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

551–560 of 753 posts

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

#551

Post by faeriechangling »

criley2 wrote: post #85
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…

> 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 enjoy to use? I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured market they can brutally take advantage of. Even…

One could argue that offering a walled garden from the outset is more honest than the Microsoft strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and ultimately the latter creates more of a monopolistic threat in practice since walled gardens almost definitionally can't capture most of the market.

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

#552

Post by modoc »

jkubicek wrote: post #430
ascagnel_ wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're navigating with a watch on, it'll notify you of upcoming turns (either through vibrations or by making a turn signal-like noise) without ducking/pausing your music.

And, the taps on your wrist are unique depending on which direction you need to turn, so you can theoretically navigate via the wrist-taps alone.

This is wonderful for when you're on a motorcycle going somewhere new. Absolute game changer!

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

#554

Post by ezekiel68 »

It's shit like this, hackerverse. It's shit like this.

This kind of behavior is why I (and many like me) will never consider Windows to be a legitimate alternate server platform or Visual Studio to be an alternative dev environment (perhaps only for coding a dedicated Win UI client). People walkin' around like the 1990s were ancient history. Well, here we go again.

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

#555

Post by trzy »

Aeolun wrote: post #537
Eisenstein wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait till you learn that "deprecated" and "depreciated" are different words, too.

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

#556

Post by anaganisk »

eptcyka wrote: post #429
anaganisk wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is a literal VM now, that runs based on Hyper-V afaik, if Vscode degrades on Linux, I'm just not sure how it won't affect WSL too. Whatever happened to using vim,emacs, intelliJ, or tons of other Vscode forks. Vscode is not the baited hook, it's the exclusive integrations (extensions) like remote containers, remote containers etc that are nice to have features not workflow breaking stuff.

VSCode runs well on host and just uses SSH to have a remote Dev env in the Linux VM. At this point, a MS advocate might argue that we don't even need vscode to run on Linux at all. I think their next push won't be against Foss people, but to get people on the cloud so they get a recurring revenue stream and their customers are hooked deeper still.

Probably works in the US, but their biggest user bases will just switch to another editor. The user bases are coders from China, India and other developing nations. You have no idea how religiously people hate paid/recurring subscription software over there.

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

#557

Post by NikolaNovak »

hospitalJail wrote: post #385
NikolaNovak wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with your premise. I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox. Same with many other things - I…

>walled garden Walled garden is marketing speak. You should not use it.

Fair enough; what is the recommended term that is applicable?

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

#558

Post by happytiger »

You can't embrace open source, stand for freedom on the Internet, and simultaneously engage in dark patterns like this without destroying user trust. And trust with users is the currency of the 21st century as much as data is the new oil.

Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for. There was this incredible move towards open source, and embracing the modern web, and so many positive developments. I think myself, and many other technologists, were going, "Wait, is this is the same company that shoved IE down our throats for years and got sued for anti-competitive practices?" It was glorious, and shocking.

All of that is now at risk so that some product manager can look good by driving enforced but entirely fake adoption of Edge — that should be nipped in the bud and a clear message sent that this era is over — from the top executives.

Or I supposed they could do nothing, and then it truly is sending a clear message as well. But perhaps not the one Microsoft intends to send, or the one that would benefit the company in coming years in terms of staying inside the good graces they have managed to create.

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

#559

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

recursive wrote: post #546
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imperson…

Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.

Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though.

Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.

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

#560

Post by thomastjeffery »

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…

You're missing some important context:

Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office, and Xbox.

Sure, they tried to break into the mobile sector, but they seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in 2002.

Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room. Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".

Post reply on HN