Microsoft now demands to know why you won't use Edge when you download Chrome
techradar.com
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I know everybody is in love with Microsoft these days because of Open AI but the dark side of Microsoft is still there. And Satya is rewarding it.
If they did, i bet their usage statistics would grow in some substantial amount. Obviously, this could open a can of worms, since they'd then be open to being sued by google...
Does that mean you're starting to believe what the naysayers have been saying for years? ;)
I don't even own any windows device, but I think csharp might be my current favorite balance of pragmatism and design. I have quite a few rather important things running on dotnet core. I appreciate their un-google hammering persistence on things and the willingness to iterate until they get it right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
The character of Microsoft as a company is well known since their early days. It is not wise to trust them.
this means there's no point in evangelizing for big companies like microsoft, because it's just the cycle. (And also, no need to be embarrassed, because that's the cycle too!)
It's like feeling bad that you got hungry, so you ate, and then you feel sorry that you ate, so you got hungry again, it's a cycle, companies need to look good in order to get customers, then they will exploit the customers they got by looking good, and then look bad cause the goal is to exploit the customers, and the cycle starts again.
Keep ruining Windows, buddy. You are doing great.
The cognitive dissonance this provoked in me is astounding. The only people I've seen praising anything AI-related at the same kinds of people who were boosting cryptocurrency and NFTs. Are there really thoughtful, mature people who think that Open AI is in any way positive?
EDIT: The most pro-Microsoft opinions I've seen have mostly been related to VS Code. Personally I don't get it - it's basically functionality-equivalent to IntelliJ, with maybe _slightly_ nicer visuals - but, sure, it works well enough, I guess!
Let's say a license is worth about k hours of development time per year. Over the course of 1 year, IntelliJ will save you much more than k hours of development time.
On the other hand, you have VS Code, which needs over k hours to configure in order to get a fraction of what you can achieve with IntelliJ. You paid the same money in a different way and obtained less benefits.
I'm sure it's better for java though, haven't tried that.
Do you mean what Gateway does, or something else?
(I'm not a fan of the concept, but I think Jetbrains does it).
It’s standard for many projects which is why you use vscode.
I'm using this on a daily basis: https://www.jetbrains.com/remote-development/gateway/
It's not the same thing?
In contrast, almost all extensions work just fine in VScode remote, and you can sync your settings across all machines that you have without doing anything.
It's not really something jetbrains can do about it, but there's also the fact that vscode is almost a standard for one click remote dev so Gcloud, AWS and Azure integrate with it super well. I can access any machine on a single click, and open test envs too while having my settings synced on the browser too. Gateway being proprietary probably makes such integration impossible
Maybe I'm being naïve here, but - why would you need your IDE to have access to remote servers? From a quick look at the landing pages for Gateway it looks like this is basically setting up an ssh connection to a remote server so that you can run your IDE locally but edit files on another server - why would that be advantageous? The only thing I can think of would be if your development machine isn't powerful enough to run your tests or a development version of your code, but I can't imagine that's particularly common?
Like you I'm not actually convinced it's a useful feature generally (otherwise we'd still all be using X11), but those are some justifications.
Ah, this was the bit that I was missing. Thanks! That's.....certainly a constraint within which this feature could be useful. Seems extraordinarily niche, though!?
Like I said, I don't like the approach, it's way too "thin client" for me, but it seems to be part and parcel of our "towers of abstraction" approach to software development. I guess the next logical step is to abstract away the physical location of the code.
A lot of people have Mac/Arm dev machines, but deploy to Linux/x86 machines. Developing and testing on the hardware/OS you are targeting lets you avoid nasty surprises down the line.
I hear this argument regularly, which is confusing when IntelliJ is free? It _has_ a paid version, but in the ~7 years that my employer was paying for the Ultimate Edition, I never once used any of them.
> is more resource efficient believe it or not
Sure, anecdotally this does seem to be true (by the fact that I can have VS Code and Factorio open at the same time :P ).
But the way you hear VS Code fans rave about it, you'd think there are oodles of extra functionality, not just "it's a little more efficient, but not so as you'd notice during the work day".
Anyone who thinks the AI developments are entirely positive and willfully ignores the downsides [information authenticity, spamming, abuse of copyright by the AI companies, the list goes on] might as well fall into that crypto/NFT cohort for me.
