Do they really expect people who go through the effort of installing a third party browser and setting it as default to switch back to Edge because of the grand experience they had with it when Windows opened some help article in it?
How much money do they make of the 0.000001% of users who do the above?
How much money do they lose because of the reputation damage and increased regulator attention because of it?
I cannot think of any scenario where, money wise, this is a net positive for MS.
Microsoft is very consistent in aggressively promoting their own stuff at every turn. Ever noticed how the "what application you wanna use for this file type?" dialog pop ups every time any application is installed that can handle that type? Ever noticed how this dialog always has Microsoft's option at the top of the list? Ever noticed this dialog pops up after some updates because the Microsoft option has been updated so it's a Totally New Experience that You Really Ought To Try Now? Ever noticed how every few months you'll get a giant screen filling modal pop-up on login telling you to create a Microsoft account Right Now or Else? Ever noticed how Windows 10 shows a full-screen "Leave everything to us" banner during installation? Ever noticed the FOMO ads on the lock screen ("Windows brings you closer to what you love in life", "Don't miss any European soccer!")? Ever noticed the cringy "Just one more thing" and "Let's get you set up" system modals? Ever noticed how you have to lie to the setup wizard in order to not have a Microsoft account ("I don't have internet")?
The entire messaging of this OS is dystopian corpo garbage and then people are shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that it's a monopolistic shitpile kicking your civil rights in the nuts at every turn.
This is what drove me over the edge to another operating system, I gotta imagine others as well.
Having ads at the OS level is just mind boggling, I get people can get used to anything but I really hoped there'd be a line where people just left in swarms.
This goes for me. When I graduate, my next machine is definitely going to be a linux machine. I will keep an unlicensed windows version on the side just for gaming.
I'm sick of having my attention preyed upon everywhere I look in that OS. It makes me feel insulted.
You might not even need the Windows install at all for gaming. With all the work Valve has been putting into Proton, even games with funky anti-cheat should work on any Linux distro by the time the Steam Deck comes out.
I haven't kept a Windows machine for gaming since 2015. It was hard then, but now it's a breeze if the game is on Steam. If it's not, Lutris will probably handle it for you. Most single player and a lot of multiplayer games work without a hitch. I am, for instance, playing Tetris Effect connected and Dark Souls 3 online right now.
But but, "Microsoft isn't the same anymore!" VSCode is open! And good!
The narrative has really pulled in Microsoft's favor and I think that's not too our advantage. Every conversation I have with them is about how they "used to be bad but are great for open source now".
I opened a PDF yesterday and it showed me the prompt, even though my default had been set. In the prompt Edge was in its own special top element (below the current default but above the alternatives) with a name like "microsoft's recommendation".
This occured just after a system update. It might even have said that edge was new and improved, but I am not sure on that.
> The entire messaging of this OS is dystopian corpo garbage and then people are shocked, SHOCKED I tell you, that it's a monopolistic shitpile kicking your civil rights in the nuts at every turn.
The funny thing is, they're doing it for more than decade, and people believe that one day they won't do it. On the contrary, it'll get more and more aggressive.
I lied the wrong way. I gave them a totally bogus email address instead of saying that I don't have internet. Now they keep telling me that "there's a problem with your Microsoft account" that I need to fix...
Luckily with the advent of Proton and actual anti-cheats being supported by Linux, the last thing keeping me on this utterly disgusting platform will be gone.
I won't miss Windows one second. Now just to find the right distribution environment...
No. I must be doing something differently. To be fair, Edge is not forced upon me, as I am using Firefox, but the only thing I do not like is that Windows 10 is updating itself whenever it wants.
Ah, and I installed Windows 10, that does not use Microsoft account(you might had to disconnect internet cable for that), so it might be the main problem.
Some Windows 10 updates add Edge into the taskbar if you move it out of it. Hilariously, if you install multiple Windows updates in a batch, you might end up with multiple Edge launchers in the taskbar. I think at least once, it changed the default browser back to Edge, too
Windows 8 automatically installs Edge even if you have non-essential updates turned off. I'm pretty sure I noticed it because it appeared in the taskbar.
> How much money do they lose because of the reputation damage and increased regulator attention because of it?
Unfortunately I doubt they lose very much at all based on a move like this. To sophisticated users this is a huge red-flag, but I would imagine a vast majority of computer users barely know what browser they use.
Probably they use edge by default until they're cajoled into installing Chrome as their default browser by their google services, and then they're confused why certain things from chrome don't work when they've been led to a website from the search bar.
That's an absolutely atrocious result from a UX point of view. And it really makes you wonder about the incentive structures in the industry to contemplate the collective frustration suffered by hundreds of millions or billions of users just so some PO's can get a raise for hitting their KPI targets this or that quarter.
This is clearly not true. Firefox has higher desktop browser usage than edge[1].
> they're cajoled into installing Chrome as their default browser by their google services. And do you really think 80% of the destop users clicked to install chrome because they click anything on the net?
I thought they removed the ad for chrome in google services.
> Firefox has higher desktop browser usage than edge
I don't think the Wikipedia page supports this definitively.
Under summary tables [1], for October 2021, 2 out of 4 sources put Edge ahead of Firefox for desktop browsers (by more than the ones that put Firefox ahead of Edge). In older data, Edge+IE seems to beat Firefox.
Separately, Firefox being more used than Edge would not contradict most people using Edge briefly until they install Chrome.
How does that graph disprove my supposition? I would assume Firefox's share is almost completely Linux users and people on the more sophisticated end who choose Firefox explicitly.
The pattern you see there would still hold in the scenario I describe so long as Chrome is quite effective at getting people to install chrome through things like banners and email CTA's.
So what that they are linux users? I am sure you would consider Linux users as at least partially caring about the browser they use. I can't imagine any linux user to use Edge even if it was available on Linux. The point is more user care about the browser they user than you think.
Well Firefox is largely the default on Linux, so it wouldn't represent a proactive choice.
And linux users are probably more likely to fall into the category of sophisticated user than the general population.
I don't see any evidence in what you've presented that the average computer user cares at all about what browser they're using beyond "I will click until the annoying notifications go away".
It’s peanuts enough to not affect that many users, but loud and clear to send the message that Windows is no longer users’. It’s Microsoft’s.
If you step back a little, there is a clear pattern. Starting with the mandatory telemetry and forced updates in W10, cross-signing requirements for any kernel code, unyielding push for using web accounts for local logins and all the way up to the mandatory hardware TPM in W11 (which literally has no other major differences from W10) - the proverbial garden is getting all walled up whether anyone likes it or not.
An iteration or two more and the OS will be locked completely, with the only way in through the AppStore.
> Do they really expect people who go through the effort of installing a third party browser and setting it as default to switch back to Edge because of the grand experience they had with it when Windows opened some help article in it?
No they don't, otherwise they wouldn't be trying to undermine the whole concept of "default browser" like this.
I think what they expect is that those people will keep using Edge "on accident" - because various bits of essential OS chrome will just keep opening it, no matter what.
After some time, those users will grow tired of manually copy-pasting the link into Firefox or whatever and just keep using Edge for those tasks.
They may just like the telemetry benefit of users accidentally opening Edge occasionally, versus any uptick in people actually choosing Edge. The "Edge Only" links tend to be to Microsoft properties. Like the weather widget opens an msn.com link.
I think search will open Bing. Unless you go to the trouble of manually copying and pasting the link, you'll open all sites you access through the search results in the same edge instance as well.
This happens to me periodically, because I rarely use bookmarks or persistent tabs. Edge will open because Microsoft, I'll start browsing, and it'll be a few minutes before I notice that I've been scammed again.
God, that's such a typical new-Microsoft dark pattern; hiding the toggle for an annoyance in some weird location, hoping the user doesn't find it. It's everywhere in Windows 10.
Probably to increase the friction of using other browsers. It will be simpler for many users to keep all their bookmarks, history, and saved passwords in one browser. If Microsoft's products require Edge, it's going to channel more users to Edge due to reduced friction.
It is very much worth it or they won't make it so hard.
https://backlinko.com/bing-users
>Microsoft generated $8.53 billion in search advertising revenue in the 2021 fiscal year.
I don't think they're doing this for money. I think they're doing it ostensibly for security reasons, with the idea being:
If the unsophisticated user performs a search with the OS, and the links get clickjacked by a cracked browser and the user ends up installing malware as a result, they're not going to blame Firefox, or the malware-writer. They're going to blame Microsoft, because they were just using the OS. What's more the vulnerability won't be something MS can fix because it will be the fault of 3rd party software. So to prevent that possibility MS want end-to-end control over the search results.
Having said that I think a lot of the recent bad will toward MS is self-inflicted. One easy thing they could do is allow the paid versions (Pro and up) of Windows to have an "expert" mode that lets the user configure their OS the way they want, including removing all the telemetry and making all unessential apps/tools entirely optional, including Edge of course.
I forget the name of it, but there's a fork one of the open source browsers that's distributed by neo nazi types. I stumbled onto it trying to find a copy of XP I could use in a VM to run some ancient software. I wouldn't at all be surprised if it had a backdoor.
This was more along the lines of my thinking too. A more reasonable explanation here is that they this gives them control over UI and security which from MS's perspective may make sense if people are likely to attribute any UI / security issues to MS. It could also be something to do with the analytics they're able to collect.
Also when you have a company the size of MS talking about a small decision like this as if the whole company is onboard and actively engaged in the decision making process is naive. It was most likely a decision made by a few people at MS. Not saying that excuses it, but often individuals in companies have their own misaligned incentives and make certain decisions for their own benefits.
Are they still a dominant OS though? I'm sure they are if you're only talking about desktop operating systems, but I think we'd want to include mobile operating systems now that many people solely use phones and tablets for their personal computing.
> Do they really expect people who go through the effort of installing a third party browser and setting it as default to switch back to Edge because of the grand experience they had with it when Windows opened some help article in it?
A lot of people don't understand what different browsers are, for them there is just "the Internet". I can tell my parents to just install and use Firefox. But they will then happily use a random Edge screen that was last visible to do their next search and be none the wiser. Meanwhile Microsoft will be raking in all their user data and advertisement space.
I can imagine that there's some contorted logic that goes like this:
* MS (used to) allow the user to choose default programs in the spirit of "openness" (because they were legally told to).
* The default settings in programs have never been legislated...
* ...therefore do dark patterns in programs and set the default search in Edge to be Bing...
* ... and make it even harder (impossible? dunno, not using Windows) to change Bing to Google in Edge and drive all Windows users to Bing, and drive ad revenue.
"There's nothing that can't be solved with an extra layer of indirection".
No, this way they can build the search experiance (and others) without cross browser testing. I'm not defending it though, it's an abandonment of the open web. Rather than work to right the ship, they choose to force everyone on a tiny lifeboat and pray they make it ashore. Nevermind that they left half the crew behind.
I don't think it's too difficult to understand.. they want a supported method to open their own apps using their own browser, guaranteeing any QA done on those apps will cover any potential onslaught of bug/support workload due to third party browsers.
I'd prefer it if these things opened in Firefox, but I can just as easily see how from an engineering perspective they want this mechanism and are willing to defend it. From that perspective, Firefox is intentionally fucking around with OS internals in a way that could create costs for their support org.
(edit: please don't shoot the messenger. I'm an affected user too)
Microsoft’s reasoning is that features like search is an end to end experience. That’s odd to me — it just opens a web page. Is there anything special about it being in Edge that we don’t notice?
I mean, obviously it’s BS, but are there PMs who actually think it’s better for the user to override the default browser for things like this? A side note: one frustrating aspect of this problem is that my browser extensions are never installed in Edge. So things like password autofill in a lot of the MS auth flows (which appear to be web-based, as far as I can tell) just don’t work
Well obviously they lose telemetry when you leave the ms ecosystem, so the user journey has effectively ended at that point /s
> things like password autofill in a lot of the MS auth flows (which appear to be web-based, as far as I can tell) just don’t work
Cynically I could believe this is partly by design. If they manage to get you into edge often enough, sooner or later you'll set up your workflows in edge as well out of annoyance. Maintaining two separate browser environments is a burden, and sooner or later a lot of people will give up and stick to the browser you have to use in many cases.
> Do they really need Edge to gather your data if they own the OS?
"Need?" No. But that wasn't the question MS asked themselves. The question was probably "More data or less?" Framed like that, it's unfortunately obvious why they chose this route.
What's your reasoning behind using 4 separate browsers? I've tried Brave and Chromium but I don't see any reason to switch between my usual Firefox and another browser (unless a webpage doesn't work at all on FF)
Everyone in a technical role at my company uses one “normal user” browser and one “privileged account” browser.
This is to avoid confusion; no chance of doing some administrative action accidentally because I recognize the different UI elements of Firefox vs. Edge.
Browser containers/profiles/whatever don’t present visually different-enough UX to each distinct persona.
Well, no, it's not just opening a web page. It's opening a search engine, see, and that's completely different.
/s
But I think that is in fact the difference. It's not that Microsoft wants you to use Edge for that so much, it's that they want you to use Bing for that. Edge is just so they can drive you to Bing.
>> We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out in the future, but it makes Edge look bad, which is a shame because it’s not a terrible browser at all.
No, it's just evil. An axe is just a tool unless wielded by a dark clown. Edge would probably be a reasonable browser in the hands of literally anyone other than microsoft.
Regardless of whether this is anti-competitive enough to be illegal, I'm surprised that Microsoft are going anywhere near this issue given their history of legal trouble with giving preferential treatment to their own browser.
After all, all of their legal troubles amounted to a financial slap on the wrist and the browserchoice requeriment which they managed to actually profit from (auctions), then dropped entirely when they saw fit.
By the time the government gets to slapping them again with another non-consequential fine, edge will have already managed to extract as much market share as they could with these techniques anyway.
Not sure if they profited but early on it was filled with dozens of trident(IE) skins and a broken random shuffle that put IE first most of the time. So they didn't loose anything with it.
Despite the fact it was explicitly forbidden for them to show other browsers based on trident. They have basically done whatever the fsck they want, since forever.
> Microsoft is also not allowed to feature any browser "which is based on Internet Explorer's rendering engine and the development or distribution of which is funded in whole or in substantial part by Microsoft."
I didn't find the full original MS agreement, but Google definitely did auctions in their equivalent EU agreement for search, so it's likely MS did the same. It was even featured here in HN not long ago, https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/csa.pdf .
> which is based on Internet Explorer's rendering engine and the development or distribution of which is funded in whole or in substantial part by Microsoft
That is not a ban on Trident browsers. It just prevents Microsoft from creating or funding new Trident-based browsers to add to the list. But none of the browsers in the browser choice screen other than IE were funded by Microsoft. The agreement explicitly called for the top 12 browsers by market share to be included in the screen, which included several Trident browsers not funded by Microsoft.
> In fact, the browser selection was based on market share, and the ordering was alphabetical, and this was documented in the agreement and in the news.
That was Microsofts proposal, people complained and it was changed to be randomized [1]. Of course Microsoft had no motivation to make that actually work, so it generally didn't[2].
> That is not a ban on Trident browsers. It just prevents Microsoft from creating or funding new Trident-based browsers to add to the list
I do not see how to parse the rule in the way you suggest. First, in legalese you normally use "and" here, even if you technically mean "and/or". Second, Microsoft is already forbidden from featuring other browsers that they fund by clause 10, so unless the point of this clause was to block Trident browsers, it would be redundant. Third, if we parse this in the way you suggest, we reach the conclusion that Microsoft is allowed to feature a browser they fund as long as it is not Trident-based, which is obviously nonsensical.
