Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users to Edge | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla slams Microsoft for using dark patterns to drive Windows users to Edge

theregister.com

97 pointspseudolus32 comments

What I don’t like about all of this is how at work, The secure windows terminal servers we use , on the corp vpn , now only have have edge . They removed Firefox and we were told it was due to the facts MS said you can secure edge better . Total garbage . What that is leading to is less testing of web stuff Is Firefox . It’s a vicious cycle. On top of that your edge settings are wiped every week. So I get the honor of turning off the ai, recommended sites bing search and other stuff once a week .

Can't they use LTSC or some group policy to avoid such a massive time waste across the whole company?

Which is kind of absurd one must do this, especially for 'Pro' editions.

Sounds like a giant waste of dev time. Team up and change the system before the system eats you.

What I hate the most is that Outlooks and Teams do not give a damn about what my default browser is and always open Edge.

I personally circumvent this by opening teams and outlook in Firefox

It's a somewhat recent change that can be undone, for now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/troubleshoot/messa...

I gave up immediately and embraced the comfy msedgeredirect

Don't know about teams but outlook now has an option to chose ithe browser used to open the links. By default, it's not the default system browser of course... This update was pushed this year, but not sure if my employer is late with updates or not.

Mozilla hasn't a leg to stand on. And it can eat it regarding Pocket and new 'enabled' ad related settings, when last I changed anything, was to disable them all. Sneaky, annoying, every company does it. It makes me hate my computer. I look at the software trying to trick me and I resent it.

I resent computing when these companies think they know better than what I want.

There is more to computing than these companies.

After I switched to NetBSD then I was able to avoid those companies. It's a UNIX-like OS that comes with everything disabled. It's up to the user to decide what to enable/install.

Before I ditched Windows/Mac operating systems permanently many years ago I resented computing, too. This was before "smartphones".

I believe we should care about privacy and education of general public, instead of building silos for geeks. One may use NetBSD, but their family members, friends, coworkers, neighbors may not.

The general public don't give a shit about privacy. They're very happy to give up all their data to multi billion companies.

FOSS can't hope to compete with that kind of money.

After I first used a VAX and experienced UNIX, I did not want to use PCs with Microsoft/Apple operating systems again. I wanted UNIX on the PC. It took a while but eventually I got it. No more Microsoft/Apple BS.

I am a family member, friend, coworker, neighbour and member of the general public. I may use a UNIX-like OS that I can compile myself instead of one controlled by Microsoft/Apple OS.

It has stalled, Mann, if only somebody had warned us.

I see what you did there

I worked at Mozilla for 5 years. It’s a wonderful company with kind and motivated people. But your concerns are totally valid, unfortunately…

I truly can’t figure out the rationale behind the idea that Mozilla is doing the same bad stuff as Microsoft and Google.

Pocket and the other related stuff I don’t want is so easy to disable.

And unlike Google, Firefox ships with reasonable web privacy defaults and doesn’t stoop to nerfing content blockers.

I swear, people expect Mozilla to be perfect to the point of wishing them out of business when they’re basically our last hope for a non-commercial web browser and engine. Nothing they are doing is anywhere near the same realm of sneaky or annoying in comparison.

Pocket has been a built-in Mozilla-owned Firefox feature for 7 years now. You're resenting a one optional button.

It’s hard for me to be gung ho about their amazing tooling and open-source support, when there’s all this happening.

But I see some hope. Edge is the absolute worst offender in MS camp. Followed by Microsoft 365 and Windows, to a much lesser degree.

They have a brilliant leader at the helm. Nadella is very underrated - others not taking him seriously might have helped them. Funding OpenAI with $10B worth of cash + Azure credits was an incredible bet. Killing the Windows monopoly approach was another one. Buying GitHub and LinkedIn and not screwing them up deserves praise (LinkedIn is another offender of using aggressive tactics to sell).

Long story short, companies are operated by leaders in different divisions. They have a significant level of autonomy. Some of them might be taking the lowly approach to hit their aggressive targets, but it doesn’t seem systemic. I’ve never ever received spam from GitHub.

>I’ve never ever received spam from GitHub.

I wonder how long they will keep investing in both GitHub and Azure DevOps. I'm worried they are just busy ruining other experiences at the moment, but enshittifying GitHub is on the list of things to do.

Azure sucks and is insecure, Teams is garbage, Microsoft only exists because of a legacy of unethical practices. Even LinkedIn has backed off of Azure.

Lol @ killing the windows monopoly approach statement inside the comments of an article about Microsoft's continued attempt to monopolize. Truly mind boggling

Dark patterns should be illegal. They make us all unsafe by making our computers behave less predictably, like malware, for anti-competitive or anti-privacy reasons.

Related/not related discussion from earlier in the week:

Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39179929

Google Maps does the same thing on iOS if you looked up an address in Apple Maps.

What is it doing exactly? I jump between Google and Apple Maps a lot and never noticed any issues.

Pulling the address from Apple Maps. I notice this when apps only use Apple Maps to offer directions somewhere, and I open Google Maps after taking the first action. (Maybe it's a clipboard thing, I don't know)

Yeah, I think that’s a clipboard thing. These days there should be a pop-up to allow/deny access to the clipboard before it auto-populates the address.

Actual Mozilla page: https://research.mozilla.org/browser-competition/over-the-ed...

Duplicate of

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39237567

(Currently top of front page)

Surprised they never did that with Google... (except for the fact that it's where most of their money come from)

Why bite the hand that pays the salary of the CEO?

"mozilla slams microsoft" conjures up an image of a chihuahua biting microsoft at the ankles

Reply on news.ycombinator.com