive adoption if they did it right. Instead I had to turn off their useless auto-coupon feature, be ever vigilant to keep them from switching my search provider to Bing, frequently turn off the distracting new tab content, etc.
Switched to Firefox and planning to dual-boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu soon.
It doesn't help Microsoft apparently also managed to make dual boot more difficulty. Some years ago it was quite seamless, you could rely on automatic partition and it just worked. Today windows messes with the Linux bootloader after install, and to make it work I have to resort to advanced partition mode.
The only thing I can imagine is that they are making a lot more than a penny or two a day from each Windows user they sell down the river.
Otherwise the marketshare graph that concinds linked to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212328 ) would be treated as an existential emergency. The only rational conclusion is that they no longer GAF about Windows as a product with paying users.
Anecodtally, people aren't moving from Windows to Mac, people are moving from desktop platforms to phones. Maybe Microsoft is taking a ride it into the ground approach. Usage growth for desktop Windows is off the table, Windows Phone is dead, so revenue growth for Windows needs to come from throwing users under the bus?
Meanwhile on Android they also started screwing everything up, which led me to switch from Outlook and Edge to k9 and Bromite.
I don't know what's going on in the applications teams at Microsoft, but it's really soured me on the "new" Microsoft, and I've been a fan up until relatively recently too. I just hope VS Code isn't next.
From whom? They've got two customer bases:
- corporate clients, who get this stuff removed, either as part of the purchase or by their various sysadmins who get paid to secure the purchased laptops
- personal clients, who purchase desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Windows, and could no more opt out of using it than I could opt out of using electricity in my house.
edit: I don't read good, nevermind.
I am currently at a Fortune 100 company and only wish my IT department would keep up with / disable all the ways automated MS(N) news feeds keep cropping up via Edge and Windows default behaviors, sometimes seemingly as part of automated updates.
Every time I think I have turned one off, there is yet another way Microsoft enables some kind of news feed in its system by default.
I have been through three rounds of exploring how to disable these sort of features in the last 6 months with windows 10+edge, and resent the time I have to spend trawling and searching how to turn each particular money grab off.
I really don't want the distraction at work, thank you!
P.S. Edge has been slightly more stable (and memory-efficient with many tabs?) under low-memory conditions than Chrome so I ended up starting to use it to avoid reboots at times. Wake up Google!
As usual, figuring out how to disable it took an exercise in asking "what would I call this feature if I didn't want anyone to find it and disable it".
I hate that I have so much OS specific software, definitely heading towards setting up a test computer with Linux to see how much I can get to work. It will be harder than it sounds but some of this stuff is legacy executables from Windows XP so getting them to run on Windows 11 might be just as much of a stretch.
I've personally been on Linux since my Windows XP / Windows 7 days (used to dual-boot before gaming on Linux got hella easier). I learned that the secret to successfully sticking with Linux as a "daily driver" is to stay fully aware that it's not Windows, and trying to forcefully shoe-horn it into Windows-like habits is a recipe for reinstall.
First and most important Windows habit to break is downloading your software from random websites. Install everything from your Linux distro's "package manager" (basically similar to an "app store" on other operating systems, except it has nearly all of the software available for Linux in it). Only install software from outside the package manager when you've no other option available.
Secondly, you should not generally be trying to find ways to run your Windows software under Linux for the most part (unless there happens to be a Linux-native version available), but rather seek out alternatives to the software you'd normally use. Instead of seeking out programs by name or brand, seek out software by the task it performs. Look for the Linux program that does the task you need done (example; Instead of wasting time trying to figure out how to install PhotoShop on Linux to alter or create an image, try out GIMP or Krita).
The "easy-mode" way to find these software alternatives is this nifty website https://alternativeto.net/ - where you can search the name of a program you know does the task you need, and you'll get a list of similar software that does that task. You can then further filter the search results by software license, operating system, and other details. Also handy for finding neat software for your phone or tablet as well.
Anyhow, you absolutely should not be afraid to follow through on your thought to give Linux a try. It ain't nearly the same beast it was way back when I first started using it. It's generally for the most part easier to work with than Windows (and sometimes even easier than Mac), and it's lighter on system resources and runs on a wider range of hardware. You may find you enjoy it enough to install it on your entire network, as I have. Hell, I don't even keep a Windows virtual machine around anymore, thanks to WINE (and Valve/Steam's Proton fork of it) making even that need mostly obsolete for me.
What I don't know is if I can get legacy LabVIEW code, hundred thousand dollar equipment with drivers designed for windows XP, and obnoxious stuff like microscope camera drivers and software to work.
No games thankfully (or not, I suppose, games on Linux work fine for me).
It's amazing that this stuff gets added without thought of consequence.
So your data is now hostage to Microsoft, and if you didn't read the full manual when setting up your partner's new Windows PC, you now lost her data. Writing about it, it feels like ransomware, except I guess we don't have to pay anything yet, other than an account that Microsoft can gather metrics from.
IMO this is one of the great tragedies with MS Edge. The UX is so much better than standard chromium but because of all the other crap that MS puts into it, I just can't use it. If MS open sourced Edge and someone created an "UnMicrosofted Edge", I would use that in a heartbeat.
Currently the only place I use it is on my work laptop where I don't have any personal info and just generally don't give a crap about privacy since I'm inside my company intranet, bitbucket or jira all day. It's honestly really great for that sort of thing because the vertical tabs let you have 50+ tabs open and still read what they are, but there's just no way I would use it for anything personal or outside of work.
I haven’t had too many problems with Edge myself. I use Kagi for search without issue. Don’t see any native ads. It’s fine.
You don’t need PowerShell to get rid of Widgets. You can disable it with three clicks: right click on the Taskbar, go to Taskbar settings, and toggle the switch next to Widgets at the top of the window.
Unfortunately, the powershell incantation is the only way to get rid of it...
For the same reason that Milgram and Zimbardo didn't see a revolt among their test subjects. Whenever anyone objected to the unethical things they were told to do, all the researchers had to do was give the same order to the next subject. They didn't have to go very far down the line to find someone who would cheerfully do the dirty work. And those students weren't getting six-figure paychecks.
I will never understand how Nadella gets fellated so felicitiously around here. (Hello, -4 Flagged). He has turned a decent OS into an exploitative nonconsensual experience, in which the user is constantly reminded who really 'owns' the computer they paid for. Even more offensive from a business perspective, he refuses to give the rest of us the obvious option to pay to get rid of the garbage. It is still far too much trouble to run LTSC without pirating it.
Last time I was there, nobody working there was happy about how things are going, except a few random sociopaths.
Because Windows is a free-in-practice product and it needs/wants a revenue stream.
Remember that Windows 11 can be activated with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 keys; as if that wasn't crazy enough you can straight up not activate it and you won't lose out on anything important.
As for install media? You can download those for free any time. No strings attached.
As for Edge, that really is a free-as-in-beer product. You literally can't buy it.
OEMs have to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses on prebuilt Windows computers.
---
>>Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work?
>Because Windows is a free-in-practice product and it needs/wants a revenue stream.
Windows is not free. It's because 2 revenue streams are better than one revenue stream. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn't you? (To answer my own question, it's short term thinking that will eventually drive people away from your product).
OEM licenses are tied to the motherboard, which is why that didn't work. It'll probably activate Windows 11 on the laptop just fine.
>Windows is not free. It's because 2 revenue streams are better than one revenue stream.
While you have a fair point and I agree it would be nice if Windows was either paid-for or free-adware, fact of the matter is it's doubledipping right now if one chooses to buy a new license.
It's still possible to run Windows perpetually without activation with no loss in practical functionality, so I stand by my position that Windows is free in this day and age.
And you know what they always say about time: Time is money.
That's like saying the SW ruining on your car's entertainment unit is free. Sure, that SW didn't cost you anything extra, but you paid for it through the car's purchase price.
