Hacker News Reader

Comment by dustedcodes | Hacker News Reader

I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here:

Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?

View on HN

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?

You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?

Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser.

Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one way, continues to act that very way still.

> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?

They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".

> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff".

Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.

We often look at companies as a single monolith but that isn't conductive to productive discussions.

OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one.

One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.

Maybe if they stopped trying to become monoliths, people would stop considering them as monoliths?

What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith.

Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,

That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because one state does something you don't agree with. In a large organization different departments may do different things and have different incentives, and until they overstep too much may have quite a bit of autonomy.

Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.

> That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because one state does something you don't agree with.

It's more like condemning all of the US because it has implemented a national policy that only one state really wanted.

It doesn't matter that only one state wanted it. It's still national policy and thus fair game to criticize the entire nation for.

Is it a company wide policy that Microsoft apps open links in edge, or a Teams and Edge thing?

Do office apps open links in edge? Does VS code?

If they do, then I agree with you. If they don't, then I don't, for what should be obvious reasons.

If a company has implemented it in a product that is publicly released, it's a company policy even if only the dev team was responsible for it.

Eh, no. That's a reach. A company policy would be something that the whole company is expected to follow. If only the teams that coordinated on it follow it, that's not a policy in any way, it's just a choice that a portion of the company made, it could be something that the company doesn't care about one way or another or it could be something that wasn't addressed prior to release (if you think every decision a team makes gets complete review and is totally understood, I think you're wrong).

Even a monolith is made up of many atoms all sticking together.

Just because your particular outcropping isn't coated in digital blood doesn't mean you're not part of the problem.

If a company sent out two crews of people and one crew gave out flowers to strangers and the other crew punched little old lady's faces in, would you still crow about how you're only handing out flowers?

A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means "tending to promote or assist" is 'conducive' with no 't', pronounced 'cundoosiv'.

> Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others are conducive to consumer spending. Notice that conducive is almost always followed by to.

* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conducive

What the hell? They’re separate words?

How did I go at least half my life without knowing this.

Wait till you learn that "deprecated" and "depreciated" are different words, too.

But "flammable" and "inflammable" are the same. English is fun!!

Unfortunately I knew this one already. It’s be too much to hope I could have my mind broken twice in a day ;)

They are close enough.

Thank you. English is not my first language so I appreciate the correction. TIL.

Pedantry around the meaning of words with common stems is against the code of conduct. In other words, do Conduits not conduct water?

You really picked poor thing to try to bash on since .NET ecosystem is one of the most sanest out of all ecosystems

Give me something as sane, coherent and friendly as .NET ecosystem for C and C++ and I would be willing to pay for that

I didn't pick .NET, parent did. And regardless if the ecosystem is nice to work in or not, Microsoft tries their true and tested strategy of EEE with that ecosystem as well.

The example is not .NET in general, but that specific event when Microsoft reneged on open development tooling[1]. For some people, that was the moment they stopped trusting "new Microsoft" to keep their word (though for me, it was when the Python language server was replaced with a DRM-locked, LSP-noncompliant one[2] a bit before that; unlike with .NET hot reload, they didn't backtrack there). I can think the company makes great open .NET tools and at the same time not trust them to close those down on a whim.

Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of MIDL[3] went, by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language grammar in the docs, because there is no language grammar in the docs[4].)

[1] https://dusted.codes/can-we-trust-microsoft-with-open-source and links there

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/4

[3] https://github.com/microsoft/xlang/pull/529

[4] I vaguely remember a GitHub issue where a Microsoft employee explicitly refused to provide one ("not a priority" or some such synonym for "we don't care, fuck off"), but I can't find it

> since .NET ecosystem is one of the most sanest out of all ecosystems

Is it? This is the same ecosystem that has .Net, .Net Core, .Net Standard, and .Net Framework as all different (and overlapping? who knows) products?

Its only .Net now.

The Core and Standard things was just there the aid the transition from Framework, which is now complete, any remains will soon be phased out entirely.

> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1].

[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--micro...

I think he means the newer versions of the stack, from the release of .NET Core 1 in 2016 and onward.

Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better product.

More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.

Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.

It’s a preference, not a bias

The choice is open, free vs closed, stifling, costly, dark-patterns.

I don't think that's bias.

I just moved to openSUSE.

It's really nice not having advertisements in my start menu.

> there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.

Who doesn't like to talk about it? It's so much easier to integrate components on Linux over windows. Why would anyone willingly use windows for data analysis?

Everything every public company does is a business decision

Isn't wanting to make a better product a business decision?

M$ only improved their product because they want to make more money! Unlike me, who works for free.

I hate Microsoft as much as your average Gen X tech nerd, but C# is good. I don't care what inspired them to do it.

You mean you don't care about Java?

I also hate Oracle. Now what?

OpenJDK, that's what.

Microsoft is terrible in almost every way, but I admit that I very strongly prefer C# over Java.

C# is great. Also VS Code.. how many Microsoft haters on HN daily drive it? I'd have to assume quite a few!

The Remote SSH extension has been a game changer for how I do development.

I like VSCode too. I use it for Clojure, Python, and C#, which I am working in this year and haven't for a very, very long time. I was pleasantly surprised at the progress it has made.

Ironically compared to Windows, MS has been willing to kill backward compatibility more to improve .NET to make it more cross-platform, something that must come from a very different part of the company, probably the one that got the "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" mandate.

I make no apologies for their history, but I like these tools and I like them much better than Java, which also has its place. (This isn't a throwaway comment, notice I said I use Clojure, it's my favorite, which runs on the JVM.)

VS Code is pretty great, and I agree the remote dev extensions (ssh) are hands down the best feature added. I also like that it had a directory tree and the integrated terminal early on, that's what got me hooked.

C# is nice, but the experience in VS Code is sub-par and I think it's the VS (not code) managers that are responsible for that state of being.

Editors have had directory trees and integrated terminals for many years, why is that something you find special?

I'm not familiar with another code editor with an integrated terminal, at least not one as complete as VS Code's before VS Code. I could be mistaken though.

C# is great. If only they hadn't made it windows only from the get go there might be a huge ecosystem supporting it instead of java.

>They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.

C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.

I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget there are people who still code actual GUIs for Windows.

How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and made it possible to build for other platforms? C# is a great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++ making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it any better: owning the devs.

VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs

Buy out of github, owning the devs

Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use

OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.

Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.

> Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use

And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.

> And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.

If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?

Can't speak for GP, but the o365 Word is better than Google Docs as well. And while you can view Visio in o365, would be nice if you could edit the diagrams. Odd, but Visio is still imo much better than alternatives in that space.

Visio documents can be edited on ODfB and SPO within the browser.

https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-for-t...

Sweet... hadn't actually touched it for about a year and a half.

365 web apps are still shockingly terrible in 2023.

Just to add more examples of markets they are trying to take over by not being better, but by buying up the competition:

- Video games: Activision/Blizzard, ZeniMax, Double Fine Productions, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile Entertainment, Playground Games, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Mojang

- Developer ecosystems: npm, Dependabot, GitHub, Playfab, Deis, Xamarin, Havok, HockeyApp

This is standard business affairs for pretty much every big company. Apple, Google, Amazon, and many other fortune 500 companies, have all bought up dozens of businesses and their products and rebranded them as their own. Not sure why we're solely picking on Microsoft here...

