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

Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users

ctrl.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 499 posts

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

#381

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #296
rjbwork wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Back then businesses were a lot more scared of the repercussions of anti-competitive behaviour than they are now. Reasonably, too. Governments seem reluctant to actually regulate anti-competitive behavior these days, especially from tech giants. I think it must be a kind of technological "too big to fail".

>I think it must be a kind of technological "too big to fail". Microsoft was still big even back then, and yet they got regulated. Bell/AT&T was also a giant monopoly and it also got broken up. It seems that size wasn't the problem.

> It seems that size wasn't the problem.

The lack of will to regulate seems to scale with industry lobbing.

I used to hope we consumers would stop reelecting corruption. We never did and now we're too busy trying to keep even worse people getting into office.

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

#382

Post by silverpepsi »

fhd2 wrote: post #288
ryzvonusef wrote: post #255

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.

There's a special place in the inferno for Booking staff who send me distracting notifications about the fact that the hotel I'm currently living out of having availability. These are especially insidious as I dare not turn off their notifications, I'm staying at a place so traveler hostil they texted me 4 hours before noon check in day and said if I didn't reply by noon they'd cancel my reservation. It is a 13 hr flight to Indonesia and free universal in-air internet just ain't a thing yet. A 4 hour window to respond is beyond outrageous and irrational. Even a tourist from Japan could be without internet the whole while.

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

#383

Post by deutschepost »

devsda wrote: post #219
codebolt wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 8 year old son inherited an old laptop this week, that was too slow to consider installing Win 11, so I ended up loading it with XUbuntu. The first thing I did was actually to install Edge, because that makes it possible to monitor his web browsing using MS Parental Controls. I actually think it's a good browser, certainly better than Chrome (too bloated) or Firefox (too buggy). I'll never understand HNs relentles…

What are these bugs that people encounter that often in Firefox? I've been using using Firefox on Linux and Mac for a long time now and I'm yet to see any bug(a rare occurrence) that is a show stopper(for me atleast).

Some anti virus software will impede site loading times in firefox or even normal operation. Windows will protect edge and other microsoft software from AV. But depending on how bad the AV is, other software will have less luck.

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

#384

Post by adabyron »

smcl wrote: post #313

Has to be pretty embarrassing for the Edge developers that something they've worked on is mostly known as a punchline or an annoyance shoved down people's throats, rather than a product that can stand and compete on its own two feet.

This is the best take. Edge is a really good browser.

It could use better privacy protection but it seems Microsoft & Bing want to make money off ads more than protect users privacy.

It has really good reader mode & read aloud features. I prefer it over Chrome. Firefox, Brave & other browsers have features that make them the right tool for the right job in other areas.

Microsoft is killing their good will & I question what they're getting for it. They're also disrespecting their employees who've put in work to make Edge a great browser.

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

#385

Post by sangnoir »

green_biri wrote: post #377
cutler wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It always surprised me how even savvy devs bought WSL as proof of Microsoft's good intentions. If you lived through Microsoft's antics in the 90s and 00s you could never imagine them changing. Well, here's the proof - they haven't. WSL was introduced purely to grab a piece of the expanding Linux market and followed their attempts to extort money from Red Hat and Suse via their bogus Linux patents racket.

WSL allows me to use Linux from Windows in the most acessible way since VMs. What drives you to claim that it is simply an extortion attempt?

I'm not parent, but you may have missed the word "followed". Patent is suggesting that WSL is a follow up to previous attempts to benefit from Linux by extortion.

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

#386

Post by alpaca128 »

dspillett wrote: post #293
squeaky-clean wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2023 and I still can't get a Dell laptop with Linux pre-installed to sleep properly without crashing without editing things in the terminal and mucking about in the bios. Even giving up on that and disabling sleep on lid close requires using the terminal. Sure the Gnome Tweaks tool has a setting for that but it's not installed by default and check the comments here, it doesn't actually work. https://askubuntu.co…

It is 2023, and they seem to have completely broken hibernate on Windows. Didn't work reliably for a while, intermittently failing to wake up correctly in various ways, one of those ways being a black screen with no choice but to reboot¹, and it seems to have vanished as an option on most (maybe all) laptops I've used recently². And sleep doesn't always stay slept. We've had machines wake up in bags so when later nee…

> We've had machines wake up in bags so when later needed they have near flat batteries and are nice & toasty

I've seen a hypothesis for this relatively common issue, which is: laptop goes to sleep while connected to charger, then charger is unplugged but the laptop still believes it gets charged and starts downloading OS updates, emptying the battery and almost overheating in a bag.

I don't have a Windows laptop to test it myself, though.

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

#387

Post by [deleted] »

oefrha wrote: post #301

Last time I tested an extension of mine on Edge, I counted four or five distinct ways Windows and Edge tried to convince or coax me into setting Edge as default. (Coaxing includes but isn’t limited to full-screen one-click “finish setting up your computer” on boot which includes adopting “Microsoft-recommended” browser security settings which of course means resetting the default browser. It appeared on every reboot…

[deleted]

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

#388

Post by [deleted] »

mlazos wrote: post #305

This stems from modern companies’ obsession with measurable impact. If it can’t be measured it might as well not exist. Unfortunately UX has to become very very bad before the effect is measurable (losing users) and by then it is much too late, especially when the company has near monopoly power. I hope they figure out that they need to make feedback easier to gather so that they can get back to making good products.

[deleted]

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

#390

Post by [deleted] »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #356

All these comments about coercing Windows into some semblance of usability. After several years of not having a PC, I recently bought a new one to use Windows to play ONE game that several of my other friends play on it, and it has been extraordinarily frustrating to configure. From the on-topic charade of browser choice, to denying Microsoft's many attempts to take over several other defaults, or install Office, to…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN