Windows 11 system components use the default browser to open links in Europe
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
That shows such complete and utter contempt for the wishes of their users. The user has actively selected a browser as the one they want to use by default, but windows only uses it in the EEA because they were forced to.
As it will be used by EEA system components, there's presumably no technical/compatibility issues that would stop the rest of the world using it to.
The eu would actually have to have a big tech company consumers actually interface with in order to fine them -besides just hardware.
That's basically fact. Perhaps you derailed somewhere. Free speech is not absolute unless you are the king.
Where are the regulators? Asleep, underfunded, or being paid off to close their eyes. And then, these companies get to write the laws through lobbying because of their scale.
The punishment is generally "comply in 180 days [actually it's usually measured in years] or we'll fine you". And they often don't comply, and then get fined and sometimes end up complying.
Why would your proposal be better?
I mean, there needs to be a safe way, so I invite everyone to become European for this patch. :-)
There never were an technical issue in defining the default browser. It's something that worked on any OS since nearly 30 years, including Windows.
It's 100% disrespect.
It was never a technical issue, on the contrary.
Same with most companies. The business side tends to steer, resist and fight the creative side. The irony is that in the long run, these two are aligned.
Sad that higher management feels the need to use short-term mechanisms for profit at the expense of reputation and what's best for their users in the long run.
I get the argument: "it's their browser, of course they want people to use it" but for me that answer isn't satisfactory. What is the financial motive to go through all the trouble of pushing Edge? The only reason I can think of is "your data" but even then, what sort of data might MS want to extract from your browser that they can't get from the underlying OS?
* Collections
* Shopping
* Browser Essentials
* Website scanning
* Outlook integration
* Games integration
* ...
- DATA COLLECTION: Allows Microsoft to collect user data for analytics, targeted advertising, and product improvement.
- REVENUE GENERATION: Advertisements and search engine partnerships generate revenue for Microsoft.
- ECOSYSTEM INTEGRATION: Encourages use of other Microsoft products, enhancing user experience.
- VENDOR LOCK-IN: User familiarity discourages switching to competitors, ensuring long-term revenue.
- COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: Maintaining a popular browser aids in negotiation with third-party service providers.
- SOFTWARE CONTROL: Allows Microsoft to guide software standards, impacting web development.
- USER EXPERIENCE: Direct control over browser enhances customer support and troubleshooting.
FOMO and Paranoia. Anything that looks like a market they might miss out on they get scared, freak out, create a shit product and jump in the market with HUGE marketing/info campaigns to convince everyone theirs is the best product, and then it turns out it's not really a profitable market at all. But at least they weren't usurped.
That's the "rules of engagement", same way you can't run Flash or Linux binaries; the same way you can't touch windows kernel space without a code-signing certificate from a eye-gouging authority.
Exceptions to apples rule are rarely given, even for educational purposes; such as pythonista.
When taken though that lens; if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app: alternative interpreters of HTML/CSS could exist.
Unrelated, but: Ironically the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones (as there was only an app store created after community backlash over Apple pushing people to the web).
It's rich to hear this used as a defense of any corporation. Everything is a web app now because nobody got their act together to ship a true "write once, ship anywhere" platform. Microsoft smugly profited off this in the short term with Windows, and Apple used it as an excuse to double-down on their proprietary SDKs. It's obvious why everything is a webapp; what's the realistic alternative? Developing native apps for every platform on one device isn't even feasible nowadays. Then you'd need the developer subscriptions, a cross-platform app architecture and the willingness to write n number of UI mockups, where n is the number of target platforms you intend to hit. It's a veritable waste of time to do anything else.
Come on, we have excellent open computing platforms; it's just not where the money is right now.
Nobody can see passed their nose for profits though so we end up with lowest common denominator everything: which forces you to run a whole code interpreter on everything.
Apple said "no, you can't" and that's where the money is, so you had (and continue to have) a choice and your business chooses to use it.
So, you have to play by those rules.
I mean, I'm not taking a stand here; despite people believing that I'm defending apple. You don't get the sit around though and reap the benefits of the system they built (and developers helped build) while simultaneously trying to tear it down.