Indeed, Microsoft didn't invent capitalism. They just have a strong position and understand the rules very well.

Because Microsoft is the subject of this thread. We could pick on other corporation, MS isn't the only one, but whataboutism isn't an argument.

And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.

> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

And VSCode. One thing all three have in common is that they are all FREE to use--they don't make Microsoft any money directly.

And, for the segment of the developer tools market that wrangles C# code, if VSCode gets too good, it becomes a threat to a cash cow: Visual Studio.

Start here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...

The relationship between VSCode and commercial versions of Visual Studio is the worst part of .net, especially the omnisharp debacle.

Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales.

VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work.

> https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-...

The "portable" language that doesn't run on FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX, etc.?

Uhm, I'm currently running abour 4 binaries that have that famous `exe` file extension on FreeBSD. C# runs on FreeBSD just fine. There is no bootstrap available for FreeBSD - must either cross-compile or use linux emulation.

> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

And typescript!

And Azure. But aside from C#, .Net, Typescript, and Azure, what have Romans done for us?

Yeah, I beg to differ about including Azure in that list.

No mentions of Excel? I still haven't found better spreadsheet software...

Its interesting to look at their 'product' history b/c they have a few shining moments of 'getting it' as far as OP means. .NET especially realizing Linux was a real thing and to at least outwardly 'embrace' it.. Then there are moments like these the OP points to .

I guess that's about .. literally.. average.

Nobody said that they have never made a good product. But in no way does this mean that the company focus has been on making good products vs strong-arming their way into things.

> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.

You think those licenses for Visual Studio and those Azure VMs sell themselves?

Encarta 96 was incredible.

100% agree, but it has been a while since that came out...

Spent countless hours on it as a child. I didn't even really know English.

"Flight mode" was a lovely curiosity at that time. Example from Encarta 98, but I thought 96 also had it.

https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131

> They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser.

Before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

To me, this is the proof that the dark patterns are a result of corporate culture that stretches all the way back to the DOS days.

They simply cannot resist the urge to cheat in this manner.

“DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"

That is not accurate, incidentally.

> "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft."

> Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades?

[0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...

Speaking as a Lotus Notes survivor, it would have been really helpful if had prevented lotus notes from running on windows as well.

Lotus notes was like the ultimate in write-only software.

> have they no pride or desire to become a great company

Yes. But their definition of those terms are stuck in the 90s

> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?

iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?

Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.

Arguably, Microsoft is why a browser's user-agent is so useless for determining supported features.

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is:

> And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.

Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.

Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though.

Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.

Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of them did.

I agree with that too, and admitted to such in my previous comment. Still, being the first practitioner of this comes with a certain responsibility for its proliferation. It's not a sole responsibility to your point, but it is primary in a way. It's a lot easier for others to decide to copy what someone else did than to decide to be the first to do it.

To the same point, Google is arguably the reason it persists today given the popularity of Chrome. Just as Microsoft is arguably the reason it started. (I suppose I could have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment since "is so useless" could imply both but I don't think it's particularly egregious.)

One thing I have always wondered about the story - were servers in the mid-1990s really sniffing user agents to decide what pages to send through? I remember most sites were static .html files back then.

Not sure if it's the server, or the javascript, but it was definitely a thing in the 90s.

I think user agent strings were a terrible idea from the get-go, so I'm OK with Microsoft (and everyone else) fudging them this way. I think it'd be even better if everyone used the exact same UA string.

> I think it'd be even better if everyone used the exact same UA string.

Then why send a UA string at all? Save the bytes on the wire.

I agree -- I don't think the UA string should exist. But it does, so the next best thing is having everyone send the same string.

I disagree with your premise.

I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox.

Same with many other things - I can install whatever browser I want as long as it's a skin on their browser.

I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.

I can install any app I want as long as it comes from Apple store.

Etc etc etc.

Yep, I vehemently disagree with your premise :). I think MS is looking at Apple's walled garden and saying "what if we could get away with some of that?"

(not disagreeing that dark patterns are despicable! My wife knows the scream that comes from my home office when I try to get iPhone or windows to do something I want! I just disagree that mobile os world is some paragon of user centric benevolence :)

> when I click a link or address

A link to what domain?

For clicking addresses, I kind of get it: the author of the text didn't link it at all, so the OS (or whatever) gets to decide how to enhance the presentation which can include promoting a specific app. Not great, but fine.

For clicking links, it should definitely just use the browser unless an installed app's manifest has the domain registered.

Apple doesn't make it easy, but they don't make it impossible either, and at this point it's on the ecosystem to show Apple they want more of this by embracing what they have. So, sure, map links tend to open Apple Maps by default, but they can offer the user the choice to use other mapping apps, which they can check for by seeing if the OS will respond to their open url scheme. Harder? Sure. Impossible? Nope.

And for what it's worth, open a directions link from Google some time - for me, it opens Google Maps, which I do have installed, but don't prefer using. I choose Apple Maps because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive, but Google doesn't offer me that choice.

> because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive

Off topic, but you're not actually looking at your watch while you drive right?

If you're navigating with a watch on, it'll notify you of upcoming turns (either through vibrations or by making a turn signal-like noise) without ducking/pausing your music.

Uses different haptics for left and right turns as well.

And, the taps on your wrist are unique depending on which direction you need to turn, so you can theoretically navigate via the wrist-taps alone.

This is wonderful for when you're on a motorcycle going somewhere new. Absolute game changer!

No I am not. The Watch taps my wrist as I drive with different patterns for left or right. If I can't tell which it's indicating, I can quickly look at my infotainment screen and see the map. But I am not driving while looking at my Watch, no. That would be very dangerous.

I’d personally like the choice to be enforced by the OS. I’m sick of Google’s popup for opening links in gmail. It confuses my partner into thinking she has the link open in her regular safari, but the option to actually do that is the only one with no icon. On top of that they’re really trying to railroad people into using chrome, and she’s accidentally hit that option a few times. I wish the justice department would treat that as anti-competitive.

You sound like a person who never even tried. Open Settings > Safari > Default Browser App, and select the app you want. It's really that easy.

I suppose you aren't aware that they are all the same browser because apple doesn't allow competing browser engines

The person above complaining about links defaulting to open in Safari was obviously talking about the app and not the rendering engine

They are the same, but Firefox on my iPad syncs with my real firefox on: linux, windows and android. I can send tabs to and from it, sync passwords etc. What rendering engine is used is completely irrelevant to me most of the time.

Is this true for Maps and most critically Voice Assistants?

How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? How do I replace Siri with a different voice assistant?

You can't for either of those questions.

Nevermind that changing the browser doesn't actually change jack because Apple doesn't allow competition in the browser engine space.

All in all, it is just hard for me to take seriously an opinion saying that Apple allows for unrestrained competition on its devices and Microsoft is the big bad in this space. Historically, maybe true - but not even close to true now imo.

You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".

However, clicking an address in a message and being told to install Apple Maps is super aggravating and I'm not sure if there's a way around that...

> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".

Yeah, and its easy to open the link from Outlook and Teams in Chrome - just copy the link & paste into the chrome URL bar.

> How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? .... You can't

> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".

Has the quoted user edited their comment?

It reads differently now.

iOS 15.7.5, there is no such setting. Searching settings for "Default Browser" doesn't come up with anything.

