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Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

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Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#231

Post by scruple »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #127
scruple wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully we have options. I'm planning on moving my main desktop to Arch over my Christmas break from work. It's been a while since I ran Linux as my main desktop, my only complaints have been around gaming performance. I have a friend who plays the same games as I do and he's got everything working on his Arch install. That's really the only thing that holds me on Windows and if it's as smooth of a transition as I…

I try to move to Linux desktop one or twice a year for the last, what, 20 years. I have Linux on all my servers, was an early (very minor) dev on pre-1 kernel and generally love it. The desktop is a walking nightmare. Something continuously does not work: multiple screens, waking up from sleep etc. I really would like to move (we use Outlook but I am even ready to go for OWA) but Windows is considerably better on lap…

I've been running Arch on my 8th (or maybe 7th?) Generation ThinkPad X1C since I bought it in 2018. I've had no issues with multiple monitors, hibernate, etc. I never got the fingerprint reader working but I don't care to use it regardless, so... Otherwise, though, it's been completely solid the entire time I've had it and it's my daily driver for personal project work.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#232

Post by dijit »

pojntfx wrote: post #85
freeqaz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pipewire has made all of my audio issues on Linux go away, at this point. Maybe it's my hardware (a high-end Dell Latitude that is Ubuntu certified) but it just f*cking works! I'm on Arch, so I find I tend to have fewer issues than with Ubuntu (due to the latter always being on some ancient version). Seriously though when I switched from Pulse to Pipewire... I rebooted and I've never had any issues since! Now, my big…

If you like i3 but want to try Wayland pain-free - Sway uses i3's config file syntax, so you shouldn't have to change anything to try it out :)

Caveat emptor: your normal apps might struggle still.

Some common things have wayland native replacements but it might be jarring.

Redshift (automatic Color temperature change) -> gammastep

Dunst (notifications) -> mako

Rofi (launcher) -> idk I just used kitty+fzf with some special options.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#233

Post by scblock »

canadaduane wrote: post #156
InitialLastName wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That gives me four years for the tools that lock me to Windows to decide to port to literally any other OS.

That has been my thinking as well. I officially migrated from my Windows PC and my MacBook Pro to Linux (Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop) this year. Both companies have been slowly showing signs that their values are drifting away from things I care about (ownership, control, privacy). I'm willing to budge a little to accommodate alternate viewpoints, but it's been clear that they've picked a direction and their tanks…

I have Pop!_OS on a Framework laptop as well and if it wasn't a project laptop meant entirely for the purpose of being a project laptop and test bed for a few things I would chuck it out the window. In the reality of actually using the computer every single thing about my 5 year old MacBook Pro (the one everyone loves to hate) is better except maybe the keyboard, and that's not as cut and dry as the internet would pretend.

Everything works except everything that doesn't work well. Fractional scaling is a mess, integer scaling is not much better. YouTube on Firefox can barely play 1080p videos. Scrolling is anything but smooth, and the system doesn't appear to be doing much drawing on the GPU at all. When connected to an external 4k monitor running at 1.5x scale (how I use it with Windows and macOS) the system gets really slow.

Wayland is better performance wise, but at 1.5x scale (the best overall balance for the screen size and resolution) all electron based apps, which rely on xwayland, are blurry, and these days that's a lot of apps (including Slack, VS Code, and Zettlr which I run on all my systems). Kernel and driver support is mostly there except for the frequent regressions, so some features will in one version will break on the next kernel version, but it's fixed in the next next version, and that is not good enough. Power consumption on use is decent, but battery drain on sleep is atrocious even if you enable "deep sleep" which makes the machine take 5+ seconds to wake up.

Meanwhile Gnome insists on hiding as many settings from you as possible, so to set up CalDav contact syncing, which is managed by Gnome, I had to install an additional email app I won't use because the Gnome account manager doesn't bother to expose a UI to manage the account directly. And if I screw up the settings in the mail client Geary, which otherwise works well and is what I use, I have to delete the account and start over because there's no UI I can find to view and edit the server settings. It's completely ridiculous.

So the Pop!_OS team has built a really nice looking UI and a pretty good overall user experience (best I've had on Linux over the years), but it's all on top of a big pile of half working garbage. So it's simultaneously a really nice UI compared to my Windows 10 machine while being entirely frustrating to use.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#234

Post by GhettoComputers »

cronix wrote: post #22

So far in the last year or so, I've heard 0 reasons why I'd even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn't even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.