They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them; so why are we complaining?
If you actually care you would make programs on one of the many open standards platforms which in turn would turn them into more attractive platforms as the ecosystem improved.
But nobody does, everyone just wants the money now.
Apple is at least complicit in the status-quo as a vendor of native app SDKs, and it's something they could probably fix with the right initiative. At the business layer, they have no motivation to fix this issue. On an individual level, it's a black hole of annoyance, confusion and hand-wavey abstraction as to why certain things are off-limits or why certain apps aren't on iPhone. Treating your userbase as a hostage situation is an obvious ploy, and one I can't encourage even to fix another problem. If we rely on the altruism of businesses to fix our market problems, then we are subject to their whims when they want to change things for themselves.
If we can both agree that Apple can and does make decisions that harm their users, then we're basically on the same page. I want to scrutinize that harm, and hopefully spread enough awareness to codify a change. You're free to feel however you want on the topic, but I would object to this behavior from any company.
> They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them
The internet did not agree to "Apple's rules". That's like saying Sony made their "rules" with the Playstation 3 browser, and now everyone has to play by that. They released a client, and their customers agreed to their Terms of Service. The internet will do whatever it wants, including whittle itself down to the lowest common denominator of 'document rendering' to hit Apple's platforms. If that's an undesired outcome for them or their users, maybe they should change their approach.
As I heard, that was just the cover story to hide the fact that the original iPhone was too slow to properly run Flash (or native apps).
Read that again to yourself, slowly.
It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.
I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.)
He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!
No thanks, I'll take properly managed freedom within my OS.
> if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app
Could you elaborate?
> Could you elaborate?
I run a web browser with JS turned off and the web is mostly unusable for me, even things that should be plain documents like news reports try to choke down a dozen or so megabytes of obfuscated garbage that it insists must run on my CPU doing goodness knows what to render a document in common markdown.
So, despite being "free" you just run any old garbage you happen to come across on the internet and hope the "Fantastically optimised awesomely sandboxed" runtime that is definitely not too complicated to have issues (despite being one of the most complicated interpreters in history), definitely has no security bugs and will protect you.
I'm not pro apple here. I'm anti the enshittification of everything because some arsehat decided it was necessary for me to run whatever arbitrary shite they managed to vomit onto a web-server.
That Apple makes it hard for you? Fine. Enemy of my enemy.
Also: fuck Chromes monopoly.
That's a highly contradictory stance. Accepting one brand of enshittification to solve another, less-significant problem is an indefensible position. You can't ignore Apple's arbitrary shite while complaining about the prevalence of other arbitrary decisions, it's a go-nowhere fallacy. There is no point; you are just promoting something that you think can help you, and then refusing to rationalize it in the greater context beyond browsers.
There's no reason to paint this as an "enemy of my enemy" situation, either. You either think browser clients are a powerful tool that deserves better scrutiny, or you think the status quo is fine. Nobody is putting on armor and picking up a sword to go to war for their favorite corporate-sponsored browser. If anyone has you believe that, they're probably manipulating you.
Apple doing shitty things is irrelevant because ultimately that applies to people who buy apple products and people who want to sell products that work on apple devices.
What Web Developers are doing affects me daily.
Apple pisses off web developers who want to turn a browser into an OS with crap like WebUSB? Not seeing a problem.
Apple actively prevents the monopoly position of v8/blink/Chrome? Not seeing a problem.
Apple has my support in-so-far as its the only company that seems to tell web developers "no".
Enemy of my enemy applies; No other company, especially one with any actual leverage, is preventing the lurch of web crap.
See, this is the problem. If Apple is going to charge you 30% to use a serialized data cable, they're going to get annihilated legislatively. That's not a choice the market gets to make, it's one market regulators decide on. As we've seen in multiple European countries, Apple doing shitty things is not irrelevant because they get fined for participating in said markets.
Thank god for the Digital Markets Act. Apple can take their performance art and sell it somewhere with proper authoritarianism, like China. Oh wait...
Different even if just as or more shitty.
There will be less incentive for developers to make sure their stuff works on anything but Chrome forcing safari devs to just play catch up all the time.
