Updates to Windows for the Digital Markets Act | Hacker News Reader

Updates to Windows for the Digital Markets Act

blogs.windows.com

66 pointsnixass64 comments

To be explicitly clear: Microsoft is spending the time to build basic features like "links clicked actually open in your default browser" and still blocking access to these features in most of the world. That's not an antipattern, that's simply evil.

It really shows that they don't see their users as customers to serve, but as resources to exploit.

In this case you can't even use the "it's free so you're the product" excuse, because people are literally paying hundreds of dollars for this crapware.

That's a rather melodramatic interpretation.

Have you opened a lot of .mht or .shtml files lately? What about ftp:// links? (Most browsers have removed FTP support and if HN is to be believed, FTP users should be beaten and locked in a cell with the uneducated, mouth breathing http:// users).

And in doing so, not cared enough to immediately go into control panel and change the file association manually, as you could for the last 30 years; rather, insisting you need an Easy Button (tm) to do this in one click?

This impacts like 0.001% of users.

They were referring to some apps ignoring your default browser preference and opening Microsoft Edge whenever you click any link in the app. That's not a niche case, it's an everyday interaction.

Literally nothing stops any app from hard coding launching msedge.exe or chrome.exe

But why ignore the user preference?

So Bing has non-zero MAU due to people accidentally clicking links on the Windows lockscreen to "learn more about this picture"

This is about integrated Windows functions from Microsoft that force the use of Edge. That constitutes anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft, besides ignoring configured user preferences.

The law does now. There’s a default setting for a reason.

Are you sure they were ignoring defaults and not just using edge deeplinks. It's not much different than apps like slack who always use a packaged in chromium instead of your default browser's web engine.

Opening Edge instead of whatever is set to default impacts way more than 0.001% of users. I think you are the one being melodramatic here.

The start menu opens Bing in Edge. Pressing Win+F1 opens Bing in Edge.

It's the kind of childish, petty response that you'd expect from a 4 year old: "You can make me do it but you can't make me like it!"

Now they need to maintain all these "if isInEEA()" equivalent complexity all over their systems just so they can comply with the law as narrowly as possible.

It feels almost like these companies with their obnoxious cookie banners: "Let's make these things as terrible as possible so we can show everyone (including our users) how grumpy and mad the law makes us feel!"

Desperate to circumvent the California/Brussels effect.

Well, it’s a company in advanced capitalism, it’s gonna chase that profit all the way to the border of legality (and beyond if it’s worth it). There’s no pretending not to be an asshole.

I’m fine with this and hope that this being the case catches up to the broader public because it will further the realization that companies must be adequately regulated.

I have a great deal of respect for the legislation that the EU have passed/enforce. They are ensuring that they get the best version of Windows and are forcing Apple products to interoperate better.

As an American, my next OS will not be Windows.

>As an American, my next OS will not be Windows.

I've used linux as my OS of choice for the past ~ 25 years. I recently installed windows 11 after building an AI/ML/gaming workstation because I wanted to run some of the more complex bethesda mods that required you to run windows executables (i.e. downgraders, etc).

The only thing that's made it tolerable is the fact that I mostly live in the WSL shell, but I cannot get past the sneaking worry that I simply don't know what my OS is doing behind the scenes. For all I know, it's logging every keystroke or snapshotting my desktop back to MS hq.

As I get older I've gotten more and more concerned about privacy and data retention. IMHO the question you have to ask yourself is not 'do I trust $megaCorp or $currentAdministratioin' it's 'do I trust every possible future permutation of corporation or government indefinitely in the future'. In my case, absolutely not. There's no way we don't someday reach the point where an authoritarian administration turns AI lose on the absolute mountain of data corporations and governments have quietly squirreled away on each and every one of us to identify 'undesirables'. At least back before the computer age this took manpower and effort. Now and in the future it just takes a little electricity and compute.

> do I trust every possible future permutation of corporation or government indefinitely in the future

People need to learn to do this in government. The party in power switches every 4-8 years. When the other guys get in, you wish you'd done something to limit executive power. Then when you get in again and actually have the power to add some new limits, well, you're the ones in office now, so why would you limit your own power?

Think ahead by more than the end of the quarter. You want subsidiarity and checks and balances to protect yourself from them tomorrow. Is it really so bad that it would also protect them from you today?

>I've used linux as my OS of choice for the past ~ 25 years.

