Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

thomask.sdf.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 389 posts

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#161

Post by thimabi »

mdasen wrote: post #129

> Partly I’m hoping that somebody at Microsoft will wake up to the unrealised potential of Edge and start treating it like Safari: a utility that end users can trust to have their back and preserve their privacy in as many circumstances as possible. Apple doesn’t try to make revenue from Safari because they don’t need to. I understand what the author is getting at, but Apple does make a lot of money off Safari. Their…

> Microsoft could just have Edge feed Bing traffic and make money off ads on Bing - but they want more!

That won’t work if users switch their default search engine to Google, what many of them probably do. And Edge’s user base is relatively small anyway.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#162

Post by koromak »

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…

Microsoft just can't stop doing this. All of their products suffer. I'm happy to fork over the absurd Apple tax just to feel comfortable at my computer, and to know I'm not going to wake up one morning to a forced OS update that has Cortana start screaming black friday deals from my desktop. I mean, ads in the task bar? I spend all of my time on my computer, I do not want all this shovelware pushed in my face at every opportunity.

I think this strategy is going to kill them in the long run. I was a pure Windows user, until I was forced to spend some time on mac for a job. What do you know, its just way more pleasant.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#163

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

The Windows 10 LTSC IoT Edition still has 10 years of support, and you can apparently hack it to continue working until the 2038 bug takes the digital world down. Looking into this now.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#164

Post by jmaygarden »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #139
recfab wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP specified "internal revolt", i.e. Microsoft employees. The composition of the customer base is a non-sequitur here.

Oh, I am not a good reader this morning.

You did make good standalone points. Monopolies have strong downsides.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#165

Post by whoisthemachine »

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…

Just recently, my partner's PC had to be wiped because BitLocker was surprise enabled by Windows 11, and I hadn't set her PC up with an online Microsoft login, so we couldn't get the BitLocker key that we never knew we needed.

So your data is now hostage to Microsoft, and if you didn't read the full manual when setting up your partner's new Windows PC, you now lost her data. Writing about it, it feels like ransomware, except I guess we don't have to pay anything yet, other than an account that Microsoft can gather metrics from.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#166

Post by KronisLV »

nicbou wrote: post #122
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…

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.

> You are right about one thing: I refuse to purchase a Windows computer, and have been refusing for a decade.

I still use Windows on my personal machine due to gaming still not being comparably good on Linux across all of the titles I want to play - sometimes native releases aren't available, other times even Proton has issues running stuff on Steam. Apart from that, there is actually very little holding me back, since a lot of things on Linux are just better (mostly development related) and in general most of the popular distros feel good enough as a daily driver.

I wrote about my experiences before: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-... but I don't think that in regards to gaming (or other software) all of the titles will ever be supported, so a Windows VM with GPU passthrough might be an okay choice in the future for entertainment and running some specific software packages, with some Linux distro on the host for the rest of my computing needs.

Which is a shame, because on a technical level Windows is okay and has lots of good software built for it in the past. Even the Edge browser is an improvement upon what they did previously (IE and the old Edge, though I'd say the old Edge was reasonably okay too). It's just the project management aspect of it that's annoying - the OS being taken in a direction with mainstream appeal (which is debatably not an issue to many), but without ways to always turn those customizations off and do it easily.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#167

Post by skrebbel »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #99
skrebbel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not going to pay MS even more just to get a version that has a “please disable this one specific bit of crap” toggle. This has got to be the worst upsell ever. It’s like you book a hotel room and the TV is on Fox News and you can’t turn the TV off. You ask around but everybody says that they can turn it off just fine, must be you. Turns out that they’re all in the executive suite and they also have Fox News on th…

Your analogy is good but I disagree with your principle. Companies need to make money (if you don't accept this premise, fair rough but we probably have no further meaningful discussion). I'm OK if they offer me options. Here's a free / cheap option that's ad supported, here's a premium option that has no ads. This is a good choice! It's a good choice for all! It's when we don't have that choice that things suck! And…

Look, I don’t even know for sure if this is a Home vs Pro thing. I’m just deducting that from the comments here. I’m not arguing against the virtues of an ad-supported software product, I’m arguing against the obscenely braindead way Microsoft is executing it.

If there were a free ad-supported Windows and a paid ad-free (and news-free!) Windows I’d be a happy paying customer.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#168

Post by dazc »

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…

'Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)?'

Maybe that ship has already sailed and they know who their core market is?

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#169

Post by masfuerte »

Kye wrote: post #29
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

I'm on Home. I don't remember what I clicked to make it go away, but it's gone. Turning off Search highlights also got rid of the news garbage in the start menu. Now it's more like KDE's launcher.

Microsoft often do this. They introduce an unwanted feature but they include a checkbox to turn it off. After a year or two they remove the checkbox. My Windows profile doesn't have any ads or Bing integrated search or other nonsense but the options I used to achieve this live on only in the registry. When I get a new computer I'm not using Windows.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#170

Post by justinclift »

imajoredinecon wrote: post #89
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome does the same thing for textboxes if you use enhanced spell checking. >Enhanced spell check Uses the same spell checker that’s used in Google search. Text you type in the browser is sent to Google.

The difference is that Google has come under enough historical privacy flak that they now aggressively privacy red-team new functionality like this and do things like make it opt-in.

That seems new?
Post reply on HN