IANAL, but the only way to parse this that makes any sense is that it prevents Trident browsers AND it prevents browsers funded (partially AND not partially) by Microsoft.
> In fact, the browser selection was based on market share, and the ordering was alphabetical, and this was documented in the agreement and in the news.
Actually no, the ordering was random, and this was _again_ published in mainstream media and IIRC again featured here in HN, because there was a complain that the actual distribution used was not uniform at all https://techcrunch.com/2010/02/22/microsoft-ballot-screen/ .
Technically legal to do that since the agreement didn't specify the uniformity of the random distribution, but obviously dark-ish and flying against the spirit of the law. Microsoft eventually fixed it.
And if the selection was purely "for the top 12 browsers by market share to be included in the screen", then Seamonkey or even Netscape would have been included on top of browsers like "Slepneir" https://sleipnir.en.lo4d.com/windows (which happens to be Gecko). It's definitely not as simple as you're suggesting and other rules had more priority, plus whatever "metrics" they used behind the scenes since they added and removed browsers a volonté. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu#Revisions
> Which means [the auctions] never happened. If it had, there would have been news about Microsoft doing it instead of Google.
Fair enough.
However we have plenty of evidence that they have done whatever they wanted.
In fact I have now learnt that they decided to literally not show this screen to Windows 7 users for over a year with no apparent reason https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21684329 .
Every time people bring up the 30 years of systematic abuse of the computing world engineered by Microsoft, there's a dogpile of people who say that was years ago and they've changed.
They haven't changed. They can't change. If you're at Microsoft or working with Microsoft because you think they will? Run.
How would campaign contributions help in the EU? The people they would need to pay off are all unelected judges and prosecutors. The elected officials do not how much power to affect anything.
But I'm not sure if they've stayed with Linux or returned to Microsoft in the last 8 years... EDIT, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux#Timeline, in 2017 some politicians said they're switching to Windows 10 by 2020, in 2020 other politicians U-turned on that decision.
What trouble? Also for reference, Apple and Google both do the same for their operating systems - iOS, macOS, ChromeOS and many Android flavours.
Edit: My point being, in this case it's an end-to-end experience, it's not a question of being able to configure anything. You get Windows with whatever Microsoft decides you can do with it. If that's not what you intended, then another vendor's defaults or an open operating system are a better choice.
> Also for reference, Apple and Google both do the same for their operating systems - iOS, macOS, ChromeOS and many Android flavours.
No, they don't. iOS, macOS, Android (not sure about ChromeOS) all allow you to set a default browser and then the OS sticks to that default. In macOS, if I do a google search from Spotlight, it opens in Firefox. Clicking a link inside Mail on iOS opens in my default browser.
I am so happy to have switched to Pop OS around two years ago. I’ve just become completely immune to random updates, shutdowns, and all evil Microsoft news.
I never quite understood what kind of difference it makes, but my computer feels like it’s my own again.
Anyway, on topic, yeah, eventually they’ll get antitrust slapped again.
I put this on par with Google automatically signing you in to Chrome when you log into any one of its services, or even the mandatory Windows Online account that you need to install Windows 11 (and to a lesser extent 10).
Just user hostile actions in the name of "convenience" (for the product owner / business).
This is only for links using the microsoft-edge protocol, which is used by internal things like whatever this "News and Interests" widget is they have on the taskbar now. Regular web links will open in your default browser, Firefox or otherwise.
I'm ok with that. I doubt Microsoft wants support calls about how someone clicked on their widget and the resulting page didn't render properly because user was on X browser. As long as this is redirection for built-in OS things only, I'll give them a pass.
So, if you want to override the users choice of browser, it's acceptable if you first replace "https://" with "microsoft-edge://" ? They're doing the exact same behavior, just with two steps instead of one.
Yeah? Isn't the part before the colon just specifying the protocol? So shouldn't the software that I direct to open URLs be the software that...opens URLs?
I'm in no way defending what Microsoft is doing here, but I would like to be able to have different clients for http:// & ftp://. Segregating client software by protocol makes perfect sense
Completely agreed, and this is why conflating protocols and programs is really obnoxious. This seems really common in proprietary software, where the conflation is deliberate, no protocol spec is defined, and the implication is that no other programs can interact with the protocol. (E.g. "zoommtg://" referring both to a software client and to a protocol.)
This is what you get when OSs allow protocol handlers but not URL handlers. It would be totally fine if you could install Zoom and then zoom.us links would open Zoom but this is what we get on the desktop.
A protocol shouldn't be specifying the client software in the first place. That's sort of the entire point of a protocol, that it can be implemented in multiple different clients.
So to answer your question, yes. If a program is specifying "firefox://" and using it to mean "https://", then that should be considered a bug in the program specifying it. That bug can either be fixed in the program itself, or can have a workaround in an external program.
I guess I'm somewhat OK with protecting microsoft-edge:// links, maybe an argument for security could be made for application-specific protocols.
But they absolutely should not use https:// for links that just open Bing and MSN. After all, those are just normal websites and work perfectly fine in Firefox, and of course in Chrome or Opera as well.
My point is that applications themselves overriding URI protocols (that already have an app set) is an anti-pattern; in my opinion, MacOS' "Use Chrome/Keep Safari" prompt is the best way to handle this, as it allows the browser to prompt for change while ultimately letting the user choose. This would help in general, even for other protocols like https or mailto.
Why would you be ok with this? There is no conceivable reason for below-average web browsers to be propped up by polluting and bastardizing URLs like this.
I mean, at least on iOS Apple did something way more drastic.
Anyway, I feel like the bigger problem is that Microsoft does not use https to open some simple websites. And people, including me, are upset about it. If they just used https instead of microsoft-edge, we wouldn't have any of those problems and everybody would be happy (probably excluding a hand full of people at MS). They could still use their own protocol to open some Edge-specific setting page or whatever.
> I doubt Microsoft wants support calls about how someone clicked on their widget and the resulting page didn't render properly because user was on X browser.
It's not "X browser", it would be just Firefox with its workaround. And it's common practice to design websites with support for major browsers, so it shouldn't be such a huge burden letting users pick a browser.
Yeah but this story is about them making a change that blocks EdgeDeflector a tool that only exists for specifically those users that want to go far out of their way to override this behavior, so it's not like it's going to innocently snare someone who didn't ask for it.
In my naivety, I've always thought of computers as the most free platform (despite being proprietary) you can get your hands on (I grew up with 7).
Unlike Android and iOS, you have Administrator access, the ability to tamper with low-level system configuration, customise the taskbar, and a boatload of other things. I'd spend hours just sat at the computer tinkering with passwords, how things looked, etc.
It's quite disheartening to see Microsoft restricting this once-semi-free platform I genuinely enjoyed using. Computers of 2010, 2006 etc. were very entertaining to customise and play around with, and part of me wants to go back to that era.
The Microsoft of 2010 and under, despite having a very different stance on Linux vs. today[0], was a lot better in many ways. There was a lot less unnerving surveillance back then. Cortana didn't exist. They tried their hand at things like Windows Live (a success), Live Mesh (bit of a flop IIRC), cloud storage, etc. but they felt more like additions to the operating system rather than some deeply-engrained spyware you can't quite get rid of.
Anyway, back on topic: speaking of Microsoft Edge, it always reinstalls itself whenever Windows updates. I use Windows less and less these days, as forced software on my own hardware feels unethical and immoral.
The phrase "offers certain end-to-end customer experiences" could be applied to anything that happens while you're using Windows – so it doesn't mean anything.
For Microsoft to label what Firefox and Edge are doing "improper redirection" is just rubbing it in. A problem of propriety is just one of failing to meet some conventional standard. But there's no community here whose mores are being violated, the convention is no more than whatever some VP wants.
This has got to be the most Orwellian thing I've read today, and Microsoft saying this unironically is just bizarre:
“Windows openly enables applications and services on its platform, including various web browsers,” says a Microsoft spokesperson. “At the same time, Windows also offers certain end-to-end customer experiences in both Windows 10, and Windows 11, the search experience from the taskbar is one such example of an end-to-end experience that is not designed to be redirected. When we become aware of improper redirection, we issue a fix.”
Looks like Firefox should be able to replace my taskbar somehow then
If they could make it like the Windows 98 taskbar while they're at it, that'd be great
tbh it's annoying typing in a program name & getting search results listed. I just want to open a program by name without taking my hands off the keyboard
Windows isn't targeting you, they're targeting your parents/grandparents who will unintentionally put their system in a non-standard state that makes it difficult for msft or anyone else to support them. They want to lock the system down to control the experience as much as possible. Unfortunately, they believe that this one size fits all.
Because it's hard to say "we're going to force you to do it the way we want" in an uncondescending way. It's even harder to supply a BS rationalization for why you're going to force them in an uncondescending way.
I actually find it surprising how dedicated Microsoft seem to be in protecting Edge browser given that they just recently made the choice to rip out the engine and replace it with Google's.
... and yet Firefox is essentially verboten in this context.
This statement from Microsoft sounds like a carbon copy of their approach that got them in trouble all those years ago:
Windows also offers certain end-to-end customer experiences in both Windows 10, and Windows 11, the search experience from the taskbar is one such example of an end-to-end experience that is not designed to be redirected.
The more things change...
I don't want an operating system offering end to end customer experiences or any other marketing phrasing. I want an operating system that gets the fuck out of the way so I can do my stuff. And their search experience from the taskbar has always been a dud experience that I avoid wherever possible.
To be fair though, Windows has been getting in the way since XP's default theme, so it's not really a sudden change of direction. It's an abusive ex that don't get why their relationships never seem to last.
If user clicks on e.g "Open in Edge" button and FF intercepts URL with Microsoft's "microsoft-edge protocol" and opens FF, then what's so shocking about the fact that MS is not happy about this?
It wouldn't be a problem if Microsoft only used that protocol handler for an "Open in Edge" button. The problem is they use it pretty much everywhere. Search the web from the start menu? That's a Microsoft Edge link. Click a link in the settings app? It's a Microsoft Edge link. They're effectively just using the handler as a way to bypass the user's choice of default browser, which is why Firefox had to implement this work-around in the first place.
Because links are universally accepted as interoperable between all devices and their browsers. Now MS wants to create links that serve the same purpose as a regular link yet can only be opened by the edge browser.
Clearly microsoft thinks they're getting something out of it and you've already bought their license, now you're also forced to use edge even if you dont realise it or want it.
Users have explicitly told the OS that they want to use Firefox but the system deliberately defies that decision. Users have pushed back against that behavior by hacking around it.
It's not surprising that Microsoft is turning into a bully here, but I wouldn't call cynicism in general about MS being a bully to be overreacting.
Yes, but it does use Edge Protocol. That's why some HN users are upset. I don't think it's an overreaction, and you seem to agree that it's wrong.
Responding to your edit: If Microsoft creates a new type of page that works well in Edge but not other browsers, they can make a new protocol for it and allow other browser to support the protocol if they want to. In fact that's exactly what happened here: Microsoft added a new protocol, Firefox said "we support this new protocol with full performance and functionality, so we should be able to open it".
This just shows how Microsoft's internal structure harms users.
PMs get paid based on idiot stats and the more the Internet Explorer Edge team can increase IE Edge usage the more they get in bonus payments. So they force it on their Windows users down their throat, completely disregarding how awful of an experience this is as long as they get a better pay check.
The same happened with Teams. The Teams PM managed to get Teams integrated into Windows 11 in order to increase its usage stats for a better bonus.
Honestly, I don't know why so many people, especially developers still use Windows. I am 100% convinced that developers on Windows who are still using Windows as their main OS for software dev have not tried another OS for at least a few months to give it a proper try. It's unimaginable how an intelligent human being would otherwise like Windows. There is nothing to like about it. Windows 11 was a massive downgrade from 10 as well.
Hardware support for most linux distros still suck.
This year I've used Ubuntu, NixOS, Arch and Zorin OS. My issues:
- Dell dock station won't work properly.
- Hibernation on Lenovo laptop won't work properly.
- Bluetooth won't work properly.
I'm using currently Zorin OS and it has the best user experience so far. That said, it still requires leg work to setup stuff compared to Windows 10 (I use it at $JOB). Ironically, I think using Linux in Windows is actually easier for many use cases as you can just wipe your distro clean if gets to a broken state.
> Honestly, I don't know why so many people, especially developers still use Windows.
A combination of comfort in familiarity and lack of viable alternatives. Not everyone has the money to buy an expensive Mac. With Linux, you potentially end up working for the OS rather than the OS working for you, no matter how far Linux on the desktop has come. See the latest video from Linus Tech Tips on Linux, for example.
> you potentially end up working for the OS rather than the OS working for you
The irony is that in using Windows 10 and 11 you are actually generating revenue to MS from their data collection and ads integrated within the core OS. You are working for the OS. And it gets better when you realize this is a software you had to purchase to use.
> See the latest video from Linus Tech Tips on Linux, for example.
lol. The OS told Linus exactly what it would do, warned him it might not be what he intended in ALL CAPS, and made him type a full sentence (with an exclamation point!) confirming that it was really what he wanted. And then it did exactly what it told him it would do.
That there was a dependency conflict for a short time there (less than an hour) is a legitimate annoyance. But developers should not be troubled by the fact that an operating system is actually obedient, or that its warnings actually mean something.
From the point of view of an absolute beginner, Linus shouldn't even be on a terminal. The PopOS shop should've worked. If it didn't work, a package installation shouldn't have asked him to nuke his GUI in huge wall of text, it should've rejected him (which is what a sensible package manager would do).
But sure, let's ignore the horrible UX and blame a newbie for not being experienced with how a terminal works.
Kind of. The apt developers have taken steps to make it harder to remove essential and protected packages, which is a good idea. It would also be a good idea to make the warnings emit red text, some of it flashing, and to replace any override prompt with a more explicit one. It would also, in my opinion, be good to have apt finally start removing orphaned dependencies by default (like many, if not most, package managers already do), so you don't have that big list of orphaned deps at the top.
But on Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian-based distros, the desktop environment is neither protected nor essential, so this prompt or error message won't even come up if a dependency conflict requires removing the DE in order to satisfy the dependencies of some new app.
> a package installation shouldn't have asked him to nuke his GUI in huge wall of text, it should've rejected him
Experience helps, but it doesn't take an expert to tell that removing 90 packages in order to install 1 application doesn't seem normal. (Occasionally one does see things like that during major dist-upgrades.) The mere fact of the wall of text itself WAS a huge warning.
A package manager should offer to do whatever is required to complete the operation you've asked of it, as long as it won't brick your system (render it unrecoverable without recourse to external media or devices, or render the package manager itself inoperable). (If what you've asked it to do is sufficiently explicit, maybe it should even remove itself.) It should also give you the resources (as apt does, through `apt show`) to inspect each package marked for removal and installation, in case you don't know what they are.
One of the reasons I like Unix-like operating systems (aside from macOS, which violates this principle) is that they don't waste your time with tons of warnings and locks and gates that don't actually mean anything, or which prevent you from doing things that are in fact harmless and unlikely to cause you any trouble.
It's fine for distros like Pop!_OS to extend the notion of ‘bricking’ the system to include removing the desktop environment. But I'm not very interested in running systems which are designed to cater to people who want to use them (and use them recklessly, at that) without understanding them at the expense of users who are willing to learn how they work.
