Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too
theverge.com
theverge.com
I know I’m preaching to the choir, and “dark patterns” are a very surface level observation of a product, so forgive me for yelling into the HN void but… I am still so annoyed seeing “not now” in a UI. It’s so ubiquitous. I know why it’s like that, I’ve been in meetings where I’ve discussed it with UI design folk. You want to make sure users aren’t stressing about making some final un-revokable decision before they even use the app. People think it’s actually a user respecting decision.
I still hate it. My proudest achievement at work in 2023 was getting an up-sell pop up to say “no” with details about where to find the deal again in the billing page displayed underneath the button.
It has never come across that way as an end user. As it has always been on some terrible change or option where the answer should be "no, now bugger off forever", I have viewed "not now" as the same as "ask me again later":
an explicit thumb in the eye and statement by the software developers that they think their mandate takes priority over my preferences and that I am not qualified to make decisions about the software I run.
It is a very easy way to maximize my disdain for a developer/team/org.
> I am not qualified to make decisions about the software I run.
What a contemptible practice.
Google Maps' navigation feature absolutely FORCING their alternative "better" route when I have REPEATEDLY chosen otherwise.
When I see that, I take that as the company being honest about the deep disdain with which they view their customers.
I've seen solutions like "if you change your mind you can access it from xyz setting". I'd much rather prefer that than constant nagging that won't go away.
It's really not hard.
As a life long android user, I recently purchased an iPad to see if I could stomach IOS because I'm really sick of Android's shit.
In going though the initial setup, I elected not to set up face unlock..."maybe later." Same with iCloud and one other thing, I forget.
In trying to use the device for the next hour or so I was nagged constantly to "finish setting up your device" because I hadn't turned this crap on that I never ever wanted to use.
Do you want to go stomp some puppies?
What!? No!!
I'll take that as a "maybe later."
Absolutely not.
"Not now" means "Fine, but we will harass you in the future, until you accept".
If it was really about respecting the user, the "OK" button would also be rebranded "OK for now", which it, obviously, is never.
And the fact that they are getting away with such behavior for years now is just the cherry on top, but they keep getting more brazen with their techniques over time. Who knows what they are going to do next to top this to push Edge and all their other programs down our throats?
After a lot of panic and powering down on an upgrade screen without a 'no' button I went to the bios and found my setting reset. Then I put a group policy in place not allowing such despicable behaviour.
It's such a widely hated behaviour that tv shows take the piss out of them for it: https://youtu.be/2zpCOYkdvTQ?si=_qGffU2M3k847C3H&t=8
The only good feature they had - the vertical tabs - is now in Brave also
This reliably prevents other apps from "helpfully" peeking at Chrome cookies. I'm not sure if they also do that for the "open tabs" database, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible.
I also really wish Firefox would copy this feature.
Oh and market capture: "maybe that excel spreadsheet I look at once a year won't work in OpenOffice/GDocs" ++ "My work is Microsoft so its the easier path"
The problem is you're stuck with all their suckage in doing so, such as poor bastards using IOS that get no basic privacy protection in the browser with extensions like ublock origin or noscript, and Microsoft simply trying to keep themselves relevant to continue slurping your data first hand.
With the web by and large having moved to using https/tls for everything, it's no longer easy to see what people are doing passively sniffing traffic, even the os, so now they build browsers to go back to watching everything you do via the rendering engine client.
Even this wasn't good enough for Apple that they implemented their default-on "privacy proxy" to provide justification for running almost everything out of your phone through them network-wise too. Plus you're held to using only Apple's webkit that they release security updates constantly for, since beside imessage is the most popular infection vector to get malware on iphones. Google is trying this now too with their "privacy vpn" (ha), I'm sure monkey see monkey do Microsoft will soon too.
This is why the EU is trying to force Apple to allow 3rd party rendering engines, to open up the ecosystem. Someone should really apply the same to Microsoft for doing this too. They might get sued if they just deleted chrome and told you to use Edge instead, but this passive aggressive and overreaching coercion is truly sinister they play at.