Free update. Better Linux subsystem support, an android emulator better than anything on Linux, good performance, easy to bypass TPM, lots of software support (since it’s emulating Linux lol).

I say this as a Linux user who doesn’t use windows except for some Win only programs that VM and wine can’t run.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#235

Post by viraptor »

josephcsible wrote: post #30
dragontamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alder Lake needed a new scheduler. So any 12th generation Intel build will greatly benefit from Win11 scheduler over Win10.

Microsoft could have given us the new scheduler without all the antifeatures, but they didn't.

That was the original plan with win10 being the rolling "last version". It's a shame they reverted.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#236

Post by einr »

cptskippy wrote: post #70
cronix wrote: post #22

So far in the last year or so, I've heard 0 reasons why I'd even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn't even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.

Windows 11 is just another Microsoft operating system setting the groundwork for a generational leap just like Windows ME, Windows Vista, and Windows 8. IMO it is designed to not be widely adopted. When Windows ME was released, it was little more than a reskin of Windows 98 that removed or disabled much of the 16 bit capabilities and support for the ISA architecture in favor of 32 bit and PCI. It couldn't be installe…

When Windows ME was released, it was little more than a reskin of Windows 98 that removed or disabled much of the 16 bit capabilities and support for the ISA architecture in favor of 32 bit and PCI. It couldn't be installed on most existing machines and was highly unstable on those that it would run on.

Very little of this is true. Windows ME runs all the 16-bit code you can throw at it and supports all ISA devices identically to 95 and 98. Windows 9x were just as 32-bit as ME and supported PCI just fine.

The only thing they removed support for was booting into real-mode DOS, and started ignoring your autoexec.bat and config.sys files for the most part. You can hack that back into the OS pretty trivially, it's purely cosmetic and has nothing to do with the underlying architecture. They probably did this in an attempt to hide its creaky MS-DOS roots, and to get customers more used to not being able to run pure DOS before the inevitable shift to NT.

Windows ME was a product even Microsoft seemingly didn't really want to make -- nothing but a last-minute stopgap measure until they got XP ready. No one liked it at the time as it was basically Windows 98 but worse. There are some good parts, though -- improved USB support, for instance -- and therefore there are now projects that "backport" features from Windows ME to Windows 98 so you can get the best of both worlds.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#237

Post by GhettoComputers »

arepublicadoceu wrote: post #210

Windows 11 was an absolute downgrade to my Windows 10 experience. To the point that I went back to windows 10 in less than a day of Windows 11. 1. I can't ungroup the taskbar windows. So now I have to hoover the taskbar to see multiple instances of the same software; 2. Who the hell thought it was a great idea to couple all the commands like WiFi, power energy, etc under the same menu? On Windows 11 I needed to click…

Look up Windows LTSC, it’s like Win10 that acts like Win7

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#238

Post by jrwr »

kaba0 wrote: post #167
pjfin123 wrote: post #33

Linux Desktop feeling extra good today, my sound often doesn't work but I don't have to deal with Microsoft nonsense.

Frankly, sound has not been a problem for a long time now I think. Hell, the number of time windows killed the sound driver under usage for whatever reason it deemed useful, I actually would say nowadays Windows has the worst audio stack out of the 3 main OSs.

Tell that to my poor Legion 7i - Has on going onboard audio issues and very wonky iGPU/dGPU support.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#239

Post by Maximus9000 »

eli wrote: post #185
thunderbong wrote: post #179

From the TFA - This is not for http:// , https:// , file:// links. This is specifically for microsoft-edge:// links, which I've never seen. I think this applies only for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). I'm wondering how many of the commentators here have actual read the article.

No, microsoft-edge links are used through Windows itself when it wants to show a webpage, e.g. from Cortana or a desktop widget. They open in Edge even if you've told Windows you want a different default browser

Even still, these are links that you're rarely (if ever) using.

Re: Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround

#240

Post by mehlmao »

zionic wrote: post #49
cronix wrote: post #22

So far in the last year or so, I've heard 0 reasons why I'd even need, want or benefit from Win11 over Win10. Tons of reasons in the negative column though. There isn't even anything to salivate over that might make you think it might be worth it to deal with the other tradeoffs. Hard pass.

If you're a gamer autoHDR and direct storage support are both wins. Also, if you have alder lake you want the new scheduler.

My understanding is that Windows 11 doesn't have Direct Storage yet, and they've announced that it will come to Windows 10 as well.
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