This is kind of a useless statement. You might as well say "I use an operating system." Someone will say "how have you solved problem X or feature Y?" And someone else will say "Oh, that's available in Ubuntu." And then "What about Z?" And the answer is "OpenSUSE has that." And so on. Ultimately, all the Linux advocates will say that Linux is parity with Windows, but the reality is that there is no distro that has 80%+ coverage of Windows features.

That's ...quite an odd statement. Linux is linux. The big distinguishing feature between most distros these days is the number and freshness of packages available to install, and how user friendly the default desktop environment is. Especially with recent advances in running windows games / apps via proton, there's never been an easier time to adopt it. I grant you, some people do not really have the skills to use linux, but my ~ 70 year old mother gets by perfectly fine with linux mint. I would expect anyone on hacker news to be able to do the same unless you had windows specific specialty apps (autocad, etc) that you needed to run.

No, all of the major Linux distros have practically 100% feature parity with each other. The differences are mainly in the default packages and settings, package management tools, release schedule, release QA process, enterprise support contracts, etc.

Well, does Windows have 80%+ coverage of Linux features? Windows is Windows and Linux is Linux. I've been using Linux as my desktop OS since 2009 because I need some of its features and Windows doesn't have them. It improved with WSL but it became much worse on everything these threads are about.

...do I read you on some shaarli river ?

The world has been waiting for the Dunning-Kreuger bottle cap engineers to start meddling with operating system design.

If it weren't for them, I could reuse all my lightning cables rather than re-buying them all as USB-C.

The gaming gap for Linux has definitely gotten a lot better recently, due to Valve's efforts on top of Wine.

Nowadays it's mostly just certain competitive multiplayer titles that won't work on Linux (due to anticheat).

Yep. I had issues with mods (downgrader exe's, etc) that I couldn't figure out how to run with wine, but the games themselves worked perfectly.

As a linux user, this is fun to watch.. isn't it ridiculous that they enable basic features only because they're forced to do so by the law, and of course only for the regions where this law applies? I couldn't imagine being an US customer, what a farce..

As a Linux user do you even have basic features like a search bar that searches the internet? It's somewhat hypocritical to complain about Microsoft not doing extra work to expand the capability of features when you don't even have those features in the first place.

Yes! Ubuntu had it a long time ago!

Now it exists as: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1057/google-search

I can't find evidence that Ubuntu had it. Searching only shows a search bar that can find local apps.

The extension you linked doesn't even have any real code in it, and the reviews complain that it doesn't work.

It certainly existed and worked in multiple DEs in the past. It exists in KDE right now too - I just tried it. I usually have it disabled though, and I imagine most people do.

Yes, if you want it. I don't, because I prefer to open Firefox. The most important feature to me that Windows is missing, is the option to not include features I dislike.

What keeps standing out to me is that windows has been moving away from the PC as Personal Computer model, they've been moving in the direction of a MS prescribed experience of what a device running windows is, with less opportunities to customize it as you want. The trouble for MS is that the ability to run old software is one of windows greatest strengths so they can't really cut off too much without killing the golden goose leaving customers freer to move to another platform, but I think windows would be much more of an appliance if they did cut off that legacy.

If I want to search the internet, I launch the browser via a keystroke. I do have a better search bar, that is the one that does NOT search the internet and I like it a lot :)

You could have that kind of setup on Windows too.

You mean you could disable web results? Good, the question is for how long before MS decides that nobody actually wants to do that. On Linux, we don't have this dependency.

I have never wanted my windows search bar to search the Internet (with the one exception being my onedrive). If I want to search the Internet instead of my local file system I'll open a browser

> A search bar that searches the internet

Is an awful feature. Pretty much never have I wanted to search the internet using that bar, and the only time I do it's because I made a typo or pressed enter too soon and the search ranked some internet search above mine.

You also can't easily disable it. This is a win for Linux

> As a Linux user do you even have basic features like a search bar that searches the internet?

Are you fucking kidding? This has been a thing for about 15 years. Here you have a discussion on the subject dating back from 2012: https://askubuntu.com/questions/233543/how-to-enable-google-... .

>Search buttons for Google and Wikipedia were present in the Activities Overview in earlier versions

This supported one web search engine which is what Microsoft was doing. But your link says it was removed which didn't give me codifidence in saying Microsoft so invest a ton of money into the experience.

Does anyone actually use that? All I've seen is people alt-tabbing to their browser (which is already open) and search there. When they use the search bar, it's for launching programs for which it's notoriously bad.

Classic windows user dunking on Linux users without even pausing to think if their sick burn is even slightly correct.