Oh yeah, I forgot that the default browser app, should be under the settings for a different browser. Putting that shit under the Safari settings is deceptive and hides it while keeping it in plain site.

You can also do it from the settings of whatever browser you want. It exists under Settings > Chrome, and Settings > Firefox, but only if you have those browser installed. The option is always under Settings > Safari, though.

I've done a fair bit of trying over the years; based on your comment I retried today I still cannot find it under Settings -> Safari -> Default Browser App.

To be fair though, I did find it on my wife's iPhone, though under Chrome (she does not have it under Safari (or General either, where I would've expected it)). Still don't have it anywhere on my iPhone. I'll try to see if that's because she's ahead of me on OS updates or some other reason.

Thx!

If your phone is a corporate device, they may have set the default browser via MDM. Check Settings > General > VPN & Device Management.

There is literally no setting like that in path you've given, I just checked on personal 13 Pro with iOS 16.4.1(a)

> I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.

As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control over the keyboard UI and how each key (if it even has keys — your “keyboard” can be literally anything) interacts with text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to “skin” the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult and that’d reduce the workload quite a lot.

I'm extremely interested in this; how come none of the keyboards I've tried depart from the same layout as Apple? Is it strict adherence to guidelines rather than technical restriction then?

To wit, some of the features that same-named apps/keyboards give me on android but not on iPhone include "hold key for alternative character" or button to "force" numpad. As well all keyboards I've tried have same layout and sizing as the original one.

I assumed it was imposed on them in some way I guess?

I don't think there's much, if anything, in the way of App Store guidelines for keyboards except that they do things with the text field the user currently has highlighted.

For instance the app Fantastical comes with a "keyboard" that inputs dates that are open on your calendar[0] and there exist a few rather nonstandard keyboards like Typewise[1].

Absence of features common on Android boards I would guess comes down to those patterns not being familiar to (and thus, not desired by) iOS users or in some cases software patents (there have been a few cases of keyboard devs receiving cease and desist notices from patent holders for using some UI pattern).

[0]: https://flexibits.com/img/help/fantastical-ios/en/f3-opening... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/typewise-custom-keyboard/id147...

I have MessageEase installed as a keyboard.

https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php

Somewhat different from the original keyboard layout.

(The paucity of alternatives is probably down to patents and licensing.)

yet, 20% of times, apple loads their own keyboard instead of my default GBoard :)

This is most likely due to developers of certain apps/inputs and not iOS/Apple themselves, there is a simple line of code to do this and from what I've noticed some overly-secure-wannabe-apps force system keyboard for certain inputs.

Yes, developers can disable third party keyboards throughout their entire app with an application delegate method[0], and when secureTextEntry[1] is enabled on UITextField the system automatically disables third party keyboards on both that text field as well as any immediately adjacent text field (likely for username+password combos).

The idea is that because keyboards can connect to the internet (with user permission), there's potential for data theft. It may also be possible to exfiltrate data from a keyboard extension by saving the data to an app container shared by the host app, which the host app can then send out with its network access.

Devs who don't know how or care to properly accommodate the variable height of third-party keyboards may use the app-wide opt-out to eliminate bugs relating to that, though I haven't personally encountered this.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uitextinputt...

For many years the keyboards were only skins, and for many years after that they would periodically lose their default status and revert to the built in keyboard.

Now it seems that the keyboards randomly hang / crash and don't come up when requested on the first try.

Apple goes out of their way to screw with third party competitors.

>walled garden

Walled garden is marketing speak. You should not use it.

Fair enough; what is the recommended term that is applicable?

“jail”

Here are some

>Closed ecosystem

>Restricted platform

>Proprietary systems

>Walled Prison/Jail(this has negative bias, but may fit depending on the context)

>Curated platform

I'm sure you can get objective phrases from chatgpt too.

Yes, but Apple offers a neat well maintained garden that is the greatest thing as long as everything you need is there, and you don't eat any apples.

MS looks at it and thinks their frat party mansion (3 bedroom duplex) can do the same.

Apple gets away with it because that what their target audience want. MS target audience doesn't want it. If I wanted a walled garden - I would use Apple, they clearly know how to maintain it.

Actually I don't get how Apple always gets away with the sh*t they are doing.

All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.

Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).

No, I am not a big fan of that Microsoft move, because I think they should respect the users browser choice. But I am even less a fan of Apple doing things nobody else is allowed (for good reason).

> All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.

The law you're talking about here specified that the charger itself must have a standard USB-C port. Apple gets away with it because 1. they don't even bundle a charger anymore, and 2. they ship a cable that allows the phone to be connected to a USB-C charger (Lightning to USB-C cable).

The new law that takes effect some time in 2024 for smartphones (amongst other devices) stipulates that the port on the smart device must be USB-C. Under this new law, essentially if a device is large enough then the port must be USB-C.

> Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).

Another new EU law (the Digital Markets Act) takes aim at this specific issue actually.

I get where you're coming from, and yeah sure one could argue that giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft should do better, but in the end they are corporations who will do what is best for their shareholders, as such I am not in the least surprised over actions they take like the ones discussed in your comment and the article that started this discussion.

I think it's great that governmental regulation is finally coming to set the game rules for things like how general purpose operating systems must allow device owners the ability to install their own software (including real actual browsers with their own engines and everything), how communication apps must support cross-network communication upon request, and to standardise how we charge our smart devices.

Thanks for the details.

For me it shows what kind of a company Apple is. Even companies like Sony (who install rootkits on your devices without your consent), comply with the spirit of the charging adapter law. But Apple tries to find a loophole, just to push their own agenda, at whatever cost for society.

But as you said, the other large corporations probably do it in some way too.

One could argue that the spirit of the law is an aim to reduce e-waste, and changing iPhones to USB-C will render literally billions of Lightning to USB-A/C cables useless within a few years. But there's obviously the argument that the existence of a need for those cables is in itself a source of e-waste production...

I swing both ways honestly, I love many engineering aspects of the Lightning port, and at the same time I recognise that having only USB-C to care about would obviously simplify my life a bit, even if I think for the purpose of a mobile phone it is an inferior port.

Uhm, I had pixel phone is the first Pixel. Once it started using wireless charging, I only use usb-c in three scenarios: I'm traveling and using a powerbank, I'm in a car and want to use Android Auto (for some reason my car has wireless Car Play, but not AA), or I'm on a couch and my phone is low on battery (never happened when I iPhone tho). For this reason, I travel with cables that have adapters for lightning. Annoying, but not the end of the world.

I realistically don't care what port is on my phone, but my wife's phone has USB-C and I have 9000 and 1 usbc cables at home.

> Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).

This is due to security imposed on App Store apps: can't do JIT, and you can't have a reasonable JavaScript engine today without it. Frankly, I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses as long as everything synced.

I have plenty of annoyances with Apple, but what people usually bring up are from people just looking for reasons to hate on Apple for no reason.

Actually, I prefer wireless charging as well (started with my Samsung S3 around 2014), in part because I can use the same charger for Apple as well as for Samsung, but also because they have no wearout and I don't like cables. However, the point is, that all manufacturers had their own adapters in the past (pre-2007) and all but Apple switched to Micro USB and later to USB-C (because the law demands it). So if Apple would also have switched to USB-C we wouldn't have the discussion.

