MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry • Hacker News Board

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#431

Post by garbagecoder » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:51 PM UTC

jsiepkes wrote: post #265

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly? They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.

> They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core. You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1]. [1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--micro...

I hate Microsoft as much as your average Gen X tech nerd, but C# is good. I don't care what inspired them to do it.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#432

Post by alberth » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:52 PM UTC

snoopen wrote: post #394

alberth wrote: post #358

I think this is being wrongly frame. This functionality is actually needed in highly regulated industries like banking or government. Which is, you need a way to secure how your employees are accessing information. And when everything is moving to becoming a cloud document (or document hosted on the cloud), not being able to have control over the browser in which that information is viewed with is a huge threat vecto…

No, it's absolutely the right framing. This isn't a setting that allows admins to force a browser for security. This is obviously about MS trying to force the uptake of Edge and nothing more.

Let's compare this to Google Workspace.

Google Workspace functionality is only fully supports Google Chrome.

Google Workspace doesn't support a number of key features on Firefox, Safari & Edge - as denoted below.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864?hl=en

So how is what Microsoft is doing, different? They are only fully supporting Microsoft Edge (much like how Google only supports their own browser)

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#433

Post by AppleBananaPie » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

dustedcodes wrote: post #6

I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here: Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile…

I'm sure I'm biased but the old school pm culture at Microsoft is still alive and well. The new hires are forced to play the old stupid games of doing anything to get the metrics to show what they want in the short term and the cycle continues. Windows and Office both have this problem and I think will continue to until they get someone up top who's sole purpose is to root out this culture from middle management through low level execs.

I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#434

Post by yoyohello13 » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

cdme wrote: post #423

I've never understood why so many folks have been fine while they quietly gobbled up large parts of modern dev toolchains given their history.

Because ease of use trumps all. People don't care about 'ethics' as long as they can install VSCode extensions with one click. Whatever you say about Microsoft their VSCode ecosystem is easy to use so people will use it and defend to the death their laziness under the guise of "My job is to provide value, not use my brain."

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#435

Post by hbn » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #400

thesuitonym wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a person who never even tried. Open Settings > Safari > Default Browser App, and select the app you want. It's really that easy.

I suppose you aren't aware that they are all the same browser because apple doesn't allow competing browser engines

The person above complaining about links defaulting to open in Safari was obviously talking about the app and not the rendering engine

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#436

Post by oldgradstudent » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

atlanta90210 wrote: post #330

capableweb wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people e…

“DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run"

Speaking as a Lotus Notes survivor, it would have been really helpful if had prevented lotus notes from running on windows as well.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#437

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, May 03, 2023, 3:59 PM UTC

jarym wrote: post #108

IT admins have only themselves to blame for choosing Teams in the first place. Yes, it is included in O365 and it makes it a no-brainer as far as additional costs and things go. But then there's the risk that Microsoft leverage their captive and lazy market to foist other undesirable things on users... like this. And crappy news / adverts in Windows 11's 'start menu' replacement. Ready to get voted down on this, but…

I have little sympathy for the IT folks, because not only did they make us switch from Slack to Teams because Teams was "free", but they actually drink the koolaid and think Microsoft products are better. They deserve to suffer for the pain they repeatedly cause the rest of us.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#438

Post by Stratoscope » Wed, May 03, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #116

modo_mario wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Have they just become Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me. They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but eno…

my understanding is that within microsoft there are different factions competing with each other for i don't know what, dominance maybe. it kind of makes sense since microsoft has several different strong products that can stand on their own (unlike google whose main income is from advertising so really all google products subsume to that), and some of these factions may well genuinely love FOSS.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#439

Post by golemotron » Wed, May 03, 2023, 4:03 PM UTC

dustedcodes wrote: post #30

golemotron wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is that Google and Apple are largely in the consumer space. MS, with Teams, is in the enterprise space where user experience isn't part of the buy decision.

If CEOs, CTOs, CFOs all start having annoying issues with Teams, Office, Azure, etc. on their MacBooks and iPhones then you can bet your right arm on it that it will affect corporate buying decisions. Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently better than another.

I think Teams would be much better if that was the dynamic.

Re: MSFT is forcing Outlook and Teams to open links in Edge and IT admins are angry

#440

Post by vel0city » Wed, May 03, 2023, 4:05 PM UTC

manuelabeledo wrote: post #396

vel0city wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google did user agent detection and would actively redirect Windows Phone users to degraded experience versions of things like YouTube and Maps even if the full versions would work fine.

> ... even if the full versions would work fine That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively. Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1] It looks to me that the pain was self inflicted. [0]…

I'm speaking from my own experiences. Proxying the requests to rewrite the user agent, the full mobile version of YouTube and Maps worked properly. Without rewriting the user agent I would be redirected to the minimal versions of the websites which had poor experiences.