Linux has any feature you want if you look for it. Most distributions are a little opinionated on their default config, but nobody is forcing any type of config, program, defaults, or telemetry on you. You're completely and totally free to configure and use your computer in the way you want with absolutely no interference of any kind. You just have to put in a bit of work.

Meanwhile on windows, your defaults are disrespected and reset automatically. Widgets and programs and adware are installed, configured, and all but non-removable by default. Even if you remove them, Microsoft will put them back eventually. Microsoft will reset your default programs, reset your taskbar config to put useless widgets back. And of course let's not forget just how much spying windows does. Even if you try, you can't really remove it all forever.

Stupid Windows users don't even understand they're essentially cattle to Microsoft. Clueless and uninformed Microsoft fanboys cannot comprehend using the comouter you paid for, which Microsoft owns instead of you, in a way that Microsoft hasn't blessed. You don't even understand the concept of freedom

We’ve had “internet search bars” (aka web browsers) in Linux since the early 90s. The web started on NeXT/Unix, not Windows.

In terms of desktop environment features there is no comparison. The variety of options and widgets in Linux DE’s extends far beyond the basic shit available in Windows.

It took Windows several decades to get virtual desktops (Windows 11). Linux had that in 1993.

Edge has supported multiple search engines for a long time too. That is not what we are talking about.

I understood they were referring to the search bar in Windows 11 which I use every day at work. I am saying that feature is redundant since everyone has internet search in the browser. In Linux we have also have DE widgets that provide the same internet search functionality in the taskbar or a popup triggered with a keyboard combo. The Plasma Search plugin framework for KDE is way more powerful and configurable than Windows 11 search.

The Plasma web search plugin includes ~100 search engines / services OOTB.

>do you even have basic features like a search bar that searches the internet?

Why in god's name would I want that? When I start typing in my search bar I want to find things on my computer, that's why I'm typing on an operating system widget and not a google tab.

It's really sad that W11 is hands down less usable and responsive than almost any other linux desktop I've used because of this.

If you don't want to use it so bad why care about how many different search engines it supports. It sounds like supporting 0 would be fine with you.

> It sounds like supporting 0 would be fine with you.

Er, honestly? Yes, zero would be better than one when that one is hardcoded by Microsoft.

1. I'm not sure how common or wanted this feature actually is. I just search in a web browser. And, when I talk to Windows users, they typically lament that Windows Search does an internet search.

2. I know krunner has this and has had it for a while. I have it turned off and I think it might be that way by default, for the issues noted above.

Turns out, mixing internet search on desktop search is just not very intuitive. Okay, the web browser searches the web. And then my operating system searches... my operating system. Seems pretty good to me.

I mean, I would be quite caught off-guard if Chrome suddenly started showing my documents in google searches.

It makes me feel kind of sick, personally. There's a guilty sort of pity when I see people using Windows 11 and also a pretty persistent dread that only a fraction of people seem to mind.

I can't say it's fun!

I can't imagine the added codebase complexity. Sure, lets add god knows how many branches behind geochecks and presumably litter them across the codebase. Instead of, you know, having one code path that makes sense - open the default browser.

It's petty, but that the expense of their engineering time. On the bright side, it doesn't matter much because Microsoft software seems to decay at a much higher rate anyway.

How kind of Microsoft to feature Arc, an end-of-life browser, in their screenshot for browser defaults.

Unfortunately there are no web search providers besides Bing for them to show in the search screenshots.

Except Kagi, which Edge keeps removing as my default search engine.

And wth is Contoso Web Search

Microsoft is number 1 or very close for most/worst dark patterns.

> In the EEA, apps can provide web search results in Windows Search

Anyone figured out how to disable web search without breaking local search or other features?

Is there any information on how Windows determines whether it is “in the EEA”? I’m in the EEA, but I like to use en-US locale (aside from some adjustments like timezone and date/time formats).

If you're using a European date format anyway, you might as well use Irish or British locale.

I don’t really want the British spellings, and also the UK isn’t part of the EEA anymore.

The changes are pretty tame and most Western users who dislike the current web features built in the shell can safely feel like they're not missing much on anything.

Uninstalling the Windows Store and custom apps giving start menu search results are pretty huge. How the hell do I get this on my machine in the US

I wonder if I could spoof my location or something while still using a US tz?

It’s crazy that they have to be forced to act normally. They should be ashamed, but that they are stating it this clearly indicates that they don’t.

They are proving that all the harshness is entirely warranted. Thanks, EU.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com