It would take more than just being competitive, the WebKit team would need to start perfectly reproducing Blink behaviors and quirks. Devs are already more than happy to never test their work against anything that’s not Chrome and that’s only going to intensify when they don’t need to care about WebKit any more — any deviance from Chrome even if it’s technically within spec will be considered an error.
That’s where users feel forced to change browsers, because if they don’t they’ll frequently be running into pages that are broken in browsers that aren’t Blink-based.
Both companies need regulatory actions to reign them in. Apple probably needs to be broken up.
Integration between devices/software is their entire selling point.
It's always done to end monopolies, to open up closed markets. The people benefiting are consumers and competitors, not Apple itself.
If the deep integration between hardware, software and services is the main reason why people buy Apple’s products the harm from breaking the up might outweigh any of the benefits.
I've never seen any video open in anything other than my default video player IINA, it's almost like quicktime isn't installed, i've never seen it pop up.
When you change the file association on OSX, be sure to also click the “Apply for all .mp4 files” button. Common mistake.
Yet, whenever I want to search for a highlighted word, it opens Safari. This is such an absurd situation where I am browsing a site and want to do a search for something I just read and, instead of just opening a new tab or replacing the active tab with a web search, it opens a different browser app I do not want to use.
This is just not the way any reasonable user would expect a system app to behave once all browser selection settings are configured to use a different browser.
Firefox on iphone is just webkit. It is not actually Firefox.
Chrome on iphone is just webkit. It is not actually Chrome.
Chrome on iPhone is Chrome on iPhone, but it uses WebKit instead of Blink.
The reason this is important for you to keep in mind is because Firefox is whatever Mozilla says Firefox is, and Chrome is whatever Google says Chrome is. There's no reason to suppose the iPhone version of some product should share any code with the Android version of the same product.
---
This is not true, and I've got receipts. Just downloaded Firefox and set it as the default browser, then used the Lookup option on the word "Lettuce."
First section is dictionary, second section is "Siri Suggested Websites." These entries have Firefox logo and open Firefox when clicked.
I’m saying the people at MS promoting this in this particular way are, well, dumb.
But as a user wow is it the most trashy and abusive program I routinely encounter. Start it for the first time and you're confronted with tabloid news and advertising. Sponsored links are mixed into your frequently visited sites by default. It injects itself into your online shopping and sends all your images and browser behavior to their servers for various weak justifications. You can turn it into a passable experience by scrolling through and configuring something in nearly every single settings tab, but then they just ignore you and inject new advertising sidebars or icons in a random update. Keeping it restricted to "just a browser" requires constant vigilance. It's clearly first and foremost just an advertising revenue funnel for Microsoft, which is completely pathetic of them. At least IE was mostly just a browser even if it did that pretty badly most years.
I cannot replicate, it opens Firefox for me BUT it completely disregards my search engine choice, so it opens Google even though Kagi is my default search engine.
That's a choice that is not based on technical conditions and is pure disrespect of user preferences.
When I click on an address in FB Messenger, I get the “open in google maps or Apple Maps” prompt, but choosing Google Maps just takes me to the Google Maps App Store page, even though I have the app installed and updated.
If there is a solution to this problem (where my attempts failed for some reason), I’d be all ears. :)
> When I click on an address in FB Messenger, I get the “open in google maps or Apple Maps” prompt, but choosing Google Maps just takes me to the Google Maps App Store page, even though I have the app installed and updated.
Is it possible that this is only the case on FB Messenger? I think there are other Apps offering this option where it does work.
This is almost certainly a bug in Messenger.
* Microsoft: we will let you set a preference, but we will ignore/reset it
* Apple: we won't let you set a preference at all
If someone wanted to say "Microsoft and Apple don't care about your preferences, but Microsoft is slightly worse", I think that'd be a fair thing to say.
