Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
research.mozilla.org
research.mozilla.org
They've really made it almost impossible to use as a privacy-respecting browser that lets you pick your search engine. There are a very large number of "on by default" settings that I had to change to turn of things like "Microsoft Rewards" and "creator recommendations."
The default search engine selection in buried in the settings under "address bar search." Even after you change that there is still an un-changeable page that comes up on new tabs that searches with Bing / Copilot, and other various ways to trigger a search that use Microsoft's search engine no matter what.
Also, whatever search engine you use, Edge will send your seaches to MS unless you turn off another "on by default" option.
And then, assuming you've managed to set everything up how you want it, MS will hit you with prompts after various updates to do things like return your default search to Bing.
Together, it all really feels egregious.
Not the only situation where it seems your Windows-running computer is basically held hostage by MBAs wanting to boost Bing’s numbers.
I can imagine getting sort of a thrill out of suggesting something stupid like "let's steal ALL OF CHROME'S BROWSING HISTORY, then CLOSE CHROME, and OPEN EDGE and see if the user doesn't notice!" because _surely_ upper management would never sign off on that, but the day after you find out they still did. What other crazy shit can you think of? At work you roleplay as some kind of evil warlock, put all of your life's frustrations into the "switch to Edge or we'll murder your dog" screens, and go home with a big sack of cash to watch Netflix on your Macbook.
Microsoft employees are certified assholes, and they know it.
The role “product manager” is what makes the product decisions like we’re describing.
The devs are just as guilty as the assholes who made those decisions, because Microsoft has been making those kinds of decisions for decades.
These devs can't even hide behind the "just following orders" excuse, because as I've already said multiple times, they knew long before they got the job, that that is the kind of stuff they would be working on.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2023/09/20/ten-years-...
https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/xbox-one-series-x-games-mi...
MS might be making a move to break the garden with GamePass, but only because they want people in GamePass's walled garden so they start renting games from MS instead of buying them from competitors. For over a decade they have failed to compete with Sony and Nintendo on quality first-party gaming.
Everyone who even applies there knows exactly what they are getting into. The application itself is an "ethics test", so to speak.
> Even after you change that there is still an un-changeable page that comes up on new tabs that searches with Bing / Copilot, and other various ways to trigger a search that use Microsoft's search engine no matter what.
If you change the search engine to something other than Bing, a second setting appears that controls the new tab search.
This is obviously a dark pattern to trick users (why would you want the new tab search engine to not respect your choice by default?), but the option exists.
Brave Browser let's you customize.
no offense, but this is an ignorant comment. we're in 2024. come join us.
I’m 100% sure that they figure out features to get your data, and not the other way around.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...
I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.
You will, whether you consciously realise it or not, switch to playing windows exclusive games the minute all your games run on Linux, hence you will never switch.
There has been an inflection point crossed lately, because of Proton and the Steam Deck. Linux is at 1.95% market share on Steam today. A year ago it was 1.3%.
You may as well say "but the sky is blue", which is also true and just as irrelevant
Well you can see it. Linux is used by 4.25% of all English speaking Steam users. And its trending upward.
It is not a statistic of Linux desktop share, it's a statistic of existing Linux users, not windows migrations.
Yes it is. The Y axis is "Percentage of Steam users". The fact that the Linux percentage is increasing means that the the percentage of Windows users are decreasing. The graph shows a trend of migrating from Windows to Linux.
"% of desktops amongst Steam users" is significantly different from "% of desktops".
(And yes, this excludes ChromeOS and Android)
Those of us who used it on desktop Linux helped drive the handheld, which is really accelerating compatibility. When Windows 10 hits EOL, folks got to go somewhere - and many are not going to toss out their hardware for new.
You can buy Windows 10 Pro OEM licenses for less than 20€ online. I did just that for a familiar three months ago. The installation was validated and associated with the Microsoft account no problem.
Then you can "upgrade" to Windows 11 free of charge, if that's your thing.
Incidentally, I've always thought W2K—taken all round—as the best version of Windows, it's the version with minimal dross and useless stuff and MS hadn't got into spying on users by that stage.
IIRC in about 1989 NT 3.1 was a very solid an reliable system.
The problem was it did no do IP
It was mostly downhill from there.