> Experience helps, but it doesn't take an expert to tell that removing 90 packages in order to install 1 application doesn't seem normal.
You're looking at it from a seasoned Linux user's perspective, not from the perspective of a guy who has used Windows for decades and can't remember the last time he needed to use the Command Prompt. I don't know if it's lack of empathy or unrelenting bias.
Is it hard to believe that millions of desktop users don't understand what a "package" or a "dependency" is? Windows doesn't link packages dynamically, it's just fat statically linked exe files, or exe files bundled with everything needed, like AppImages. For someone who's never known the concept of a dependency, expecting him to understand that wall of text is pretty elitist.
> One of the reasons I like Unix-like operating systems (aside from macOS, which violates this principle) is that they don't waste your time with tons of warnings and locks and gates
Yes, agreed, and I'm of the same opinion, which is why I use Linux as a daily driver. However, this is NOT the experience a new user or a complete beginner should have. A power user experience for beginner is like giving keys to a car to someone who's never driven one and asking him to drive in a metropolitan city with millions of cars on the road. You know what's gonna happen and it'd be pretty weird and apathetic to blame the beginner if he crashes his car and gets injured, which is what you're doing.
> But I'm not very interested in running systems which are designed to cater to people who want to use them (and use them recklessly, at that) without understanding them at the expense of users who are willing to learn how they work.
Sure, but then let's not proselytize Linux and how it's beginner friendly and how it's "better" than Windows or Mac when the intended usage involves knowing how to work on a terminal. Unless you can confidently say that this Linux distribution doesn't require you to touch the terminal, ever, not once, don't recommend it. This is why I don't recommend anyone to use Linux, not unless I want to waste their time and see them in pain.
> You're looking at it from a seasoned Linux user's perspective, not from the perspective of a guy who has used Windows for decades and can't remember the last time he needed to use the Command Prompt.
I'm writing with Hacker News readers, and especially developers (as mentioned somewhere upstream in this thread), in mind as prospective Linux users. For them, I don't think what happened to Linus represents a difficulty they will struggle with or find difficult to avoid.
> Is it hard to believe that millions of desktop users don't understand what a "package" or a "dependency" is? Windows doesn't link packages dynamically, it's just fat statically linked exe files, or exe files bundled with everything needed, like AppImages. For someone who's never known the concept of a dependency, expecting him to understand that wall of text is pretty elitist.
It's not hard to believe at all. That's why, imo, distributions that target users migrating from Windows— especially distros that target Windows ‘power users’— should generally direct users away from package managers like apt in favor of package managers which avoid negotiating dependency conflicts in a single global namespace, like Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, Guix, etc.
I agree that Linus' experience was a problem, especially for Pop!_OS, given its mission. But I don't think apt was really ill-behaved here, and I don't think interventions at the level of apt's behavior are likely to be as effective as directing new users toward more appropriate tools when they ‘just wanna install Steam’, so-to-speak.
> Sure, but then let's not proselytize Linux and how it's beginner friendly and how it's "better" than Windows or Mac when the intended usage involves knowing how to work on a terminal.
Agreed, kinda. I've never recommended desktop Linux to a Windows ‘power user’, and nowadays there isn't really one I would recommend to such a person unless they asked me what to try.
I have recommended desktop Linux to totally non-technical people I'm willing to support, though. After the first week, I pretty much don't hear from them again until the hardware dies. I've also recommended desktop Linux to mathematicians and scientists who may have written some code before but don't really know anything about hardware, operating systems, or systems administration. They seem to do fine solving their own issues.
> I'm writing with Hacker News readers, and especially developers in mind
Not all developers are system administrators, which is one of the reasons why MacOS is vastly more popular among developers than Linux. Imagine executing `sudo apt install npm` or `sudo apt install python-pip` and having your desktop wiped out just because you were in a hurry and assumed that everything would work out (which, admittedly, it usually does). I know how to recover from that, not all developers would.
> That's why, imo, distributions that target users migrating from Windows— especially distros that target Windows ‘power users’— should generally direct users away from package managers like apt in favor of package managers which avoid negotiating dependency conflicts in a single global namespace, like Flatpak
Agreed when it comes to Flatpak (I despise it though).
> I have recommended desktop Linux to totally non-technical people I'm willing to support, though.
I've done that before and those people usually turn into help vampires, so I don't do it anymore.
That's not what it is. What it is is this: on Unix-like systems, the chief safety mechanism at every level is operator knowledge. This is in part due to incidental history that many distros (including Pop!_OS) have good reasons to want to overcome. But it's also because they're systems that are designed to trust their operators, and to be scriptable.
This reliance on operator knowledge is present in a negative way (e.g., there's no confirmation dialog or trash system for running `rm` against a normal file). But it's also there in a positive one: programs report to you what they're going to do and provide you with tools to further inspect those reports.
Lots of Linux distros encode these safety mechanisms socially, or through their installation procedures. Distros that don't come with desktop environments help ensure that their users know which packages relate to their desktop environments and how by having the users install those packages themselves. This is famously true of Arch and Gentoo, but it's also true of Debian, on which Pop!_OS and its package management tools are currently based.
It's not a bug that every package you install with apt is related to every other in a uniform way, and managed in a uniform way with all the others. It's a feature, and an awesome one that developers should appreciate and enjoy rather than fear. But it also means that when you use apt to install anything, you're administering your whole operating system, and you need to act like it. That doesn't mean that you have to be extremely cautious, but it does mean that you can't be totally inattentive to dire and emphatic warnings.
If some distro wants to take on young users who can't read, or end users who think 'because I'm just installing an app, I don't have to think about anything the UI presents to me', it will be fighting an uphill battle as long as it tells users to 'install apps' via system administration tools that negotiate a global shared state, with maximal resource sharing, among every program and library installed on the system. And when they do put up more gates, three things will happen:
1. They will become a distro that many users outgrow after trying, because managing and customizing the distro will become annoying to them
2. They will become less and less attractive to users familiar with upstream and other traditional users for the same reasons
3. They will reinforce the same blindness to text, to warnings, and to the transparency of the operating system that these gates were set up to solve.
One of the results of these things is that the distro will increasingly become one used exclusively as a commodity, and predominantly by newbies or others who don't care to know what they're doing. (This could be a good thing, depending on the distro's goals.)
But there's a better way! If a newbie-friendly distro wants to present users with tools for installing applications (i.e., not operating system components) that are more or less safe to use thoughtlessly, they can direct users to package management schemes that don't involve resolving dependencies globally, or rely on the base system, like Guix and Flatpak.
And then they can even leave the system administration tools in place with, yes, some UX improvements (colored text, more concise output, requiring more explicit flags for potentially disruptive or deeply transformative operations), but without turning them into tools that think they know better than their users.
It's in this sense that Linus' experience doesn't indicate a fundamental problem with apt, or a reason that someone who is (willing to become) competent to administer an OS which is hesitant to overrule them should shy away from desktop Linux.
Obviously, Pop!_OS' goals are not aligned with Linus' experience. But that's more because apt was not the kind of tool Linus expected than because there's something fundamentally wrong with apt, or that Linux distros don't still need a tool that plays basically the same role in basically the same way.
What happened to Linus was sort of an extreme case. He has a complicated set of hardware and the bug that he ran into that didn't let him install steam shouldn't have been there in the first place. The fact that he tried to force it to do what he wanted was a natural reaction, and apt wasn't lying when it told him it wouldn't work. Just bad luck all around, and evidence of how linux has pitfalls. This coming from someone who has used one distro or another as their daily driver since around 2002, I think.
Most people aren't going to run into this. The problem he ran into installing steam was only a problem for a short time, and I'm pretty sure the devs aren't going to allow that one to happen again any time soon. For your average non-power user, a desktop install will go fine, the steam install will go fine, and their favorite games will have a good chance of working properly. Obviously you can live happily in linux since I've been doing it successfully for a couple of decades. Once you get it set up to your liking, it's generally smooth sailing. Depending on your individual circumstances, though, that can be a chore, I admit.
I also remember the pains I went through learning DOS and it's quirks, Windows 3.1 and it's quirks, Windows 95 and plug and play, etc. Life in Windows hasn't been a cakewalk either. Things generally work a lot better now, but I shudder thinking about having to download a driver from somewhere, deal with the extra crap they throw in, run through it's installation program, etc. Don't get me started on trying to run something not bought from a company, but downloaded from a website somewhere. Yikes. Or just dealing with how MS breaks their own rules. Click on any non-MS program once, and it takes your click. Click on anything built by MS, and it just gives it focus and you have to click again to get it to do what you wanted to the first time. Windows is user-hostile if you don't walk their walk. Linux is user-friendly if you are open to the idea that a bunch of software built by well-meaning developers that do their own thing might not work as smoothly as something built from the ground up by a corporation.
I can't recommend linux to just anyone, even today, but for me dealing with user-hostile problems thrown at me by a corporation is much worse than trying to figure out a workflow that will make these tools built by separate groups work together. Or un-fsck whatever stupid thing I managed to do to myself today by trying to be fancy.
> ... and the bug that he ran into that didn't let him install steam shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Exactly. If an operating system is offering a GUI for installing software, it should work. If it isn't working, it takes an extreme amount of bias to blame the user instead of the operating system.
> Windows is user-hostile if you don't walk their walk.
Windows 10 is user hostile only if the user in question is sensible enough to understand that an operating system can be user hostile. News flash, most people on Earth who use a laptop or a desktop couldn't tell the difference between Firefox and Edge and why they might wanna use one over the other. For such people, who are used to double clicking on exe files and using them without issues, Linux would be incredibly user hostile. You just need to look at things from the perspective of a beginner, not yourself.
> ... but for me dealing with user-hostile problems thrown at me by a corporation is much worse
Which is why I've been using Linux as my daily driver for more than 6 years now, but I would never recommend anyone to use it, unless I want to see them in pain.
Which software would you need to work to make the switch? So much of what I use is web-based nowadays, it's only really dev tools and games which I care about running natively. The former is best-in-class on Linux, and the latter is getting pretty darned good.
Not much actually, Ableton Live, Max/MSP and loads of ancient VSTs. Yes I tried ardour, bitwig and reaper but those aren't enough for my workflow unfortunately. Also HW supports isn't great on linux when it comes to various combination of external audio gears.
Like another child comment said, I've tried multiple distros for years as well but always came back to win cause I can't be bothered to maintain two different OS in my flavor. Windows is cumbersome for sure but it can be mitigated at the end of the day. Windows is not my fave OS per se but just works in most cases..
I've been actually a mac user for a long time but it sucked on HW/SW in my case. I ditched mac like a couple years ago but now It might be in a better fit..
There will always be some people who are stuck on Windows, because there will always be some people who need to use things like SolidWorks / Fusion 360 / Altium / Zemax.
It never included the windows/office teams otherwise we would have had a native port if office to Linux.
What happened was merely that azure was given the same freedom the Xbox division used to have to operate in their market niche as if they were an independent company with no obligation to promote Microsofts other products, and it's a question if that is actually going to last.
otherwise we would have had a native port if office to Linux.
Do you really believe that is the only reason we don't have a native port of Office for Linux? If Microsoft released a version of MS Office for Linux tomorrow, that was just as compatible with the Windows version as the Mac version is, how many extra licenses do you think they would sell?
Here we go again. I want MS to understand that I want it to get out of my workflow once I paid for it. Just get out of and stop making me jump through hoops. I am tired of this corporate doublespeak nonsense.
Yes, exactly. Microsoft products try to be smarter than the rest of the world and it's infuriating. Office, Teams (worst software ever to be forced to use in corporate), Edge and now we get Windows 11, the Windows version we supposedly would never get, remember? Windows 10 being the last?
Microsoft will never change. Microsoft is the next IBM. Remember IBM? They are selling blockchains, quantum computers and magical AI products now.
A few months ago both Firefox and Brave added this workaround. Being able to modify the default app for the "microsoft-edge:" handler is something that was available since 2017 and pretty much EdgeDeflector was the main user. Most people back then said that Microsoft would never patch this thing but here we are.
Having a <0.1% of users bypassing your custom handler isn't relevant at all. But having 5~6% of them is not.
If your competitor (Microsoft) plays dirty and you play even dirtier (Brave, Firefox) at their own field, they will notice it, patch it and use it against you.
Since antitrust doesn't seem to work in the US... Maybe Microsoft will get another anti-trust fine from the EU and they'll forced to disable this handler at least inside the EU market.
What Microsoft is losing is mindshare with their customers.
It'll be a piece of cake, once their customers are angry enough, for a new tool to become popular that circumvents whatever "patch" Microsoft puts out.
This started with Windows 10 only allowing Microsoft programs to automatically pin themselves to the Taskbar.
As an experiment I left Edge on the Taskbar for my users, with Chrome on the Desktop. Chrome is 3x more popular even though Edge is a) default, b) pinned to Taskbar, and c) Syncs automatically
I installed Windows 11 and my god... what a goddamn mistake. I had to reformat and go back to Windows 10. They screwed it up yet again. So much UI/UX regression. It's hard to believe they haven't learned their lesson after so many years, honestly.
For a lot of technical people they start applications by hitting the Windows key and then typing. If you do this quickly and accidentally mistype something you'll most likely end up doing a search.
I can't say I enjoy firing off a web search for "Windows update" in Bing which appears faster then the local system match for Windows Update somehow (or cynically perhaps by design)
Microsoft is slowly pushing me back to Linux. VS Code and WSL had me fairly content for a while, but as time goes on, I'm thinking more and more about how little of what I do actually needs Windows at this point. I miss my days using Arch, and it's more likely that I'll switch back to that than that I move to Windows 11.
I have been loyal, if grumpy, Windows user for all my life. But they really did broke something in me with the Windows 11, and these -- moves. They really are intent on burning bridges now!
I don't want my operating system to dictating behavior of taskbar, default browsers, etc. I'm planning switch to Linux, when I can figure which one. It will be laborious, as I have years of workflow helpers built in AutoHotkey, custom DLL's and some Win32 applications.
I never liked the Windows' command prompt / Powershell. All my servers have been Linux boxes so I've known bash way better, so that part will be really easy, in fact joyous to get rid of command propmpt / powershell.
What kind of problems? Technical problems, to get it running at all? Or some taste related things. I'm more worried I don't like the font rendering because I'm so used to ClearType, even though I can run Windows 2x mode as I have dual 4k screens.
I'm only slightly worried about technical problems, because I've periodically booted up to Linux from USB sticks. It's just small things are difficult, like getting 4K video to work smoothly etc.
Installing Arch is a great learning experience! That said, if you do not have the time to read the excellent Arch install documentation you could give Manjaro a try.
I haven't used Windows as my main OS in a really long time -- 20 years? -- and crap like this is one reason why. I thought that, with Ballmer gone, they'd stop doing deeply wrong stuff like this, but here we are.
They cheated the license with Spyglass Mosaic for Internet Explorer - making it based on software purchases and then bundling it for free with Windows so they didn't have to pay any royalties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Internet_Exp...
Then there's the Halloween documents, and the attempts at forcing ActiveX (and IE) on the early Web, etc. - the whole company is rotten.
That kind of behavior stems from leadership, though, and the MSFT we've seen post-Ballmer has been dramatically more aware of its position in a diverse marketplace (vs. attempting to own the entire market).
