It would be interesting to hear what people outside of the HN bubble (or outside of tech in general) think about this. I bet a lot of people like seeing the news right after starting the browser because that's exactly why the opened the browser in the first place.
The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
11–20 of 389 posts
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#12While I'm sure that the shareholder love this, from the outside it looks like that last desperate acts from a company try to avoid bankruptcy.
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#13I’m a longtime Windows fan, and initially I was quite enamored by Edge as well. Base UX is excellent, lots of settings and they’re easy to find. Vertical tab bar, profiles, and it all Just Works. I flat out love its “turn this website into a desktop app” feature. But by now they've shoved their core consumer products so chock full of crap that even I am starting to look for a way out. I got my son a new laptop recent…
Exactly. While I get that live tiles and universal apps have their limitations, I vastly prefer a weather live tile that opens to a full screen weather app over the news widget that shows me weather in a random location among clickbait. And if you click weather, you go to an ad-infested web page.
Remember when places hired UX designer to, you know, design a great user experience? This is not that. This is one hundred percent how can we get ad clicks, with apparently no one to push back. Except unhappy consumers that are ignored.
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#14I’m a longtime Windows fan, and initially I was quite enamored by Edge as well. Base UX is excellent, lots of settings and they’re easy to find. Vertical tab bar, profiles, and it all Just Works. I flat out love its “turn this website into a desktop app” feature. But by now they've shoved their core consumer products so chock full of crap that even I am starting to look for a way out. I got my son a new laptop recent…
>and you can’t turn it off! Except you can. Taskbar setting -> toggle Widgets to OFF >I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. Windows sales aren't core moneymakers anymore when they're basically giving them away for free (I have mine registered with a MSDNAA key I found online and it worked). Money is in Azure, O365 subscriptions and ads shown to their Windows userbase. Nadella even said t…
Except I can’t (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208271).
Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just three clicks to disable widgets, "Right click taskbar, select taskbar settings, click on slider to turn widgets off".
I’ve seen those screenshots too, I spent hours googling for this. But that setting is not available on my Windows. Maybe a pro vs home thing? I’m on the latest version. I don’t believe that this is by accident, I think MS decided that I’m in some customer segment that’s not allowed to not know that Jimmy Fallon might be depressed. And even then, I can’t get the widgets feature, a pretty decent idea, without the news.…
I have Win11 Pro and it really is just those three clicks.
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)? (Internal) metrics say otherwise.
(Internal) metrics may be short sighted.
What if they're not?
What if it really is economically better for Microsoft to "double dip" and try to monetize Windows beyond its purchase price?
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just three clicks to disable widgets, "Right click taskbar, select taskbar settings, click on slider to turn widgets off".
I’ve seen those screenshots too, I spent hours googling for this. But that setting is not available on my Windows. Maybe a pro vs home thing? I’m on the latest version. I don’t believe that this is by accident, I think MS decided that I’m in some customer segment that’s not allowed to not know that Jimmy Fallon might be depressed. And even then, I can’t get the widgets feature, a pretty decent idea, without the news.…
Might be a dumb question but are you the admin?
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and you can’t turn it off! Except you can. Taskbar setting -> toggle Widgets to OFF >I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. Windows sales aren't core moneymakers anymore when they're basically giving them away for free (I have mine registered with a MSDNAA key I found online and it worked). Money is in Azure, O365 subscriptions and ads shown to their Windows userbase. Nadella even said t…
Except I can’t ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208271 ). Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
>Except I can’t
Maybe it's a Win Pro edition thing and not on HOme.
>Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
What you don't understand is irelevant to the Microsoft board meetings where they show ad-revenue go up, because money is the only thing they understand, user experience be dammed.
What are those users gonna do, install Ubuntu? /s
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#19Oh, the Bing button does have an opt-out. It's a Registry Option or a Group Policy option (or create a custom shortcut with some launch argument). Because of course they have to make it as annoying as possible, and impossible for a traditional user.
Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge
#20Oh man, as a longtime Mac user I have zero patience for this. Unfortunately my corporate laptop is a Windows one and when that giant, gaudy big blue Bing icon showed up in my toolbar yesterday I dropped everything to try and disable it.
I was disappointed but not surprised there was no setting for it. A quick search online led to some policy and registry settings but the corporate policies my company has in place wouldn’t allow those. Thankfully I found a command line option and quickly made a new shortcut which worked.
Back to work without that giant B looming over me.