Microsoft Edge Pre-Installing Google Docs Offline Extension | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Edge Pre-Installing Google Docs Offline Extension

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61 pointstech234a43 comments

They should pre-install ublock origin

They pre install Adblock Plus on Edge mobile. So almost there.

They probably pay Adblock Plus to have bing ads whitelisted just like google does through their "Acceptable" ads program

You can disable "Acceptable ads" in Edge mobile.

What exactly does this extension do that regular HTML5 couldn't do?

HTML5 allows service workers for offline abilities.

HTML5 has copy and paste...

If it isn't good enough for Google Docs, then perhaps Google should be making it better for all websites rather than making an extension for just their own site?

Every so often Google docs prompts me to install their plugin. At this point I don't even remember what issue it caused, I just remember that it was so infuriating and that I decided I never wanted to deal with it again.

google seem to be specialists at making people feel like that lol

That's... Super interesting. Guess this is due to customer demand somehow. Surprised edge has that sort of clearance from the rest of the biz to make these sorta calls.

I am sure there's no problem signing off on stuff that makes them less likely to attract antitrust scrutiny.

If that were true they'd be the most competition friendly company on the planet.

There's a lot of things that surprise me, since I assume Microsoft does a lot of dogfooding.

Like does any exec there ever open up Edge and cringe at the scam ridden cesspool that MSN has become? Or ask why they have to see Candy Crush ads jiggling around in the start menu? Somehow the low-rent skeevyness can't be outweighed by the ad revenue.

I suspect that Microsoft internally is using Enterprise edition, where the Start Menu behavior is disabled, and likely sets an internal landing page as the start page for the browser. So no, I suspect generally most Microsoft folks don't have to suffer what the rest of us see.

Those who do probably don't have the clout to demand a change that removes revenue.

Not just enterprise edition, they have all kinds of special Microsoft internal stuff on it

I still have friends who work at Microsoft and internally, Microsoft employees see the same tabloid articles and a fresh install of Windows comes with Candy Crush.

What people on HN don't realize is that the general public likes Candy Crush and tabloid news. My parents love these things being front and center on their computers.

I have less issues with Candy Crush and tabloid news than I do with Microsoft's use of Taboola for ad revenue. It means you can go from stock Windows to malware in one click from the Edge homepage.

They get the cesspool. Whether they wince or cringe or not is a matter of character

I consider myself to have a more "highbrow" taste but millions of people watch reality TV about fat people.

Those MSN articles are a look into the human condition and MS has the telemetry to prove it.

Ah no I bet it's about Edge losing default status with google docs users as people using google docs would be prompted to install google docs with it chrome. They adopted chrome for edge as they know they could not beat it now they are using the same old playbook Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

What happened to the EU ruling from way back? Do I still have the option to uninstall (or not to install) Microsoft's browser?

Edge is not really Microsoft's browser anymore; they're just helping Google at this point with their browser engine effective monopoly.

last i checked you can remove it but it will break things

Afaik you still cannot uninstall:

* Internet Explorer

* Edge Legacy

* New Edge

so, yes there's now effectively three browsers that you can't get rid off.

You can install a different browser, and make that other browser your default browser - but certain Microsoft apps will ignore that default browser choice, and open links in Edge anyway.

Apart from that, depending on your region and version of Windows, you might get bugged about making Edge your default browser, or switching to Edge during some Windows Updates.

The login screen on Windows is still a veiled advertisement for Bing search, which too opens in Edge.

IIRC Internet Explorer no longer ships with Windows by default and you have to use an IE compatibility mode of Edge to use sites that require it.

> IIRC Internet Explorer no longer ships with Windows by default and you have to use an IE compatibility mode of Edge to use sites that require it.

Most or all of IE is still there. All Microsoft has done, is made it so if you launch iexplore.exe without arguments, instead of starting, it pops up a screen telling you to use Edge instead, and offers to start Edge for you.

But, when you enable IE Mode in Edge, then Edge launches a subprocess for each IE Mode tab called "iexplore.exe". In fact, it is launching it with almost the same arguments that IE itself uses to launch a tab subprocess (SCODEF:, CREDAT:), just with an added "APPID:MSEdge" argument.

And the APIs to embed IE into third party apps (MSHTML, WebOC) also still work. It is like they've boarded up the front entrance to make you think the building is closed, but come in the side door you'll discover everything's still open.