Agreed that apple's is a lack of a feature, BUT if you look at the features which apple does support, it feels closer to they don't want to add it for anti-competitve reasons, and not a technical/implementation reason
* ios apps can be deep linked via "apple-app-site-association"
* ios apps can have custom url schemes "comgooglemaps://?parameters"
* android has had "intents" for a very long time
* ios sms is already detecting "this is an address" from free text and is hot linking it to their maps app
Apple don't provide such system and so you are blocked by what the source app wants to open. On Apple apps, it will open other apple apps, and on tier apps, it's up to what they want to open. Of course Apple have zero incentive to change this so I don't see it changing.
- Stuck to EdgeHTML and Chakra for a better diversity of web technologies
- No bloat, tracking, data siphoning, sign in pressure, sketchy financial services, bing integration shitware
- Cross platform (Win/OSX/Lx at least)
- Open source so we know there's no funny business
That would be a genuinely interesting browser that would have a chance of selling itself.
Instead we get a poor Chrome reskin that offers minimal incentive to use it.
So it turns out, Edge isn't even good enough to fulfill its meme.
The pop-up said Edge was based on Chrome with the added trust of MS.
I really wish I could get others to use Firefox, but they're too used to Chrome.
Edge: the best browser downloader downloader!
That’s why Britain didn’t even consider joining the EEA after they left the Union. From their point of view, it would still be the regulatory burden of EU membership without most of the benefits they enjoyed as a full member. When they’d decided to take the economic impact of leaving the free trade area, it wouldn’t really make sense to stay on worse terms than they already had.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/01/uk-eu-safet... - UK to retain EU safety mark in latest Brexit climbdown
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66394235 - Post-Brexit import checks on food delayed again
And, the UK recently decided to forgo their UKCA mark to replace the CE mark as it would cost UK businesses too much to support both.
And lastly the UK has yet to impose sanitary and phyto-sanitary rules on imports into the UK because it would cost consumers in the UK too much (UK food inflation is still higher than just about all EU countries even without the checks). But the EU does impose sanitary and phyto-sanitary checks on food imports to the EU from the UK. So, in net the EU benefits from this as well.
So in balance the UK doesn't benefit. And it's a huge deal.
Have you considered that UK food inflation is higher precisely because they're not in the single market?
A smart person who has read up on EU/UK and some European migration situations will note that migration to e.g: Denmark/Switzerland is still difficult despite being part of those four freedoms. This is because they bothered to mitigate migration within the parameters of the law; since the right to work under EU's four freedoms only applies for 6 months.
That's not really true if you are living in one of those countries (I live in one of those countries). In general, we get the protections that the EU gives its people and I get free travel within the zone. Lots of little things like my phone working without outrageous charges when I travel to most places here, too.
Just don't get anywhere near Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Andorra, Monaco with your roaming enabled :)
Switzerland has its own arrangement, and the roaming deal doesn't apply.
Andorra, Monaco, the United Kingdom, the Faroe Islands, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Belarus, Russia, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova are not in the EU or EEA.
Something which almost certainly wouldn't happen if they passed these laws by themselves, rather than as part of a much larger economic area.
But otherwise... I mostly agree with you. Lots of laws, not much representation.
The US doesn't, in general, give any extra rights or protections to its people without a bit of force, and then one is lucky.
Hence, no real consumer protection (which would include this). No signing of a thing giving rights for children, and so on. The rights folks legally have were grand enough 200 years ago, but have become substandard over time with little upgrading.
Something has changed since then that has made US anti-trust much "lazier".
Sounds like cheap ass startups or poorly executing corpos
After learning the basics, I can't go back to windows anymore because I know how a proper OS works and can see how terrible windows actually is as an operating system, not just in terms of user experience. That alone keeps me motivated to push through any difficulties I face with linux.
I love Visual Studio, and I love .NET which went way more open source than I thought it would, I for sure assumed it would be licensed under the MS-PL which is far less demanding than the GPL but not as a free as MIT, but no, they went straight for the MIT license.
Every single repo is MIT licensed.
I also appreciate VS Code, I know some people will still find some reason to hate on it, but its blatantly clear that it has taken the industry, the number of times I meet a developer who loves using it for programming is much higher than the number of developers I used to see using literally any other range of editors, it all seems to be uniform towards VS code. If you take away the OS, Microsoft still builds amazing products.