I got my first Linux machine in about 1992 and lost touch
But keeping windows NT patched, and keeping it running IP reliably were incompatible for a while
Did not stop its wide introduction in my world as IP servers.
It was as if software managers did not know any other systems existed.
Linux was considered "a toy" because it was free, it was much more reliable than NT (as was BSD I hear)
Sun were the other option but I saw no one spending the money
It was buggy, unreliable, insecure NT servers all the way
Still is for some. Squeezing into a Windows instance on Azure, fifteen mouse clicks, three context switches, and you have emulated rsync... Still making money selling terrible software, but now as a service....
It all just works and then the perfectly good Mail app is forcing my mom to switch to the new Outlook, which is Mail, but messier, with ads. What?
I wish Satya Nadella would pull a Steve and yell at some people for this shit. It’s eroding trust in the company that they maintained for so many decades, that can’t be a good long term game can it?
Just to check, are you suggesting a Steve Ballmer yell or a Steve Jobs yell?
Game made with directx6 20 years ago will render in CPU and just work but be so slow to be unplayable. Then you need to replace the .dll and make it link with an open source library that reimplements dx and converts the calls to the new API, so that it can actually render in hardware.
Yes, solitaire.exe still works. 3d games less so.
I'm full of games like star wars jedi outcast or so that no longer work on windows.
Of all the languages I speak, German is the more chaotic language by far. But most native Germans consider it the best/easiest.
For me the Windows management of Windows is horrible, but I spent like 90% of my time in Linux were I was young, even using things like "screen" that uses the command line and shortcuts to be the most efficient thing I have ever used (while requiring learning the shortcuts before becoming productive).
Today I use Mac like 95% of my time, control Linux machines with it and use Windows when the force of circumstance obliges me the 5%.
My conclusion is that usability is mostly about getting used to how things work and a tiny bit of customisation. There are no significant usability differences between operating systems.
The _only_ thing that I have never gotten used to and that keeps slowing me down is that app switching (Cmd+Tab) in macOS is MRU while switching windows (Cmd+`, Cmd+Shift+`) within apps is circular.
I'm finding it impossible to remember whether I have to go forward or backward to get back to the window I'm looking for within an app.
I consider my native language to be chaotic and hard to learn. Not all things are subjective, some things can be objectively compared.
Meanwhile on KDE I have an easy option to swap caps lock and ctrl, without having to install some weird .exe file off github.
There used to be a 'tile windows' since windows 2.0 or something like that, but it did just that, splatted the windows to take up all the space.
One thing I like about X11 and Windows doesn't do it, is alt-dragging from anywhere in the window, last time I used Windows you couldn't move things around by holding alt and left clicking anywhere, you could only do that from the title bar, which means you can't slide the top of the window off the screen.
The other major thing for me is selection copy, if you highlight text, you can't middle mouse button to paste it, you have to ctrl-c first, which is just more steps.
You can use "move" in the system menu. Once activated, the arrow keys in the keyboard will move the window outside the desktop window, not sure if you can do it using the mouse somehow.
With XFCE though, I'm quite happy with the level of focus stealing, things that seem to be justifiable are at the right level, like authentication prompts.
Out of interest, what are the things that take focus for you? Maybe we're running totally different sets of programs which might give me an impression that isn't warranted.
I've not noticed focus stealing outside of Steam. What is steam made from, it seems very browserish.
This topic is causing some self-reflection and wonder if I am the peculiar one who does different things and just not bumping into it, I mainly work from xterm, screen, mutt, vim and a lot of time in firefox. Perhaps this combination just doesn't start things that request focus, but when in MS Windows I noticed it a lot.
You're right about steam, but now I'm on a path of wondering...
This topic confirms that focus stealing is a thing in XFCE, I have some research to do!
I am baffled as to how that has been allowed to go on so long. It makes Office a trainwreck usability wise.
The two things that trip me up are that you able to move windows to a position that you can't move them away anymore.
And that apparently maximized windows sometimes leave a 10px gap at the top so that you click on the window behind :-/
In case you hadn't come across it yet, there's a third-party piece of software called AltDrag [0] that lets you do it. It's kind of a must have for me whenever I have to use windows. Yes this should just be builtin
Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:
https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/kazpcn/spectacle_alter...