This kind of thing is especially apparent in interoperability -- Office on the Mac is currently as good as it's ever been; I never need to switch to Windows to get something done. Sharepoint (which is awful) now works properly on non-Windows platforms. There are excellent iOS builds of the Office tools. None of that was conceivable under Ballmer.
So yes, I'm old enough to have lived through all the things you mention, but I have also noticed a distinct change in MSFT's behavior in the last 7 years. I see this kind of browser tomfoolery as a return to the bad old days, for sure.
I would be interested to know how Microsoft is justifying this - what does the Edge browser do that others don't? I presume they can't argue the old 'it's an integral part of the OS' type stuff following the previous court cases about this.
For example, if i'm using OSX, is there any situations where i'm forced to use Safari? I'm not aware of any, I believe I can delete Safari from Apps if I want and nothing terrible happens.
It does seem peculiar, i'm guessing it's more to do with being able to claim so many users, rather than ad flinging, but really, it's a bit weird and 90s if you know what I mean.
Just for fun, I downloaded the Windows 11 dev VM via Hyper-V to try it out.
And you're right, the keys I mentioned don't seem to work anymore.
There's a policy called "Don't search the web or display web results in Search", which doesn't seem to work. Perhaps it requires Windows to be domain-joined?
Or perhaps they were referencing the "Turn off display of recent search entries in the File Explorer search box" policy, in which case it works. The description for that policy doesn't mention web results at all, which is odd. Anyway, you will have to kill SearchHost.exe for the policy to take effect, it will be launched automatically when initiating a new search.
Thanks. Will try and have a look next time I'm forced to boot into windows.
Used to be that Windows users would complain that Linux made them edit arcane config files, I guess now it's Linux users that complain about Windows needing you to edit arcane registry settings.
>> We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out in the future, but it makes Edge look bad, which is a shame because it’s not a terrible browser at all.
Thank you, it's basically Chromium with MS spyware instead of the usual Google one
It's pretty pathetic that the only way Microsoft can get people to use their browser is to force it on them against their will. It's an admission that it's literally overpriced at "free".
I don't understand the drama, really. It's not like they are restricting the default browser for web navigation in general but actually to a URL type that clearly says "edge".
The problem is how they then use this URL type. You see this now in Windows 10 when any links off the lock screen always open in Edge regardless of your default browser.
Try telling your security department they're on an unsupported configuration and see how long before your higher ups request an audience with you for a "quick chat"
> “At the same time, Windows also offers certain end-to-end customer experiences in both Windows 10, and Windows 11, the search experience from the taskbar is one such example of an end-to-end experience that is not designed to be redirected. When we become aware of improper redirection, we issue a fix.”
Hey team at MS who implements stuff like that: How does it feel working on this? Genuinely interested.
Just turn off the search bar. You gain a whole lot of taskbar space, and in my experience Windows search is almost useless anyway. For files Everything [1] is far superior.
Surprise, surprise. Microsoft being the big bully on the block, and being slick about allowing users to freely choose what browser they want to use. If a person doesn't use Edge by default, then there might be trouble and for any workarounds. Yeah, choose Firefox or Brave, but then Windows will start acting "funny" about it or make life difficult.
Reminds me of their opt out strategy. You can opt out of their stupid behaviour (eg win10 welcome screen that pops up every now and then after boot) but then again after some updates they introduced just another switch that is turned on by default, ignoring effectively the user's choice of opt out.
Group policies have a shitload of these switches...
> but it makes Edge look bad, which is a shame because it’s not a terrible browser at all.
Maybe its not a terrible browser, but first impressions count for a lot. To even use the browser for the first time you need to sit through their sales pitch (for anyone who has installed windows recently, you'll understand that all the popups and so on take much longer than you'd expect). They practically beg you not to use another browser.
All this I'd say fine to. They have mistakes of the past to fix, and want people to give them a chance. Maybe not ideal, but the first time I saw this, I thought fair enough, I'll give them a chance.
As soon as you do that and cave to them, the first thing they ask for is all your data, with a massive obstrusive banner that's of course intentionally difficult to say no to. Not even Chrome is so brazen as that. You give them an inch and they take a yard
In my opinion it is Windows that is improper. It is an operating system whose developers devote a lot of work to implement telemetry collectors and ads on the core UI.
And the fact that they are so vocal against FF's hack is because it interferes with their telemetry golden egg.
Gods I miss the days when I got so excited for a Windows release. Now it's nothing but a constant stream of "fuck you-s" from Microsoft. I'd give anything to see a Windows install screen and smile again.
Really a dumb PR move, people willing to change default browser will do anyway and will also be pissed off.
Almost everyone I know use Chrome, a few Firefox, no one use Edge.
I don't see a problem. Those who don't like Edge would be more pissed that their configured/chosen browser is being bypassed again and anything that comes out of (turning off the search on toolbar/ignoring it/taking it as the last straw and thinking of alternative OSs) is good for Firefox/Linux etc. Those who don't care about the browser, don't care anyway. And the three people who use Edge would be happier.
I'm dropping support for employees at my two companies even using Windows on our network. No more of this. This whole industry is 20 years behind thanks to a couple of decades of these kind of shenanigans. Micorsoft wishes to embrace and extend the entire HTTP and HTTPS protocols and by doing so, has blown up their last shred of trust.
I left the Windows ecosystem at the right time it seems... Something about Windows 11 made me not want to upgrade and just take my chances with Linux. I feel like Microsoft is slowly consolidating against consumers in more and more egregious ways, and it's not worth it anymore (especially because of Proton, lol).
> the search experience from the taskbar is one such example of an end-to-end experience that is not designed to be redirected
The bing searches that appear in my taskbar search have never been useful and just pollute the local results I’m looking for. I’ve tried disabling them with regedit tricks to no avail.
Microsoft returning to its early 00s attitude. I wonder if the EU will step in and make this an anti-competitive thing.
Yet another reason to not install Windows 11, including telemetry, adverts, an always on internet connection, and abandoning perfectly functioning hardware in favour of TPM chips.
This in particular seems to blatantly fly in the face of the precedent which was established by the earlier anti-trust judgements against them.
It almost seems as if they believe anti-trust has been effectively killed between then and now, and they're ready to poke the bear to verify that it's dead.
I wouldn't be so sure, here across the pond we tend to slap these arrogant giants from time to time with few billions fine. Still just cost of doing their often amoral business, but often a big one.
These cases are fought for years, and theorized over for decades. In the meantime, the companies have gained or lost market share, profits and future revenues move in whatever direction, and the court ruling and the fine have little importance.
This may have been different some time ago. Nowadays, however, rest assured that no internet company will be deterred by pesky things such as laws, morality or ethics. If market share is at stake, that is.
This goes for Microsoft as much as for Google and Facebook. Google settles important cases (data related) to not have any legislative interference, and will pay the fine for everything else. Microsoft would be foolish to do anything else.
The companies are more powerful than the legal systems in the EU. Not the EU, mind you - if the will was there.
But it isn't.
Look at the fines, look at the dollars actually being paid. And then look at the prospect of gaining 30,40 maybe 50% market share in the browser market - now that all bets are off and Microsoft has gone back to just siphoning off all data without even giving normal users a choice.
Yeah.
> To date, Google has been found guilty of antitrust behavior in the cases related to Google AdSense and Android, and has been fined over €8 billion (~$9 billion)
I don’t think comparing the fine to the company’s entire revenue makes any sense. It should be compared to the magnitude of the conduct they are being fined for. If you base the fine for a specific action on the company’s entire revenue, it creates some perverse incentives around corporate structure and leads to all sorts of absurd results.
For example, if breaking the rules to earn 0.1% of revenue leads to the same penalty as breaking the rules to earn 100% of revenue, the company might as well maximize the scale of each rule broken to improve the risk-adjusted return.
More reasonably, a fine should be proportional to the amount of incremental revenue that the company obtained by engaging in the illegal conduct, and that should be multiplied by the odds of getting caught (so the fine can’t be amortized as a cost of doing business).
I think this rhetoric claiming that fines are just a slap on the wrist made sense at some point when we were talking about million-dollar settlements, but now we’re talking billions, and in some cases it’s so much money that the company certainly didn’t increase their revenue by that much by breaking the rules. I feel like people are just repeating the same old argument and they aren’t thinking critically about the numbers. Companies do, in fact, care about being fined billions of dollars! It’s a big deal! That kind of money really does drive corporate strategy! Try asking your CEO for a billion dollars to build a new product if you don’t believe me.
Wouldn't the other poster's point be that these are not "real numbers" relative go Google's revenue? Fines actually have to affect the bottom line to act as an incentive to change.
As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble. Android has fewer issues around the browser engine, but with Google Chrome handling clicks to URLs inside apps instead of opening the default browser, I don't think Microsoft is any worse than Android either.
I hope someone will take action against all these three companies but I don't think the laws have been written to deal with this.
> with Google Chrome handling clicks to URLs inside apps instead of opening the default browser
Are you sure about that? On Android my default browser is Firefox. If I email myself https://detectmybrowser.com/ and then open it in the Fastmail app on Android, it says I'm using Firefox.
The main difference is that Microsoft literally had a massive anti-trust action taken against them in 2001 on exactly this issue.
I agree that Apple and Google are also guilty here, but MS is repeating actions which there is not only a direct legal precedent against, but one which involved them as the defendant.
Yeah, it's kind of odd, where you would think Microsoft should know better. Wondering what Microsoft might be thinking is the "ace up their sleeve" to prevent court actions against them again. Wondering if it's all the user information they overtly and sneakily collect.
>As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble
The issue wasn't what they did, it was what they did in combination with their monopoly of the desktop market.
Apple gets away with what they want to do because they're a minority player in both the desktop and smartphone markets. It will be interesting to see how this changes with Epic's attempt in court with redefine the market to a fraction of the market.
> As long as Apple can get away with the way they treat iOS, I don't think Microsoft will be in any trouble.
Would "but Apple is doing worse" really work as a valid defense in court? Wouldn't it just provoke another litigation against Apple (if the court decided smartphones should be treated in the same way as personal computers)?
It's not a defence, for sure. I just think that until the much worse mobile market gets prosecuted for antitrust violations, there's little chance people will go after Microsoft.
We feared communists, and socialism, while creating the corporate demigods that puppet our governments, control our communications and by extension control everything anyone can aspire or achieve.
What's amazing to me is how much platformization has happened since then, especially in mobile, where even though no one company is a monopoly, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are definitely flexing their "we own the platform" muscles quite as strongly as Microsoft did in the late 90s (or stronger), to the detriment of both users and developers.
It's kind of a problem with such huge companies. The bit of MS that is funding VS Code and other open source dev-tooling has managed to win back a fair amount of good-will through their work.
But that doesn't automatically mean that the bit of MS that is dealing with Edge, or Windows, or Teams, is also as virtuous. In fact, they seem purely driven by business analysts who don't actually care about the product, just the metrics. If they did care, you wouldn't get nagged about Teams every time you booted up the computer, and you wouldn't see them trying so hard to keep Edge as the default browser.
It also doesn't mean that the work they're doing with VSCode is "virtuous".
It's generally foolish to expect multinational corporations to act as if they are motivated by virtue - the incentive structure is just not set up for that.
Yeah I totally agree. I think there are some small companies which intentionally set themselves up to forward a particular cause, like sustainability for example. Also privately held companies don't have the same accountability structures as public companies, so it can be the case that virtue is a motivator for that individual but for the most part we shouldn't expect virtue from profit-driven companies, and that would very much be the exception rather than the rule.
Not only for anti-monopoly reasons but for data-protection reasons as well. It's hard to swallow that any public service uses Microsoft after the Schrems-II verdict.
This (banning MS products in education) is difficult. Schools rarely consider anything else because it's what "business" uses, and so there's a lot of push-back from both students and parents whenever a school suggests moving away from Microsoft.
I'm secretary of the parents association of a rather large European school, and face this argument at least once a year.
The last one is not a necessarily true point. If Apple and Android can stop supporting older hardware on their newer operating systems, why can't Microsoft?
Maybe in some vague way - but in a technical sense, not allowing the user to implement or install their own protocol handler very much goes against the historical spirit of Windows. But then again, so does ads in the shell. But Windows has always allowed vast, fine grained programmatic read/write access to anything the running user has authorization for, and for admins that's almost everything. Certainly everything in userspace, such as URL protocols.
I can’t figure out how to disable internet search in my app search on windows 10 any more. All my privacy settings keep getting undone in updates. It’s messing with my browsers. This OS stresses me out, it isn’t even an OS any more, it’s a manipulator now that refused to get out of your way
just curious, is there any hard evidence that the telemetry in Windows 11 is any worse than what was in Windows 10 (which was already pretty horrdendous)?
> end-to-end experience that is not designed to be redirected
Oh I love wording of this. It's almost like Windows 10 is a piece of art and altering it to serve end user is somehow wrong. It's almost like they think it's up to them to decide how customers can use their OS.
It’s improper to invent a custom scheme that specifically opens a URL in a browser the user neither uses nor wants. I think some Microsoft employees should check out their own Wikipedia page sometime for an interesting history lesson.
Even the mere existence of this bullshit URL type "microsoft-edge://" is heinous and should be illegal. Or, if we can't make it illegal, can't we have some sort of URL-protection vigilante squad?
Can someone recommend a linux distro where i can run steam and get most games. I know some games dont run on linux at all. I am using a last gen threadeipper and 1080ti.
at this point i am ready to jump the MS ship completely.
I use Ubuntu, and most of my games work great. Check protondb.com to see if your critical games work well or not in linux through steam. Some may require special switches to be add in the game setup in Steam to get them to run well. There is also a version of proton (which is Steams's additions to Wine which is what lets you make Windows API calls) called glorious eggroll that implements some fixes that haven't yet made it to proton. Make sure you install the proprietary nvidia drivers, and you should be all set.
It's truly a new world for gaming in linux now. I've been on linux since the early 2000s and had basically given up on getting almost anything to run through wine. Now almost everything in my steam catalog runs fine.
Just a heads-up that it's not all roses, though. There may be games that run fine for some people but don't on your setup, and anything with anti-cheat is basically not going to run yet, though Valve is working hard on that problem. You may find issues with alt-tabbing from fullscreen games, you might find that some games rely on an api that isn't working in proton or wine yet. For example, I play Phasmophobia solo, and that works great for the most part but they rely on Cortana for voice recognition, and that isn't implemented yet. I can make noise and ghosts will hear me, but they won't understand what I'm saying.
In my opinion any issues you run into will be small fish in comparison to issues thrust upon you by Microsoft being Microsoft, but they will seem huge at first because you're probably used to trying to solve problems the "microsoft way". Once you get past a few you'll be doing great.
Pop!_OS (especially for NVIDIA) or Ubuntu 21.10, imo. Install Steam and enable Proton. Most of your games should run the same as on Windows, or better, and it's rapidly improving.
Instead of preventing competitor products working on your platform, why not spend the energy learning why people avoid Edge in the first place? Forcing unwilling users into a bad product never ends well.
Time to go full nuclear on Microsoft and replace Edge entirely with a stub that will open what you want (Firefox in my case). Basically create a rootkit just for this shitshow
> Ah, the eternal cycle of: Microsoft does something bad, then people move to Linux, then they get dragged by Linux's rough new user experience, then they leave Linux, then things are fine for a while, then people mock Linux users for being paranoid, then Microsoft does something bad...