I also enjoy Azure more than I do thinking about what half of AWS services mean or do. I seriously have to google a service every time someone brings one up just to remind myself what its for. I rarely do that with Microsoft services, some of it is I'm used to them, but some services have blatantly obvious names as well.
I swear by a lot of their developer tooling and open source work but abhor the Windows ecosystem
That’s Microsoft. They control their own software.
Microsoft wants to be a subscription company and will try and funnel you down any route to keep that revenue. Shareholders and management are driving this because the platform was the product and the product is worth absolutely fuck all at the end of the day. Ergo now it's a subscription delivery mechanism for Office, OneDrive and Edge etc which are all data gathering mechanisms themselves.
It just doesn't change the fact that they're in the advertising business, and that the advertising business is really lucrative so they started pushing for it hardcore.
“If only the tsar knew!”
A business can be predictable without being shitty to the core. Microsoft has been a shitty scofflaw company since the day it was founded. Apple and Google are pretty shitty, but they weren't in their early days. Microsoft has always been a criminal racket.
Instead, it makes more sense to direct your energy towards the government that's letting them get away with it.
Same with monopolies; it's absolutely fundamental to their nature that we don't have any leverage over them as consumers. We can either cry impotently about Google and MS being bad guys or we can actually demand our governments do something about it. It's bizarre how often people choose the former!
That shows that the user is only being respected when pressured by legislation, not because you're the customer.
Microsoft does not respect its customers and does not deserve our business.
I don't have the answer. Especially in the past, it seemed like a cost factor to keep up a modern browser (just ask Mozilla) if people might as well install anything else and still buy your OS and use your services. That may have just been going with the flow, not wanting to miss the boat.
My best guess for nowadays is the same as why Google hijacked a login to any google service (from gmail to youtube) as a log in to the Chrome browser, after which all the data on any website is up for grabs and they can facilitate privacy extensions all they want without compromising their own market position. Does Microsoft (plan to) run an ad business? Is it built-in Cortana integration which can answer with ads included or ranking own services higher? Is it just to be able to shove any new future service into more people's faces? To steer web standards, like if you have >70% market share on Windows desktops can you just build in a new ActiveX for WebOffice (as an example) and you'd force others to follow?
Or maybe a combination of all of the above. Either way, I think it would be good to know what strategy is behind this relentless pushing
Microsoft Advertisement is pulling in 10 billion dollars a year (~=5% of total) and Microsoft wants to aggressively expand it.
Microsoft ditched their own browser engine and the current version of edge is just using chromium, so it's cheap to maintain.
Edge uses bing by default so Microsoft can serve you ads, and it has a shopping plugin built in which also probably generates revenue. They can also try to redirect people to other microsoft services whenever they want in the future.
They also like to take choice away from power users with the same excuse.
But regarding browser choice, they are happy to support different behaviors depending on geographic location... which already tells me that current Microsoft's practice of forcing Edge onto users does actually make a difference.
The marketshare figures will just be the cherry on top.
The USA's legal system is, plainly, only driven by the interests of the groups willing to pay the insanely high legal fees to do anything about it.
Over here, privacy is an afterthought, and I sincerely doubt anyone will discuss it this election: nobody profits financially from it.
Wait a minute. Are they trying to cause me to have a complete meltdown? This is so irritating. The task bar can also no longer be placed vertically on the left or right. Imo. Microsoft should be forced to open source important parts of Windows so that these processes can be more democratized by users of the system.
And it's a real tab, not a pop-up, so I haven't figured out how to tell uBlock to suppress it yet.
For example, I don't think it's realistic to expect a US citizen traveling to a EU country having to follow US regulations and laws, nor the opposite.
So I'm not sure it would apply in this case either, but I'm not even sure what regulation/law made Microsoft add this change to the update in the first place. If we can figure that out, I guess we could figure out the real answer to your question without guessing.
WSL2 works really well for my needs. I get the best of both worlds. I also hate all of the data collection and dark patterns.
Normal, enjoyable games don't have kernel anticheat.
Cheaters are serious problem.