> The most pro-Microsoft opinions I've seen have mostly been related to VS Code.
I think it just stems from the fact that "new" Microsoft releases a lot of code as open source, and isn't out trying to sue everyone who looks at their intellectual property the wrong way.
> Personally I don't get it - it's basically functionality-equivalent to IntelliJ
As a heavy VS Code user, I don't really consider it a replacement for other IDEs. It just so happens that the "heavy" IDEs have always done a pretty poor job serving the frontend/backend Javascript stacks- which are the world VS Code was built for. I think of VS Code as "the IDE for Typescript" the way I think of IntelliJ as "the IDE for Java".
You can certainly adorn VS Code with plugins and write Java in it, and you can certainly install some plugins in IntelliJ to do Javascript in it. But these won't be the ideal experiences.
Besides that, it will have a huge impact on non-trivial things like the design industry and data interaction. Being able to programmaticly handle abstract decision making is a big one as well.
It frankly baffles me that people can describe the current AI boom as a fad, when a simple extrapolation of the current technologies will show you what an enormous impact it is going to have in the coming years...
In fairness, I do see _some_ possible value in AI (though much less than the superfans do) - but you must admit that this exact sentiment was being expressed by cryptobros a couple of years ago.
It’s worth looking at who the detractors are: People, creatives especially, feel genuinely threatened by generative ML models. The recent writers strike, specifically addressed it. Nobody that I saw felt threatened by crypto currencies in the same way.
Even at the foundational level, crypto currencies/“smart” contracts/NFTs are additive to the economy, they are a new, different and discreet, whereas AI is disruptive/transformative it is a new way of doing something that people already do. I still can’t pay my bills with crypto or even deposit it at traditional financial institutions, but artist are already using genAI as a tool, today.
Thinking so is how groupthink works.
Thinking intelligence and morality are aligned has terrifying conclusions that you may do well to investigate.
Where Ballmer was DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS, Nadella is DATA DATA DATA.
I miss Ballmer.
Also, arguably, the biggest part of MS’s success under Nadella has been the massively improved dev experience, with the open sourcing of C#/.Net, Powershell, the promotion of Thpescript and VS Code, to name a few larger Dev focused efforts.
The MS dev story under Ballmer was dire. Despite C# being a tremendous language and .Net being an excellent framework, Windows’s supremacy under Ballmer’s MS meant it was never allowed to go beyond Windows, and IIS, which meant both the language and framework fared extremely poorly largely due to the underlying Windows Server and IIS dependencies.
Again, not defending this practice, but this browser thing is superficial.
It already has.
If only that were true, the dark pattern pushing Edge onto users when a Windows feature update installs got my father and I'm sure many others.
Seriously, thank you. I'm sick of shit-people being shielded by the name(s) of the institution(s) they haunt.
WTF already; used to love Edge until all this started.
In my case I switched to Firefox. It's working really, really well!
There was a point in time where I didn't bother installing another browser on Windows computers. That's far in the past now.
"You are failing to comply with my repeated insistence that you love me"
Goodbye, Mikey. You were always a tool.
This roughly translates to "we know damn well why you're downloading Chrome, and we'd really rather Google or Apple be left wondering why you're downloading Edge, but we have no idea how to get there"
In fact, just about the only browser I don't like to use is Edge. I used to use it quite a bit, too. But I stopped using it a while back, precisely because of shit like this.
> "I can't search Google easily"
"Have you heard about Bing, which let's you harness the power of AI to... Click [here] to visit Bing. Otherwise click [here] to find out more about Bing's powerful AI features."
> "I can't access my Google documents"
"Have you tried Microsoft 365 that harnesses powerful AI to increase your productivity?..."
> "I don't have my favorites or passwords here"
"Did you know about Microsoft... powerful AI... something something AI..."
> "Click [here] to visit Bing. Otherwise click [here] to find out more about Bing's powerful AI features."
Yep, Microsoft pushed an update that adds a (completely useless) launch app button to Windows Search results, and that button is being used to promote Edge.
> I don't believe Microsoft are trustworthy
At the very least, it'd be a direct option for them to measure their brand damage (thus far).
