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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

#301

Post by oefrha »

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 until someone told me about a setting to disable it.) Mind you, the four or five ways I encountered were from using Windows 11 Pro normally or opening Edge briefly; I’m not even counting additional conditional shenanigans like special banner on chrome.com, or asking you to use Microsoft everything (including on mobile devices) to bump up your position in Bing Chat waitlist.

The brazenness and shamelessness is really appalling.

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

#302

Post by yard2010 »

antiframe wrote: post #79
doyouevensunbro wrote: post #61

I’m using Windows 11 and nothing forces open Edge on my machine. Every link opens in Brave like I told it to.

What happens when you press Win, type a query, then press enter, quickly? In Win 10 that opens a Bing search in Edge for me, no matter what settings I try. Very annoying when I type "(Win)chr(enter)" to open Chrome and get a search instead. If I do it slow it will sometimes work. I haven't tried it on Win 11 because that was what caused me to drop Windows altogether. (Everyone has their straw).

A while ago I uninstalled IE from my pc. I'm not sure how, but now when I do what you say nothing happens. It says "search the web" but I guess it can't find IE so it just fails silently. It took me a while to recall that I uninstalled IE in a tantrum in the past so that puzzled me for a while

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

#303

Post by dns_snek »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #110

I'm surprised no one has brought up United States v. Microsoft yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... . They were successfully sued for favoring their browser over others, and faced being broken up. Though their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago, it's obvious that no lesson has been learned.

> Though their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago

How so? They still bundle a browser, but now they go a step further and actively ignore user-selected preferences for the default browser.

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

#305

Post by mlazos »

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.

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

#306

Post by yard2010 »

mythhabit wrote: post #281
mherrmann wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd argue for the opposite - we need strong standards and some methods to strictly enforce them. Governments could do that but the level of incompetency and politics are huge roadblocks

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

#307

Post by prmoustache »

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.

I uninstall edge from my laptop when bing search started to open a chatGPT prompt instead of showing me related links.

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

#308

Post by qyron »

SadTrombone wrote: post #229
qyron wrote: post #228

I share all criticism on the subject but I must admit there is a killer feature that alone converted me to use Edge on MacOS - native vertical tab bar with tab grouping. It worked much better for me than all Chrome and Firefox extensions I tried before. I know Brave implemented it recently too so Edge is not the only player in town now, but it was the first! Hopefully the rest of browsers will follow the trend.

Have you tried Vivaldi's vertical tabs? They seem quite powerful and I like the implementation more than Edge's.

More powerful does not necessarily means better. Vivaldi indeed allows much more customization, but for my tab-heavy browsing pattern Edge's (and now Brave's) way suits much more. For example some things I don't like in Vivaldi:

- No colors. In Edge/Brave new color is auto-assigned when creating new tab group and can be overridden at any time.

- When tab group is expanded, the group name/header is not shown. When you have many groups with similar tabs they are much less visually distinct from each other.

- Moving new tab to one of previous collapsed groups can be easily done via context menu in Edge. In Vivaldi you'll have to expand the group and drag the tab.

These are all minor inconveniences but together they make a big difference.

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

#309

Post by yard2010 »

ZoomerCretin wrote: post #110

I'm surprised no one has brought up United States v. Microsoft yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor... . They were successfully sued for favoring their browser over others, and faced being broken up. Though their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago, it's obvious that no lesson has been learned.

> On June 28, 2001, the Circuit Court overturned Judge Jackson's rulings against Microsoft. This was partly because Jackson had improperly discussed the case with the news media while it was still in progress, violating the Code of Conduct for American judges.[24] The Circuit Court judges accused Jackson of unethical conduct and determined that he should have recused himself from the case.

Lol.

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

#310

Post by alkonaut »

ben0x539 wrote: post #285
alkonaut wrote: post #204

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…

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

Because I accept both things on their own, and I accept that the combination of them follows naturally. Then I must (reluctantly) accept unfortunate outcome of the combination.

I wouldn't say it's reasonable that browsers could never suggest they be made default, and I don't think it's reasonable that you can't have some OS function that wants to show e.g. a help section use the OS embedded browser.

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