You somehow think that all the bad decisions from Microsoft comes directly from Ballmer? There are plenty of people at Microsoft (still) who think like Ballmer did, and they will in the future too. The decisions that come from Microsoft comes from the entire of Microsoft, and they are all contributing to it happening too.
Ok where are all those people who had convinced me Microsoft has changed their hostile behavior? I mean how can they change when their dna is like this. Do people really think if some company like facebook/microsoft spends some dime they can whitewash their tarnished reputation? Can we buy reputation from money? Lets not create utopia for sophist corporation.
And their browser is not better than ungoogled chromium or vivaldi or firefox. Their browser despite being copy of opensource hasn't even published the source (I understand its BSD). Will we get edgium?
Ok where are all those people who had convinced me Microsoft has changed their hostile behavior?
I'm big enough to admit that I was one of them. I genuinely felt that between VSCode, WSL, their involvement with improving Python, the improvements to Linux on Azure, Open Source .Net Core etc. etc. that Microsoft was changing and Windows was a genuine and valid OS option for developers. I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and a second chance, despite having been an actively anti-MS Linux user through the whole "Open Source is cancer", EEE and anti-trust years.
I wouldn't be too harsh on yourself. I think the people involved with those projects are genuinely trying to pursue the idea that providing quality open source tooling can be good for business without predatory behaviour and dirty tricks that MS has been famous for. However MS is a big company, I imagine that there's a separate set of people managing and developing Windows who are much closer to the "old" MS we love to hate.
It's self-defeating IMO - the developer goodwill they gain with the projects you mentioned is immediately lost any time they pull stunts like this.
> It's self-defeating IMO - the developer goodwill they gain with the projects you mentioned is immediately lost any time they pull stunts like this.
That's something they will never ever get. I could be convinced that VSCode is a great tool or that the azure cloud is a worthwhile alternative to AWS or the Google Cloud...
And then I remember it's microsoft, a giant software company so shady i refuse to run any of their software on my devices because every day theres a new dark UI pattern, a new advert injected somewhere, a new abuse of trust. Why would I EVER recomend any of their software to a customer of mine if I deeply distrust them and expect them to try to fuck me over some way or another any way they can.
I genuinely felt that between VSCode, WSL, their involvement with improving Python, the improvements to Linux on Azure, Open Source .Net Core etc. etc. that Microsoft was changing
Well, a part of it changed somewhat, because these things were unheard of in the past..
Windows was a genuine and valid OS option
..it's just that this bit didn't change.
for developers
Depending on the type of application, Windows can practically work perfectly fine for a developer, always has and probably always will. Just too bad said developer also has to deal with the not-so-sunny side of MS.
I was also in this boat as a very happy user of VS Code, Azure, and the .NET ecosystem. I still think MS's philosophy behind those products is a good one. My mistake was in thinking it would apply to their older products. I guess my next laptop is another Mac.
Yes, apparently they can. There used to be huge threads here on HN on how today's MS has nothing to do with its past, that it's ridiculous to believe that the company will always stay the same, that the Ballmer epoch is all over. I mean yes, these people are right, MS is a different company - but will still do grayish stuff on the verge of legality, as long as they can go unpunished. And because corporations are not people, apparently we can only speak about the legal aspect, not the moral one (as if nobody was personally responsible for these decisions).
Corporations are made by people and are led by people. I wish we get rid of the limited responsibility stuff. You're the CEO, you go to jail. This would probably break large companies in a multitude of much smaller ones to manage risks. How many people can you manage and be reasonably sure don't do something that sends you to jail? Not many. We would still have software, FOSS demonstrate it, and entrepreneurs would still find a way to create new things.
The point is that Microsoft effectively "bought" that good will with developers and now they've cashed it out. I have no plan to trust them, and if I hear the "actually Microsoft has been good for open source" argument, I can finally counter it with reality.
I never trusted them and I'm not using their products unless I really must (a customer's Windows server, their Android PDF reader or Google's one, maybe that's it.) But yes, when one is young and exposed to Microsoft for the first time and see them behave it's easy to dismiss the tales of old bad behavior. If one is 40 or 50, it takes a lot of naivety to trust them or any similar corporation. If anybody did, they are hopefully changing their mind because of the facts of the last few years.
Money can buy stuff. Apple forgoing some, in my opinion, minor tracking and ads stuff in the grand scheme of things, garners it a ton of goodwill among the tech and gadget communities.
Facebook gets hated far more than is necessary. As if it’s some evil far worse than other companies. Even just other major tech companies.
Amazon somehow is able to maintain a decent enough reputation. The disdain for Amazon is far less than Microsoft on HN. Or in general where people don’t care about Microsoft but are more or less okay or better with Amazon.
This is all anecdotal and my personal opinion of how big tech is viewed.
The big difference is Amazon consistently focuses on the customer. That is their big thing. Notice that the criticism is never about what Amazon does for/to customers, but about other players: delivery partners, employees, rival sellers. Where the customer does suffer (IME very rarely) it is due to a failure (e.g. not keeping up with scams on their marketplace) and not malice (actively spending engineering effort to make the product worse for consumers, see Microsoft Windows, or promoting engagement at the expense of society). Meta is actively thwarting international attempts to hold genocidal regimes accountable, so I think they deserve the hate they get. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-28/facebook-...
It’s frustrating with Microsoft because the bad behavior is completely unnecessary. They are torching their reputation and goodwill for what can only be marginal gains in usage share for a free product, that might ultimately lead to showing slightly more ads.
At least when Amazon screws over business partners, it is on my behalf (in the form of cheaper or better goods and services - Amazon Basics being a great example). When Microsoft screws someone they screw me. When Facebook screws someone, they screw me (or they did, before I deleted my account, good riddance).
I think the key here is that both things are true:
1. Microsoft has changed their hostile behavior in some segments
2. Microsoft has always been hostile in others, and that has not changed
In a company as large as Microsoft, any kind of transformational change is not going to be evenly distributed.
A charitable take on this is: Some parts of MS are as they have always been, but others have improved.
A slightly more pessimistic take: Microsoft realized they needed to change to say relevant with the developer community, and so they focused on that community only.
Moves like this certainly bolster arguments that MS never really changed, but I think it's more complex than that.
I've been saying this all along. The leopard can't change its spots that easily. Micro$oft is still Micro$oft, despite so many people's wishful thinking to the contrary.
Time for Linux developers to buckle down, rally behind standards that third-party developers can count on, and give the world a better platform that respects the user...because we know none of the big players will do that.
There always will be those who support and those who don't. People are not 100% rational to begin with, and not having complete information only amplifies the problem.
No, it's much more basic than that. The system launches a URL starting with microsoft-edge: and uses the protocol handling system to open that in the Edge browser.
This week I finally made the decision to ditch Windows 10 and move to Elementary OS on my desktop computer (my laptop is a Pixelbook).
I was attempting to edit videos. I plug in an external hard drive with my footage, and... nothing. Well, not nothing. It's there in Devices & Printers. It's able to be ejected safely. Troubleshooter has no problems.
But nothing in Explorer or any other obvious place you'd think. Panicking, I plugged the same drive into Chrome OS. Literally three seconds later I was browsing my footage.
That's the point I got up from my desk and said, "I'm done." I'm so over Windows.
They spend how much time and effort shoving a Linux environment into things when they apparently can't even support widely-used filesystems. The fact my external drive is mountable by both Chrome OS (where the code for mounting is open source) and macOS (a closed-source OS used by a minority of the populace) but not Windows is an utter joke. I shouldn't have to spend all this time trying to access my files in 2021. This is something that should Just Work.
This was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I've had several minor and major annoyances with Microsoft's treatment of Windows ever since Windows 8, and none of them have gotten better.
- Constantly degrading your choice of default browser, as in the OP.
- WTF is "3D Objects" and why does it always bubble up from the pits of hell even when I delete it? Microsoft is very opinionated about the User folder in general, while I think they should be as hands-off as possible. Stop adding folders I didn't ask for and stop resurrecting them after they're deleted. Why is this so hard?
- Obscuring local account creation to a ridiculous degree in Windows 10 (you need to literally disable Wi-Fi or unplug Ethernet to even see the option) has gotten even WORSE in Windows 11. Now you can't even set up a local account at all unless you shell out extra for Windows 11 Pro! They've learned nothing from the Xbox One always-online debacle, and honestly looking back, this should have been the dealbreaker. But I thought, "hey, I don't create accounts that often, this is something I can live with." No longer.
- The amount of analytics and data-gathering in Windows is the worst it's ever been, and worse than any comparable OS. "You can turn it off though." Well, maybe. Until Windows Update decides it knows better and turns it back on.
- This is purely aesthetic, but Windows 8 and 10 looked utterly horrible if you did anything more than look at the desktop and open the Start Menu. Clashing styles and UX edicts from decades of past releases, in very visible places. It gives the impression Microsoft just doesn't give a shit. And don't tell me "it's too hard to update everything in time for release." It's not everything, and Microsoft is a big boy with lots of money and developers. They decided they just don't care.
- When trying to migrate my files in preparation for moving to Elementary, I plugged in an SD Card and got BSOD'd immediately. Absolutely wonderful quality control. People complain Linux is buggy and you have to jump through hoops to do what you want? Windows is now that x100.
It's not getting better or even staying the same. Microsoft is actively making Windows worse for their own ends. Thankfully I have the choice and ability to install an alternative, but my heart goes out to those with no choice. It's Orwellian.
The last version of Windows I used was Windows XP. I since switched to various Linux distros and macOS, now settling on a combination of Debian and Ubuntu as my daily laptop/server OS’s.
My initial reasons for my leaving the Microsoft world were because I didn’t agree with Microsoft’s ethics: it’s like being an exploitative, self-serving (as opposed to user-serving) conglomerate is wired into its company structure.
MS’s great work with VS Code got me thinking that maybe there’s some hope for them as an organization, but every time I peek back into the Microsoft world like this I’m even less inclined to ever go back.
I mean, their customers are actively developing workarounds for their shitty dark UX patterns, and their response is basically: “sorry, we insist that you adhere to our dark UX patterns”.
Fuck that. Life’s too short for that bullshit. Vote with your time, money and attention.
Yeah, there are effectively two Microsofts. The dev/tooling MS is awesome. VS Code is great, .NET is unsexy but very solid, their recent efforts on Python are commendable, I've also heard good things about Azure.
The Windows/Office world, is, well...
One of the saddest things I've ever seen is how they decided to put ads on the Solitaire app. Is the massive UX degradation such a move entails really worth the extra ad revenue? For real? They don't give a damn, they've never given a damn, and now they're even stopped pretending.
This is true and Microsoft is known to be a company that has many product groups that are often in direct conflict with each other.
Cloud Services is the "cool" Microsoft and their cloud services are now the biggest profit center for them. They have Azure, developer tools and contribute a huge amount to the overall open-source world. The majority of their customers run Linux workloads and things like Kubernetes. Cloud folks at Microsoft don't care if you run Linux or MacOS as long as you run your web apps on Azure that's all they care about and they try to make it as easy as possible. These are the guys that developed Microsoft's first internal Linux distribution.
Satya Nadella comes from the Cloud/Azure part of the business. That's why Microsoft has been doing some really innovative and smart choices lately under his leadership.
The Windows group are the luddites at Microsoft. Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary. They only put WSL (Windows Subystem Linux) because the Cloud group wanted it. Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system. They put ads and use dark patterns because they're desperate to show that Windows can still make money. Their CEO is now one of the Cloud guys and for them that sucks.
> Windows group is living in the 1990's and still thinks you can make money on a desktop operating system.
I can't speak for others but I'm more than willing to pay good money for a version of Windows that isn't actively user hostile and full of garbage. Like, give me a Windows 2000 UI on top of modern Windows underpinnings and I'll give you $500/year. They can even keep putting out the shitty version of Windows and just make it explicitly ad/creepy-data-harvesting supported. That might still not be enough to actually make them money, I can't say.
What I can say is that I feel like Window's current strategy is less about making money and more about actively trying to kill off personal computing for the sake of pushing everyone to subscription services.
I typically get downvoted for mentioning this, no idea why: This is basically Windows Enterprise LTSC/LTSB.
That is what I use and that it what I set up for my less technically competent friends and family who are not good at navigating the ever-shifting sands of the Windows UI, the situation changing on them, a game they had not remembered installing appearing in their Programs. Working on the simple rhythm of muscle memory and repetition, they draw the Worm.
> I typically get downvoted for mentioning this, no idea why: This is basically Windows Enterprise LTSC/LTSB.
In the context of a discussion about Microsoft’s intentions, it is very clearly asshole behavior by Microsoft to have a perfectly good product that people want, but then put up artificial barriers like having a friend who knows how to get it and install it.
I would not downvote you for mentioning it, but it makes Microsoft look even worse than if they did not have LTSC at all since it removes their plausible deniability.
I am a power windows user and its such a shame ( on my end ) that I did not have a clue that Windows 10 LTSC existed till recently. I was quite happy with the Windows 10 PRO version, wanted to check out WIN 11, installed it, it started giving me the dreaded memory leak issue ( on AMD currently ) when opening windows explorer. Tried to revert back to windows 10 but the option was greyed out ( 10 days is the max time to revert back to Windows 10 ). Got to know about Windows 10 LTSC version, activated it with KMS and its snappy as f, no Ads, no Microsoft Store, no cortana, no bullshit. Basically the version people should've gotten in the first place.
Yes, after upgrading to windows 11, you get a 10 day period during which you can revert back to windows 10. After that it greys out automatically. I was forced to do a fresh install because of how laggy windows 11 was.
Means it's TECHNICALLY possible, and Microsoft actively takes away the option after 10 days?
Do people not hate this?
On macos the only way to revert is through full machine backups. That at least lets me think the upgrade is irreversible without backups, and then I am fine with it. :)
Obtaining Windows Enterprise legally is tricky if you're not a big corporation. It's not even a money thing, it's that they outright won't sell you a license directly, instead you have to go to a reseller and then pad the order with cheap client access licenses to reach the minimum amount of licenses required for an order.
Visual Studio (formerly MSDN) subscriptions come with purpose-specific (for software development and/or testing, depending on the subscription) licenses for lots of things (exactly what also depends on the tier, IIRC).
The usage constraints are mostly social/legal rather than technical, of course.
Visual Studio subscription is effectively $200/yr if you use Azure at all. It's $800/yr, but you get a $50/month Azure credit. It's not hard to use $50/month worth of Azure stuff.
The problem with LTSC is that newer games won't work, other than that it's a pretty reasonable experience. I put vanilla Win 10 on computer recently and it's bad. Luckily the games I'm trying to run are better supported on linux via proton than they are on LTSC, and there's no way in hell I'm installing win 11, I already find the lack of proper programmatic file-association support infuriating.
I think at least personally I've finally reached the tipping point where dealing with the annoyance of running windows apps on linux is going to be worth not having the huge host of annoyances microsoft is intentionally pushing onto me.
LTSC still contains a hefty chunk of bullshit, in my opinion, including all the god awful unnecessary UI changes they only ever half implemented and the laggy apps that take ages to launch and use up entirely too much memory.
> I typically get downvoted for mentioning this, no idea why: This is basically Windows Enterprise LTSC/LTSB.