[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
(PowerToys doesn’t do this by itself, you have to select every window in place if I’m not mistaken.)
As just one example—the dock is atrocious for a browser-centric workflow. I only ever have 2 "apps" open at a time, but I have 6 Firefox windows and 2 IDE windows, and remembering where I put a specific window (or even that I already have it open!) is a chronic problem. I know about right-click to show all, but the text that pops up is small (it's a context menu, not a first-class navigation element) and that doesn't help with the discoverability problem.
I'm sure that there are other apps to patch the other aspects of the system that irritate me, but if you have to install 4 third party tools to get something close to how good Windows is out of the box then I'd say OP has a good point.
Also you seem to be ignorant of a lot of features of macOS, like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth. Or swipe down from the trackpad on a Dock icon to show the windows of the app.
Anyway, YMMV as always. Personally I find the window management atrocious not because of the way it was designed, which definitely works for me (and I hate the Windows’ one), but because of the bugs which they insist on never ever fixing…
It's not that I'm ignorant of these, it's that they're clunky for a browser centric workflow. The abstraction of an "app" is just plain wrong for the way that I and many others use computers these days, because one app (the browser) is home to most of the tasks I'm working on and already has its own second-level navigation in the form of tabs. The "app" layer means on Mac there are three levels of navigation to get to what I'm trying to do, which is too many.
What makes Windows (and most Linux DEs) better for the browser-centric world is that windows themselves are first class citizens—I don't have to pass through Firefox to get to GitHub.
This happens every time I unplug my laptop from external monitors, or plug it in to external monitors (even if they’re the exact same model and configuration as other monitors I’ve previously used). It’s aggravating and distracts me from what I’m trying to do.
Whereas I never have any issues on OSX, always find my windows where I expect them to be, and spend a lot less time moving and rearranging them.
The two operating systems do have different approaches to window management and to me it sounds like you simply prefer Windows, whereas I prefer OSX.
Huh? You can't even snap windows to screen edges.
Two anecdotes: starting Windows Terminal by clicking an icon in the taskbar (W10) creates a window that's not focused. W11 does away with the alt-space keyboard shortcut to open the window operations menu.
Win10's UI on Win11:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o6ysyb/so_i_repl...
Not sure if this was some Acrobat specific stuff or if it’s still “there” in general.
This is the company that put the entire Windows 95 memory manager into later versions of Windows to keep compatibility, there are tons of old code paths still lying in wait for old software to reuse.
You can't use this stuff as your main UI well, it's no longer tested or optimised for that use case.
- notepad with tabs
- shell UI with tabs, VT-100 support and ability to replace the shell
- Paint.net with AI
- even Windbg has massively improved
I feel applications that do tabs are just like applications that do their own custom quirky File-Open dialog even though my OS provides a standard one.
Screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/r/UsabilityPorn/comments/bqg9tw/fluxb...
Then there's the way they put search into a fixed floating window, which when you search upward sits on top of the search result, obscuring it.
Serious question: Where do you see ads? I’ve used Windows 11 since it came out, and have never experienced a single advertisement.
Bitlocker may state that it's on, but by default, it doesn't encrypt the drive unless you log in to a Microsoft account or manually add a key protector.
This is documented on a Microsoft site somewhere, but it's shit like this that make me wary of the "bypass Microsoft's shit" approach; the bypass methods often lead to behaviour that Microsoft never bothered to test and has side effects they don't bother to warn you about.
I think there are others, but I believe I've figured out how to turn most of it off.
Here’s a genus idea, put an object oriented language in the terminal.
An object oriented language that doesn't have weird-ass pitfalls: https://web.archive.org/web/20240112161109/http://mywiki.woo...
An object oriented language that takes the piping concept and improves it so one can actually form pipelines that make sense and not waste limited resources in just parsing text. However at the same time add more powerful and efficient text parsing tools. So one can actually script on the go with ease.
An object oriented language that is not C which is the language which most stubborn Unix developers usually reach for when their shell is too inefficient or too unwieldy for certain tasks and create even more security holes.