Also, the experience on Wine/Proton isn't always the best. If you have high-end hardware, you probably want features that just don't work because of your GPU driver of implementation gaps in Wine/Proton.
No, I'm not missing the point. I'm not really big on activism or proving points or things like that - but this is something which is something you don't do if you have principles.
These games make people addicted because your friends play them. Learning to say "no" to these exploitative practices is a very useful thing. Make your friends play better games, or simply refuse to play their games.
(Full disclosure: I use windows myself, I'm not disagreeing with you on that regard about proton)
Oh? Tell me more about me not wanting to play games that are fun and very widespread in my group of friends?
macOS has excellent compatibility with 95% of windows software through Parallels, and also respects your choice of browser.
I have Firefox, Chrome, Tor Browser and Brave running next to my current browser of preference, Safari. But switching back and forth is easy, and macOS respects my choice when I change the settings.
Let’s not delude ourselves to thinking that two of the richest tech companies in the world are all that different. Both are working against your interests to monopolize their turf.
The group that truly puts users first is FOSS: Linux and BSD.
Please, name me one, just one, software that I should want to run on macOS but can't?
> Let’s not delude ourselves to thinking that two of the richest tech companies in the world are all that different. Both are working against your interests to monopolize their turf.
I never said they were. All I was talking about is free choice of browsers, which I have on macOS.
> Thousands of dollars?
What is the price of a Mac Mini in your country? Here it reads $599.
Or a laptop, a MacBook Air, is $999.
The Macbook Air starts at €1349 ($1450) here
I also wonder how much money they invested in the legal handlings of this topic and how many developer/sales hours are and were wasted to make this "split" possible.
Whole operating system just comes off as super shady and desperate since Windows 10 - feels a lot like fake antivirus malwares from the 2000s. It has always been pushy in this millennium, sometimes for a good reason (updates are important), but all of this is without any decent reason.
Installing those updates of course also re-enabled automatically installing drivers without any prompt, which promptly caused the Nahamic malware to be re-installed through Windows Update. Somehow most IT people are not bothered by this. I imagine if you would tell this stuff to a mid-2000s IT person their head would simply explode.
A lot of people are ok using their phone as their primary device. And a chromebook and access to google suite would fill the rest of their needs. I’d install linux mint and they’d only notice the interface is different.
They still haven't noticed.
E.g. EU enforces free data roaming for cellphone providers, but many providers allow free roaming to Switzerland and the Nordic countries too - not sure if it's just practically easier than trying to geofence those areas into a different tariff or if it's legally too complicated, but I'm fairly certain they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Supranational_Europea...
No big mystery: because EEA countries agreed to the ruling to make that a requirement and not just EU countries?
There is tons of stuff applicable at the EEA level, it's quite common. After all the purpose of EEA is to have common regulatory framework.
"1. Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions."
Or there might be an argument that downloading instructions to a user's device, causing it to do something they didn't want, is a breach of the EU's anti-malware rule (AKA the much-despised "cookie law", even though that name downplays its significance)
You're not looking for converts when you're forcing somebody to do something. Most of Microsoft's business has always been about forcing people to use things. The other choice is a company that you have to pay a premium to choose, but then you're forced to stay or else lose your stake. None of this is competition, it's all market manipulation.
I mean, obviously they want to push Edge - but for some reason their hands were forced within the EEA. I'd be interested to know that reason :)
I've submitted a few GDPR requests that had an impact on Microsoft too - so if you're an EU citizen, make a good habit of complaining about bad data hygiene and anticompetitive behavior.
Source: currently on win10 enterprise and it refuse to open certain PDF files outside Edge, because "security"
(Sick of links I click in Teams opening in Edge instead of my system's default browser!)
Apple open webviews in Safari, does not respect the user's choice at all, and doesn't even allow you to install a non-safari browser on their mobile OS.
This is like peak irony. Apple is the walking definition of this problem.
Its like if you cheated on your wife and told her she can't get mad because your neighbor cheated on his wife first. Somehow that is a rebuttal even though she was never married to the neighbor and may have even started dating you in the first place because you didn't cheat.
Something Apple does considerably worse than Microsoft, intentionally and purposefully - entirely for control and profit, mostly to maintain their app store taxes.