Because it's incredibly hard to outright impossible to get a legal version of this. AFAIK it's only available for MSDN subscribers, OEMs/ODMs/embedded device manufacturers and large-volume customers and illegal to resell; on top of that unlike regular Windows ISOs there are no public download links that you can then either activate with a key you happened to find somewhere or run one of the usual activation cracks.
No matter what, unless you are in a highly privileged position you do not have a way of obtaining LTSB without exposing yourself to legal or security risks.
ETA: Just had a look on a well-known torrent site - "LTSB" yielded no usable results (> 10 seeds), and "LTSC" only one that matches the seed count, and it doesn't even ship supposedly virgin ISOs but modified ones, so no way to know if at least the install media is free of malware (by comparing it to known MS hashes). Jesus, I didn't know the situation was that bad.
That's weird, because I have used Bittorrent once, about a decade back, just to see what it was like, for a few movies but no software because, well, malware. I downloaded ISOs from a MS site and bought a key off of a reseller. So, no, I don't feel highly privileged.
No. Windows server w/ Desktop Experience contains pretty much all the same bullshit as Windows 10. Even LTSC only cuts out a relatively small portion of it.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid (but considering Microsoft's behavior over the past twenty years, it would be in character), I can't help but think that WSL is a stalking horse for forbidding Linux from bare metal booting on consumer PCs. Revoke the Linux distro UEFI keys for "reasons" and there you have it.
That's not paranoid at all. MS goal is to declare Linux a "legacy" environment, like they tried to do with UNIX in the 80s (the so called POSIX subsystem).
Secure boot could be a good feature, but it can be severely abused. Some people really put effort in it to make it more secure. But the usual problems of certificate logistics leads to the case the Microsoft basically owns secure boot.
Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
>Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
Which is completely absurd. Within minutes of Netflix/anyone releasing anything new I can download it via Usenet or torrents. Nothing anyone does will change that reality. They just continue to make it more difficult for the average user to access content via player requirements for various DRM schemes. Which funny enough pushes people back to pirating to avoid all the nonsense.
It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.
> It must be soul crushing to work on DRM for any industry as your job. Knowing that no matter what you do, how clever you are, etc - it doesn't matter at all, it'll be bypassed very shortly.
I can't imagine doing this, to be honest if I were asked to implement DRM I would quit, or try to make sure there are fundamental flaws in the scheme, it's the only moral thing to do if you're put in that situation imo.
EDIT: To those upvoting me, software as a service is usually DRM, so maybe hold your upvote if you're complicit.
> Only a matter of time before Netflix demands remote attestation.
They already do on Android. Root your device and either play cat and mouse with Magisk and Universal SafetyNet fix, or get downgraded to L3. And even then, it's uncertain how long the USN hack will last, given that all it does is pretend the device doesn't have hardware attestation - once Google decides to mandate HA for all Android 12 and above devices (as all SoCs capable of running that should have some form of secure element), it's game over.
We need legislative action against anti-rooting measures and other shit that takes away control of devices from users, and that fast, but it doesn't look like it's high on the priority list for the next year of the Biden admin, and after that we will likely see, once again, a gridlocked Congress and in 2024 the Rise of the Sith again.
I think of Windows as a legacy environment, having abandoned it when Windows 7 ended. That's when Microsoft exited the operating system business and entered the ad business.
Microsoft is a very large company. Anyone who's worked at a company even a tenth the size of Microsoft knows how hard it is to get the company to pick a direction.
The only real direction you can get everyone to agree on is "profit," and the nice thing about the existence of Azure as one of their major profit centers is that Microsoft now has a bunch of business that depends on Linux running well. A company mostly running Linux is already looking at them as third place behind Amazon and Google - if Microsoft risks making kernel developers unable to run Linux, they risk making kernel developers unwilling to accept patches to make Azure (or WSL) run Linux well. I'm not saying they're never going to try it, since the Azure org doesn't control the UEFI signing program, but I am saying there's a significant part of the company that will say that it threatens their profits to a scale much larger than the lost Windows licenses on consumer PCs.
Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.). The only thing harder than getting a company the size of Microsoft to agree on something is to get the rest of the industry to go along with it too. The few cases where they've succeeded (e.g., the thing from the 1980s where they made OEMs pay them even for machines that didn't ship with MS-DOS) were when they had a sufficiently technically superior product they could use to bully people. They don't have that power anymore.
> Fun fact: every single example in the Wikipedia "embrace, extend, and extinguish" article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... is something that failed (IE is dead, Office 365 works great on non-MS browsers, MS has no influence on Java, MSN Messenger is dead, MAPI is dead, etc.).
You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor.
Netscape is dead (and Firefox is dying), all the historical competitors to MS Office are dead or have negligible market share, Java never got enough market share to make it easy for people to switch away from Windows, AIM/ICQ/whatever are all dead (and worse, nobody really uses XMPP or other open protocols), hardly anybody runs their own email server anymore, etc.
They successfully destroyed all of the independent versions of these things, so that now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.
It's also kind of disingenuous to say "IE is dead" and "MSN Messenger is dead" and ignore Edge and Skype and Teams etc.
Well, until the LibreOffice Foundation gets a bit smarter or greater business support from some heavy hitters. Microsoft relying on Office is on shaky ground.
People arguably use MS Office out of habit and since it's a forced de facto standard at work. But, there is no reason they can't switch to LibreOffice for 95% plus of what people are doing.
My org is basically at this point exclusively Google docs. Chromebooks for support staff and Linux laptops for devs. I think only sales is still on windows.
Underestimating the JVM there a bit. Sucks that Oracle tried to monster it, but it's a solid workhorse. Also, down with MS, leopards don't change their stripes so easily, a change of helm won't turn a company with greed so deeply entrenched in their DNA. *Spots not stripes. Or tigers.
Java was released by Sun Microsystems, a Unix vendor with their own hardware architecture. The big feature was "write once, run anywhere." Write the program once and it would run on Windows/Intel as well as Solaris/SPARC.
The Java language wasn't horrible and WORA was a big advantage in the days when there were half a dozen Unix vendors plus Mac and Windows and Novell Netware etc. So it was becoming popular, and every app the developer decided to write in Java was one that wasn't tied to the Win32 API and therefore Windows.
It's also possible to compile other languages to Java bytecode as along as they didn't use OS-specific APIs -- and Java provided platform-independent ones. So there was a real risk that everything would end up running on a platform-independent JVM. Which Microsoft successfully prevented from happening for long enough for Sun to run out of money and get consumed by Oracle.
It is hard to remember, or for younger developers to believe, but there was a time in the mid 90s when:
1. Most programing languages sucked
2. Java was fresh and new
Java had a lot going for it. It was free, with a functioning IDE that had a working graphical debugger! MS had just about finished killing Delphi (which also cost $$) and over in *nix land the GUI libraries were fighting amongst themselves and Linux wasn't something even an average developer was going to install.
So you had Perl, raw C, the horrors that were DSLs and frameworks written in the c++ of the time, then Java came along.
Applets failed, sure. And back then everyone wanted their GUIs to look like the platform native UI (how times have changed!) but Swing was super easy to write UIs in.
I'd wager the majority of programmers, outside of ex-LISP folks, didn't know what closures were, and functions as first class objects wasn't on anyone's mind.
So all of Java's shortcomings didn't seem like a big deal. It "compiled" fast, had actual packages you could distribute and import easily, and the compiler errors made sense.
So yeah Java was a fresh breath when it came out.
Then c# came out a bit later and was basically better in a million small ways from day 1, except it wasn't open source so a community never built up around it in the same way.
Now days we are spoiled for languages to choose from.
None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"? And they're misleading at best.
Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system. That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality (see: every other OS). Just imagine shipping a computing device today without a browser! Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.
Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode. The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.
Java was never a Windows replacement. And as a platform it is doing just fine.
Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc. It's not like everyone is using Skype (which MS bought, not built, and long after the IM dust had settled).
Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail. And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach. It requires professional knowledge to get email delivered these days.
None of those examples have anything to do with "embrace, extend, extinguish"?
They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.
That wasn't Microsoft's choice, that's just de-facto reality
That's what BG said in his deposition, but MS was the only company who embedded IE into the OS to make ActiveDesktop and put VBScript and ActiveX into IE.
Java was never a Windows replacement.
AWT and Swing and browser applets were Windows replacements.
Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.
You're talking about things that happened ten years later. There was a time when one app would connect to every network.
>They all do. IE is eee of HTML and the web. MS Java and VisualJ or whatever it was called was eee of Sun Java. ActiveX was eee of the web browser.
All of those efforts failed miserably. They have nothing to do with the actual reasons why Netscape died, why Firefox is trending down, why Java never became dominant, why Open/LibreOffice never replaced MS Office, why open chat protocols were replaced by chat services from Google, Facebook, Discord and Slack, why Java applets never caught on, etc.
The grandparent comment is right on the money with "You're assuming the goal of these things was to replace the product, when the goal was to destroy the competitor."
MS bought at least 10-15 years of dominance with EEE, vaporware, and other anticompetitive practices.
Just like Google killed RSS with Reader.
Just like Facebook bought WhatsApp and Instagram to avoid them potentially growing into replacements for Facebook.
The goal was to kill or delay an upstart that would distract users away from their core products, not to produce a successful competitor to the upstart.
Netscape
Netscape no doubt had its own problems, but MS deeply embedding IE into Windows 98 was a huge part of them.
Java
Actually Java was pretty dominant. Interactive web was either Flash or Java. If it was for entertainment, it was Flash, if it was for work or computation, it was Java.
WordPerfect lost to Word for the exact same reason Lotus 1-2-3 lost to Excel. They were extremely late to the transition to GUIs. By the time they had Windows versions, the world had already switched.
Java was never widely deployed on the web. The only services that ever used applets in any meaningful way were a handful of Asia-only banks. Applets were stillborn for a large number of reasons, all of which you can blame on Sun.
MS giving away IE for free torched Netscape's business model, but that seems like a strange objection - we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.
They were extremely late to the transition to GUIs. By the time they had Windows versions, the world had already switched.
In the case of WordPerfect, what I recall reading was that this was in small part because WP kept writing everything in pure assembly language for way too long, and in large part because MS gave Word a leg up with internal Windows APIs. This was raised in one of the antitrust suits against MS, but I don't recall which one. Either way, I had used a GUI WYSYWIG version of WordPerfect (for DOS) long before I'd ever even seen MS Word of any form.
Java was never widely deployed on the web.
This is a point that would have to be settled by numbers, and I don't have them. What I do know is that every simple web-based calculator app was written in Java, and that in my circles installing Java was one of the first things one did after installing Windows and a browser.
we all expect browsers to be free (and built into the OS) today.
I think this was a mistake. All that "you're a feature, not a product" nonsense is a distraction from the insane degree of consolidation we've tolerated in technology. There should be thousands of billion dollar tech companies each serving in interoperable niches, not a handful of trillion dollar tech companies.
You can't blame MS for WordPerfect's failure. This story repeats ad infinitum - WordPerfect had a large body of users who had already memorized the alt-shift-F8 combos and didn't want change. They were in no hurry to alienate their established base. Microsoft gets credit here, they saw the future that WordPerfect and Lotus didn't.
Name one widely used (in the west) website that used Java applets. I can name exactly one, because I worked on the backend for it, but even in 2002 everyone knew it was an odd duck. Flash was still popular, activex still around, but ajax was a thing and everyone knew it was the future. Applets were a joke.
The market doesn't really care about your opinion of what is/isn't a mistake. Sorry.
They introduced Win95 and would not allow WordPerfect access until it was public while building office which meant it took them 6 months to port over to windows 95. WordPerfect wasn't able to recover.
There was a period in the early 2000s where that was everywhere, and that was when Netscape died.
Causing intentional problems with non-Microsoft Office products on Microsoft operating systems is what caused everyone to get locked into Microsoft Office file formats.
Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.
You can't just say "no it isn't" and make it otherwise.
> Causing intentional problems with non-Microsoft Office products on Microsoft operating systems is what caused everyone to get locked into Microsoft Office file formats.
So it's like Google making their services slow on Firefox? History repeats itself, only the names are different.
It's tiresome refuting misinformation like this point by point, so I'll just pick the one I have deep knowledge of:
> Microsoft successfully suppressed Java for long enough for Sun to die.
Tell me, how did Microsoft "suppress" Java? The main contention of Sun's lawsuit is that Microsoft was harming Java by adding features (most notably, delegate - ie closures). That almost nobody used. I know, I used them. There's no meaningful interpretation of the word "suppress" that applies here.
Furthermore, Java was always a cost center for Sun. There is no alternate history where Java somehow saved Sun. They made their money from selling hardware that eventually nobody bought.
Set aside your blind hate and learn from people that actually worked with these technologies in that era.
I can only speak as a SysAdmin at the time. There where sites/applets that did only run in IE with MSs version of Java and sites/applets that only run with Suns Java. I remember having to create different desktop shortcuts for differently configured browsers.
That (plus the long startup time of the odd Java based sysadmin-tool) lead to a general feeling of "Java == Bad". Which shined through to invitation to tender. No mater whether the subject had anything to do with something user facing.
One way to suppress something is by diluting it or distracting from it with a bunch of slightly different options. Kind of like the spoiler effect in first-past-the-post elections.
> Netscape died because browsers became a part of the baseline operating system.
You're ignoring the actual EEE part.
Microsoft didn't just include a browser, they included a browser that didn't follow standards and had a bunch of its own extensions. Then since Windows was the largest platform, lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls and other IE-specific features on websites, and users had to switch to IE even if they preferred a different browser.
> Steve Jobs put it best (to a different company): You're a feature, not a product.
Steve Jobs did the same thing. You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers to force developers into making native apps where Apple gets 30% of the developer's revenue and can exclude apps that compete with their own services.
> Excel was a vastly superior product to the competition. I used it back when Lotus was still running DOS character mode.
The history of Office goes like this. There were many competitors and many users preferred the competitors, but Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems so that people would use Office instead.
Then, once Office had the most market share and everybody was locked into it because all their documents were in its proprietary format, they used the revenues they denied to competitors to make Office better. Now you say, look how good it is! But how did it get there and why is nobody else?
> The only really competitive product today is Google Sheets, because collaboration is a killer feature. And Google Sheets is doing very well.
now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.
> Java was never a Windows replacement.
It wasn't supposed to be an operating system. It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems, which Microsoft successfully impaired.
> Instant messaging died out due to Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Slack/etc.
This is the one where they basically failed, because the network effect counterbalanced the leverage of the Windows monopoly. If your friends had ICQ then you installed ICQ even if you already had MSN Messenger installed as part of Windows.
But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE. If they'd succeeded in getting MSN Messenger into a dominant market position then they could discontinue or cripple the non-Windows clients and lock people into Windows with it.
> Google dominates email, not MS/hotmail.
Outlook.com has 400 million users.
> And spammers killed the "run your own email server" approach.
Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach, by marking email from small email servers as spam even when it wasn't. Plausibly on purpose.
And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange. Gmail did that by offering 1GB free storage back when that was expensive and subsidizing it with Google Search revenues.
> You have to use their browser on iOS and its purpose is to be less capable than competing browsers
This is not a serious take. Safari on iOS is a very capable browser and crazy things have been done with it. Where it does make it difficult to replace a dedicated app, this can be ascribed to security more easily than "Apple wants one of its major iOS features to be bad".
> Microsoft intentionally made them crash on Microsoft operating systems
This is not a serious take. I'd love to see proof of this. There are lots of reasons Office became dominant, some of them even anticompetitive; "MS made competitors crash" is probably not one of them.