I'd rather they have kept the UI of IE, with the rendering engine of Edge/Chrome. That would've made it a little bit less of another Chrome-clone.

They almost embedded the Edge Legacy engine in Internet Explorer but that didn’t make it out of technical preview builds [1].

[1]: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/how-to-enable-spartans-e...

That was the Windows 7 N and E editions. N didn't come with Media Player and E didn't come with Internet Explorer. I don't believe any version has had an E edition since Windows 7 but you can still have the N editions through to Windows 11. The requirements by the EU on Microsoft regarding browser choice ended in 2014.

So they are now operating in the same way as Apple.

This Microsoft attitude of embrace everything, I don't know how far this will take them.

It's okay. If all else fails, they have a team of sales bozos that will visit your company and convince them to use Edge as well as Teams. It's the Microsoft way.

Uhhh... what do you think business people do?

Use microsoft products unilaterally, force them upon their employees via policy, and then consider anything not made by MS a security threat.

Businesses use Teams because it’s good enough and they’re already paying for Office so it’s free. Most of the alternatives cost money.

There is no universe where Teams can be described as "good enough". It is without question the worst piece of software I have ever used.

It’s no worse than any other electron app. Teams is fine man. It’s not perfect but you can do a lot through it and a lot of functionality is free.

Made perfect sense to switch to from Slack when it launched.

I can only join Teams meetings (as a "Guest") if I'm signed out. If I'm logged in to my Microsoft account, I cannot join calls and get some weird error.

Nobody at Microsoft can resolve this error. It's been two years now.

Teams is objectively bad software.

It's not free, it's about $6 USD per user per month for the basic edition, and as high as $22 USD per user per month for all the bells and whistles. [0]

Many bulk license discounts usually apply, but the narrative of "free and good enough" isn't really useful as it's not the case at all on either account. And you cannot mix and match lower tiers; the highest tier someone needs in your org defines what you pay. Yes, office licenses are bundled with Teams licenses, but you're paying quite a bit for it as a business regardless of how useful it is for most of your day to day work.

While Teams might seem nice in that it has connectors for power bi or bots or other loose integrations with other services, this ecosystem is not very mature or populated and at least from my experience, it's mostly in the hands of the System Admins who manage Teams/Azure for a company; you need to run resources on Azure or self-host most of the integrations (excepting the prebuilt apps like Polly (poll tool for polls in Teams)), you need to manage resources on Sharepoint/OneDrive as the data lives there, etc.

It starts to really add up after awhile. I don't think the main selling point of Teams is as a chat app, but instead as a monitoring app. Microsoft Viva will give you little reports on your work usage which is presented as a healthy work-life-balance helper, but ultimately it's just an employee monitoring tool. [1],[2] It was sold and pushed as the single business analytics tool from Microsoft with complete visibility into your employee time/work; from what I've seen on the Admin Center, it's quite deep in what it analyzes, despite a lot of the functionality it uses for monitoring being quite buggy (e.g., Status tracking is a non-trivial amount of reporting, but the actual Teams app status gets stuck all the time)

Teams is not a chat application, it is a monitoring application that can also do chat/video and monitor said chat/video. It is questionable in most orgs I've seen whether this feature is really useful/necessary once it's actually deployed, as the takeaway that managers have from the same reports is usually pretty vastly different and there are a wide range of interpretations applied. (this last part doesn't just apply to teams but all employee monitoring apps, but that is another discussion entirely)

0 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-teams/compare-micr...

1 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-analy...

2 - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/activi...

It’s included with Office and nearly every business uses Office, therefore odds are good that your company already has a license to use Teams, thus it is free compared to having to pay for something like Slack in addition to that.

> I don't think the main selling point of Teams is as a chat app, but instead as a monitoring app.

Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about.

Embrace Extend Extinguish - MS Eternal Mantra

Oh did I trigger some MS fanbois with the literal official mantra of MS from when I was a teen and young adult?

tangent -- a Chromebook using Google AUTH just poached LinkedIn login credentials after the experienced owner repeatedly, and every time, declined to save login password. The Chromebook account offered to "restore open tabs" and lo-and-behold, there is an open LinkedIn entry page with login. What are the implications ? US-West

How would a non-Google developer write a browser app that can save its state locally, like Google docs?

localStorage, IndexedDB, cache storage... + Service Worker

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