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The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

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Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#151

Post by sandworm101 »

tored wrote: post #39
skrebbel wrote: post #3

I’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…

I recently switched from Edge to Firefox. Edge used to be great, but all "features" it has added the past year is not features I need, like sending my text input to Microsoft, showing online shopping suggestions, discover features, sidebar apps and what not. Edge also has a annoying bug in combination with AMD graphics card where the bottom of the screen flickers when watching certain video content in Edge, like Netf…

Edge's only real feature is that it works... sometimes. I use it only when i run across some work-related thing where edge is literally the only option, like stupid configs whereby msoffice runs inside the browser. Instead of just downloading a pdf i have to trick edge into "printing" a docx to a pdf format that i can then actually read like a sane person. When edge dies i will be first to dance on its grave.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#152

Post by Symbiote »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #28
skrebbel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buy chromebooks most likely

I've never seen chromebooks in continental Europe though. Maybe it's an AMerican & UK thing.

Only part of Denmark is on the continent, but anyway.

The categories are "Laptop computer", "Macbook" and "Chromebook" on Denmark's largest electronics retailer: https://www.elgiganten.dk/computer-kontor/computere

12 of the cheapest 15 laptops are Chromebooks, although that could also mean they aren't selling well and have been discounted.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#153

Post by neltnerb »

gregw2 wrote: post #106
pavel_lishin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. From whom? They've got two customer bases: - corporate clients, who get this stuff removed, either as part of the purchase or by their various sysadmins who get paid to secure the purchased laptops - personal clients, who purchase desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Windows, and could no more opt out of using it than I could opt out of using elect…

re: "corporate clients, who get this stuff removed"... I am currently at a Fortune 100 company and only wish my IT department would keep up with / disable all the ways automated MS(N) news feeds keep cropping up via Edge and Windows default behaviors, sometimes seemingly as part of automated updates. Every time I think I have turned one off, there is yet another way Microsoft enables some kind of news feed in its sys…

Same, every time I run windows update on my lab with 22+ computers somehow (to no one's real surprise) OneDrive reappears, Edge keeps getting reset as my default PDF viewer on the regular (acrobat reader DC is installed), and lately the search bar added a bing icon to access AI search.

As usual, figuring out how to disable it took an exercise in asking "what would I call this feature if I didn't want anyone to find it and disable it".

I hate that I have so much OS specific software, definitely heading towards setting up a test computer with Linux to see how much I can get to work. It will be harder than it sounds but some of this stuff is legacy executables from Windows XP so getting them to run on Windows 11 might be just as much of a stretch.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#154

Post by [deleted] »

Nextgrid wrote: post #50
frankjr wrote: post #11

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.

> 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. Does anyone, besides maybe the elderly (out of habit), use a desktop computer to read (clickbait, low-quality) news instead of their phone? As an anecdote, I know a non-technical Windows user who unlocks their machine by clicking the "like what you see?" prompt on the loc…

[deleted]

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#155

Post by pseudalopex »

sph wrote: post #67
zvmaz wrote: post #63

It's also obscure what really gets sent to Microsoft, and what not. There was a Linux based OS that warned the user at every single application trying to phone the internet[1], even Gnome Calculator. [1] https://subgraph.com/index.fr.html

There is no reference to GNOME calculator in that page. Given the extraordinary claim, please link better proof. I cannot imagine GNOME calc phoning home, unless you crashes and you have manually enabled debugging telemetry post-installation.

The claim was not extraordinary. Many calculator apps have currency conversion.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#156

Post by neltnerb »

godsfshrmn wrote: post #114
pavel_lishin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. From whom? They've got two customer bases: - corporate clients, who get this stuff removed, either as part of the purchase or by their various sysadmins who get paid to secure the purchased laptops - personal clients, who purchase desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Windows, and could no more opt out of using it than I could opt out of using elect…

Yeahhhh this crap is on every computer in the hospital I'm at (minus the ones on XP of course)

I noticed that nice new bing AI enabled search bar at the bottom will generously help you provide PII to openai now...