Maybe 2025 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
The lack of hibernation with an encrypted system is an annoying problem, though. There's a good reason it doesn't work, and the explanation has made me doubt other hibernation implementations, but it's annoying that bypassing this restriction is so hard.
I don't understand. Hibernation to an encrypted swap partition (and even to a swap file on an encrypted rootfs) works normally.
> Not buying hardware from certain vendors (Nvidia) helps improve your chances.
nVidia just works if you accept the proprietary driver. On the other hand, with AMD, you get fun like this: https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2020/linux-amdgpu-pixel-format.... Of course, if you don't need high GPU power, use Intel integrated GPU, which works the best.
Nvidia "just working" is a matter of luck and patience. I'm on kernel 6.7 on my laptop with the latest Nvidia driver and I'm booting with special Nvidia command line flags and running with carious Nvidia specific tweaks to make the thing not drain my battery the moment it boots up. Wayland support remains spotty on multiple compositors.
It'll probably Just Work with a whole bunch of extra power consumption on desktop, as it does on mine, assuming you don't particularly care about Wayland support. Wayland support works in that there is content rendered to the screen, but hardware acceleration is spotty and has weird performance issues that aren't present on Intel iGPUs.
You can make all of this work, but out of the box it doesn't.
I still use X, as Wayland does not seem to implement all the features I'm using (but it's improving, so I expect I can go to Wayland in a few years).
As for Wayland, I learned the hard way that modern distributions have removed the Wayland block on Nvidia drivers, and many will go Wayland-first after install. It's easy to switch back, but only if you know what X11 and Wayland even are in the first place. Of course distros have to try to push people to Wayland, because Red Hat and desktop environments are moving towards Wayland-only for new releases in a couple of years, but that's not without its unfortunate consequences.
In a few years, Wayland has gone from "doesn't even start" to "usable with a whole bunch of quirks and issues", I'm sure it'll work fine when the time comes to abandon X.org. But for now, the defaults are a bit weird. In practice, distros can pick between "some weird issues on Nvidia hardware" and "extremely limited touchpad gesture support" and it's tough to make a choice there.
For Chrome/Edge I have added a lot of small shortcuts for IMDB, post tracking codes, geoip and many more "not search" things to search bar. Just keyword and %s in search url is needed.
Search url: https://api.hackertarget.com/geoip/?q=%s
URL: https://api.hackertarget.com/geoip/?q=%s
Keyword: @geoip
And now I have many nonsense bookmarks because I want to use them as search
On Firefox Android, you can also just go to into settings, search, manage search engines, + add search engine. So, basically, exactly where you would expect it.
I think on desktop it's just as easy? Can't you just right click on most submit forms?
I would expect same in Desktop also. But in Desktop you have to add bookmarks to manage extra search settings.
If Mozilla is pissing other browsers all the time then why they do not fix it. Googles money does not allow easier search settings?
Keyword bookmarks have been a thing in Firefox since 1.0.x days and well before Chrome was officially released. It's an opinionated implementation that lives today as ~2 decades of deeply engrained tech debt. How do you even come off expecting Mozilla to operate at the same level as Google and its $1.7+ trillion market cap?? The level of entitlement in your remarks is simply beyond absurd.
You can change default search engine, but you cannot add extra search engines in Safari without building your own extension (and paying apple for it)
So does Firefox desktop...? Extensions aren't needed, just right click on a search field and add it. You can customise placeholders and keywords too
The resulting search shows up in the search UI, whether you have firefox configured for a seperate search bar or have their default of the address bar also being the search bar. This is the same as the extension method.
If your complaint is that they also show up in bookmarks, then ehh, whatever. Most people either don't use bookmarks or have a giant dumping pile. If you're one of the 1% that organizes them, just put all your search bookmarks in their own folder.
They aren't. Why do you claim things that aren't true?
Safari automatically detects search fields on websites and adds to the smart address bar. E.g. if I type "discmaster myst" Safari will suggest to search discmaster.textfiles.com for "myst". And that's something it automatically picked up. No plugins or configuration needed, users don't need to learn how HTTP queries work.
[1]: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.h...
Microsoft lost this monopolizing tactic in a court case decades ago. It seems either no one remembers this fact or that Microsoft hopes it's so.
Regulators will you please damn-well regulate. In simple English, do your fucking job.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/...
