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MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

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Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people e…

> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.

Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".

> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff".

Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#212
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because one is a clearly declared policy that anyone can look up (even though you, or regulators of a certain country, disagree with it). I’m sure there’d be a lot less outrage if it was Microsoft’s policy that other rendering engines (or browsers) were disallowed, instead of being sneaky and trying to fake error messages, degrading user experiences, and the like. Further, it could be argued that dynamic code executi…

> Because one is a clearly declared policy that anyone can look up (even though you, or regulators of a certain country, disagree with it). Microsoft has now clearly declared this policy. The basis of the article is the message sent to IT admins clearly declaring it.

Sure, but one week it's a first run screen recommending Edge, the next it's pop ups when visiting Firefox download page from Edge, the next it's a notification icon about "Microsoft recommended" settings, then it's a notice before running the installer, etc. There is no rhyme or reason besides their business interest and no timeline besides "let's boil this frog"

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine. In Android, all my links open in Firefox. I don't see any issue there. Might serve as an inspiration to Microsoft ;)

I have that setting set, and various links still open in chrome instead of firefox for me. In particular, links that are opened via gmail, maps or the "google" search widget.

Maps open links in Firefox for me; Gmail by default in-process with webview, but that is disable-able in settings and then it opens links in the default browser. For the google search widget, I don't use it, but after a quick check yes, it does use webview too, but also has the option to open in browser.

I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a Firefox addon that spoofs the user agent for Google-owned sites so it delivers the Chrome version of things. Works without any issues and it's a much nicer product experience.

I'm not trying to excuse Google, but feature detection is really hard and browsers sometimes suck with their APIs. I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.

There's no excuse for not being able to read the user-agent strings of the top five browsers in the world, especially when 2 of them (at least) are your own code base.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't use Apple Music at all, you can uninstall it from your phone and it will stop being the default choice. I do this on my phone without any problems.

I don't have an extensive list, but Apple preferring their own apps on iOS is not hyperbole and evident in lots of places. Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list. And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead…

I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.

Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#218

I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here: Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile…

“Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors”

They did decades ago in the last century. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#219
post #80

Am I the only one who sees the technical aspect here: They literally write in this article that this is about embedding web pages next to the chat/email/whatever. That means in-memory over contracted hosting api etc. When I would own, e.g. MS Teams or Outlook, the hell I would love to have a dependency on the internal Firefox hosting API which can break any other day (just a example ... firefox is cool) or introducin…

I hate this pattern, even if it's not monopolistic. If I want to open a link, I want it to go to my browser, not some embedded pane. It completely breaks my workflow. I can't bookmark, use password managers, any of my extensions.

> Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage.

Once again, MS with the browser balkanization. MS is on all the consortia, they can push for browser standards too.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#220
I don't like MSFT as much as anyone else but this does feel like a misattribution of blame.

On Linux, the "default web browser" is part of the XDG specification and available under the settings key `default-web-browser`. In the absence of such a standard at the DE level in Windows, it seems reasonable to me that developers would have to maintain a hardcoded candidate list of web browsers and their likely executable paths in the filesystem. And yes, of course MSFT would put Edge on the top of this search list, the same Apple would do Safari, or Google would do Chrome.

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