And even then, I can’t get the widgets feature, a pretty decent idea, without the news. I want to turn off the news, not the feature.
It’s like you book a hotel room and the TV is on Fox News and you can’t turn the TV off. You ask around but everybody says that they can turn it off just fine, must be you. Turns out that they’re all in the executive suite and they also have Fox News on the TV, turned on by default when they enter the room, but for them the hotel didn’t hide the remote.
(Edit 29 minutes after, because I can't seem to post anymore:)
It still runs its webview in the background and can be toggled with the keyboard shortcut, Win+W, even if the button is hidden.
In order to fully disable it you need a Group Policy or a registry hack.
I need to figure out a way to remap it but not having admin on my corporate machine I have little hope.
macOS was just too good.
I tried setting my "Home" to Google, but that doesn't seem to do it.
Also it's open source: https://github.com/jimschubert/newtab-redirect
The only way AFAIK to change the new tab is an extension
It’s a shame because I actually liked Edge, and it was the fastest browser in my experience.
I am willing to sacrifice Bing.
> Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
It’s disappointing to see them working against their own mission like this…
Remember when places hired UX designer to, you know, design a great user experience? This is not that. This is one hundred percent how can we get ad clicks, with apparently no one to push back. Except unhappy consumers that are ignored.
Some tortured soul, chained by NDA, not allowed to tell its tale of angst and woe, is hastily linking your comment, to email manager "See!!!! It's rubbish to do this, they hate it, see!!"
Because companies are structured so that it never happens. Moreover, professionals who are too angry about direction are expected to leave. Not just in MS ... anywhere including in startups. Companies are not democracies.
My understanding is that they did, around Windows 8 or so, and all the people who had scruples about the desktop experience left and were replaced by people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place.
Yikes, you could be correct. Is this re-Ballmerizing? Wasn't that supposed to be off the table a while ago?
Not only Edge, Windows itself is acting uglier every time too.
Some of my scientific instruments are over 20 years old and going strong, a few still supported by the latest Windows software from the original vendors.
Now some of the new instruments do have lab functions the old ones never will but at least the old ones are on equal footing as data peripherals when you are sitting at a Windows 11 PC.
But the very oldest used to work with Windows 98 and Windows XP originally.
These things have always had some pretty demanding software, and before installing, the factory instructions had a few paragraphs you were advised to follow in order to configure Windows so it wouldn't have badly compromised performance.
You needed to manually disable a number of underlying Windows processes that were totally un-needed by the task at hand, if not highly detrimental.
It took about 10 minutes to go through the list and then the high-dollar software installed in 85 MB and worked really snappy on a 300 MHz processor.
To run the same old instrument now there are fully updated drivers for the new factory software so the readings can keep coming in to the PC at the same old 100 MB ethernet speed, including all the latest data integrity features from that point which didn't exist originally for these type analyzers.
It really does work and it is fully validated on Windows 11, but before it installs it autoruns a script which takes half an hour on a 3GHz PC in order to disable all the detrimental Windows defaults these days. It would take you hours if you wanted to do this manually.
Before it unzips its 10 GB package of goodness, which now runs like a dog on a dedicated near-gaming PC, compared to the number of clicks-per-minute you could get 20 years ago on a Windows 98 office machine. For the same raw data being processed the same way which is basically both the state-of-the-art at the time.
"Slowing down the speed of scientific progress one Windows version at a time."
Now I like Edge since I only use it offline, to open PDF's and web files like HTML help documents.
Interesting. I've never heard of a commercial product shipping with its own Windows decrapifying script. Any chance this script is available publicly? We build similar things (relatively high-end instrumentation that needs to stream a lot of data to the PC), and have similar customers with similar problems.
Flatpaks and Proton are really coming into their own. And not in a "year-of-Linux-desktop" way where it's perpetually "almost ready" for 5 years. So many of my teething problems moving away from Windows have been buttoned up and solved since originally using mainlining Linux 10-15 years ago.
I'm a Gnome weirdo though, Gnome 3/4 are easily my favorite complete desktop experiences (Elementary was competing there for a while).