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...
Microsoft would not have been able integrate Internet Explorer into Windows nor even the IP stack as these are actually applications. The whole world of security would have been different and more manageable not to mention much improved competition from other vendors.
Above can make a huge difference legally. Specifically your reference to the previous court case, which was built on point 1-2 above. Key word here being monopoly and how it's defined.
Apple lived (until a few weeks ago, still do outside EU) in a world where it's OK to have it basically impossible to install another (real) browser on it's biggest OS, or install any app of your choosing without their blessing (and a 10-30% cut on revenue!) for that matter.
It's complex for sure.
It's unfortunate imo that Mozilla/FF got squashed by Chrome, and also made some questionable strategic decisions in the last 10-15 years. Performance, simplicity, stability and keeping up with me web tech being key USPs of Chrome, compared to competition. Note that absent from that list is monopolistic abuse (even though Google has it's fair share of that as well). In other words, you don't win the browser war by simply using monopolistic abuse as a strategy, you need to primarily win on value to your end users. That's at least how it's been in the past.
That's essentially irrelevant because (a) Microsoft complied with the Court's ruling and allowed other browsers to be installed without hindrance, that's not the situation now; (b) you're painting a picture as if Microsoft was disadvantaged by the situation now and thus it's unfair to impose such restrictions again this time. To that I'd add that in case you haven't noticed Microsoft has just passed three trillion in value, it's only second to Apple in achieving this milestone. Thus the changed situation hasn't disadvantaged it one iota.
I'd maintain that Microsoft has only managed this incredible feat because throughout its 48-year life it has consistently used unacceptable, bullyboy monopolistic practices at every opportunity.
Essentially, Microsoft's growth has been at the expence of competitors who haven't had the size and finacial power to stand up to its market dominance no matter how good their products were. Such bad behavior has screwed both the market and product development for everyone—small and medium-sized developers, hardware manufacturers and end users. Just about the only entity that hasn't been screwed by its unacceptable business practices is Microsoft itself.
The most significant reason for Microsoft's unfettered growth is that the regulators have been asleep at the wheel for decades—no doubt encouraged to 'sleep' by millions plowed into lobbying.
On the matter of Mozilla, I'm certainly not an apologist for the company, in fact over the years I've been very critical of Mozilla including here on HN. Yes, the dominance of Chrome from that other monopolist Google has had a lot to do with Firefox's downfall, but that said Mozilla has been shooting itself in the foot for decades. Why and how is pretty obvious and well known so I won't debate that here.
Company size is for example not considered (generally anyway) as relevant for whether a company has a monopoly/market dominance or not. This seems to be forgotten, and it seems few cares about why the definition is what it is (or even what it really is).
Sorting out technicalities is the job of regulators and government. It shouldn't matter a damn if the situation is different. What's common and ongoing is that Microsoft's monopolistic practices are still in place and small and medium businesses are still being hurt, and users are still being taken advantage of.
We know what needs to be done to reign in Big Tech. If current laws aren't strong enough then it's Government's job to legislate to fix and strengthen them. It has yet to do that, and that it hasn't is the key problem.
What's needed is new law that makes employees just as responsible as the corporation would be, they, after all, are the ones who make the decisions.
If those who work for Big Tech knew their actions could easily land them in the slammer then we'd have a revolution in good behavior overnight.
It should matter in this context because this entire thread chain was started with a reference to the 90s era monopoly challenges against MS. If the situation isn't the same then the old monopoly challenge really doesn't matter, sure it was the same corporation but it was different leadership with different employees working in entirely different industry and time.
We won't fix big tech with regulations and laws. That's hard enough when you're going after large corporations with massive legal and lobbying teams, see the cigarette and oil industries for example. When its a tech industry that changes on the order or months or years rather than decades, regulators have no chance of predicting what coning innovations they need to plan for or closing loopholes in regulation written for a fairly unique industry.
Sometimes it doesn't work for us to go crawling to big governments to drop the hammer and save us with yet more regulation that no one has time to read or comprehend. Big tech only has the power it does because we all choose to use their products. If we really cared, consumers could make real change without regulators by simply telling big tech to screw off and opting our of using their products.
