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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

#251
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn’t read the article. Glad I scrolled down this far, my care for this is now 0.

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

#252
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while these can be made to work .. Fusion360/SolidWorks/CATIA/Siemens NX are notoriously hard to make work, and when they do the fixes usually only last a single patch; and these softwares (aside from SolidWorks) are all always-connected and auto-updating. and unfortunately a lot of that software is simply career-making. It's simply an arms-race that can't be won from the consumer perspective without applying adequat…

You're not necessarily wrong, but the vast majority of recent WINE developments have been going into making it a much more stable experience. The past decade of WINE development has pretty much been about throwing the kitchen sink at your program and praying that it works, but companies like Valve have made some pretty wild overhauls to the system that allow for both leaner and more predictable prefixes. It's still n…

It would take a lot of progress for me to bet my livelihood on WINE functionality for niche software (whose customer support I pay for, and whose support agents would hang up on me the moment it became clear I was having trouble while not running on Windows).

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

#253

Microsoft is making me seriously reconsider using Windows for my Alienware gaming PC. Does anyone know if there's a version of the Alienware, Steelseries, and Razer control software for Linux?

You may be interested in these FOSS alternatives for Alienware, Steelseries, and Razer control software on Linux:

- AlienFX (https://github.com/trackmastersteve/alienfx): Control Alienware lighting effects on Linux

- rivalcfg (https://github.com/flozz/rivalcfg): CLI tool and Python library to configure Steelseries mice on Linux

- RazerGenie (https://github.com/z3ntu/RazerGenie): Configure Razer devices on Linux, uses OpenRazer

- OpenRazer (https://openrazer.github.io): FOSS driver and userspace daemon for Razer devices on Linux

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

#254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah! I had forgotten to mention that. I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. As someone who used it in 2012 and went through the pain of getting an Optimus graphics card working correctly, and dealt with the weird rendering issues of Gnome 3, and had to write a bootup script to disable "tap to click" on my mousepad, it's a reasonable complaint to say that the…

> I can't really blame people for thinking that the Linux desktop experience sucks, to be fair. Nor me. A lot of it has been small things in my experience though, like this trackpad being terrible, or GNOME crashing once in a blue moon. I've definitely not experienced the level of pain you had with Optimus, or the rendering issues, which seems like a good thing. Although... on the subject of rendering issues, Firefox…

Actually, outside of having trouble disabling tap to click, I haven't had a ton of issues with the trackpad.

I also haven't had the Firefox rendering problems, but I think that might be because for the last Linux laptop I had, I specifically sought out a graphics card that was likely to not have any issues.

> I might learn C so I can look into making my own.

I've thought about that too. If I weren't on Apple now I probably would have already started on that, but the closest thing I've done to any kind of "driver" has been to make custom FUSE mount.

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't you heard? It's the year of the Linux desktop :) In all seriousness, until about a year ago when I got a discount on a Macbook and changed to that, I had been running Linux for about a decade across different laptops, and feel that since ~2017 the desktop experience has improved substantially . I bought a new laptop in 2017, installed Ubuntu on it...and that was it. I spent exactly zero minutes installing dri…

I'll typically do a minimal starting distro and lots of tuning, which works decently I think in the desktop world. But whenever I tried to apply this to a Laptop it would fail miserably, I think because my various static configurations don't work great for typical laptop use cases. Boring old Ubuntu with some DE customization works totally fine on a laptop, though. I don't know why I tried to do this hard-mode for ye…

Yeah, I used to run a vanilla Arch install on my laptop, and I did manage to get it working almost as well as Windows or macOS after about a week of tinkering, but after a certain point I realized that I want to work on cooler problems than mucking with systemd or dkms, so I just installed Ubuntu and never looked back until I bought a Macbook last year.

I think the newest versions of Ubuntu are great. They've started to give me everything I like about macOS [1] while being FOSS(ish) and portable to any computer I want.

[1] Not comparing Ubuntu to macOS directly, but more of a macOS "feel" in the sense of how I use it.

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the moment you fire up Firefox without prefetch nor studies and enjoy the peaceful DNS logs without the constant telemetry calls to LinkedIn and to all interested 3rd parties, five eyes etc

i thought that too! but firefox has different dns requests going to their servers as well.

On linux you can use IceCat. On windows, download simplewall and block pingsender.exe there. Should get rid of the queries if you combine it with userjs tweaking.

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

#258

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…

It's still Windows, we can tweak everything exactly how we want it. https://github.com/valinet/ExplorerPatcher https://ramensoftware.com/7-taskbar-tweaker-on-windows-11-wi... I've been using 7taskbar for years, it's rock solid. ExplorerPatcher is a new requirement, works great and adds tons of features.

Don’t forget classicshell!

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

#259
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…

I still don't understand how the hell they shipped the Metro Start screen on Windows Server 2012 and 2016. I hope somebody got fired for okaying that decision.

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

#260

Firefox should go all the way on this. Exploit bugs, modify binaries, whatever it takes. With user consent of course. If the user says they want Firefox to be their default browser, Firefox is justified in modifying the operating system to achieve that. Ultimately Microsoft is powerless to stop this except by using their antivirus to block installation of Firefox in the first place, and I'd like to see them try that…

> Ultimately Microsoft is powerless to stop this except by using their antivirus to block installation of Firefox in the first place

They've already started down that road with s mode, which is default for new installs and not a separate SKU (anymore) that you can avoid.

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