That's something they should add to their exec compensation goals. ;)
I don't think they're trustworthy either: why would I trust a company that forces ads on me right in the OS, tries to force their crappy browser on me, and many more awful things? So, I don't use their OS. It's pretty simple. If you continue to use them despite supposedly not trusting them and being offended by their user-hostile treatment, then you're just rewarding their behavior.
The very, very common reason for this is that it's an employer provided laptop.
So the employee has no (reasonable) choice in the matter.
---
That also often (but not always) comes with a locked down admin capability. So installing a different browser may not even be possible after the download. But that's a different issue. ;)
In this case, the point is moot: the employee should not be trusting his/her data to Microsoft, not because of MS itself, but because the computer isn't theirs. Even if the computer were running an OS they trusted, they shouldn't be putting their private data on there, because it's not their computer. Clearly, the employer trusts MS, because they selected them as their OS vendor, so the employee's opinion doesn't matter. If the employer's data gets stolen or whatever, that's the employer's problem, not the employee's.
If you simply don't like the computing environment your employer provides you, find another employer, or just put up with it like you put up with other annoyances that come with employment. Every job is a compromise.
No valuable data stored on the gaming PC
Both Microsoft and Google are both trust-worthy (I trust them not to phone home with my bank login details) and untrust-worthy (I expect them to gather as much information about me as possible) to equal degrees.
Both want to show me ads. Both want to track my behaviour. It's trivial to point to either and show multiple examples of egregious behaviour.
So yeah, if you're choosing Google over Microsoft for -trust- reasons then I have a page of ads for you.
The real reason I'm installing Chrome is simply because I use Chrome. It's a browser. My life is too short to waste time deciding which browser to use. They're all good enough. Of course I could switch to Edge. I just couldn't be bothered to.
The article itself is about the poll happening when a user tries to download Chrome, but the poll wording and behaviour seem like it may also be happening for other browsers too.
Did you file a bug report with MS?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Computer_Products
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_1.0x
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_Server_Enterprise
And now, GitHub (your code as a dataset), and Microsoft Pluton (your computer as a prison).
We should however give them some credit for being one of the few companies that does something serious about accessibility.
winget install mozilla.firefox
Then you don't even have to open Edge!
I usually just do that step with chocolatey as part of an ansible playbook, but winget works even better.
winget install LibreWolf.LibreWolf
1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customizing-firefox-usi...
Microsoft is sticking ads and deceptive practices into the OS and its tools (that you pay for).
The google maps web page is checking which browser you are using.
The ms edge browser is watching what you are doing when you are using the web. Someone had to add code that said “if trying to download chrome send this system popup. “ which startled me when I saw it.
That and my one windows machine seems to open edge when waking from sleep (maybe rebooting?)
This made sense back before iOS let you change the default browser, but it's been several years since then. Google apps should really just obey the system default and open the link I tapped without nagging me.
When Google advertised their browser every time you visited google.com with a non-Google browser, nobody lost their mind. Nobody (yes, I know some people complain) complains when Apple forces Safari on every iOS user (Even if you used a non-Apple browser, it's still Safari under the hood).
But when Microsoft does it, people would have you believe the sky is falling.
Then they adding a shopping helper; then more ads to the new start-page; then a notification about Microsoft rewards; then popups about how "Bing is better" or that "Bing AI" was there to help - don't forget the "Open links in Edge on Mobile" popup; then they added a side toolbar with a giant B[ing] button that wasn't removable unless you toggled a group policy (now there's an option for it). The damn button was the last straw for me because of the amount of work I needed to do to just disable it.
> I just want to get on my computer - do a few things and get some stuff done
Yeah, so do I and Edge kept getting in the way to keep telling me about all the new things that Microsoft things I should use.
Chrome isn't great - the privacy sandbox/built-in interests stuff is disgusting - but Chrome wasn't as "in your face" so I could just start it and go. Brave avoided the the privacy sandbox and now Firefox works for me everywhere.
Going to download chrome multiple times just to pick this. I prefer Edge but this seems morally good
Why are they even paying developers to duplicate these Windows features?
And if you think browser innovation is dead… check out Arc
how about because I said "no", because I can, that's why.
Why inevitably?
I sure as shit would never download or use Chrome unless I don't have a choice.
What a strange headline.
Thank you HN for bringing this utility to my attention!