E.g. you shouldn't be able to use product 1 that has 100Y market in A to create any advantage for product 2 in market B if you know user uses competitor in B who's market in B is < 10Y (e.g. 10x less than market of product 1).
For example if you have 2B market in OS you should not be allowed to use OS to advertise your own browser to user who uses another browser with under 200M users.
That would also cover Apple exerting power over 50,000 installation apps.
And by "know" here I mean that if you know user is not using your product yet, you must check the condition or not be allowed to use the advantage (e.g. either you should see Chrome ads in Chrome, or Google cant advertise Chrome to Edge users).
Whenever a regulation compares against what you "know" it is usually pretty easy to just not look, or claim that you numbers were inaccurate, or that team A knew but team B which implemented feature didn't (potentially even claiming that's a privacy feature by protecting user data).
Even more difficult, the stats needed would be owned by the same party. I.e. Microsoft would be the one collecting and owning data of what apps a user already installed, and Google would be doing the same for any pertinent data related to Chrome use and advertising. Its effectively a black box to regulators, they would be asking MS for their own internal data that both sides already know must fit a very specifically defined legal requirement. This is exactly how VW got away with fudging the numbers on diesel regulations for so long.
To put it differently you can't hide ad for Chrome users and then pretend you did not know others used FF.
I may very well be misunderstanding the idea here, but it still seems like it would come down to (for example) Microsoft being required to limit how they send user notifications/recommendations based on Microsoft's own internal analytics for user metrics.
For the Chrome example, the regulator would have to know how Google's proprietary ad targeting algorithm works to confirm that it doesn't target based on user agent or browser manufacturer. I'm not sure how the regulators would really be able to pull that off any better than regulators asking VW software for VW diesel emissions measurements.
Some things can be collected through third party sources, though that depends on those third party tools being used, not being blocked by a user, and on API access for those third party tools to collect the necessary data. I would hope such regulations wouldn't depend on regulating specific API design, but that could be necessary.
Microsoft stole my Chrome tabs, and it wants yours, too
The fact that you can't test on Safari without osx is insane. Some bugs can be reproduced in other WebKit browsers (I test with epiphany) but some are safari only. Not to mention the fact that Safari is the only choice on Apple mobile devices.
I believe Apple is significantly worse than Microsoft in regards to browsers. I wish Mozilla would focus on them.
I am saying this as a developer who was using Firefox since firebug v0.8 era.
I'm hopeful that if people have a choice on iOS, then Apple would invest more on their browser.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/articles/startup-boos...
To me this reads like it's going to behave like many apps nowadays, there is rarely a "No, go away", but only "No, but annoy me again in the future".
One time after an update Firefox loaded a page that said "Thank you for loving Firefox". Eww, no?
God damnit, why do I tolerate such asshole behaviors from our OS and browsers? Chrome also deserves a duck you..
Same with those damn YouTube shorts. They even have a dedicated button in the toolbar that cannot be hidden, on the mobile app.
If you don't intend to use Edge, I suggest you uninstall it before you give Windows internet access. Because after Edge receives some updates, it becomes harder to remove.
And don't forget it's been done in the most painful way possible. Yet, I've not seen any reports from Mozilla about ios' practices over the past decades, or the after.
I tried editing the raw config files with some values stack overflow suggested would disable it but it hasn't worked. Not a huge deal because I don't need to open it too often, but still annoying that there isn't a "don't ask me again" button
Edit: crap, I tried to see what happens when I do set Chrome as a default and now that I've switched the default back to Firefox, I get the popup on startup too. At least Firefox has a setting to disable the check, now I need to figure out how to make Chrome shut up again.
Edge hasn't displaced Firefox, Chrome has.
But they have about 600 million ($) reasons to avoid pointing this out.
Let's face the facts --- Mozilla is Google's bitch and has been for a long time. And this is just the latest example.
They've got ~$6000 (?) million from Google over the years. In a total distortion of reality Edge is the downfall of Firefox, not the reason they spent $6000M for 3% market share because they made every mistake they could make. Everyone else would be belly up already, but $600M/year makes it hard to die.
The fact that new browsers are popping up left and right (like Floorp) should tell Mozilla there seems to be demand for something that isn't FF.
(Written from FF with Tab Center Reborn as a vertical tab)
There is a demand for something that is really privacy focused.
