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

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 753 posts

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

#531

Post by coffeeling »

kortex wrote: post #219
oaiey wrote: 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 th…

It won't go to an embedded pane. What they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.

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

#532

Post by CharlesW »

djtango wrote: post #478
CharlesW wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't you see how absurd that is in 2023? I understand that POV, but I should temper my "serious work" statement by saying that the Office web apps are pretty great and keep getting better. However, the native desktop apps are just better. It's hard to make a direct comparison with Google's web-app-only strategy since the Workspace apps are toys in comparison, more akin to Apple's iWork suite.

I haven't used Sheets as extensively as I've used Excel, and once upon a time I was a real Excel machine who knew all the alt menu navigation by heart (great precursor training for vim) but I have slowly become a Sheets convert. Being able to write appscript between all the Workplace products was pretty painless. I haven't tried to push Sheets to do million row fat sheets for crunching but wouldn't be surprised if it…

I can totally see that, and Sheets seems like the most capable app in the suite. And although I found myself frusted by Docs and Slides limitations, I know that they're perfectly fine for lots of (maybe most?) use cases.

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

#533

Post by coffeeling »

thatnerdyguy wrote: post #157
oaiey wrote: 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…

This is the correct take that should be at the top. They aren't opening the links in Edge, they are opening the links in an embedded window implemented using Edge.

As far as I can tell, what they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.

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

#534

Post by Rimintil »

tracker1 wrote: post #511
nordsieck wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice. If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?

Can't speak for GP, but the o365 Word is better than Google Docs as well. And while you can view Visio in o365, would be nice if you could edit the diagrams. Odd, but Visio is still imo much better than alternatives in that space.

Visio documents can be edited on ODfB and SPO within the browser.

https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-for-t...

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

#535

Post by dragonwriter »

coffeeling wrote: post #531
kortex wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

It won't go to an embedded pane. What they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.

> The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all

Maybe, but if I have the Outlook app, a browser, and a windowing desktop environment, it seems a little superfluous.

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

#536

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

capableweb wrote: post #106
dustedcodes wrote: post #6

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 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…

Arguably, Microsoft is why a browser's user-agent is so useless for determining supported features.

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is:

> And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.

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

#537

Post by Aeolun »

Eisenstein wrote: post #508
gtirloni wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We often look at companies as a single monolith but that isn't conductive to productive discussions. OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one. One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the per…

A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means "tending to promote or assist" is 'conducive' with no 't', pronounced 'cundoosiv'. > Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, wher…

What the hell? They’re separate words?

How did I go at least half my life without knowing this.

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

#538

Post by lokar »

sn_master wrote: post #500
jsiepkes wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better product. More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.

Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.

It’s a preference, not a bias

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

#539

Post by faeriechangling »

toyg wrote: post #37
dustedcodes wrote: post #6

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 is actually the one reacting here. They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases; Apple and Google took advantage of that to build two walled gardens, which ended up dwarfing MS's own empire. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, MS would have gone "If this behaviour is now allowed, why should we not do it too?" This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practic…

Apple is certainly a worthy competitor to the Microsoft empire, Google remains a cut below.

>Monopolistic practices on mobile

Most of my phones have shipped with Samsung Internet.

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

#540

Post by nick_kline »

cobbaut wrote: post #525
capableweb wrote: post #106

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…

> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?

Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.
Post reply on HN