> It was supposed to make it easier for users to switch operating systems
This is not a serious take. Java was never intended to make it easy for users to switch operating systems. Sun did not make "supplant Windows!" one of its KPIs, and the continued dominance of Windows is neither here nor there when evaluating whether Java was successful. Java's pitch was to make writing platform-independent code easier, but at best that's tangentially related to having users switch OS's.
> Outlook.com has 400 million users.
So?
> And we got large email providers to begin with because they were the ones who could overcome the Microsoft lock in to Outlook/Exchange.
You're replying to a comment about people who run their own web server, so talking about Exchange lock-in is neither here nor there.
> lots of web pages started using Windows-specific ActiveX controls
Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s
> The history of Office goes like this.
I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.
> Java
Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.
> But it was clearly still an attempt to do EEE.
You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.
> Outlook.com has 400 million users.
"Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia
> Large email providers killed the "run your own email server" approach
Man where do you get this stuff? I wrote a mailing list server that had a brief moment of popularity, and the underlying (Java!) smtp library that lots of other folks use still today. I know a thing or two about smtp, and I gave up running my own email servers a long time ago. Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team. Barring some sort of massive change in the protocols, the home email server is dead dead dead. Microsoft and Google are the symptom, not the cause.
> Ah, that explains why ActiveX took over the web and why I'm forced to read HN on IE. /s
It did take over the web, for long enough to kill Netscape. Then they stopped caring because Netscape was already dead.
> I'm guessing you are way too young to have experienced it, because the history of Office was nothing like that.
You're denying that Microsoft caused intentional problems for companies making competing products on Microsoft operating systems?
> Again, I'm guessing you didn't actually live through that era. I did. Hell, I even wrote Java desktop apps for a living in the late 90s. Microsoft did absolutely nothing to prevent Java from taking over the desktop; Sun managed to accomplish that all on their own.
For Java to pose a threat to Windows it had to be a large enough proportion of software to allow people to switch away from Windows. To succeed they only needed to keep it below that threshold, not keep anyone from developing any Java applications at all.
> You can talk about "attempt" all you want, but there are still zero examples of EEE being successful.
Explain Internet Explorer's market share circa 2004.
> "Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide." - Wikipedia
So a number of users larger than the population of the United States is to be disregarded because one other provider's is bigger?
now their competitors are only the likes of Google and Facebook who get where they are by leveraging their own dominant market positions in other markets.
> Spam fighting requires a massive engineering team.
The problem is completely the other way around. Receiving spam is a minor inconvenience. The biggest problem with running a small email server is that messages you send are marked as spam by large email providers even when they're not.
How odd… seem to have all the facts at your disposal, yet use them to support the argument of the person you are adamant that you disagree with. Not a combo I've seen.
MS did destroy whole swaths of the industry that threatened it—on purpose. A lot of the initiatives failed later, but I'm sure they cried all the way to the bank and their record-breaking yachts.
That a lot of their competitors stumbled on their own was simple fate. Every company stumbles once in a while. Unlike MS which was bolstered by monopoly, a single significant mistake meant the end of most competitors. MS on the other hand was heavily insured with a river of money after the IBM deal.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, you have a point. Though it'snot about license, but more about market position. I'm also afraid that MS still has plans for Linux, but they are on the first E atm.
I have exactly the same fear. Trying to lock down boot on PC is pretty much exactly what they seem to be doing. Hello to shitty OS on PCs... (yes, every mobile OS is pretty bad)
However the whole computing paradigm has changed. Laptops/PCs are now 'trucks' and the 'cars' of the computing world are phones, tablets and consoles. Ie. Laptops and PCs are mainly used for work now, and lots of that work is being done on Linux. Lenovo ThinkPads can be shipped with RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu. Several Dell laptops (including the highest end workstations) can be shipped with Ubuntu. Framework and System76 of course are Linux friendly/default. And most other makers allow disabling UEFI from the BIOS menu.
Considering how much of MS' value is derived from Azure and that their main competitors are Linux-first (Amazon, Google), it'd be idiotic for them to try kill Linux again. You're right though, they'll probably try. I just have faith that enough hardware makers care about their users more than propping up WinTel like the old days (both Linux and AMD have made massive inroads).
It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of the measures being put in place which would make this possible, especially given MS's history.
To give an analogy, there might have been a time in East Berlin where people could have said: "It's fine that they check papers before crossing into West Germany. Your fears will be reasonable when they no longer permit entry."
Secure Boot is about to become the consumer standard with Windows 11. Popular online games are already starting to require it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Netflix and other streaming services require it.
Keep in mind that this is currently possible only because some governments were looking into persecuting MS for abuse of market power when Secure Boot was standardized.
> Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary.
Ignoring the question how much revenue they'd lose from such a move I don't think they could easily.
Windows doesn't consist only of Microsoft's code, but there is the whole legacy with OS/2, DEC/VMS and certainly a bunch of external companies contributing device drivers and things. I assume there are notable parts where Microsoft can't easily figure this out anymore. Code was moved and changed over time and for open sourcing they have to be sure about each line being ok to open source.
Look at Sun's process for opensourcing Solaris and where even OpenSolaris still had some binary blobs in some parts in the end after they went through the multi year process of going through it and rewriting different parts.
There are legacy parts, but OS/2 subsys was never used, VMS was never supported. The OS has become more modular, would be easy to deprecate ancient stuff.
If anyone has the resources, it is MSFT, however investment in Windows has been on a downward trend, so don't hold your breath.
Who knows what's in the contracts ... and what code moved around and survived where MSFT has no license to share code. Sure most of the things are out, but one helper function here, one there, maybe some data type they are still using relies on code from there ... it is a huge codebase grown in different ways over decades. And a few lines in an old subsystem and some and some successor of some original license holder can use it to refinance all their investments by sueing Microsoft.
Microsoft still makes billions from selling WIndows OEM licenses. According to their financial report such sales increased 9% from 2019 to 2020. It appears you can absolutely make tons of money selling desktop operating systems in 2021. I'd be delighted to make even 1% of Microsoft's Windows desktop OS sales.
Personally, I think exactly what is ruining Windows as a desktop OS is trying to cloud-ify everything and render it more like a "future of computing" operating system packed with useless AI, Metro apps, cloud integration, app stores, and locking it down for normal consumers. I mean, look at Microsoft deprecating fantastic apps like Windows Backup or Windows Snipping Tool. They want to transform Windows into a "hip" and "cool" Nadella-vision OS and that vision sucks.
Microsoft is a fractal of infighting and groups at war with each other.
Cloud Services are cool, and Windows are the weird ones. But within Windows there's the kernel team who are cool and customer-focused, and the User layer as the weird ones. Go another level deeper and you have fights between C++ and .Net, or historically the crusade for COM+. Or the transition to UWP, which clearly at most half the Windows UI team got behind.
> Instead of open-sourcing Windows and treating it as open technology something the Cloud group would love they still jealously guard it as proprietary.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but I don't think this really works. Windows remaining proprietary is something that makes sense from MS's POV. If, say, Windows 12 were to become open source, would you use it as a development platform or as a server? I for one wouldn't, the reason why developers don't want to be on Windows isn't that Windows costs money, it's that Windows is bad.
It only makes sense for MS to continue milking Windows until the bitter end. Eventually it won't be worth the effort any longer and Windows 19 or something will be a Linux distro.
The TPM thing for Windows 11 makes all my home PCs (5+) not meeting the requirements for upgrade, even though they all work totally fine. I am seriously considering moving to Linux desktop and I am doing research on it. I have tried a couple times in the past and my experience with Linux desktop was terrible. I am still not convinced to make the move. Maybe I need a Chromebook kind of OS for my family and a different one for myself.
You might have heard it before, but here it is again: your "terrible" experience might be (partly or not) due to the fact that you've been using Windows for decades and know how to solve problems. On desktop linux, you might not, so you experience friction and frustration.
Desktop Linux is indeed somewhat behind OS X or Windows. I'm currently on (somewhat dated) Ubuntu 18.4 from 2018, and it is more or less on par with Windows 7 from 2009. For me that's not a problem, I liked Windows 7 and actually stayed on it until 2018, but keep this lag in mind.
I gave Windows another chance with Windows 8 after switching to Linux Mint KDE of all things and that finally killed off any desire to use it as a daily driver for good. I found KDE very understandable coming from Windows, in all honestly it felt more like "proper Windows" than the industrial accident that was Windows 8's UI ever managed.
A user-friendly Linux distro like that was a gateway drug into becoming a terminal jockey though.
Yeah, I feel your pain. I hate Windows more and more every day, but whenever I try to use a Linux Desktop for anything serious I find I hate that even more. Some day Microsoft will achieve a level of awfulness that makes Linux Desktop's awfulness the more tolerable alternative for me, but it won't be today.
Maybe if I get really really lucky Haiku will be usable for my use cases by then, but that doesn't look very likely.
I just can't bring myself to use Windows anymore, but I agree that Linux Desktop just isn't there. I'm mostly on Macs these days, but I still have a Dell laptop running Fedora 35.
Every other day something breaks. We're spanning the entire range here, from petty stuff like Firefox missing fonts, to straight up the kernel not booting. And obviously everyting in between, like apparently the only way to receive Exchange mail is to pay for a Thunderbird add-on. Or setting up the VPN requiring arcane SELinux magic.
I honestly don't see how one can recommend desktop linux to someone without at least a minimal knowledge of how the OS works and some decent terminal-fu.
As sad as it is your parent is right. Non-technical users should just get a chromebook.
I'd never recommend Fedora, non-LTS Ubuntu, or Debian Unstable for a Linux newcomer. Any time you run a development release, you risk breaking something whenever you update.
I've been happy running Cinnamon on Ubuntu LTS releases, and I like what I see playing with KDE as well. I've never had a kernel fail to boot (other than by hardware failure), and AppArmor is, IMO, far better at staying out of the way than SELinux. I can't help on the Exchange stuff, I've never had to deal with that.
It would be a little easier to just run Mint instead (Cinnamon being native there), but on Ubuntu you can just "apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment" and then choose Cinnamon the next time you log in.
Exchange access outside Outlook and Apple's Mail.app is PITA anywhere. Part of why you need to pay for Thunderbird add-on is that Microsoft asks for license fees. Nobody is going to pay that for you (and for Apple, it is hidden in the overall package price).
What SELinux magic you had to do for VPN? All VPNs that I've set up were fine with just clickety-click in the GUI.
Well you are running Fedora which is a bleeding edge distro aimed at Linux devs and is a testing ground for red hat. You’d have a lot less problems on Ubuntu.
I didn’t have many problems either except in regards to my nvidia graphics card. I’ve used Ubuntu for about a year (coming from Fedora for 3) and Ubuntu is more stable in that regard.
I hear this a lot. What I don't understand is why my own experience is so different. I don't find Linux desktop awful at all. On the contrary, I find it to be the best (by far) experience as compared to both Windows and MacOS. It's so much more convenient. MacOS is kind of OK, but Windows is nearly unusable.
What I've seen it is not just expectations, but also experience/inertia.
When somebody is used to (for example) Windows, he then approaches any problem the Windows way. But the Windows way may be not the optimal one on any other system. But since it was optimal on Windows and the person doesn't know anything else, then he will see suboptimal results anywhere else.
It is not just Windows -> Linux; the same problems will be experienced with Windows -> macOS. Even Microsoft had the same problem, when they redesigned Windows elements and the uproar it caused.
The key to enjoying Desktop Linux is giving up on the desktop environments that try to ape the Windows/Mac stuff and just biting the bullet to a tiling WM. It's a steeper onramp (e.g. you somehow have to know you need rofi to have an alt-tab window switcher) but it leads you to something different and better.
More generally, I only find desktop Linux tolerable when I start from very little and build up to what I want, rather than starting with a full DE—even the heavier "kitchen sink" XFCE variants are too heavy to start with.
There was a period of maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was really killing it with their defaults & configs under Gnome2 and it really was quite nice, but before and after that, I've found going minimal and all hand-installed to be the only way not to constantly be angry at my machine and experiencing all kinds of mysterious brokenness.
In fact, accepting that what you can productively and pleasantly do with desktop Linux is a different (though overlapping) set of things than what's productive and pleasant under Windows or MacOS, and not trying to do those other things at all, is the path to contentment under desktop Linux, I think. At least until it gets a lot better, which, with all the Wayland shake-ups, seems really far off, if it ever happens. I think it's more likely Google's replacement will get actually-seriously-no-bullshit-quite-good for desktop use, before Linux does.
For the most part, though, I just stay on MacOS these days. All the time I lost to Linux during my decade or so of using it as my main OS on desktops and laptops taught me a lot, so wasn't completely wasted, but I just can't be bothered anymore. I just want to start up the machine and get stuff done. MacOS gives me plenty of glitches, I don't need even more, plus a ton more crashes and weird behavior. And I do want my computer to just do a bunch of nice stuff for me automatically, without constantly (instead, merely often) breaking or glitching or requiring me to set all that up.
Maybe look at using Android for the desktop. Example Android-x86 (https://www.android-x86.org/) and others. The thing is, many people are already using Android for their smartphone. The jump to laptop or desktop is arguably smaller than many make it out to be.
Don't consider - just do it. One at a time. The more you consider, the lesser the chance that you actually will.
Linux desktop is terrible only as long as you perceive it as an "other Windows" thing. No, it is something completely different. Instead - make a commitment, embrace it - and you will learn to love it.
I actually tried this approach before, but eventually something would be come a last straw to force me give up. For example, as I know, there is nothing comes close to Windows RDP on Linux Desktop. On Linux desktop, it's very hard to remote to the local desktop session from remote, also no automatic resolution adjustment like RDP.
I don't know if I buy this explanation to be honest. I guess main business is office because nearly every company on the planet uses it (for no good reason in that vast majority of cases, and please don't be the guy that defends 'cloud-like' auto-save).
Azure? Not too much touching yet, I am an AWS guy (I can complain here just as much). But their office software and worse their office software APIs are abysmal. I am not registering an app and describe its function to access their beta graph API just to add a task to Planner. I fired the customer that wanted that.
Desktop does make money since most people use their office suite on a Windows PC. Windows isn't that important anymore, but it is still present. And the direction they go with TPM and notebook camera requirements is predictably bad.
You cannot open-source Windows anymore, that would probably be a legal nightmare. Maybe parts of it of course.
Some newer parts of Windows are open source, and in other places they've added open source software to the overall distribution (such as OpenSSH). But yeah, almost nothing legacy in Windows has been or will be open sourced, due to the difficulty of tracing which lines Microsoft actually owns and which ones they only have a license to.
For legacy components that have been open sourced, the only one I can think of is conhost, which they're trying to get rid of anyway in favour of the new (and fully open-source) Windows Terminal and its console component OpenConsole.
For what it’s worth, OpenConsole is conhost, and any improvements we make there go right back into Windows. We’ll probably[1] never get rid of conhost; the worst we’ll do is make it possible to update it without updating Windows so that folks don’t have to wait so long to get bug fixes.
[1]: so long as I am the engineering lead. You know how these big companies are :|
(edit to add: This isn’t meant to detract from your point, just to add additional info.)
I could have sworn that OpenConsole is a complete rewrite of conhost. Having double-checked the terminal project's readme, though, I see that I was mistaken in this belief.