It's amazing that this stuff gets added without thought of consequence.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#157

Post by fuzzfactor »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #136
skrebbel wrote: post #3

I’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…

> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. My understanding is that they did, around Windows 8 or so, and all the people who had scruples about the desktop experience left and were replaced by people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place.

>people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place.

Yikes, you could be correct. Is this re-Ballmerizing? Wasn't that supposed to be off the table a while ago?

Not only Edge, Windows itself is acting uglier every time too.

Some of my scientific instruments are over 20 years old and going strong, a few still supported by the latest Windows software from the original vendors.

Now some of the new instruments do have lab functions the old ones never will but at least the old ones are on equal footing as data peripherals when you are sitting at a Windows 11 PC.

But the very oldest used to work with Windows 98 and Windows XP originally.

These things have always had some pretty demanding software, and before installing, the factory instructions had a few paragraphs you were advised to follow in order to configure Windows so it wouldn't have badly compromised performance.

You needed to manually disable a number of underlying Windows processes that were totally un-needed by the task at hand, if not highly detrimental.

It took about 10 minutes to go through the list and then the high-dollar software installed in 85 MB and worked really snappy on a 300 MHz processor.

To run the same old instrument now there are fully updated drivers for the new factory software so the readings can keep coming in to the PC at the same old 100 MB ethernet speed, including all the latest data integrity features from that point which didn't exist originally for these type analyzers.

It really does work and it is fully validated on Windows 11, but before it installs it autoruns a script which takes half an hour on a 3GHz PC in order to disable all the detrimental Windows defaults these days. It would take you hours if you wanted to do this manually.

Before it unzips its 10 GB package of goodness, which now runs like a dog on a dedicated near-gaming PC, compared to the number of clicks-per-minute you could get 20 years ago on a Windows 98 office machine. For the same raw data being processed the same way which is basically both the state-of-the-art at the time.

"Slowing down the speed of scientific progress one Windows version at a time."

Now I like Edge since I only use it offline, to open PDF's and web files like HTML help documents.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#158

Post by pseudalopex »

delecti wrote: post #134
Nextgrid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there an actual example of what these "enhanced" spell-checkers provide over basic ones that run locally? To me it seems like spell checking is a problem that Word from over a decade ago solved well enough (and ran fine on that era's hardware).

A normal local spellcheck requires you to be much closer to the word than an "enhanced" one. As an example, if I search Google for "nucrusift" ("microsoft", but typed with my right hand one space to the left, a fairly common category of typo IME), it suggests a search for "Microsoft". The built-in spellcheck in Chrome (which I'm using to type this comment) does not offer any suggestions to correct "nucrusift".

iOS's local spell check suggested Microsoft.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#159

Post by [deleted] »

unxdfa wrote: post #128
nicbou wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind how non-consensual the Windows experience has become. I wouldn't let someone with a similar understanding of consent anywhere near my drink. You are right about one thing: I refuse to purchase a Windows computer, and have been refusing for a decade.

Yep. I’m in the middle of switching from macOS back to windows because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. I’ve had to build out a locked down windows 10 LTSC build to get anywhere near a sensible outcome for me. I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.

[deleted]

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#160

Post by lloydatkinson »

skrebbel wrote: post #3

I’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…

I've been working on automated setup and configuration of Windows for my purposes and for family computers etc.

As part of that I wanted to hide the widgets, the pointless search input, move the start menu back to its normal place instead of the dumb place, hide one drive icon from explorer, etc etc

This also installs software from Winget.

This is what I have so far: https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/...

I have a version for development machines too which is WIP but you can see what I have so far.

The repo root has a big readme of what it does and does not do.

Once it's done you end up with a consistent Windows setup.

I haven't looked into how to disable the bing crap on the start menu search yet as apparently the previous registry keys people found to disable it have been deliberately changed into "touch these values and your start menu search won't work for anything" which is a new level of contempt from the Windows team.

Tldr: Automate all this tedious tweaking and turning off of crapware features via PowerShell. The end goal is to be able to run a single command from the windows terminal and leave it to do it's thing.

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