> I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses

Just to give one example from the top of my head: For years (5+), Apple did not implement a proper Push-API for Safari. All other major browsers had it, but because on iOS all browsers are just Safari, there was no way to have it on iOS, which is a pretty big market share. Push-API sound like some marketing stuff, but in reality it is pretty fundamental to a lot of use-cases like multi-user synchronization, chats, etc. So you might think that you don't care about the rendering engine, but in reality Apple can abuse the browser situation to control the whole JS ecosystem.

So I don't hate Apple for no reason. Instead, I hate them for very specific reasons. They also do good stuff (primarily for their users/customers), but for me the bad far outweighs the good, because it affects everybody who has contact with their customers and not just the people who decided they want to have an Apple device.

There all doing the same shit just in vary levels of degree and focus. If anyone thinks different, they are only fooling themselves.

Apple is the most user-hostile company I have ever seen from a individual freedom centric standpoint, but they are good at hiding it. They think everyone outside of the organization should follow their line of thinking. Apple wants to be the gatekeeper of everything and that doesn't work in a free society. Deep down, I think people want to be free of external influence. Microsoft only cares about maximizing profits and doing whatever it takes to get there. I guess there is no difference between the two except that apple tries to justify there behavior behind a superiority complex.

Email is the most annoying one. There's an old API that some apps use that always uses Mail.app, regardless of what my "default email client" is set to. SUPER annoying as I only have my work email in Mail.app and it's usually for things like bug reports or news article feedback, you know, things I do on my free time which have nothing to do with work.

The bug report ones is especially annoying as those emails are often pre-populated with a bunch of data that isn't so easy to just copy into a new email in a different mail client, like support attachments, etc.

On WINDOWS. On a DESKTOP COMPUTER.

On your phone, the walled garden approach is fine. On a desktop machine in which you control, it is not.

>They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.

Sorry, but Google really isn't a saint regarding degraded experience. The shenanigans around UX for example using Google services in Firefox have a long, well documented tradition. They just aren't as overt and clumsy with it as MS.

Apple blocking iPhone browsers without Webkit (excluding Chrome and Firefox).

Android not exactly making it easy to change the default browser for average users either tbh

Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1118/

yes on phones this has tradition to a point it started to got legislation involved

but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least tried, and it wasn't a problem for years

honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation, world wide

and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in monopoly (because with today markets you can have more power then a classical single market monopoly while not being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)

XKCD isn’t relevant to the sentence before, as comic notes, it’s about Apple.

the “Android makes you tap something to change your default browser!” was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped spreading because it was generating backlash.

Much like the “you have to confirm you enable sideloading!” alert in Android, it’s not clear what people want otherwise, a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult.

I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it harder to have the real conversations needed to get things back on track

> a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult

The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm before downloading each app. And then it will confirm before installing each app. And then it will confirm again because, well, I have no idea.

One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult. Piles and piles of them is.

Not entirely true on the latest version of Android. I'm not sure what the pattern is, but for most of the apps I've installed via Droidify, I don't have to confirm anything when installing updates.

My theory on this is it has something to do with battery life. I can't think of another reason they'd limit browser engines.

Apple has an ads unit, there have been multiple other times when they have shown that user privacy is a thing that really only applies to other companies.

Apple's reasoning is that browser engines need JIT to run JS with acceptable performance, but if they were to give apps JIT capabilities, that would significantly open up the attack surface.

Don't know if serious or not, but I'll bite.

Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only. Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing people away from Macs.

They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts them in a similar position.

Google has a slightly different issue, in that for instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser taking the android world by storm is nothing good for them.

Firefox and Chrome accounted for a third of browser marker share when the iPhone came out. It came out with no App Store, and there was no guarantee MS would develop IE for iOS.

> I can't think of another reason they'd limit browser engines.

Apple doesn't trust third party developers when it comes to running code that Apple has not vetted in advance.

I use a Firefox addon that spoofs the user agent for Google-owned sites so it delivers the Chrome version of things.

Works without any issues and it's a much nicer product experience.

What is the name of this addon?

tagging myself in here as well

You can favourite HN comments if you just want to come back to them.

To clarify, since it's not obvious in the UI, you have to click the timestamp of the comment, and then you can favorite it.

Thanks, I should have mentioned that. A couple of features are hidden in the show comment view.

Damn, I've been here for years and never knew that you could favorite things!

Or install this extension https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news to have better UI on HN

afaik, pretty much any user-agent changer works. At least that's what one of my colleagues uses to join MS Teams meetings on Firefox. Simply switch your user-agent to Chrome, and it should do the trick.

On Android, it's one of the very few allowed ones, Google Search Fixer[1].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

This is the one I use, i think: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...

Afair there's also one for YouTube.

"This add-on is not available on your platform." on Desktop Linux.. what makes this windows only?

I'm not trying to excuse Google, but feature detection is really hard and browsers sometimes suck with their APIs.

I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.

There's no excuse for not being able to read the user-agent strings of the top five browsers in the world, especially when 2 of them (at least) are your own code base.

Everything is hard if you don't want to do it.

link?

What are the Chrome version of things specifically? I just wonder what I'm missing out on..

Mobile Firefox gets a very basic result page for "weather" for no clear reason.

For a while downloading a lot of freeware would result in installing Chrome and setting it up as the default browser on Windows.

Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed the issue).

>Have they just become

Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me. They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but enough for me to be consistently reminded that generally their incentives and goals run counter to what I'd prefer.

my understanding is that within microsoft there are different factions competing with each other for i don't know what, dominance maybe. it kind of makes sense since microsoft has several different strong products that can stand on their own (unlike google whose main income is from advertising so really all google products subsume to that), and some of these factions may well genuinely love FOSS.

They're FOSS friendly because they don't have a choice.

They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in. Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees, becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that hosts a lot of open projects.

You may enjoy these org charts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...

> Were they ever different tho?

According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace open source now" argument:

* their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous attempt to discredit their competition that took over a decade

* the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu and other spyware with settings that reset after random upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS

* if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its boot menu.

Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the changes are just superficial.

> According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates.

Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?

> Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems.

You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to install Windows?

In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to boot automatically. It won't mess with secureboot keys or anything. In my case, I removed the pc's default ones and installed my own and signed ms's key with mine. It works fine.

> In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to boot automatically.

In UEFI? If I have the OSes on separate physical disks I'm planning to use the bios to select what boots.

There's still a "default", at least on my PC.

But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated bootloader).

If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big" updates.

I had OSes on separate disks. Win7 and Arch, used UEFI to choose who to boot.

Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux

I have rEFInd installed on window's EFI partition, and it boots either windows or linux (on separate drive though). It's been like that since skylake came out, and I never had issues with it.

As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues. If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing it.

The whole stack of .NET Core, WSL 1/2, Windows Terminal, and Visual Studio Code has been an effort to keep Windows relevant as a development environment for web apps. Nothing more. It was desperation, but well done. Given their history, I'm quite sure that many people in their ranks pinched their noses at being forced into these moves, but the PR department did fine work in spinning this as a "kinder, gentler" Microsoft. The people who haven't been around since the 90's took the bait, but organizations don't change like that. Old timers are still there (looking at you, Brad Smith), and people who have left have invariably been replaced by similar people. That's how hiring works.

Apple controls the browser on iOS with an iron fist. Even if you are using a different app, its still Safari under the hood. And even though they control the rendering, they still open all links from Apple apps in Safari.

Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I choose to. That doesn’t stop Apple music from being the auto play choice even when I don’t use Apple Music.

If Apple’s products are so much better they should allow choice and bot be threatened by it.

If you don't use Apple Music at all, you can uninstall it from your phone and it will stop being the default choice. I do this on my phone without any problems.

I don't have an extensive list, but Apple preferring their own apps on iOS is not hyperbole and evident in lots of places.

Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list.

And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to install Apple Maps...

I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.

Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.

URL types for geo locations are standardized. And even if they weren't or the standard isn't sufficient (which one could reasonably argue), you are talking about features made by the platform owner. Apple can trivially declare "this is the iOS geo share format, apps intending to share or handle shared geolocations should use this format" and expect the ecosystem to deal with it.

That’s a good point, although it seems that this kind of behavior, at least specifically to map apps, is quite common.

Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS, searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes straight to Google Maps.

I haven’t been able to find the correct MIME type or URL protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me suspect that there is more to it than it seems.

Google specifically handles all links in its apps so that they go to the corresponding google app if possible.

> I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.

Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others can?

Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do the same, if they wanted to.

Music settings like the Equaliser actually only apply to Apple Music. You can uninstall it but there is no systemwide equaliser, because why would you need one when you can use Apple Music?

Same with MacOs and using it with a studio display makes the bass ridiculously loud.

Somehow they manage to control it with an iron fist but still allow apps to intercept links, opening them in their nasty embedded version with injected JS.

Microsoft is actually the one reacting here. They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases; Apple and Google took advantage of that to build two walled gardens, which ended up dwarfing MS's own empire. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, MS would have gone "If this behaviour is now allowed, why should we not do it too?"

This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and Google for that. If you want something different, call your representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.

Simply put, people don't love Edge as much as they love Chrome. The browser bundled with Windows 11 is naturally Edge, but users who use Chrome install Chrome of their own volition, so forcing them to open links in Edge is extremely annoying.

I don't use either chrome or edge but why would I use a clone instead of the real thing?

I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later scams.

> why would I use a clone instead of the real thing

Has nothing to do with why people don't use Edge (they still didn't use Edge when it was using a custom engine; same for IE before it).

And it's only the techy minority that even knows Edge is built on top of Chromium.

> I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption.

It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.

Small correction: the new teams client (currently in preview) uses WebView2 (based on Edge/Chromium), not Electron

I'm disappointed that they're still going with a web-based thing, but maybe WebView2 will suck a little less than Electron. I'll take what I can get.

Writing a browser engine is a lot of unprofitable work just to get to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams. Especially when you already wrote one and couldn't keep even that in pace with standards and the evolving web technologies.

Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.

Edge was, initially, Chrome but degoogled and it had (and still has) a lot of great UI innovations, like a vertical tab strip that's just right. Their wide use of hovering menus that can be pinned to become sidebars is honestly good stuff.

Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).

In a corporate context, it's very different from Chrome.

>It's more memory efficient in general

>It supports the Edge Webview2 framework that MSoffice apps use further cutting memory use

>It supports MDAG https://learn.mecrosoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...

To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.

Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible with the modern web.

Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.

If that was the reason, surely it would have been quicker and easier to change the default user agent string themselves?

Yes and no. It's part of the reasons.

Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.

But well-designed websites don't alter their behavior based on the user agent string. They test for capabilities before using them.

Indeed.

That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.

I doubt "love" for the software is involved here. I think many users believe Chrome is "the internet" just like they used to believe the Google search page was the internet, or Internet Explorer before that. This impression of Chrome was built on the fact that it's a solid browser but was enforced by Google with the same underhanded practices they applied for years.

My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall, just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for years, so people are used to that. The synergies between those devices and the Google services services makes it easy to stay and hard to leave.

People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome on a fresh Windows install. So I don't think anyone thinks that Chrome is the internet (that's actually something Chrome had to overcome when IE was dominant and installed by default).

Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have been told and essentially trained to install a new browser if they want a good internet experience on Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early 2010s.

Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with Windows is crap" inertia right away.

> People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome

That's not been true for a while. IT preinstall Chrome in most companies nowadays, and obviously it's already on the phones and tablet you buy for the home.

Yes, MS dropped the ball after killing Netscape and being humbled by antitrust laws. But the current situation is as much a product of Google's "growth hacks" and mobile monopoly.

Maybe in a corporate environment. But not when it comes to personal devices.

Most tablets sold are iPads. They don't have Chrome pre-installed. In North America, most phones are iPhones that don't have Chrome pre-installed. Most personal laptops are either Windows machines or Macs which don't have Chrome installed. Its pretty disingenuous to pretend as if Chrome market share comes from devices with Chrome preinstalled. People go out of their way to install Chrome.

There's also the fact that as soon as you touch anything by Google you'll get nagged with adds and pop-up suggesting installing Chrome.

Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!) option to install Chrome and make it the default browser. CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.

People seem to have forgotten how Chrome captured the desktop market to begin with. For many many years it was effectively almost impossible to download freeware without accidentally installing Chrome. Sites like download.com and even sourceforge wrapped everything in custom installers that would automatically include free trial of an antivirus, maybe some adware, and Google Chrome, unless you were aware and clicked the secret hidden opt-out link that was almost the same color as the background.

Every site doing chrome downloads without a clear opt out (or opt in, I don't remember) was demonetized, IIRC.

Attributing Chrome's popularity to it being included in download.com bundles doesn't sound accurate at all. If anything, the "Download Chrome!" link on Google.com yielded far far more installations.

Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after release when they finally added extensions and themes around 2010.

People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps were moving to.

Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were great bets that were copied by everyone else.

1. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html

As annoying as for Edge-loving people who then buy a mobile phone and are then forced to "open their links" in Safari or Chrome.

But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people live on phones, and when they have to interact with desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably, the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there is little or no choice in that world.

The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the force of the State.

Granted I haven't used Chrome in years, but I find that firefox integrates remarkably well from phone to pc. The menu of open tabs on other devices is invaluable to me (although idk if Chrome has this too)

Sadly it integrated even better before they rewrote the mobile browser and threw out every useful little feature that had accumulated over the years – with the old mobile Firefox, you were able to forward links from other apps directly by sharing them to Firefox without actually having to open them on your phone.

New Firefox is too dumb for that – you actually have to open that link in a new tab before you can send it to some other Firefox instance (and then close that useless tab again).

Android actually lets you live without even having a default browser. It's great since you can use multiple browsers in place of multiple browser profiles. Apps will just ask what browser to open the link in. It's great.

You can set Edge as the default browser and links will open in Edge.

You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.

Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android is relatively open (certainly more open than any mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For instance, Microsoft added support for running Android Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done completely without any involvement from Google. That is unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets pushed around here is baseless.

MS built a walled mobile garden too. Nobody bought into it.

> They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases

They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a factor until years after the fact.

The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that MS "won" with IE (95% market share!) and then pretty much lost the stomach (or focus/budget/etc.) to advance the web in any way.

The specter of further anti-trust action still hung around. It's only been relatively recently that it has become apparent that the country's leadership is not interest in trust breaking anymore. But now Microsoft is playing catchup.

Apple is certainly a worthy competitor to the Microsoft empire, Google remains a cut below.

>Monopolistic practices on mobile

Most of my phones have shipped with Samsung Internet.