In other words, something that isn't directly connected to Google with a blatantly obvious conflict of interest.
Blink is an open source rendering engine.
This allows alternative browsers to fork Blink/Chromium and strip out and remove any and all tracking, telemetry and data collection and produce a product that is privacy respecting by default.
Mozilla could easily do the same with FF --- but they simply refuse to.
Instead, every install of FF downloaded directly from Mozilla is unique. It comes with a unique identifier embedded along with lots of telemetry and data collection enabled by default --- including allowing Mozilla to install and run "studies" on your computer with no further consent required.
https://www.ghacks.net/2022/03/17/each-firefox-download-has-...
The fact that 95% of people are trying to change to Chrome doesn't deny the merits of Mozilla's complaints. Remember, anything they put in the way of switching to Chrome will also be deployed against any other browser they consider a threat.
However, I just went on a sort of browser deep dive for the best browser on windows and came away, surprisingly, with edge.
The requirements were vertical tabs, keep my chrome extensions, and got out of my way.
Brave, firefox, chrome, and vivaldi all had issues that couldn't be resolved in the UI. For example, firefox's tree style tabs still kinda requires that you keep the top tabs for some uses.
I didn't even consider edge at first. The rewards/shopping/bingwhatever integrations were disqualifiers. But apparently, you can disable all of them fairly quickly.
The pdf viewer is also better than chrome's with extended options.
I guess I also must admit the benefit of not fighting windows because I'm doing what they want.
We'll see if their next forced update reverts to their awful defaults but for now, I'm happy with it. At least until arc browser is available.
It's a real shame that Microsoft is so schizophrenia here. If they were to respect their customers, they would gain far more than they would lose.
The dev-focused arm seems to understand long term customer goodwill but the OS/browser team does not.
Hm, I've been using Tree Style Tabs for many years without the top tabs visible and I've never needed them back.
Then they rewrote the the UI engine replacing XUL and made Firefox a more 'user friendly browser' copying all UI features of chrome sacrificing the customization options.
I am a heretic now who is running Windows 10 with WSL2 and edge as primary browser due the points you mentioned.
Fact is firefox is not competitive. Its not because MS is playing dirty. If it was then chrome wouldn't be dominating everything.
Unfortunately I’ve had the same problem with Edge after refusing to use any M$ browser for decades, I gave it a try to get early access to “Sydney” which was worth it all until they lobotomized it.
Microsoft at its best, gave us the Xbox by abandoning Windows and focusing on making a good product regardless of ecosystem ties (and using its enormous money/muscle).
Microsoft at it’s worst uses deceptive lock-in tactics on its own users and is still not above force-feeding: “if you want to use this product, you HAVE to use these other crappy products you don’t want.”
This is so strange to me for a company that has worked so hard to transform.
It is possible to get a clean Edge build running via containerization + disabling some Windows background services + blocking outbound/inbound requests to various Microsoft + partner IP addresses. Big hassle though.
I just want to play games and surf the web with FF.
in a non-shady/license-compliant way
LTSC is cleaner out of the box and has much longer support, but otherwise it's not that different. And Edge on LTSC still does annoying things, such as adding a Bing search box on the desktop, for example.
> This report was commissioned by Mozilla
I have nothing but utmost respect for Mozilla and these researchers, but the paper needs to be read not as facts, but merely conjectures, to be verified by other more neutral parties.
One of the most egregious things is the insistence on using the Bing start page. You have to install an extension to have your own start page (in fairness most browsers are like this these days).
However, lately Edge just magically stopped letting new tab redirect work. At least it loads a blank page, but it is annoying. Microsoft seems hell bent on preventing user control all over their client ecosystem. The same extension works fine in Brave and Chrome - so it is definitely something they did.
I still use it but am aggressive about tightening up the settings.
In general, I just use the browser that's "native" to the platform. On Windows I use Edge, on macOS and iOS I use Safari, and on Linux I use whatever I feel like at the time (Edge, Firefox, or Chrome). At the end of the day, features are effectively in parity, so I just don't care that much, and right now I use Edge on Windows and Android. Edge does have some nice features though. It doesn't keep me wanting.
