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Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

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Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#71

Post by Piskvorrr »

zchrykng wrote: post #64
alxlaz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly shady, given that they own both the product they're advertising and the medium they're advertising it through. I don't expect that I'll be able to get them to give me a top spot for an ad saying "Concerned about Microsoft's tracking policy? Mozilla Firefox is here", or "Still using Edge? Why not just get the original -- Google Chrome is here'.

No, but Google would be more than happy to put the later on their main search page. Not really any different. Microsoft controls Windows and uses it to advance corporate goals. Google owns their search interface and uses it to advance their corporate goals.

This doesn't look like the 2001 brouhaha over "MS using Windows to peddle IE", nope, nooosir, not at all, honest.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#72

Post by ChicagoDave »

I’d also note that ten years ago this would be actual news.

People just don’t care because Windows 10 is stable and Microsoft is probably the least evil, most admired, corporation on the planet.

“Still bitching about Microsoft 2003? Try the new 2020 Microsoft!”

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#73

Post by kuku4 »

34679 wrote: post #43
chrisseaton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft doing shady stuff again. Seems anything but shady? On the start menu in full sight and just explicitly suggesting their browser over Firefox. Doesn't even claim anything about either browser, just suggests theirs! Seems as honest and upfront as any advertising could be? 'Try our band of coffee' effectively.

If W10 is on 800,000,000 computers[1], and it costs each user 1 second of productivity, then every time that ad shows, Microsoft is stealing 222,222 hours of productivity from people and businesses around the world to advertise its subpar browser in an operating system they've already been compensated for. https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-says-windows-10-is-n...

>Microsoft is stealing 222,222 hours of productivity

You better don't want your boss to know how much HN is stealing "hours of productivity" from you :)

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#74

Post by dannyw »

givinguflac wrote: post #68

My god if apple did something like this people would burn cities down. Why do people still trust Microsoft when their OS is literally a native advertising and tracking tool now

You're literally banned from shipping non-WKWebKit browsers on iOS though...

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#75

Post by woofie11 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #22
aneutron wrote: post #6

Microsoft doing shady stuff again. It's really a shame. The engineering that the teams at Microsoft put to the kernel and the actual operating system at large is amazing. But then some Product Management division decides to shove this shit down people's throat and, for me at least, ruins all the fun of what would is otherwise an amazing piece of an operating system. I paid for an operating system, just let me use the…

Tasteless maybe, but I don't think it's shady.

Microsoft went through an extended process with the DOJ about almost this exact thing in the day of Netscape Navigator -- using market power in operating systems to try to gain advantage in the browser market. That's unethical and generally illegal under antitrust law.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#76

Post by woofie11 »

chooseaname wrote: post #56

It is the Microsoft sleight of hand. One hand is showing you want you want to see; Open Source initiatives, developer glad-handing, etc. While the other hand does this.

It's more like hundreds of teams who don't talk to each other.

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#78

Post by alxlaz »

iso1631 wrote: post #59
alxlaz wrote: post #20

This, and every other screw-up in the same vein, is why those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools? Cynically, it's amazing th…

Over the last couple of years I've been coming round to the fact that microsoft aren't necessarily a major problem now, compared to google and amazon at least. Doesn't take much to put the shields back upto full. I just don't understand why people run windows. Maybe I just use computers wrong, having been on linux for the last 20 years, but my family (who I refuse to help with IT needs) are all far happier on chromeb…

> I just don't understand why people run windows.

I've used Linux for about the same time and honestly, I understand it completely. I would switch, were it not for muscle memory and for the fact that at least 50% of my work involves systems-level development for Linux (mainly embedded stuff, so a lot of cross-compiling). In the last five or six years I've come to dread the Linux desktop and its constant churn of rewrites and UX "improvements".

I have a Windows machine that I use for work the other half of the time and honestly... it's great. Yeah, the occasional update breaks some fringe feature. But the chances of something like waking up to the announcement that Microsoft is removing desktop icons in the next update and you can just install this third-party application for it (which will break with every update) are practically zero.

Microsoft puts out a lot of broken stuff (some of which slowly morphs into non-broken, useful stuff over time, e.g. Powershell), but you can mostly be assured that, if something works today, it'll work ten years from now, modulo some registry hacks. That's incredibly valuable.

I really don't care about things like UI consistency and whatnot -- what I do care about is stability and functionality.

Edit: tbh, the main reason why I'm not switching today is that I don't really trust this whole OS-as-a-service model. If it were Windows 2000 instead of Windows 10, I wouldn't think twice before switching, but these are different times.

(More edit: please realize that I'm the same person who posted this reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288917 , yeah?)

Re: Microsoft begins showing an anti-Firefox ad in the Windows 10 start menu

#80

Post by dralley »

alxlaz wrote: post #20

This, and every other screw-up in the same vein, is why those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing. Want to get me to try Edge? Great -- instead of a passive-aggressive ad, try telling me how it's better than Firefox and why I'd like to use it instead. What will it get me? Better privacy? Better performance? Better development tools? Cynically, it's amazing th…

The Windows division has never really been part of the "New Microsoft", it seems from the outside.
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