An even faster Microsoft Edge
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
Also, the Teams desktop app has moved from Electron to Edge WebView2 - which is a Microsoft product.
On old PCs - not much, just slightly better. Perfect on modern PCs though so I se no reason (other than testing) to use Chrome on non-museum computers.
And yes, I do sometimes use Edge and Chrome, mostly for my work machine, because sometimes the company internal web products are developed on and tested only Chrome and on occasion things don't work for FF. Those don't feel any zippier to me.
It also then started uploading literally my entire user folder to OneCloud - without asking. It just did it.
Edge was a decent browser for a very short time when it was just a minimal browser. Around the time they switched the engine. Today is in no way better and in quite a few parts even worse than Chrome.
If M$ didn't make it so that exchange email exports only worked in Edge, I would never use it at all.
Pretty sure all these big companies are equally awful.
Unfortunately the masses don't care, so the big companies just get more core to life, and keep getting worse.
If anyone knows the solution. Please run for president/prime minister/benevolent dictator.
Building a lot of spying is one option
Another could be to simply get a "a device without an SSD or with less than 8GB RAM!", launch the app and observe all the slow glory yourself
And yet another is doing a bit more architecture design work upfront and... not use React in the first place instead of doing rewrites
Other aspects of Windows are so good, such as WSL, but they completely ruin it with all of this.
Im not at all opposed to Linux either but I can run a real shell on OSX and all my scripts.sh run just the same locally as they do on my cloud Linux deployments - and thats enough for me personally.
But all that doesn't help if the OS gets trashed by bad project leads and Microsoft seems to employ a lot of those. Their technical mistakes are dwarfed by their strategic ones. And companies being locked into their environment providing a record income probably don't help with Microsoft really trying to be competitive instead of milking users as much as possible.
I feel like it underscores what a cheap/bad product windows feels like. Even though, technically it is fine (and I know you can turn it off, but defaults matter!!)
If clickbait was the only problem. The site is full of scam ads. It really shows how much MS cares about the users.
I was a *huge* Microsoft fan boy for decades. Like, I eagerly awaited releases of the products I used like Windows and Visual Studio and Excel and on and on. It was thrilling to use NT with the Windows 95 skin when it was available in beta. Sorry to nerd out so hard, but I just loved their products. Now they're just making Windows worse and worse and worse. It's almost as if they want to harm Windows.
The other day I had to help my 80 year old Dad with his Windows PC. Microsoft wanted him to "finish" setting up his PC that he has been using for 18 months. Okay, he accidentally clicked yes and then ended up somewhere that was trying to make him sign up for a Microsoft account. Yeah, my Dad doesn't even know how to do that! We had to turn off his PC to get out of it and then I had to look up how to make sure it never happens again.
Why so many dark patterns MS? My Dad already paid you for Windows. Why do you need to collect more and more and more? HE'S 80 YEARS OLD! LEAVE HIM THE F** ALONE!
As a result of all this, but especially the telemetry, my Dad's on Google docs, my Mom is on Google docs, my family is on Google docs. Never going to use 360. Nope nope nope. Sure, Google has dark patterns, but at least I know that about Google. Microsoft pretends that they aren't like that, or wants to have that brand image, and meanwhile, they're busy trying to suck up all your personal information and spy on you with telemetry and send your keystrokes to their servers.
The funny thing is that my Dad only had a Windows PC so he can run one app: Chrome. His entire internet life is in Chrome. Everything syncs with his phone. It's just NICE. You can't even imagine how much easier this makes his life and ... mine :)
So yeah, I don't want more Microsoft software in my life. I want less. Zero, would be ideal, but that's not the world I live in.
Yet.
The rendering engine was nicer than ie, but they built a queue between the UI and the browser engine, so navigation including the stop button didn't interrupt the work in progress until it polled the queue, which could be seconds later when it had gotten stuck (as browsers do), and then it would go ahead and do the many actions you had queued up.
Reskinned Chrome is less bad, I guess.
So get him a Chromebook or a tablet? He doesn't need Windows to run a browser.
If he does still want Windows for some reason, there are ways of de-bloating the installation. It takes some initial technical work, but in the end you can be relatively sure that it's free from all intrusive software. You still have to be vigilant of Windows Update, but you can also turn that off, and run it manually, or cherry pick the updates you want.
Microsoft makes it difficult to run a clean version of Windows, but if you still want to use it there are ways of cleaning it up.
Prior to this, I had quite a lot of tech support I had to do with her when she was running a Windows PC - for all sorts of things. Since then, never once have I had to do so, other than website help (i.e. what she's doing on a site). I'm no fan of Google (and use Firefox as my browser and have for years), but Chromebooks just work for these kind of use cases, and are the reliable appliance that computers should be.
I mean, they're basically outsourcing a lot of the heavy lifting to Chromium, which is a pretty rock solid piece of technology.
Being able to do that while adding a layer of customization and metrics/analytics/telemetry/features/whatever on top of that with their branding is pretty much ideal from where they stand.
Given that most people won't bother with switching away from defaults, it feels like a smart move to me. Most people aren't even aware that there should be alternatives to the dark patterns, nor have ever used an OS like Linux.
Honestly, I recently got some Apple devices for a freelance thing and while their UI/UX is a breath of fresh air, I also ran into some weirdness, like Firefox not working with my VPN on the MacBook or not having uBlock Origin on the iPhone. Meanwhile, I'll be strongarmed with replacing my Windows 10 install with Windows 11 sooner or later, whereas Linux is generally nice, except some games and whatnot just won't work (sometimes due to lacking interest for Proton support, other times due to developers and anti-cheat), as well as there are the occasional issues (audio drivers and Wi-Fi drivers still come to mind, depending on the hardware, especially the cheaper netbooks I have historically been using for note taking). I'm getting a bit sidetracked, but feels like every OS and piece of software out there has some issues, for a variety of reasons, many of which we shouldn't be dealing with in the first place!