(can't comment on iOS since I use Safari there, but then TFA is about Windows 11 i.e desktop-side)
I can go on, but macOS is not an OS that respects users or user choice.
Do you mean Pages/Keynote/Numbers?
Since these are not 1:1 (neither on feature nor in concepts) with MS Office/OpenOffice opening such a file is by definition a lossy import, so saving in the original format would be destructive, both with regards to the original contents being lossily converted to Apple app concepts and any Apple concept specific change made after opening being lossily converted to the original format.
This is not user hostile, this is saving the user from the impedance mismatch between software that organically grew from Multiplan and software that's been designed from the ground up.
Now, the Apple office suite being "shitty" is largely your personal (and the way you phrased it, judgemental) opinion, I personally prefer the Apple office suite any day to MS Office/OpenOffice/GDocs.
nice
these spammy tactics and built in coupon addons make it feel trashy.
So if you want to make your random executable be "a browser", my guess is you should register it as a handler for http, https, and .html, at least.
Some time ago Microsoft made it impossible to reassign this scheme to another app like EdgeDeflector.
PS: It was KB5007262 that "addresses an issue that might improperly redirect OS functionality when you invoke microsoft-edge: links."
I used Edge for a few years when it came out and it was good, but each version they shoved something new in your face and I had to go back to Chrome.
I mean does any normal person even care about this? Eg, not people on HN with Macbook Pros – your average Windows user.
At the end of the day Windows does loads of stuff I don't like. That's why I don't use Windows anymore. Like with most things the EU regulates this just isn't an issue. Windows using a different browser for system apps is so far down on the list of things I don't like about Windows that even if you asked me to write a 100 point list of things I don't like about Windows I'm not sure this would make the list. Guess we need some more regulation.
Edit: Please don't downvote simply because you disagree with me. It's better to have a discussion. Different perspectives are good.
Probably several millions, yes. Considering the EU has 450 inhabitants, that*s increasing my tax bill by cents. Well worth the money to me. Probably, MS will try to backtrack and violate regulations at some point so it will pay for itself too.
I'll never get the US masochism where interference by regulators to defend the end-user is somehow seen as odious.
But this never ends. Every week there's a new article here about how the EU is forcing electronics makers implement their preferred charger ports, or displaying cookie notices to EU visitors, or making phone batteries replaceable. It's endless crap that adds drag to businesses trying to operate in EU, costs tax payers hundreds of millions and has almost no significance to the average person's life.
I'm not anti-regulation at all. I just think it needs to be limited to places where there's a clear need to regulate. Honestly sometimes it seems like the EU is just looking for the next pointless thing to regulate so they can continue to justify their jobs.
Please take this as a separate point on taxation more generally, but I tend to find the most pro-tax people I know are those with the highest incomes. Those in favour of people's income being redistributed to regulators in this way I find are often the same people who argue in favour of spending "a little more" for free ranged eggs, and organic fruits, etc. I'm not suggesting you don't do this already, but we should consider if those pennies would be better in the pockets of workers rather than taken by government regulators so you don't have the displeasure of using Edge when you occasionally need to use Windows instead of your Mac.
> That money will come from the pockets of the people you're describing
Very indirectly maybe. Ad spend is a cost to businesses, not consumers.
I'll also add that making ad spend less inefficient (as this regulation will do) will ultimately cost either the business or consumer as someone will need to eat those extra costs. Assuming that those inefficiencies are not passed to the consumer and is instead is a cost to the business, this would still only be a good thing if you believe companies making more money is bad.
I very much disagree that prescribing a common charging port for phones has had no significance to the avg. person's life. I am old enough to remember my drawer full of chargers for various phone companies - some even created new plugs for newer generations of phones.
> we should consider if those pennies would be better in the pockets of workers
That's not how it works, those pennies would end up in the pockets of anonymous wealth funds and the family offices of the filthy rich while workers had to buy phone chargers with all their new phones.
The market ultimately fixed this though (mostly anyway). Personally I like Apple's charger ports, but I'll soon no longer have this choice as a consumer because regulators think they know what's best for me.