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors

The last 30 years of MS shows that they are not interested in the non-hostile approach

Few things:

- Microsoft Java Virtual Machine scandal

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

The precursor to .NET being born. :)

.NET events, P/Invoke and Forms were born as J++ events, J/Direct and WFC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Foundation_Classes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#The_WFC

Not to give Microsoft an out here but really?

The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine.

The equivalent Microsoft apps on mobile OSs aren't degraded - they aren't even allowed to exist in the first place.

Microsoft is bringing the desktop experience in line with mobile here. Doesn't make it less terrible but contrasting Apple and Google as better actors in this sense is an odd take.

Microsoft apps exist on Android and they're not forced to open links in Chrome on Android. If the user chooses, they can open on Microsoft Edge on Android. The user can set their own browser preference - and Google doesn't force them.

Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but it's on them.

None of these bug tech corps are in the right here, but MS is being more anti-competitive than most.

Edge and Chrome use the same engine, don’t they?

So the correct iOS parallel is not Apple’s refusal to allow non-WebKit engines. But Apple’s hypothetical refusal to allow links to be opened in WebKit-flavored Firefox. Which, for the record, it does let you do.

>Edge and Chrome use the same engine, don’t they?

To be precise: No, they don't. Their engines are based on the same codebase, but they still are running their own installed engines.

In contrast, Apple doesn't just refuse to allow non-WebKit engines. It requires everyone to use the pre-installed, Apple-provided engine. You can't use your own build of WebKit.

I know I'm comparing a turd sandwich to a puke pancake here, but in what way is "Apple doesn't allow other browser engines" less anti-competitive than what MS is doing?

For Apple, the wall around the garden is so high that you don't realize there is an outside in the first place. So no one notices it.

Never said it wasn't, thats why I used Android's example and then also called out Apple.

Umm, MS Teams on Adroid forced me to install Edge to open links. Even the copy action pushes "haha, we wont give away this link you moron" (in corp speak) to the clipboard.

Thats on Microsoft not Google

I use Teams on my phone regularly and have never seen this happen. Clicking on a link takes me to the web page without any problems, even in my default browser which is Firefox.

I think they are using a dark pattern now. I opened a link in Outlook (Android) after a recent update and I got a popup to open with Edge. I didn't have Edge installed so I was confused for a moment. Just below the big colorful edge icon was (a much less visually prominent) option to open in my default browser.

If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought that they were forcing me to install Edge too.

One variable many people don’t consider is that Microsoft gives organizations an incredible amount of control over application behavior when trying to maintain a through line for rights protection of organizational data. Like not allowing organizational data to be opened in apps that aren’t approved, authenticated with user creds, and supportive of rights management (no printing, no saving, etc.).

I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with GP’s experience with Teams, but just pointing out that when thinking about MS app behavior on any platform, it’s a variable that can be present in the corporate context which many “users” remain blissfully unaware of, or see it manifest as these weird rules and behaviors and not acting like other apps. But there can be an entirely different set of user stories at play beneath the surface.

But you compared Microsoft apps on Android. This article is more analogous to Google apps on Android always using Chrome.

The equivalent apps on iOS aren't even allowed, Android allows other browsers (including their browser engines) just fine. Firefox is the only browser to bother though, as most of the chromium wrappers, including edge for android, are happy to just build a skin around the default web view.

What web view engine? MS are using chromium

On iOS?

I thought the argument was they were against using someone else's rendering engine?

Android allows this. Links from the gmail app open in Firefox in my Android phone.

On Android I can install Firefox and have all browser activities forwarded there, even from GMail, and even for opening YouTube links.

> The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine.

In Android, all my links open in Firefox. I don't see any issue there. Might serve as an inspiration to Microsoft ;)

I have that setting set, and various links still open in chrome instead of firefox for me. In particular, links that are opened via gmail, maps or the "google" search widget.

Maps open links in Firefox for me; Gmail by default in-process with webview, but that is disable-able in settings and then it opens links in the default browser. For the google search widget, I don't use it, but after a quick check yes, it does use webview too, but also has the option to open in browser.

I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.

> I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.

Except for the things that you just said open in the chrome webview, right?

It is not chrome webview. It is android webview. Yes, it is similar to chrome engine, but it is not chrome. Just like edge is not chrome.

It is also per-app choice. If an app decides doing something in a particular way, it is not the system's fault -- some reddit readers do the same, for some reason. For now, apps do have preferences to open in browser instead, and that option respects the default one.

> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.

I disagree here. Despite me using firefox on my android device and it being set to my default browser, many apps will still open in chrome (usually google apps - maps, gmail, etc) despite me explicitly asking it _not_ to do that. It's also not clear that it's using chrome, as it's the "generic" browser modal. The way that google services are bundled together on android and have limited interop (Samsung and Google Pay regularly fight with each other on my device for "who is the default payment method", and google is _not_ happy to not be my default).

Google have been pushing manifest v3 despite massive objections, introducing undocumented "fair usage" limits [0], require third party cookies to use some of their services to download files (gmail, gdrive). Google are drowning in dark patterns.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135

Not OP and unsure what happened to that link, but:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135

Thanks, I botched pasting it.

Links from Google maps and Gmail open in Firefox for me. I'm on android 13.

Microsoft has been playing the vendor lock-in game for his entire life and they were and are very successful. It is an interesting exercise to think if this time is different. Again, Microsoft always compete with better technologies from other vendors.

One aggresive move that Google or Apple could do is to really help companies in the migration to their technology beyond saying RTFM and use our support. For example, augmenting these locked companies with Google staff. You cannot expect a big corporation to move all the gears alone to change their technology.

It is not the technology, it is the business execution.

Virginia Tech recently notified everyone that they are ditching Gmail in favor of outlook because of large cost increases coming. Google seems to be going backward in that regard:

“ A key factor in the decision was cost. Under the new Google license model, an equivalent amount of Google cloud storage would cost more than seven times what it will cost the university on the Microsoft platform.”

https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2023/04/google-changes-announcem...

> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft

How? I mean, how does a degraded experience on android cause people to abandon windows desktops?

I just don't see the connection here: if Google, tomorrow, outright rejected any MSFT software on android phones, how does it hurt windows desktop deployment numbers? Maybe if everyone switched to Mac, but that would kill of android too...

This is what a working monopoly looks like. We've seen before this exactly how much crap users would put up with on the desktop, and still they didn't abandon windows.

There is nothing the mobile market can do that they haven't already tried to take windows market share.

In fact, there is nothing that the mobile world can do to Windows users that is worse than what Microsoft did to them, and yet those users are still chugging along happily paying for Windows every year.

> old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?

I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured market they can brutally take advantage of. Even today, Apple has banned all browser competition on iOS, and only Safari is allowed to run. All competitors must just re-skin Safari to obey the monopolistic demands of Apple. Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.

Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.

But Microsoft, to me, barely has a drop of the anti-competitive evil of its competitors. Apple mints hundreds of billions by banning competitors, locking them out and charging 30% rent on their monopoly. Microsoft... just wants their re-skinned Google Browser to not die.

> Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.

They tried; with different means, but they expected the same result. That's what the antitrust case was about.

> Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.

While I have the same opinion as you wrt Apple behaviour, there is a difference: Apple doesn't have the market position like Microsoft did. You can function perfectly fine in society without any Apple product. That was not the case with Microsoft, they did everything they could so you had to use Microsoft system. Communicating with your bank or with government or public offices? Microsoft products were required. Apple has not such grip on the market and that makes the difference.