(Internal) metrics say otherwise.
What if it really is economically better for Microsoft to "double dip" and try to monetize Windows beyond its purchase price?
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
But it did visually show a marked decline over the most recent year and a half or so, which may be a realistic indicator even if not pefectly accurate numerically.
Looks like the downturn accelerated to its current more-rapid decline right after the release of the latest Windows 11 22H2 version in late 2022.
This would have been the time the true enthusiasts, who were hoping for some respite from user hostility and compromised privacy, could finally be giving up for good.
And it doesn't look like Windows 11 relented at all, when it comes to expanding its support for more older PC hardware than it did with its original release which was so misguided in this respect. Plus more dark patterns in things like online account approach.
So now that it's even more plain to see how much faster it's getting worse, even the users who embraced Windows 10 have finally had enough.
Now my opinion is based on professional use of W11 since its initial preview.
As always, the product of some absolutely outstanding engineers at Microsoft, some of whom add wonderfully to the discussions on HN.
But somehow or another, even the most excellent code is still getting Ballmerized by a vestige of the corp that seems to still be in position to compromise "what could have been" before it gets a chance to be considered or deployed by users.
Also anecdotally I was the only one using Windows 11 when I presented at a conference a week after W11 was released back in 2021. Didn't notice a single other one this year either.
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They are also chasing the Taboolah/Outbrain native advertising space that masquerades as new articles, hence stuffing that box with celebrity news.
Except you can. Taskbar setting -> toggle Widgets to OFF
>I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt.
Windows sales aren't core moneymakers anymore when they're basically giving them away for free (I have mine registered with a MSDNAA key I found online and it worked).
Money is in Azure, O365 subscriptions and ads shown to their Windows userbase. Nadella even said that Google makes more money from Windows users than Microsoft does, so shoving ads in your faces was them taking a slice of that sweet ad revenue.
It's unfortunate, but this silent acceptance is our society having been numbed to being bombarded with ads on every computing devie it just became the new norm sadly and it doesn't seem like there's any hope for the trend to be reversing. People just got used to SW & online content being free and ad supported rather than paying upfront for it.
Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
Maybe it's a Win Pro edition thing and not on HOme.
>Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
What you don't understand is irelevant to the Microsoft board meetings where they show ad-revenue go up, because money is the only thing they understand, user experience be dammed.
What are those users gonna do, install Ubuntu? /s
Oh there is. Governments. The GDPR was a massive hit against the advertising industry, and there is more in the pipeline (DMA/DSA). Additionally, the EU is beginning to act against crap like lootboxes, and other annoyances like NFTs collapsed on their own.
https://pureinfotech.com/uninstall-widgets-powershell-window...
As part of that I wanted to hide the widgets, the pointless search input, move the start menu back to its normal place instead of the dumb place, hide one drive icon from explorer, etc etc
This also installs software from Winget.
This is what I have so far: https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/...
I have a version for development machines too which is WIP but you can see what I have so far.
The repo root has a big readme of what it does and does not do.
Once it's done you end up with a consistent Windows setup.
I haven't looked into how to disable the bing crap on the start menu search yet as apparently the previous registry keys people found to disable it have been deliberately changed into "touch these values and your start menu search won't work for anything" which is a new level of contempt from the Windows team.
Tldr: Automate all this tedious tweaking and turning off of crapware features via PowerShell. The end goal is to be able to run a single command from the windows terminal and leave it to do it's thing.
Also from this thread I have now added HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Dsh\IsPrelaunchEnabled to 0 to stop Widgets.exe from executing on startup. Unfortunately it still starts up if you accidentally swipe the touchscreen from the left.
That second key is new to me I'll be adding that too thanks.
Well they replaced their journalism team with "AI" and that's what their AI thinks you want.
My partner helped someone in our family the other day with Edge(tm) and she told me she thought the browser was so weird it looked like one of those "home page hijack" sites from the early 2000's.
