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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

#321

Post by NoGravitas »

squaresmile wrote: post #66
Shorel wrote: post #54

The old Edge is one of the best Epub readers I have ever used. The new Edge, I have no reason at all to use it over Firefox. I hope no banking website makes it necessary to use Edge, as it happened with previous Microsoft browsers.

Yep, it's a shame that they removed it and actively prevented me from using it even though I still have old Edge on my system. Now I need to import epubs into Calibre to have a reasonable epub reader.

[EPUBReader](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/) is an _okay_ ePub reader for Firefox. It's not fantastic, but it's good enough for ephemerally reading ePubs I don't want to put on my Kobo.

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

#322

Post by latenightcoding »

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…

Some friends think I'm overreacting for refusing to use Microsoft products to this day, yes they have open sourced a lot of cool tech but they are still Microsoft. I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!

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

#323

Post by srhngpr »

rafiki6 wrote: post #313

Has anyone here actually looked at the "anti-Firefox" ad in question? It's literally a tile that says "Still using Firefox? Edge is here!". I'm not really sure what we expected here. This is about the same as a browser asking you to make it default when you open it. All big companies do weird anti competitive things. This isn't one of those things. I know I'll likely get downvoted for this opinion, but to many commen…

I agree with you. This comment should be higher up as it's more objective to this whole situation than a lot of the top comments that quickly resort to Microsoft bashing and "remembering the old Microsoft is the same Microsoft" type of comments.

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

#324

Post by deaps »

rafiki6 wrote: post #313

Has anyone here actually looked at the "anti-Firefox" ad in question? It's literally a tile that says "Still using Firefox? Edge is here!". I'm not really sure what we expected here. This is about the same as a browser asking you to make it default when you open it. All big companies do weird anti competitive things. This isn't one of those things. I know I'll likely get downvoted for this opinion, but to many commen…

It's not an overreaction. It's literally a targeted ad showing up in your day to day work space. It's invasive. I switched to mac a long time ago, but I still have a Windows device because some things are just painful (or impossible) to use on a mac.

The difference between using an application that prompts "make this default?" and a specifically targeted ad showing up on your start menu is that the user used the application that threw the prompt...That might actually be helpful.

The fact is, if Microsoft wants me to switch to Edge, they need to tell me the benefits. A chart will do fine comparing it to other common options. I don't need a targeted ad that proves they know and keep track of what browser I'm actually using. That's literally ridiculous.

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

#325

Post by magduf »

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…

>those of us old enough to remember the Halloween documents don't buy the whole "new Microsoft" thing.

>Cynically, it's amazing that Microsoft collects so much personal data about each user -- and yet its "target" ads are hopelessly generic and tasteless.

This doesn't surprise me. As someone else old enough to remember the Halloween documents, MS has long suffered from serious organizational incompetence. Just look at that whole debacle they went through with music players: "PlaysForSure", Zune, etc., where each one obsoleted the last one and screwed over any users who had bought into it. Exact same with their phone OSes.

Maybe it has to do with that funny org-chart picture with the different MS business groups pointing guns at each other. They collect a bunch of personal data, but can't look at things from a big picture and think "we collect all this data from our users, so maybe we could use a little of that to target our ads better". Of course, if you look at MS's marketing over the past 20 years, it should be readily apparent that they have some of the worst and most clueless marketing talent in the entire corporate world.

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

#326

Post by jmnicolas »

djsumdog wrote: post #263
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…

I want to see Windows 11. I would rater pay for a new product update than just have Win 10 forever with ads and tracking. Microsoft stop this bullshit. In my world, your OS is good for one thing: gaming. Even then I have to install an outbound Firewall controller (currently Windows 10 Firewall Control) and spend an hour trying to disable all your shitty adds and phone-home and Cortana rubbish! My Linux box is what I…

I'd pay up to 500€ for a 100% telemetry / ad free version of Windows.

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

#327

Post by Permit »

latenightcoding wrote: post #322
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…

Some friends think I'm overreacting for refusing to use Microsoft products to this day, yes they have open sourced a lot of cool tech but they are still Microsoft. I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!

>I felt vindicated when I bought a Lenovo laptop after using mac for the last 8+ years and found out you need to create a Microsoft account to use it!

I don't have the same laptop so I can't comment on your exact situation. That said, I have a Windows machine and I am not using a Microsoft account to log in so your experience is not universal.

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

#328

Post by WanderPanda »

overgard wrote: post #309
iso1631 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 switched over to running desktop linux a couple months ago because I was so fed up with these things, but the truth is... it's just pretty bad. Like if I let my laptop go to sleep my touchpad will never work again. I had to do a bunch of weird kernel hacks to keep my wifi working when the device goes to sleep, and even then it's a hack (I had to enable the airplane mode button, and then make sure to hit it twice an…

Exactly my experience! In addition to that, it kills your battery in no time

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

#329

Post by alxlaz »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #274
alxlaz wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's tongue-in-cheek of course :). That being said, I did find tiling WMs to be very unwieldy on most screens. When I first went down the tiling WM rabbit hole, I was using a laptop with a 15" screen, and that was great. After a while I got a 27" monitor, though, and tiling became extremely annoying -- every window is now either too wide to be read comfortably and I end up padding the screen with useless xterms, or t…

How are useless xterms different from uselessly used space for a simply centered window? I have 2x4K monitors at home. Moving to i3 is the best thing that happened to me.

> How are useless xterms different from uselessly used space for a simply centered window?

You still have to open them and move them around, especially if you do change your layout eventually.

I actually didn't have that problem when I was using ratpoison, but some applications (looking at you, Eclipse...) don't really work with it. (I know about stumpwm, and I do know Common Lisp, but alas, we just don't get along too well). When I moved to i3, which is greedy with screen space, I actually wrote myself a couple of scripts to handle this situation "gracefully" (automatically pad the screen with empty X11 windows, automatically un-pad them when needed) and bound them to a couple of key combinations.

I mean it sort of worked but at one point I decided I want to spend more time doing fun/useful things and less time hacking on my window manager.

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

#330

Post by iso1631 »

starik36 wrote: post #316
zentiggr wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I work in a Windows-only facility, at least where my level of dev work is done. And I live in a house where the only other person has only ever user Windows, and hates change. Like even desktop icons shouldn't relocate unless she does it herself. She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason, then there better not be any more differences than the ones indicated.

> She fights every application update unless there's a clear reason Unless you are in the IT industry or at least an enthusiast, this is a rational approach.

I'm in the IT industry, and it's my approach. I changed my desktop from fluxbox to xfce about 10 years ago, but have much the same keyboard shortcuts as I did 20 years ago, and the occasional icon has appeared in the dock as time progressed (namely volume, battery, wifi). I still use xplanet as my desktop for the rare times I see it, and I certainly don't have any icons on the desktop.
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