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The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

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Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#291

Post by ccouzens »

Dalewyn wrote: post #191
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…

>Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work? Because Windows is a free-in-practice product and it needs/wants a revenue stream. Remember that Windows 11 can be activated with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 keys; as if that wasn't crazy enough you can straight up not activate it and you won't lose out on anything important. As for install media? You can download those for free any time. No…

I still have Windows for multiplayer games (everything else is done on Linux). When I built this desktop, I had to buy a Windows 11 license. It wasn't free. My laptop's old license did not transfer.

OEMs have to pay Microsoft for Windows licenses on prebuilt Windows computers.

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>>Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work?

>Because Windows is a free-in-practice product and it needs/wants a revenue stream.

Windows is not free. It's because 2 revenue streams are better than one revenue stream. If your goal is to make money, why wouldn't you? (To answer my own question, it's short term thinking that will eventually drive people away from your product).

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#292

Post by soundnote »

skrebbel wrote: post #37
pluc wrote: post #31

The only reason to use Edge is because your corporate policy forces you to. There is no other reason whatsoever. If you must, use Chrome if you'd rather send all that data to an advertising company in exchange for a familiar UI. Otherwise, use Firefox.

Edge has lots of great features and UX elements that set it apart. Eg proper vertical tab bar, profiles with great UX, “turn site into desktop app”, well-designed website translation, etc. Chrome has some of these and Firefox lets you piece it all together with lots of add-ons but it’s not the same. Firefox is my daily driver, but for a long time, before all these user-hostile misfeatures were added, Edge was Pretty…

Brave has vertical tabs nowadays, though they're still behind a flag. But they've gotten pretty and stable enough that I don't miss Edge at all.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#293

Post by soundnote »

pluc wrote: post #31

The only reason to use Edge is because your corporate policy forces you to. There is no other reason whatsoever. If you must, use Chrome if you'd rather send all that data to an advertising company in exchange for a familiar UI. Otherwise, use Firefox.

Why use Chrome when you could use something like Ungoogled Chromium if you don't need backend services, or Brave if you want an end to end encrypted independent sync backend?

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#294

Post by soundnote »

Kwpolska wrote: post #246
pluc wrote: post #31

The only reason to use Edge is because your corporate policy forces you to. There is no other reason whatsoever. If you must, use Chrome if you'd rather send all that data to an advertising company in exchange for a familiar UI. Otherwise, use Firefox.

I use Firefox as my primary browser, and Edge as the secondary browser for things that don’t like Firefox or for when Firefox does weird things. I don’t have Chrome installed on my PCs (both work and personal), because I don’t need it. Also, Microsoft is not primarily an advertising company. They make money by selling software to businesses, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Office (or Microsoft 365).

From 2020, "Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home?" https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

> We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#295

Post by soundnote »

shp0ngle wrote: post #113
pluc wrote: post #31

The only reason to use Edge is because your corporate policy forces you to. There is no other reason whatsoever. If you must, use Chrome if you'd rather send all that data to an advertising company in exchange for a familiar UI. Otherwise, use Firefox.

Vertical tabs

Are built in in Brave (still behind a flag, though, but already in perfectly usable shape)

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#297

Post by jasonlotito »

throwbackhere wrote: post #135
justinclift wrote: post #21

Did you know that out-of-the-box, Edge will transmit the content of your text boxes on web pages to the Microsoft Editor service for the purpose of grammatical suggestions? I have no idea how this concept got past legal but hey, it’s on by default now. Holy shit. :( At what point are some of the major government legal departments actually going to step up and sort this shit out? It is so , so, so, so, so far past ove…

Your comment reminded me of the new grammar checking feature on my phone. It better not be what I think it is. EDIT 1: I just checked and, fucking hell, it's grammarly! Samsung sneaked in an update that was silently leaking everything I wrote to fucking grammarly. This can be disabled by pressing the gear button and accessing the hidden writing assistant menu. Good hardware is not worth risking my private information…

> Samsung sneaked in an update that was silently leaking everything I wrote to fucking grammarly.

It's not leaking if it's intentional. Leaking makes it sound like it was mistake.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#299

Post by fuzzfactor »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #273
fuzzfactor wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 t…

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. Interesting. I've never heard of a commercial product shipping with its own Windows decrapifying script. Any chance this script is available publicly? We build similar things (relatively high-end instrumentat…

I have been wondering if I could find the script in the installed folders. I'll have to check on Monday.

Re: The dark defaults of Microsoft Edge

#300

Post by soundnote »

uni_baconcat wrote: post #229

I quite like MS365 and Edge works great together. But there’s just too much adverts and unrelated content from MSN.com pushed to the index tab. Also, they ruined the PDF experience when changing the engine from EdgeHTML.

Old Edge was a really nice ebook reader.
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