It's actually a problem for me at work because they keep drawing my eye and distracting me from getting work done. It's crazy. What are they thinking?
Except, obviously, when they want the news app to attract your attention and get a few advertising cents.
At least on windows 11 pro workstation, this is a right click and a preference setting or two away. The start menu can be moved to the left corner where it has long been with a taskbar setting. I did this as recently as yesterday with media dated February 2023.
Maybe that ship has already sailed and they know who their core market is?
On my low end laptop occasionally I can't even close it or click away and it takes a minute or two to decide to go.
Insane.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/x739nt/is_there_...
Did you know that out-of-the-box, Edge will transmit the content of
your text boxes on web pages to the Microsoft Editor service for the
purpose of grammatical suggestions? I have no idea how this concept
got past legal but hey, it’s on by default now.
At what point are some of the major government legal departments actually going to step up and sort this shit out?
It is so, so, so, so, so far past overdue. Yet nothing. :(
EDIT 1: I just checked and, fucking hell, it's grammarly! Samsung sneaked in an update that was silently leaking everything I wrote to fucking grammarly. This can be disabled by pressing the gear button and accessing the hidden writing assistant menu.
Good hardware is not worth risking my private information. Samsung, this will be the last time I buy a phone from you.
EDIT 2: Couldn't find anything about this on Samsung's website. Found more information on grammarly: https://support.grammarly.com/hc/en-us/articles/440798862017...
It's not leaking if it's intentional. Leaking makes it sound like it was mistake.
>Enhanced spell check Uses the same spell checker that’s used in Google search. Text you type in the browser is sent to Google.
Maybe there's a blackmail and bribery department looking at what those people have been writing? (/s)
Lets see if that "backlash against big tech" thing actually goes anyone. One can hope. :)
Why would they? It's cheap intelligence on their opponents. Bypasses those pesky constitution laws. Win-win.
> By default, Microsoft Edge provides spelling and grammar checking using Microsoft Editor. When using Microsoft Editor, Microsoft Edge sends your typed text and a service token to a Microsoft cloud service over a secure HTTPS connection. The service token doesn't contain any user-identifiable information. A Microsoft cloud service then processes the text to detect spelling and grammar errors in your text. All your typed text that's sent to Microsoft is deleted immediately after processing occurs. No data is stored for any period of time.
So, they don't keep any data using this.
But it's unclear since they also do text prediction; which can be toggled separately in Edge.
> If the Use text prediction toggle is turned on, Microsoft Edge sends the text in the text box, your top language from the browser setting, and a text box identifier to a Microsoft cloud service over a secure HTTPS connection. The text box identifier is not associated with your account. The Microsoft cloud service processes the text to generate a relevant text prediction. Typed characters and text predictions are cached for up to 30 days, for service quality and performance improvement purposes only.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/privacy-whi...
Interestingly, if they also share the text with third parties, then every one of those statements could still be completely true.
At the point when their love relationship with US will end up in divorce. So not in the near future.
https://www.techdirt.com/2012/04/23/to-read-all-privacy-poli...
That is, some UI widgets will still open Edge even if you change the default.
There used to be an awesome open source project called EdgeDeflector that would fix that. Microsoft got wise to it and found a way to neutralize it, which killed the project. https://github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector
Hampered by other things in the same pattern, right now requiring an Edge User agent.
I see you haven’t actually used Azure Devops. (Their “enterprise github”, sort of.)
Yes, except Windows 10, Office 365, Teams, Edge, Calculator, Settings.
Copying UI from Google tells a lot about the spirit at Microsoft.
I understand what the author is getting at, but Apple does make a lot of money off Safari. Their deal for Google to be the default search engine makes them a ton of money.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/08/27/google-e...
"Sacconaghi estimates that Google could be paying nearly $15 billion in 2021 for default placement. This is an increase over the roughly $10 billion Google paid last year for the exclusivity."
That's essentially $15B in pure profit.
The issue isn't that Microsoft wants to make money from Edge. Apple makes plenty of money from Safari while making sure Safari keeps that space as "a utility that end users can trust to have their back and preserve their privacy in as many circumstances as possible." The issue is that Microsoft is looking for all the edge cases to milk marginal profits out of. Microsoft could just have Edge feed Bing traffic and make money off ads on Bing - but they want more!
The issue isn't always making money vs. not making money. Sometimes the issue is restraint. It's why I'm sometimes skeptical about companies trying to optimize things too much. Maybe your profits are increasing, but are you doing long-term damage to your product and brand that will see bad long-term effects? "We've found that we can increase ad revenue by adding 7 more ads to the page." Then a few years later customers have left. It can be really hard to pass up what seems like free money and what seems to be working. Whether it will be sustainable money is the question, but often one that isn't asked.
That won’t work if users switch their default search engine to Google, what many of them probably do. And Edge’s user base is relatively small anyway.
If people wouldn't trust safari, and treat it like edge: uninstalling it, moving to other browsers, etc.. it wouldn't be worth it for google to pay apple.
I was disappointed but not surprised there was no setting for it. A quick search online led to some policy and registry settings but the corporate policies my company has in place wouldn’t allow those. Thankfully I found a command line option and quickly made a new shortcut which worked.
Back to work without that giant B looming over me.
Apart from the small matter of Google paying Apple $15bn to be the default search engine in Safari.
If you must, use Chrome if you'd rather send all that data to an advertising company in exchange for a familiar UI. Otherwise, use Firefox.
Firefox is my daily driver, but for a long time, before all these user-hostile misfeatures were added, Edge was Pretty Great As Well in my opinion.
Website translations and the profiles UI is very similar to Chrome as well.
Also, Microsoft is not primarily an advertising company. They make money by selling software to businesses, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Office (or Microsoft 365).
> We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex.
As others have pointed out, maybe it's actually "features" that adds value for the general public, maybe it's just greed. In any case from my point of it taints the image of a company that's otherwise highly respected.
> We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex.
Given the extraordinary claim, please link better proof. I cannot imagine GNOME calc phoning home, unless you crashes and you have manually enabled debugging telemetry post-installation.
It is at the bottom of the page I linked to, under "Application Firewall". There is even a screenshot.
Step 1: Add in the properties of the shortcut icon that launches the Edge browser additional flag:
--disable-features=msEdgeSidebarV2
So, it would look something like this:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\msedge.exe" --profile-directory=Default --disable-features=msEdgeSidebarV2
Step 2: Disable in the browser's Settings in the "System and performance" section "Startup boost" for it to not launch the browser in advance without the flag.
Step 3: Restart the browser.
P.S. I used to love the Edge and switched everything to it from Chrome. But OMG! Microsoft with every update ruins the experience even more and tries to shovel an even more irrelevant introduction to other services that have nothing to do with a browser. Microsoft abuses users' trust. I already think about abandoning Edge. I've read recently that next it will try to integrate a crypto wallet into the Edge.
It's sad that Microsoft clearly has talented developers, but their product people seem to be like an Apple that is openly hostile.
They force you into their workflows or design conventions, but they were generally good or at least bearable.
Whatever good taste Microsoft had, it evaporated shortly after the release of Windows 7.
I think I'm about two OSX upgrades away from switching to a *nix OS as my daily driver, though I don't know what I'll do for some niche software like Clip Studio Paint.
https://krita.org/en/ is probably the closest one, it's open source and doesn't cost you a penny
I installed Windows 10 LTSC and am not looking at a regular, retail level Windows ever again. They are shoving distractions and spyware into every app
I wish Microsoft really paid attention to this. This is the core reason why people jumped to Brave (despite the crypto wallet connection & byzantine ad revenue sharing, which I assume sends some kind of telemetry too). I personally don't like it, but having a feature rich Chromium-based, modular features browser would be nice. This is such a missed opportunity.
Does anyone, besides maybe the elderly (out of habit), use a desktop computer to read (clickbait, low-quality) news instead of their phone?