One could argue that offering a walled garden from the outset is more honest than the Microsoft strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and ultimately the latter creates more of a monopolistic threat in practice since walled gardens almost definitionally can't capture most of the market.

"forced Candy Crush ad tiles in the start menu" is all the answer you need to your questions.

I wonder how much money this shameful bottom of the barrel company behaviour makes them.

It probably decreases revenue. Like the Edge "enagement" manipulation with Teams.

Are there managers who has their pay tied to some KPI? I have such a hard time believing there is a from above decision to do all these user hostile changes turning their main product into a BS joke.

Microsoft’s stock price over the last 10 years has soared consistently. They have a lot of admins at small/medium companies very very willfully and loyally locked in to their ecosystem.

Microsoft does not care if they piss off most of these people because they not the ones signing the contracts and the lock-in is SO BAD that even if they piss off the right people, making any change is way more trouble than they are willing to deal with.

There is an entire side of the tech industry with admins who only want to learn powershell and still think you can’t “lock down” Linux and mac machines.

I would replace "learn powershell" with "click buttons in some wizard". I have rarely seen IT person that wants to "learn" something new or automate some process.

I've been fortunate enough work with some people who REALLY wanted to automate and do things "right" but believed so whole heartedly in microsoft they anticipated every powershell release.... But I've seen more of the "click button in some wizard"

You must be young. Welcome to the real Microsoft. Now that you've seen it for yourself, don't fall for their tricks again.

They surely do, one of the reasons why Windows Phone failed to gain adoption was how Google blocked access to their apps from Windows Phone.

But they didn’t. There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.

Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.

Google did user agent detection and would actively redirect Windows Phone users to degraded experience versions of things like YouTube and Maps even if the full versions would work fine.

> ... even if the full versions would work fine

That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.

Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]

It looks to me that the pain was self inflicted.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-phone-8-1-fe...

[1] http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24422_Thestate...

I'm speaking from my own experiences. Proxying the requests to rewrite the user agent, the full mobile version of YouTube and Maps worked properly. Without rewriting the user agent I would be redirected to the minimal versions of the websites which had poor experiences.

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-calls-out-google-po...

> There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.

No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time. User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google properties with Windows Phone IE.

Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube apps for Android and iOS were native.

> Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.

Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs.

I think it never broke past 5% of smart phone market. If this was a reason, I never heard. I feel like most people just were interested in something else and never even really considered it as an alternative.

"Why is Google blocking Windows Phone's YouTube app?"

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474516/why-is-google-...

No doubt the did it, I just don’t think it’s the primary reason windows phone fails to get penetration as that link says;

> Windows Phone's Achilles Heel is its app gap -- it has far fewer apps than Android and iOS

This was more of an issue than one specific app, especially one that like YT that can be consumed via web browser

I’m just speaking based on intuition and what I remember happening, I might be wrong

> Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.

They could not, because if they did that cartel suits would be opened within hours. I expect both the US and Europe have such suits ready to go just in case, and Microsoft (hypocritically) has amicus briefs on standby.

Google literally forced MS to fork Chrome by degrading the experience.

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game.

I think this is already happening. Google pushes non-stop for you to use the Gmail app, then once you do all the links prompt you to open Google Maps, and all the rest. It's annoying and there's no way to change it.

I think Microsoft is just taking a step out of Google's playbook here. Doing exactly what Google does on mobile, but doing that same shitty behavior on desktops. "If you made the choice to use a Microsoft app, you're making the choice to be in the Microsoft ecosystem."

I hate it, it's trash, all the rest... but it feels like -- shocking -- Microsoft is just copying something they saw someone else doing.

Anti-competitive behaviour runs deep in Microsoft. They've been doing it since their early days.

Lest we forget

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

> Anti-competitive behaviour runs deep in ~~Microsoft~~

rampant capitalism, especially in the US of A

the end goal is always to become a monopolist

Well on paper at least, the US has antitrust laws going back to the Sherman Act and Standard Oil.

Microsoft was basically inches away from being broken up in the late '90s due to their anti-competitive practices.

They absolutely should have been and if they were we probably wouldn't have the amazon or google we have today.

I'm kind of hoping the EU decides to pick MS up on this, with a 2nd go around of "abusing their monopoly on the desktop".

Maybe this time they'll break MS into small pieces. :)

> Well on paper at least, the US has antitrust laws going back to the Sherman Act and Standard Oil.

That's my point.

China got their "Antimonopoly law" in 2007.

“Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors”

They did decades ago in the last century. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Are you totally unaware of the history of Microsoft all the way back to the 80s?

Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom line. As long as they can increase revenues and market penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game since IE.

Until very recently you couldn't even change the default browser on iOS, I think the idea Apple are playing "fairier" than Microsoft is a lot more nuanced than you make it seem with this statement.

Even after adding ability to change default browser to iOS, there's still the limitation that only the webkit rendering engine provided by Apple can be used - Firefox and Chrome on iOS are wrappers around the OS level Webkit implementation - the rendering engine is still Safari/webkit - they aren't using their own rendering engines as they do on all other OSes.

There's also the agreement between Apple and Google for default search on iOS too, which absolutely costs Bing marketshare.

> https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/01/web-developers-challenge-appl...

> I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?

They were always that, thru entirety of their history they have used anticompetitive practices on any chance they could.

You're operating under the assumption that Microsoft is the only one doing this.

This sort of thing happens regularly on Android though it's perhaps more subtle. I don't know how many times I've had to set the default browser, photo viewer, pdf viewer, etc only to be prompted to choose how to open a file and Google's App is first in the list.

They also implement features in their Apps to avoid your defaults: https://i.imgur.com/9nzpTPG.png

Certain features like STT for the entire operating system require Google Assistant. And image search or real-time translation require the Google Search App to be installed. So you have to choose between being harassed by Assistant and Search prompts at ever turn, or disabling core OS features.

> Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?

I mean... yes. But that happened in the late 90s. Hasn't changed since then.

> But they don't.

What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari, the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you from collecting any sort of payment without passing through their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?

Google doesn't have nearly as much control over android as microsoft has over windows.

Didn't Google kill non-Chromium Edge with changes on YouTube?

You're missing some important context:

Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office, and Xbox.

Sure, they tried to break into the mobile sector, but they seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in 2002.

Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room. Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".

I'm sure I'm biased but the old school pm culture at Microsoft is still alive and well. The new hires are forced to play the old stupid games of doing anything to get the metrics to show what they want in the short term and the cycle continues. Windows and Office both have this problem and I think will continue to until they get someone up top who's sole purpose is to root out this culture from middle management through low level execs.

I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)

Not entirely a correct narrative as both Edge, Safari and Chrome have had their own private link protocols embedded in their own browser products involving other dark patterns.

> But they don't.

I mean, they actually do though. Apple and Google both do similar things, they just get less media coverage because they are seen as normal to the mobile ecosystem, while this seems abnormal because it's in a desktop environment. That's no excuse for Microsoft, I wish they'd stop doing some of this garbage, but to act like Apple and Google have clean hands is laughable.

