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Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

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Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#111

Post by atribecalledqst »

epolanski wrote: post #39
YPPH wrote: post #26

Windows just keeps getting weirder. There's this regrettable dichotomy between (1) a rock solid OS core with great features like Hyper-V, PowerShell and exceptional back-compat, and (2) a crap, sluggish, inconsistent UI slapped on top, laden with ads, "Rewards" Points and tracking.

WSL2, power toys and hands down the best window management of any OS, I hate working on my MBP just due to the difficulty of managing different windows and aligning them on the same desktop.

FYI -- on my MBP I use a program called Spectacle to snap windows around, and I now have no complaints relative to what you can do on Windows.

Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:

https://www.reddit.com/r/osx/comments/kazpcn/spectacle_alter...

[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#112

Post by hilbert42 »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #84
hilbert42 wrote: post #61

When the fuck is this going to stop! Microsoft lost this monopolizing tactic in a court case decades ago. It seems either no one remembers this fact or that Microsoft hopes it's so. Regulators will you please damn-well regulate. In simple English, do your fucking job.

It's not the same situation as back then. 1. They don't have the same browser market share at all. 2. They don't have the same operating system market share they used to either (specifically, they lost the mobile space - which is how majority of people in the world access the internet). 3. It's easier to use another browser now on Windows then back when it was at its worst in 00s (where IE was more or less part of ex…

"It's not the same situation as back then. 1. They don't have the same browser market share at all."

That's essentially irrelevant because (a) Microsoft complied with the Court's ruling and allowed other browsers to be installed without hindrance, that's not the situation now; (b) you're painting a picture as if Microsoft was disadvantaged by the situation now and thus it's unfair to impose such restrictions again this time. To that I'd add that in case you haven't noticed Microsoft has just passed three trillion in value, it's only second to Apple in achieving this milestone. Thus the changed situation hasn't disadvantaged it one iota.

I'd maintain that Microsoft has only managed this incredible feat because throughout its 48-year life it has consistently used unacceptable, bullyboy monopolistic practices at every opportunity.

Essentially, Microsoft's growth has been at the expence of competitors who haven't had the size and finacial power to stand up to its market dominance no matter how good their products were. Such bad behavior has screwed both the market and product development for everyone—small and medium-sized developers, hardware manufacturers and end users. Just about the only entity that hasn't been screwed by its unacceptable business practices is Microsoft itself.

The most significant reason for Microsoft's unfettered growth is that the regulators have been asleep at the wheel for decades—no doubt encouraged to 'sleep' by millions plowed into lobbying.

On the matter of Mozilla, I'm certainly not an apologist for the company, in fact over the years I've been very critical of Mozilla including here on HN. Yes, the dominance of Chrome from that other monopolist Google has had a lot to do with Firefox's downfall, but that said Mozilla has been shooting itself in the foot for decades. Why and how is pretty obvious and well known so I won't debate that here.

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#114

Post by KingOfCoders »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #106

Mozilla took aim ... and wiffed ... big time. Edge hasn't displaced Firefox, Chrome has. But they have about 600 million ($) reasons to avoid pointing this out. Let's face the facts --- Mozilla is Google's bitch and has been for a long time. And this is just the latest example.

600 million ($)?

They've got ~$6000 (?) million from Google over the years. In a total distortion of reality Edge is the downfall of Firefox, not the reason they spent $6000M for 3% market share because they made every mistake they could make. Everyone else would be belly up already, but $600M/year makes it hard to die.

The fact that new browsers are popping up left and right (like Floorp) should tell Mozilla there seems to be demand for something that isn't FF.

(Written from FF with Tab Center Reborn as a vertical tab)

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#115

Post by janwillemb »

RedShift1 wrote: post #41
janwillemb wrote: post #33

Outlook has been a nightmare lately regarding this. It could be that it is my organization that pushed this, but links never open in the default browser, and get routed through a Microsoft link, which for some reason does not work on Edge. The only way to open links is to right-click them, copy, open browser, paste in address bar.

Nope this is intentional by Microsoft and the group policy settings to change this only work on the most expensive Office 365 subscriptions. You can change it manually in the settings though to open with the system default browser.

Do you know how?

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#116

Post by lelanthran »

weberer wrote: post #104
lelanthran wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a statistic that is irrelevant to my point. It is not a statistic of Linux desktop share, it's a statistic of existing Linux users, not windows migrations.

>It is not a statistic of Linux desktop share Yes it is. The Y axis is "Percentage of Steam users". The fact that the Linux percentage is increasing means that the the percentage of Windows users are decreasing. The graph shows a trend of migrating from Windows to Linux.

> Yes it is. The Y axis is "Percentage of Steam users".

"% of desktops amongst Steam users" is significantly different from "% of desktops".

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#117

Post by throwaway13337 »

Dark patterns are certainly evil. I don't think they help the company in the long run.

However, I just went on a sort of browser deep dive for the best browser on windows and came away, surprisingly, with edge.

The requirements were vertical tabs, keep my chrome extensions, and got out of my way.

Brave, firefox, chrome, and vivaldi all had issues that couldn't be resolved in the UI. For example, firefox's tree style tabs still kinda requires that you keep the top tabs for some uses.

I didn't even consider edge at first. The rewards/shopping/bingwhatever integrations were disqualifiers. But apparently, you can disable all of them fairly quickly.

The pdf viewer is also better than chrome's with extended options.

I guess I also must admit the benefit of not fighting windows because I'm doing what they want.

We'll see if their next forced update reverts to their awful defaults but for now, I'm happy with it. At least until arc browser is available.

It's a real shame that Microsoft is so schizophrenia here. If they were to respect their customers, they would gain far more than they would lose.

The dev-focused arm seems to understand long term customer goodwill but the OS/browser team does not.

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#118

Post by torginus »

epolanski wrote: post #39
YPPH wrote: post #26

Windows just keeps getting weirder. There's this regrettable dichotomy between (1) a rock solid OS core with great features like Hyper-V, PowerShell and exceptional back-compat, and (2) a crap, sluggish, inconsistent UI slapped on top, laden with ads, "Rewards" Points and tracking.

WSL2, power toys and hands down the best window management of any OS, I hate working on my MBP just due to the difficulty of managing different windows and aligning them on the same desktop.

Sorry for being off topic, but just tried powertoys based on your post, and holy cow! What an amazing piece of software. I particularly like the file unlocker feature, and the Windows implementation of Quick Look.

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#119

Post by hilbert42 »

passwordoops wrote: post #72
hilbert42 wrote: post #61

When the fuck is this going to stop! Microsoft lost this monopolizing tactic in a court case decades ago. It seems either no one remembers this fact or that Microsoft hopes it's so. Regulators will you please damn-well regulate. In simple English, do your fucking job.

To be fair to the regulators, they have been busy lately: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/12/... https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/01/...

Perhaps so. But they're too late the damage has been done. Unfortunately, they should have acted 30+ years ago. The need to regulate back then was just as obvious as it is now.

Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

#120

Post by metaphor »

sccxy wrote: post #109
aragilar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? There's OpenSearch and web extensions which let you add more search engines (removing builtin ones is harder though).

Ok, then tell me how to add search engine to Safari iOS/Desktop and Firefox Desktop without building and downloading extra extensions. Search url: https://api.hackertarget.com/geoip/?q=%s

For Firefox Desktop, just create a bookmark with your search URL and assign a keyword to it, e.g.

  URL: https://api.hackertarget.com/geoip/?q=%s
  Keyword: @geoip
...then Alt+D and queue off the keyword directly from address bar.
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