Much better memory and power efficiency on Windows devices. Plus the Copilot/Bing AI mumbo jumbo.
[1]: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/110870809/default-p...
Invariably someone is going to note that with this extension and that extension and various canary flags you can do similar things, but I'd rather not have the nuisance.
Edge actually has its uses. It is unfortunate that Microsoft is tainting it -- something the company just seems unable to stop itself from doing -- as it should sell itself.
Then microsoft started adding MSN type of bullshit to it (rewards, bing chat gp nonsense, reset new tab page / privacy settings / games (wut?) / shopping suggestion).
Switched back to firefox after using edge for around two years.
> From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are qualitatively different from the other browsers studied. Both send persistent identifiers than can be used to link requests (and associated IP address/location) to back end servers. Edge also sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft and Yandex similarly transmits a hashed hardware identifier to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.
I think people are getting too cared away on things such as "open-source" or "it invades my privacy", or some weird deep hatred for Microsoft aspect, when most people don't care with that. It's not even a parameter for them to judge if a browser is bad or not, because they simply do not care. So you have to see the situation through the average people's eyes.
I don't use Microsoft Edge, but I'm not some radical free-software absolutist either, I'm capable to see that most people don't care with that and make a fair observation about a piece of software. If you are worry with privacy/open-sourceness, there is Firefox, there is LibreWolf, etc...
I’d be much more likely to run a fork of Edge without the incredibly annoying/distasteful coupons and rewards it keeps trying to push on me, for example.
That is... an odd take?
While it's true that society, as a whole, don't care much about, and I cannot stress this enough, many things, outside whatever may have some direct effect on everyday everyone's lives, someone needs to do the job of informing them about why something is actually more important than they may think.
Thus, Edge users who are fine with the software, for a variety of reasons, may not understand why the browser is better or worse than the competition, if they choose to ignore the facts about it, regardless of it being open source or not.
I think privacy is a big one. Perhaps I wouldn't choose Chrome over Edge, but I would absolutely not choose Edge over pretty much anything else. Privacy violations do have a larger effect on people lives than they may think, and they choosing Edge just because they can have vertical tabs, is a bit like choosing to smoke because it "calms the nerves".
It was thanks to the EU regulations on MS. Now that the limits on that had ended MS is sinking to new lows.
So next time an Appleoid tells you how the horrible EU is destroying innovation by asking Apple to use the USB-C connector on its phone that it does on every other device in its lineup, remember MS. (also the fact that if it wasn’t for anti trust actions against MS by the U.S. and the EU Apple almost certainly wouldn’t exist).
Here's John Gruber (who I like a lot, but you know when his Apple blinders are blinding him).
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/09/23/eu-usbc-mandate
And now they're complaining about the EU requiring Apple to open up iOS like the Mac, and they are pushing back against that.
It's the regulatory version of how everything sucked until Apple did it (so multi-tasking on phones is awful, until Apple decided that actually now it's ok and now Stage Manager is the best thing since sliced bread).
The people who complained about one thing isn't even necessarily the same group complaining about the other.
You mean just these dark patterns with their browser, right?
I may have written about this a dozen times on HN, but there was a time when Exchange refused to play nice with anything that wasn't an Outlook client. Even nowadays, Outlook doesn't support half a dozen standards that would allow better interoperability with other calendars and clients.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is not something Microsoft has reneged of since the origin of the phrase back in the 90s.
What a mistake, not importing cookies and local storage as well...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fc...
There is a Windows 11 version that you can install without Edge now if I remember and read this correctly. Its because of some EU law that requires M$ to ship without a browser. Not sure if there is also a way to actually remove it if you did not a fresh install now, when I read about it there was not.
Like, the search basically doesn't work for me in Acrobat but works fantastic in Edge/Chrome.