Microsoft is a schizophrenic company. For each employee who tries to do things well, clean, and respectful of privacy, there is another one with the same amount of power who won't hesitate engaging in the worst tactics (dark UI patterns, fake/ambiguous statements, regular settings resets, etc.) to earn a few more points in a performance objective. Both crowds probably hate each other, but the working conditions are so great when you work there that the "nice" guys will probably always prefer to walk away, rather than engaging into a conflict to try convincing a moron that forcing a specific browser is a very very very bad idea.

This thing of forcing Edge for opening links, it's clearly an idea successfully forced by a small group of bullies upon other employees, and they probably get a reward from the increased Edge traffic/usage.

Ultimately, there is only one person responsible for this toxic culture and it's the CEO.

This is what happens when good engineering principles get replaced by greedy MBAs and chasing shareholder value

Well, it's more likely that it's because the greedy MBAs are unable to chase shareholder value, so they just pushed down the task into fiefdom leaders.

I mean, it's Edge that they are work so hard to push. What do they actually gain from doing that? It's stupid all the way down.

Bing adoption. Microsoft wants to get a bigger piece of the ad pie, and they hired a former Yandex exec to run it if I'm not mistaken.

>Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?

Change that from a question to a statement and it becomes one of the better single sentence summaries of the windows 11 design methodology.

Didn't Google intentionally break YouTube on IE to make users move to chrome?

Apple does plenty of dark patterns. You are locked into their store, they decide what programs you can run on your phone, they decide what browser you can use, all the other browsers are actually just skinned safari.

The entire crux of any discussion on Microsoft's behaviors hinges on one figure: What percentage of their Windows and Office revenues are coming from end users versus corporate sales? I mean, I think it's kind of obvious, but yet we still have arguments about why they would screw users with these sorts of decisions. It makes no sense to me. Further, (and deference to Tom Warren), but I would bet that a lot more IT admins are happy with this change than there are those who are angry.

Probably inherent because they'll fire you if you don't perform so you put dark patterns in or you get cut. I know they quit the official stack ranking... but I wonder

I can't believe this is the top comment on hacker news. Some of the replies are already covered but as much as I use my Android phone and Microsoft at work, I have never had anything other than Outlook 365 on Android. How is Google going to "literally destroy Microsoft"?

And then there's no need to comment on the Apple portion in your comment, considering the critique is that Microsoft isn't playing nice because they try to default to Edge.

Google and Apple have to be careful not to sink to the historical levels of that other company.

One nice thing about the last decade or so is that other company has had to rein in its historical behavior, and also care about PR a bit.

We'll see how that plays out, given the increasing power that might come with the intimate relationship with OpenAI, and the frenzy of market interest around what's shipping there.

"Microsoft" is not a person with emotions and desires. People too often anthropomorphize, and it is a natural thing to do imo, because we still think with human brains. Microsoft, like any other company, is a far more complex system than I think our brains are ever meant to comprehend, let alone create. Is it food to eat? A fire to warm up? Is it a leader to follow? A book to read?

What even is Microsoft?

> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.

I have been investing in MSFT under the assumption that they have completely abandoned these markets. What mobile market does Microsoft require when they have an increasing number of SMBs locked entirely into their death star?

> given up on making products which people enjoy to use

Building new apps in with .NET/Azure/GitHub is a dream. The laser focus of the tech community on principled Windows OS issues and other product concerns is completely missing the overarching universe that is being forged by Microsoft.

Azure in 2023 is like Disneyland for a SMB CTO/CIO. If you go all-in you can actually enjoy your weekends and auditors can't really figure out how to ruin your free time as much as they used to be able to. Sure, there are specific technological or economic things that might be better on-prem (or in a different cloud), but overall I have never seen something this unified, stable, confidence-inspiring, etc.

I believe that the first cloud which can be largely delegated out to non-wizards is going to be the one that wipes the floor with the others. I suspect Microsoft is already hard at work integrating the LLM features they acquired into their Azure administration use cases. Simply having a bot integrated into the portal that can provide suggested configurations in a few hotspots (e.g. make a VM like XYZ but with ABC changes) would be incredible.

Yeah... Imagine if in iOS every link opened in Safari and the only alternative browsers allowed were reskins of Safari.

Google and Apple do utilize dark patterns, as does Samsung, and Dell, and pretty much every other major device manufacturer.

Microsoft just really abused it bundling in IE and was penalized hard for it.

These other players have learned to push the limits of anti-competitive behavior while maintaining a plausible defense against government action.

Microsoft make a ton of products that are still great to use. Microsoft Flight Sim? No jokes, it's just good fun from what I hear. Their Visual Whatever IDEs? They built that by creating great things like the LSP.

And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind of walled garden incentive mechanism.

I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we get there, the journey, matters.

Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that. Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me towards a troll state.

But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into something else.

And I see that happening with other things I love too.

Sorry, just to add: Those new OSes and new languages and the entire growing ecosystem of computer engineering may be beautiful. And this statement can be viewed as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns. And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to different outcomes afterwards.

They aren't doing that not for the goodness of their hearts, but because Microsoft has them by the cojones when it comes to anything related to Cloud, OS used by millions of Android devs and productivity tools.

The big difference is that Google and Apple are largely in the consumer space. MS, with Teams, is in the enterprise space where user experience isn't part of the buy decision.

If CEOs, CTOs, CFOs all start having annoying issues with Teams, Office, Azure, etc. on their MacBooks and iPhones then you can bet your right arm on it that it will affect corporate buying decisions.

Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently better than another.

Things can change fast when executives start complaining about the software the IT department is making them use.

I think Teams would be much better if that was the dynamic.

Executives don't use chat; they use email. And their secretaries manage it for them.

There's even a Simpsons episode about it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TANRRhdncHc

> I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company?

That might be their problem. They are a great company. Where do they go from there?

It feels kind of like the have been taken over by some other organization actually.

How could they destroy MS? The majority of MS's market is enterprise stuff.

Apple and Google own the mobile market together. There's not one player that owns almost all of it like that did with Windows (and still do really).

One is a healthy market, the other is not.

And Android respects browser choice, iOS will soon be forced to in the EU with the new sideloading mandate.

Both monopolies and duopolies are unhealthy, the only reason they're acting better in Europe because, as you said, they are being forced to.

They don't because they can't. People use ms programs for their daily work , phones are secondary.

And how is ms degrading googls products? They don't even have a mandatory app store in windows.

When comparing them all, ms has been the most open one

I think people care more about their phones than wether they use Goole docs or Word to put together a report at work which nobody is really going to read and if they do they'll ask for a PDF print out anyway and not the document itself.

Same for other products. If OneDrive or MS Teams was all of a sudden really annoying to use on iOS and Android, but Slack and Google Meet would work really reliably and smoothly then I think a lot of people would just starting to use the non Microsoft alternative because nobody likes to deal with annoyances on a daily basis. We have seen this already, when Zoom came about it captured a huge part of the market really rapidly because it did something so much better than Teams did before. It didn't even require a dark pattern, now imagine how many more would have left Teams if dark patterns would have helped on top of that.

You massively underestimate how much business world (corporate especially) depends on MS Office and how deeply integrated it is into companies eco systems.

And how little they can care about user experience if something ticks all other boxes.

> They don't because they can't. People use ms programs for their daily work, phones are secondary.

I suspect many, many more people globally (and in the US) use a smartphone than use a desktop with MS products on it daily.

Work puts food on the table though, Instagram does not

Reply on news.ycombinator.com