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

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

#571

Post by PascLeRasc »

vxNsr wrote: post #411
nickjj wrote: post #171

Interesting timing. 2 days ago a place I'm at switched us from Google mail + calendar + meet to Microsoft outlook + calendar + teams. I almost can't believe at how good Google's suite of tools are compared to Microsoft. I never used any of MS' office tools until a few days ago. Outlook's web app doesn't even let you click into an email to mark it as read. You have to explicitly click the mark as read button. It also…

Let me preface this by saying, I don’t work for Microsoft but have used their suite for a long time. Nearly everything you’re complaining about can be changed in settings. Either by you or the IT Admin.

Do you know what setting I need to use to enable deleting emails without first archiving and un-archiving them?

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

#573

Post by LocalH »

geodel wrote: post #568
sneak wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A proprietary software company never makes a "move toward open source". Microsoft released some things with source simply to sell more proprietary software that does not respect user freedoms. Open source and free software is a philosophy and ideology. Microsoft is incompatible with it no matter what licenses they use. Microsoft never embraced open source. You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released wit…

> You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released with source as free software, which will Never Ever Happen. That would wouldn't change a thing even it happens. No one except Microsoft is going to be expert on 50 million lines of windows code and contribute meaningfully to it. Add to that contributor's licensing agreement, community behavior, sheer capacity to make API changes and get it accepted. It will…

Not immediately, no. But what about in 25 years?

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

#574

Post by wolpoli »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #559
recursive wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.

Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though. Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" inst…

Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of them did.

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

#575

Post by waboremo »

sneak wrote: post #561
happytiger wrote: post #558

You can't embrace open source, stand for freedom on the Internet, and simultaneously engage in dark patterns like this without destroying user trust. And trust with users is the currency of the 21st century as much as data is the new oil. Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for. There was this incredible move towards open source, and embracing the modern web, and…

A proprietary software company never makes a "move toward open source". Microsoft released some things with source simply to sell more proprietary software that does not respect user freedoms. Open source and free software is a philosophy and ideology. Microsoft is incompatible with it no matter what licenses they use. Microsoft never embraced open source. You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released wit…

Open source and free software are separate things, despite how much they're used interchangeably.

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

#576

Post by icepat »

rootusrootus wrote: post #437
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.

There's sadly a subset of IT folks, often in large corps or government, who tend to just drink the Microsoft "Customer Success Engineer" koolaid without thinking. When I worked briefly for a gov org, any time the IT staff came out of a meeting, we would always be worried about what "solution" they had been sold this time.

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

#577

Post by SllX »

sneak wrote: post #561
happytiger wrote: post #558

You can't embrace open source, stand for freedom on the Internet, and simultaneously engage in dark patterns like this without destroying user trust. And trust with users is the currency of the 21st century as much as data is the new oil. Microsoft needs to get their brand straight and decide, once and for all, what they stand for. There was this incredible move towards open source, and embracing the modern web, and…

A proprietary software company never makes a "move toward open source". Microsoft released some things with source simply to sell more proprietary software that does not respect user freedoms. Open source and free software is a philosophy and ideology. Microsoft is incompatible with it no matter what licenses they use. Microsoft never embraced open source. You can't claim that until and unless Windows is released wit…

That’s more of a free software mentality. Open source is just open source; Microsoft has some open source software, they use some open source software, but they are in the business of selling proprietary software and free software as Stallman defined it is antithetical to that.

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

#578

Post by crumpled »

The reasoning they are alleging is so unsound: "so you don't have to context switch"

Going from my email into a browser that doesn't have any of my history or autofill stuff is going to result in a butt-ton of context switching. It's almost worse that they don't set it as the default browser.

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

#579

Post by crumpled »

I only occasionally use Edge on a machine where I use Firefox because it has similar API support as Chrome. (I only need it for like one web site). I've never needed Edge on any machine where I have Chrome, but I'm not installing chrome on any new system.

M$FT wants me to install a dev build of Edge if I want to try Bing chat on Linux? Dream on. No Google or Microsoft applications on my Linux machine, thanks.

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

#580

Post by manicennui »

I'm baffled by why MS still cares about their browser. It made sense in the IE 5/6 days when they were using it as a way to lock people into their platform, but that seems unlikely to happen again unless their browser offers some huge advantage (ActiveX support was arguably the advantage in the past). This seems especially unlikely given that they are irrelevant in the mobile space.

Pushing Bing search as a replacement for Google search seems like a much smarter play with a much larger upside.

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