Windows 11 Officially Shuts Down Firefox’s Default Browser Workaround • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by keawade » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

ashton314 wrote: post #18

MS is getting desperate. This shill [^1] had the audacity to reply to a tweet I made praising the very excellent FOSS Zotero bibliography manager with a suggestion to use Edge. Like, come on. Amusingly, Twitter initially hid his tweet with "Tweet may contain offensive material." Offensive to a FOSS-loving mind indeed. [^1]: https://twitter.com/varadarajans

Pedantic musing:

> Shill

> One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

Is it "shilling" if you're a project manager recommending your product? He doesn't appear to be posing as anything other than a Microsoft employee working on the Edge team.

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

#62

Post by josefresco » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

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.

I've ignored the prompt to update to Windows 11 for a couple weeks now. This morning it gave me just two options "no" or "now". There was no clear option to "remind me later". Maybe they just continue to nag you, but it wasn't clear to me as a user.

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

#63

Post by ComputerGuru » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

jareklupinski wrote: post #29

jagger27 wrote: post #20

United States v. Microsoft was 20 years ago. Is there nobody left at Microsoft who remembers that?

avg tech turnover is 1.5 years, it's likely...

Microsoft has much lower turnover than that.

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

#64

Post by freeqaz » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

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.

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 biggest complaints are around i3 and X11. I get some flickering, and display management is a little painful. But those are largely self-imposed because of i3. I haven't tried switching to Wayland yet because it's good enough for me.

At this point, it's been years since I've used a Windows PC for work and... I'm so damn happy about it!

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

#65

Post by Strilanc » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

0xC0ncord wrote: post #16

recursive wrote: post #13

Firefox, if it makes you feel any better, you can just make your own firefox: (or mozilla:?) protocol handler, and probably no one will mess with it.

The problem is that the microsoft-edge:// protocol is used throughout the Windows UI and menus and will always open in Edge regardless of the user's preferences. If you click on a link in say, the Settings UI, it will ignore your default browser preference and open in Edge with no way to change it.

Even if you uninstall edge, you can't make windows stop trying to open `microsoft-edge://` links with edge. The default-program-settings page lists it but it's a cruel joke because it doesn't let you actually pick anything except edge; you can't pick a custom program like you can for every other protocol. There are corresponding entries in the registry, and those you can edit to point at firefox... but they are simply ignored. It's quite frustrating.

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

#66

Post by InitialLastName » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

josephcsible wrote: post #23

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.

Unfortunately, there's one very big reason you'll need Windows 11: that Windows 10 won't get security updates forever. After October 14th, 2025, you'll need to "upgrade" to it to stay secure.

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

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

#67

Post by 2Gkashmiri » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

no_circuit wrote: post #55

Forcing the use of edge for features that should be browser-neutral like Bing web search from the start menu seems very wrong in terms of user choice. However, if this is Microsoft's version of "Electron" in order to implement parts of the OS, then blocking other browsers seems pretty reasonable. It makes technical sense because they can also directly provide a Windows Login cookie for linking to their apps on the we…

why do you need to ALWAYS stay signed in? for the past decade i have a habit of doing CTRL+SHIFT+P on my firefox and using that. i did a "privatebrowsing.autostart=true" in the past but for a few years, a simple private window is enough.

it takes me 2 seconds to click on sign in to anything and when i close the window, everything is washed away. no more youtube building my profile.

i'm not saying this is for everyone, i have gotten used to no history so i have to "remember" the url or bookmark it.

still, this is too creepy. wittill they remove private browsing mode from chrome/chromium to protect users. smh

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

#68

Post by Guillaume86 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

jjcm wrote: post #60

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.

I've been using Win11 now for about a week (so take this with a grain of salt) and one positive I've noticed has been a far better UX. OSX has made a ton of leaps and bounds for optimizing controls for how you use your computer, and it felt like windows 10 was lagging behind quite a bit in the last year. Windows 11 addressed a lot of these grievances. Browser overrides like this are definitely in the negative UX colu…

The new taskbar UX is a huge downgrade compared to my "always ungrouped" taskbar in Windows 10, hope the add it back before I'm forced to upgrade.

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

#69

Post by sleibrock » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

bovermyer wrote: post #40

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?

I can't say I've used it personally but I know of OpenRGB[1], which should help with lighting on those types of computer devices. Maybe that might do the trick?

[1] - https://openrgb.org/

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

#70

Post by cptskippy » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

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 installed on most existing machines and was highly unstable on those that it would run on.

Windows Vista wasn't much different. It was a crappy skin and a new desktop composition paradigm requiring better underlying graphics hardware than Intel was providing at the time. Many systems couldn't upgrade to it and those that did had stability issues due to immature graphics drivers.

Windows 8 was similar, it introduced a newer kernel design that fully extracted Win32 out to userland. It also introduced Metro and other modern elements that weren't bound to IA32/IA64. It was primarily targeted at modern single screen touch enabled devices and didn't work well as an upgrade or on desktop PCs. They eventually shipped Windows 8.1 which was largely a refinement of 8 that was arguably the test bed for extending Windows 8 concepts to the desktop.