As an anecdote, I know a non-technical Windows user who unlocks their machine by clicking the "like what you see?" prompt on the lockscreen backgrounds as a way to dismiss the (stupid) lockscreen and get to the password prompt.
Doing so opens a Bing search for some bullshit (in Edge obviously) which she just leaves in the background as she moves onto her actual work-related application. I bet this looks great in metrics and "engagement", while being totally fake engagement and not actually representative of the usefulness of this "feature". I wonder how many other useless features are misused by non-technical users where all the "engagement" is actually just accidental clicks.
It’s not like what Microsoft shows is a good source of news either.
https://twitter.com/thebookisclosed/status/16367594878299176...
Edit: I'm extremely skeptical of this claim. The capitalization of "Web3" isn't consistent, most of the text reads like it hasn't been reviewed/edited. Seems fake to me.
Edit again: there are several more screenshots, many of which contain glaring typos. This is almost certainly fake.
I'm not sure what triggers this or if there's a way to disable it, but it doesn't appear if I restart a new instance.
But they keep adding invasive features without asking. There's supposed to be a setting for Discover but it's not actually there.
I understand it is a necessary evil for some of the forms stuff, digital signatures, and the full edition for editing.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2023/02/08/adobe-acrobat...
This would be it
Background: At present I'm a heavy user of Windows 10 Home Edition, Firefox, KEdit, Rexx, etc. From a move, I have a Windows 7 Professional system in a box and am eager to get it running. That system has the 100,000 lines of code for my Web site I'm eager to get on-line. I'm considering plugging together a desktop computer for a Web server, with, say, some 16 core AMD processor, solid state memory for much of the file system, e.g., the SQL part, running some version of Windows Server 2019.
(1) Simple question: This thread has many mentions of a widget. What is a widget? Maybe I use them nearly hourly, but I don't know just what they are, what the definition is.
(2) My understanding is that with Windows Server, can turn off the automatic updates. Is that true? Hopefully.
(3) I am guessing that with Windows Server I can still run software that has long, commonly run on Windows, e.g., KEdit, Firefox, Rexx, some IBM code in Fortran for the classic applied math of linear programming, a Fortran compiler, Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader, Knuth's TeX mathematical word processing software, .... Is this true?
(4) I'm guessing that Windows Server will have less of the intrusive, unrequested popups, suggestions, recommendations, etc. about shopping, weather, travel, news, celebrities, etc. than Windows 10/11 have. Is that true?
(5) Generally, if I want or need to leave Windows 7 Professional, I hope to move to some version of Windows Server and just stay away from Windows 10/11. Is that doable?
Thanks!!
software widget
has some good descriptions, examples. I was surprised that Google had such a good description of widgets.
It turns out that I am not a heavy user of widgets and would not much like them.
Okay, that answers my question about widgets.
Anyone have any information on the questions about Windows Server?
I don't know what their marketing department believe their core business is, but selling adware and spyware isn't a viable long term strategy.
Slightly off topic I know since I don't think it will change things in Edge itself, but for that, you can go install your own preferred browser just like the last 28 years.
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/safaris-dangerous-default...
These articles came out in the same week, so it looks like one inspired the other or was just serendipitous timing.
There is a way. That way is freedom.
It’s otherwise very user hostile but just I love the vertical tabs so much
I find it interesting how we have a perfectly viable alternative in Firefox, but even many privacy informed users still promote Edge or Chrome. The author is a perfect example of this, he says he wants to box his "privacy exposure" to as few companies as possible. That would somehow make sense if all "companies" (in the broadest sense) were equal, but Firefox is made by a non for profit with the explicit goal of keeping the Internet free and private. And for the argument regarding Apple, Apple is perfectly happy to milk you for all your private data as well, they just keep it all to themselves. Why else the locking to their ecosystem.
I disliked how Brave includes all the crypto nonsense when I tried it last. Yes you can turn it off, but you can say that about Edge too.
I believe Ooshutup like tools can help up to a certain extent.
"Dark Pattern" does not just mean anything you don't like.