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Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

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Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If anything Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers gives a false sense of healthy competition.

I view Brave as very healthy competition to Chrome and Edge. Yes, it's based on Chromium. But it disables the many egregious privacy violations, as well as other bad things.

And whatever Google decides they want to implement or support in Chromium will be the web default, even just how they interpret ambiguities or undefined behaviours - standards be damned. We have tried this before and it was not pretty.

That is why we need competing browser implementations.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#282
post #7

I gave my old parents the latest hand-me-up laptop and installed ubutntu on it because of windows 11. The install process and default configuration is so user hostile to someone that "just needs to use chrome". My niece & nephew have only known ChromeOS/iOS/Android. They will never use windows until a college course requires some specific software, or they get a desk job. I think they will for sure eventually "learn…

Ubuntu is now bundling advertisements for their paid services in apt upgrade output and the GUI software sources manager, in packages which cannot be uninstalled because they're hard dependencies of the `ubuntu-desktop` metapackage. Plus they've replaced Firefox with a package which installs a Snap, which loads so slowly they added a "snap opened" notification.

Do you mean you should just stick with Windows because Ubuntu now prints a line in your console when you apt-get upgrade telling you that Ubuntu Pro exists?

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That an internal OS system (help) opens in the OS browser I'm willing to accept. That every browser says "please please make us the default browser" is annoying but hardly unique for Edge. This is just the combination of the two. I don't think enough people use Win+Type+Enter queries, nor F1 help in Windows to make the discussion very interesting compared to the really interesting ones like which browsers will open a…

Edge is the only browser that periodically captures you in a full screen multiple pages nag screen when it's not default. It's also the only browser able to set itself as default without further interaction. It's not behaving the same as any other browser.

It does that when it's the default, too. I only occasionally use Windows, so couldn't be bothered to install something else. Yet, I feel that every other time I start it, I'm presented with some "use edge! it's so cool!" screen I have to sit through. It also insists on changing the search engine to bing. I'm usually pretty cautious and try not to press "ok" just so it leaves me alone, yet it managed to change it. For my needs, pretty much every search engine is good enough. I prefer google since I can convince it to use dark mode and use English instead of my local language (even though windows is set to use English as its display language).

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#284
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating that you can't change DE in Windows though, and that it changes from version to version.

You actually can, but there is no viable alternative DE. If only KDE had a Win32-free build for Windows.

I didn't know that, thanks for mentioning. It's apparently called shells in Windows lingo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_f...

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except edge then opens and presents you with some message about setting it to the default browser (which a lot of people will just click ok to make it go away)

That an internal OS system (help) opens in the OS browser I'm willing to accept. That every browser says "please please make us the default browser" is annoying but hardly unique for Edge. This is just the combination of the two. I don't think enough people use Win+Type+Enter queries, nor F1 help in Windows to make the discussion very interesting compared to the really interesting ones like which browsers will open a…

How is it more acceptable because it's a combination of two things? Lots of objectionable outcomes are a combination of multiple factors!

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#286
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when you are such a proficient user of some technology you don't even realize how many mistakes you can make along the way. And some small annoyance that you don't even notice might be a burden and a day-long struggle for someone less experienced. As an example of such a behavior on Windows. My customers (too often) complain that my console-based program suddenly stopped and they tried everything and can't ma…

GP said 15 years though, not exactly someone less experienced.

I know people who seem to have managed to have the same year of experience 15 times over, learning nothing along the way…

Time spent is not necessarily experience, especially if you are trying to do something else at the time. In this case trying to do DayJob so not having time/care to commit much operating system management knowledge to memory, which is more understandable than the people mentioned in my first sentence who were failing to learn what was their job.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#287

Windows continuously monitors what browsers users have installed. If you uninstall Chrome, it immediately tries to make Edge the default browser. And it never respects my wishes for a default browser. Any OS embedded help link will open Edge, wasting me time, memory and screen space.

One thing I really hate is that, I like to hit the windows key and start typing the name of an app I want to open, but if I mistype the app name, it searches the web for the misspelling... in Edge!

they have to get those bing numbers up somehow!

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#288

I use Edge on my laptop (because of Bing Chat, easy to use on Edge, without faffing around on OpenAI), and Microsoft still won't stop trying to push it on me every once in a while. (on windows 10, because of TPM1.2, small blessings) Like chill, you already got me. I am not going to remove Chrome and Firefox, but you are the default browser already and I use Bing too, now go away.

A: "Edge conversations are up 4%! What else can we do to increase them?"

B: "Users that already have Edge as their default browser also see these, shouldn't we first fix that?"

A: "That wouldn't increase Edge conversions, would it?"

B: "No, but..."

A: "Then we don't have time for that. What can we do to increase them?"

Been there - not at Microsoft, but it's not particularly unique to them.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#289
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Windows 10/11] fades into the background I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something work…

Windows key+E opens explorer. Or do you mean that it's so slow that it takes several seconds?

On my work machine (approx 4 years old, Win10) and home machine (mostly 2 years old, graphics card, a 1060/6GB is more elderly, Win10) both take most of a second to bring up a fresh Explorer window, timing by eye from Win+E to the whole UI being present. It seems far more variable (sometimes feeling quicker, sometimes taking a couple of seconds) on my laptop (Several seconds sounds like an exaggeration, but it never seems anything but sluggish to me.

One UX delay that irritates me is the time it often takes between hitting Win+R and the run dialogue finally being ready for input. Regularly the first few characters of what I type after that ends up going to the app that originally had focus. That used to be instant, on much older kit.

Re: Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good husbands don't let their wives use Windows.

Good husbands don't force their wives to wrestle with random daily problems like screen brightness not working on Linux because of their personal tech politics.

MacBook Air M2 should be the choice for any normal person who just needs to get normal work done. No politics, but clearly I've touched an insecurity here :/
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