> Edge does have some nice features
Such as? This is what I want to know. What value to you as an end user does Edge provide that makes it worth tolerating the nonsense?
You can go read the Edge feature list if you're bothered by it. For one, I don't tolerate the nonsense. It can all be disabled, so I disable it. Secondly, I don't think Edge is the "best" browser. I don't think there is such a thing, and I didn't compare it to others.
Things that I like are the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen for checking downloads and websites (which has caught me, e.g., because Imgur packaged malware when I downloaded an image I had uploaded to my own profile) in addition to the built-in Microsoft Defender, collections, the web capture feature which makes it nice to be able to capture a screenshot of an entire page, the tab grouping, browser casting to another device, workspaces, and the syncing that actually works. My password manager also integrates quite nicely. Now, before people respond with "but Chrome/Firefox does this" or god forbid "you can do all that in Emacs", I never made a comparison. They probably have similar and also features that separate themselves. I just said Edge is a good browser, which it is, underneath all the marketing and advertising shenanigans that Microsoft is idiotically throwing around within Edge. The default Edge is indeed a very annoying browser. But, like I already said, underneath all that is a quite good, professional browser that makes it easy to do real work., and it's not all that much work to disable all of that.
It's surprising how much time such a little thing saves me, compared to trying to wrangle the default browser start pages into something usable.
A lot of nice features are included in the browser, that maybe they are in other browsers now, but that hasn't always been the case. I was a Vivaldi user prior to switching to Edge, but here are some things I like:
- Tab groups. Vivaldi has this also, and has better tools for collapsing tabs by host - Some of the built-in features are nice. QR code, send to other devices, split view, capture & markup, easier profiles. - Bookmark bar has a per-bookmark option to hide title. Doesn't delete the title, so you can still use it for search. But this makes a really handy app bar. - Probably not true, but I expect it to be better optimized for Windows vs other browsers - Cross-platform w/ workspaces is great. I use a mac for personal and windows for work. Can't use Safari on Windows, and Vivaldi wouldn't sync tabs (at the time) - I expect Microsoft to integrate AI features in early and well, and I want to be on the cutting-edge to see what AI has to offer.
I agree, I hate all the tracking BS also, but I turned a bunch of things off and the rest is probably a wash with everything else tracking me anyways.
I really recommend you fire it up and give it a try. You're sure to be surprised, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
Edit: Feature that I'm missing most from Vivaldi - the speed dial page was just amazing, running through bookmarks. I've mostly supplanted by using the bookmarks bar, but it's still not a perfect replacement for me.
(My oft spoken rant) Horizontal tabs are useless if you have more than 8 tabs open at once. Or if you are one of the very few that has a monitor with more vertical pixels than horizontal.
Also, Safari’s vertical tabs implementation is weak whereas Orion’s is workable.
so they're resorting to their usual dirty tricks
Bing Chat has been working with Firefox for a while now.
The best part is the "let's get you connected" or whatever crap it says when you first start it. I often connect to fresh VMs over RDP, so it's always a joy to get to sit through the crappy stuttering animations just so I can tell it to leave me alone.
Right now, the only serious alternative to Google Chrome is Edge, and if Firefox became too good or threatened Google in any way, Mozilla may see the money flow stop.
I wish Google started innovating again, and that Firefox offered a good and competitive free software browser, but reality is what it is.
So I've moved from Windows to Linux, but I keep using Edge, because it's a good browser (vertical tabs etc)
- it was prefilled with icons for facebook and twitter (bit let's say people who switch may be lost without these icons)
- it keeps trying to push pocket to me (no excuse for that)
- if had the feature for antitracking multi-account-containers, but didn't push them
- it lacked advanced anti tracking (ex: fixing the canvas size, the fonts etc)
I'd prefer Firefox with a focus on privacy and antitracking to Edge cool new features, but I think Microsoft has both a financial interest and the technical capacity to protect me from google panopticon while also delivering cool new things.
I don't like Firefox interface including its lack of innovation (edge has tab groups, split screens), and how the only redeeming point that could make me consider Firefox (privacy) is not put front and center.
I will keep checking Firefox now and then, but I don't see much chance of improvement as Google money keeps Mozilla warm, comfortable, and also totally disconnected for what its potential users would like.