> That's not how it works, those pennies would end up in the pockets of anonymous wealth funds and the family offices of the filthy rich while workers had to buy phone chargers with all their new phones.
We're getting into an economic debate now. I think generally it's good to assume that the more a business makes, the more people it will be able to employ and the more those employees will make.
I think the problem you're touching on here is that in recent years the bottom line of businesses don't correlate well with the income if its workers. I think there are better ways to solve this problem so that if Apple makes more money on chargers their workers would share in the profits. Regulating phone chargers and browser preferences may not be the best solution here.
Yes, I was attacking your argument that eased regulation would profit the workers - in our current climate, it doesn't. So regulating phone chargers makes a difference to the plutocracy only, not the workers. And you should not forget that a phone that comes without a charger can be cheaper by the BOM of the charger.
It would be just fine if you had 20 interchangeable OS vendors competing for your buck indeed. Unfortunately you have 2 or at best 3 if you count the mythical desktop linux. And they're not interchangeable.
Same for phones, can I choose between 10 phone operating systems? Um no, there are just two of them.
Here in the US we're obviously in the opposite situation. We get some good protections occasionally, but the default position is almost always pro-corporate. With extra favor given to those who donated money to the politicians. I'd so much rather have the EU way of thinking. Even if it leads to more annoying cookie banners.
Those are not the result of EU regulation; they're not even compliant with EU regs, usually. I don't know for sure why companies put up those stupid banners, but I suspect it's partly a kind of protest, and partly an (illegal) attempt to trick users into consenting to data collection.
I've had to implement and manage these banners at almost every company I've worked for the last several years. It's EU law. Websites that operate in the EU must obtain explicit consent to use tracking cookies. The exception here would be essential cookies which are needed to provide service – although you may still need to consent to do that depending on what data the service is collecting / processing.
Some banners don't comply with EU regulation because they default checkboxes to approve cookies and the EU regulation requires "explicit consent". That said, you almost certainly won't find a major website that doesn't comply for EU visitors and where sites get this wrong it's usually not intentional and is normally because smaller companies don't have the time or resources to comply with the nuances of EU data law. The larger companies who do have the resources hire people like myself to do it for them. There's a sizeable industry around complying with EU GDPR regulation here in Europe. Companies like Usercentrics make millions charging companies for EU-compliant cookie banners, https://www.cookiebot.com/
It's not great for small businesses, but it's great if you're a larger corporate with the money for compliance or an individual riding the EU regulatory gravy train.
The regulation is only 99 articles long and full of fun legal talk if you're interested in reading it yourself. It's just one of the many documents you'll need to familiarise yourself with if you want to do business in the EU: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
You mean, taxpayer funds being used to fund the operation of a regulatory body? I wonder how they should be funded in your ideal world:
* Don't fund them at all; the world is better with no regulators and no regulations.
* Cut them loose from the taxpayer; let them behave like an LE agency, and fund themselves by levying fines.
As far as I'm aware, there's no regulator involved in this, taxpayer-funded or otherwise. This is simply a law (which you can call a "regulation" if you prefer). As such, the only "regulatory" body involved is the EU lawmaking apparatus, and EU citizens seem to be OK with funding that.
You're either misunderstanding or purposefully misrepresenting my point. Happy to clarify my position if it's a misunderstanding.
EU tax payer here. I was asked by the EU if they could use my tax money for this and I was fine with that. I think my neighbour was also asked and he was cool with that, too, so the EU went this way.
Don't worry, it wasn't your money that was spent here...
Yes. The EU has an annual economic output of about 17.4 trillion Euros. A few million dollars in taxes is probably like what, 0.0001% of the zones tax burden, a fraction of a cent of my taxes?
I'll do you one better, if I could kill one of big techs user hostile features with a regulation I will chime in 50 bucks per bill. Windows probably runs on 90%+ of people's home and work devices, no regular user is just switching off Windows, you're not the norm.
If you think different perspectives are so good, why do you immediately call the opposing view insane?
Are you telling me you really don't care about this disruption that happens tens of times per day or just that you are not impacted and so noone else should care?