Where do you place the teams in charge of the steaming pile of manure that is Teams, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Office 365 et al? Seemingly these turds have also dropped from the cloud faction. My experience seems to be that excluding dev tooling, all attempts by MS to bring productivity tools to this brave new Internet thing have failed dismally.
Office 365 vs Google Suite is not even funny, if you have to use O365, that is. Dynamics 365 looks fancy at first, but make a few clicks towards settings and you can witness 5 different UX languages, one half-assed modernisation attempt laid on top of another. Plus the churn from ongoing attempts, pointless rebrands and nonsense invented by bizdev guys. Add the famous MS back compat policy and you have a special kind of hell.
On every Windows computer I ever had, from 3 to XP, none of whose hardware was great even by the standards of the day, Solitaire opened instantly and was maximally responsive and crisply animated. They changed things in Vista, I think, which slowed it down by was basically fine. But the new one ("Microsoft Solitaire Collection") takes forever to open, requires multiple clicks to get a game going, lags, has ads, and is such a dumpster fire that one of the few joys I had in using my parents' computer when visiting them is now gone.
Would probably be faster if any other programs actually used their newer APIs. I really think burning people with WPF and introducing their shitty store was what many devs drove away. Wasn't really a C# (good language and good APIs in my opinion) guy for too long, but around the time Windows 8 was released, I left for greener pastures and didn't look back very often.
I think you might be just remembering the good times and forgetting the bad. When I first upgraded my box to XP, things weren't very snappy. Even Notepad took a second to open. The OS definitely required more RAM and CPU power than its predecessors.
Despite this horrible injustice, you still visit your parents, right? :)
It's just that in the 20 minutes I sometimes have to kill on their computer I went from playing commercial games from my childhood to good solitaire to…bad solitaire. So much for nostalgia.
In 3, mine sweeper and solitaire where added to teach people how to use a mouse. Ads, slow loading and what not would have gotten in the way of doing their jobs.
Once computers (especially windows) became ubiquitous they had to pay for themselves since user training wasn't picking up the bill anymore .
> Yeah, there are effectively two Microsofts. The dev/tooling MS is awesome. VS Code is great, .NET is unsexy but very solid, their recent efforts on Python are commendable, I've also heard good things about Azure.
The same goes for lots of organizations, which makes it really hard to vote with your attention, time and money.
Facebook is another example. Yes, React was really cool when it launched, and great innovation comes from the Facebook engineering team. But is it worth supporting their engineering team when at large, the organization seems to contribute more bad to world than good?
I'm torn myself and not sure what to think anymore. Same applies to Microsoft. I really want to like the new Microsoft, but it's hard to just forget the past and see past issues like this, and it makes my view on the rest of their tooling to be less favorable.
The React team is like 7 people; I'm not sure that qualifies as a seperate organization within Facebook, since the rest of their 1000's of developers are just using React like everyone else.
While I do run windows at home you can easily enjoy the developer-centric Microsoft without enaging with the consumer side.
React is just one example, Facebook does a lot more engineering and releases it to the public than React.
I know I could just use and promote React without using and promoting Facebook-The-Platform. My argument was more around that by using React and promoting it, aren't I indirectly promoting Facebook then? Same goes for Microsoft or any other company that has a "good" side and a "bad" side. How can we support the good side without supporting the bad side indirectly?
At the very least, it results in people filing bug reports and feature requests which may in turn result in their products being more reliable, faster, etc.
I don't know what their policy on accepting code contributions from third parties is, but the prospective value of those contributions should speak for itself.
Just finished a major deployment and learned that Azure is a clown show. It has incomplete documentation, automation is a joke, and it has a horrible IaC implementation. They also use security to up-sell; secure versions of various services are only available in higher cost tiers. We are paying thousands/month in azure; the equivalent deployment in AWS would be a fraction of the cost.
Azure is a total ripoff and I will never use it again.
I noticed some parts of this as well. I just finished AZ104 and 80% of it amounts to "here is how you and your role-based subordinates can spend more money on these product offerings"
Nope, there's only one Microsoft, and it's clever enough to know that they had to learn to wear the Jazz hat when dealing with the oldies and the Punk Rock one with the youngsters.
No, there is just one MS. They try to do nice things for developers because they need mindshare. A developer chained to .NET and VS Code is a fantastic asset for them. But their goal is always to extinguish outside competition.
I mostly agree with you, but I'd point out that I think we apply different standards to cloud products than we do desktop products. Cloud lock-in is huge, and we're very OK with it--I think as engineers we respect the complexity of tackling it. Desktop lock-in super irritates us, but it's not really different.
Lock-in exists both on the desktop and in the cloud (and all kinds of other places in tech) because that's what the business incentives are. It's a race to the bottom and no company can resist it and still have shareholders. We need regulation to make them knock it off.
Regulation may help, but companies can blame themselves for cloud lock-in, not shareholders, engineers, or complexity.
Prior to being a SWE or SRE-SE I worked in Network Engineering. Seeing how most companies ran their DCs and treated the devs that were required to use them was illuminating. Everything was a "service desk" staffed with generally ticket handlers. It took ages for them to get things done, and you were almost always hunting for the person on the desk that just "got things done". I worked nights and my engineering line would get clear day-time-appropriate requests at nights because the most qualified engineers were in school and ended up on the night shift. Compute scheduling was no different. You now have APIs for both of these jobs.
My point being that the real innovation that made developers turn to the cloud was APIs. All these "availability zones" didn't exist in most company DCs, usually someone had a lever to throw to switch DCs at best, and even then they really weren't used. Downtime was expected. Those very same APIs could've been made by a coalition of those small and medium companies using the same technique Google used with Kubernetes: open source. By the time such a project started, it was already too late, and public clouds had built what they'd built. Not having open hardware also contributed to the problem, but again, nothing a coalition couldn't overcome.
There are more like 50 different Microsofts, one for each major product.
My theory is that there are still some old Ballmer loyalists left over running some of these products. Dark UX is not what Satya wants.
And yet here we are. I think it’s more likely that Satya wants a perception that he doesn’t want Dark UX and then use it everywhere. Windows and azure is full of this stuff and it doesn’t make sense that people are secretly going against the CEO’s vision and direction.
I don’t expect CEO micromanagement, but if Satya wanted a positive user experience seriously, then the solitaire PM wouldn’t have added ads or at least would have removed them after the backlash.
I think Microsoft has really improved (eg, WSL, vscode, GitHub) but think it’s just PR about how great everything is supposed to be.
It’s like the Amazon ads that show happy workers getting degrees and stuff. I’m glad those things are happening but it’s just PR.
Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm triggered.
Dotnet is probably the most polished, most modern language out there, and I have no idea what would you call sexy... Maybe all quirks with javascript or the mess that python is with special functions and the like?
> Not trying to start a flame war, but I'm triggered.
Please untrigger yourself :)
I probably used the wrong word, but I agree. What I meant is that the entire .NET platform is very solid even though it doesn't get a lot of mindshare. Wasn't meant as a putdown of C#.
It's a non-trivial percentage of the ~25M professional programmers in the world. It has plenty of mindshare, just not within the communities that feed the HN userbase.
This is actually a feature of MSFT, and not a bug. (I’m not a MSFT apologist, and have had my issues with them too)
They could have kept on the Ballmer path and been a Windows and Office company forever, milking the existing base. That path would have likely turned them into IBM. Less relevance, less R and D, and tons of share buybacks.
Instead they bet the farm on emerging computing models. They pulled their money and top talent from the legacy products, and moved them into the new world. So the newer stuff is improving (Azure isn’t AWS but it’s a credible #2) and the old products lag. That’s just a result of the priority decision. They had the courage to starve their cash cow.
If there was a last straw to me ever using Windows again - I think that info was all I needed.
That’s my final nail in the coffin. It might sound dramatic - but it literally - - clearly - shows that there is no intention on providing value to customers with their software anymore, whatsoever.
It’s only going to get worse from here, and I for one am glad I already bailed.
…damn, but really? That hurts my childhood a bit. I have distinct memories of Solitaire from the 3.11 days. :(
I was truly starting to believe MS had changed seeing their work with vscode, but they have let me down even there. All of their recent work has been locking it down more and more - all of the remote development extensions are closed-source, so is live share and most shockingly, their new Python language server.
Yes, this all rings true. I recently did a fresh install of Windows 10, the first fresh install I think I've done in about 13 years (XP at the time, later upgraded to 7 and eventually 10). I was struck by every step of the installation process:
Can we have your information?
Can we have your information please?
Will you allow us to collect and sell your information?
Please give Edge a try, it's great, really!
And yet I can see that VS Code is great, though I don't use it myself. I use lsp-mode every day, and I think that's even more important than VS Code itself. And the LSP is brought to us by Micro$oft as well. Definitely a dichotomy.
I will give credit where it may be due however - I did install WSL for the first time, and while not perfect, it's pretty good! Better than Cygwin for sure is my initial impression.
I know you probably know this, but Cygwin, WSL, and WSL2 are all very different from each other in approach despite the superficial similarity of purpose being to run Linux/POSIX applications on Windows.
Cygwin is a source level API adaptor, so recompilation is required. WSL is an ABI adaptor like the reverse of WINE. WSL2 is an adapted Linux kernel running in a featherweight VM.
> Fuck that. Life’s too short for that bullshit. Vote with your time, money and attention.
As someone who really isn't the target audience for HN, this sentence has a different meaning than you likely think. I vote with my time, money, and attention - and that vote results in me still using Windows. I've tried various Linux flavours every ~2 years for the last 20 (starting with Knoppix), and every time, some component doesn't work and I'm into the terminal within an hour of booting. Usually something to do with sound or display or wife/ethernet. Back in 2007ish, I managed to put in the numerous hours to make it work, and used linux for several years before something arbitrarily broke during an upgrade and I moved back to windows.
All that said, everything about Windows 11 looks terrible, and I'll not be downgrading to it. I haven't written them off entirely - I will stay on win10 ltsc for the time being. Did the same when windows vista and windows 8/8.1 were out (along with trying ubuntu, linux mint, kubuntu, etc)
Android users don't like iOS, and iPhone users don't dig Android. Are they both right, or wrong?
"What on Earth are you talking about?" ... The point is, whether you like change or not is utterly uninteresting; most people don't. Vote whatever you like, and you have to suffer from Microsoft's BS forever (with only a hope that it sometimes eases). The alternative is that you could suffer from someone else's instead. The choice is yours.
(No one really falls in love "trying out flavours" of alternative software; the little differences just get in the way. However, it works both ways: those who don't usually use Windows find the little differences in Windows annoying.)
> No one really falls in love "trying out flavours" of alternative software; the little differences just get in the way.
As stated, I used linux for an ~3 year period, using only one distro (I forget now if it was Ubuntu or Mint). When I've tried again, it's not "the little differences" that bother me - it's that my HDMI port doesnt work, or my audio doesnt work, or my wifi doesn't work, or (in my most recent attempt, using ubuntu 20.04 with hardware released between 2016 and 2018) all three at the same time.
> Android users don't like iOS, and iPhone users don't dig Android. Are they both right, or wrong?
They're both right. There are legitimate concerns with both. Same with linux, and windows, and mac OS.
The point is, with windows, I hack around to make things work in a way I like, but they work to begin with. With linux, in my experience, it takes hours of hacking to get things working at all, and then they arbitrarily break weeks to months down the line for no clear reason and require many more hours to figure out why.
MS dev communities slowly become wastelands if you look for an expert. Granted, you will find a massive amount of consultants, but if you have a specific technical problem you are often more or less alone. Perhaps they all hide somewhere, but I couldn't locate them.
I think Windows is also slowly decaying. Windows 11 is basically a slightly changed UI with new requirements for TPM or that a laptop has a front facing HD camera. Many probably know the type that makes decisions like that in large companies...
Yesterday I signed my daughter up for her own minecraft account. It was maybe the worst computing experience I've ever had thanks to the Microsoft accounts. Made her a microsoft account with accurate 'kid' age, could not buy anything. Made myself a parent account, added her as a kid, still couldn't buy anything.. went to her account, added credit card, couldn't buy anything. 2 hours later of following tutorials around giving her enough "xbox / windows 10" permissions and eventually just disabling "request before making purchases" I was able to buy minecraft for her. Repeat the process (tutorials, guides to the microsoft preferences maze, jumping between accounts) to figure out how to let her join a local multiplayer game.
Anyways, it was quite the insight into the level dysfunction that can ship when a company is that big, and I'm sure somewhere a manager is defending every step of that process and that it's my fault for not understanding it. Wild.
I have to agree stop using companies with shitty ethics. It's hard at first but over time most of the issues will be resolved.
I feel the same about Facebook, people bitch about them endlessly but won't stop using WhatsApp or Instagram.
I am from Brazil, before WhatsApp existed, some cellphone companies were charging what was at the time 1 USD per SMS message sometimes.
When WhatsApp first shown (not owned by Facebook yet), some cellphone companies literally sued them (and lost), claiming all sorts of random bullshit.
Now everyone here uses WhatsApp, some services are WhatsApp only, as in... the service is basically a bot on WhatsApp and you send commands to that bot using WhatsApp.
I tried to not use WhatsApp, but when I saw the SMS fees... well, WhatsApp did forced them to bring fees down, but not by much.
I also tried to convince people to use other software, it worked partially...
1. Telegram, people here use this whenever WhatsApp is down, then they delete it again.
2. Kik, I was using it to talk to some poeple in other countries, for various reasons slowly this failed, the most bizarre one was a friend that lived in Alabama in US, seemly her phone company (AT&T I think?) detected her Kik usage and charged every single video chat we had as if it was an international phone call... as you can imagine this killed our Kik usage quite fast, we now use only Discord and e-mail.
3. Discord, only young people use that.
4. Slack, only works for work.
5. Matrix, Irc, etc... nobody I know in person uses it, people just refuse to use "techie" stuff.
6. ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc...: these were wildly popular here, ICQ was kinda killed by MSN, that then was killed by MS themselves for some reason. Nothing replaced MSN here.
Not only that but in a lot of countries network providers actually give away free data for certain preferred apps like Whatsapp so the financial incentive for people to keep using it is even stronger.
Never knew that kik had video call feature, but I dropped to use it not long after it appeared.
There was Duo for Android to make video calls. Might be still around, but it is only for calls and not chat, so not really useable if you have to find other ways to send chat.
Skype was one of them that I still use, but it is probably ancient technology for younger people. Skype was offered to use for free of data charge by telecom company, so you could make video calls everywhere.
The problem with Whatsapp is that it comes together with Facebook and whatsapp is terrible for privacy - you have no control over how your number and other available information will be shared with other apps, who will collect that information and someone will publish that information available as database.
I hate to break it to you, but your friend who claimed her phone company started charging her for international phone calls when you chatted using Kik probably just didn't want to talk to you anymore. AT&T and other providers don't do that.
There was no lie, the person at first was confused where charges came from, and sent me a copy of the phone bill, by reading the bill carefully I noticed they were charging for IM calls.
It's not that easy. For example if your education establishment or employer uses it (google suite is a common one). You stop using WhatsApp, and undoubtedly lose contact with at least a few people unable or unwilling to switch to an obscure-to-them alternative of your choice. You order food from a restaurant which hosts its website on azure or aws? Supports them indirectly. Just living in a modern technological society has net negative ethical impact because you don't have control of the supply chain.
The world is complicated. Solution must be systemic. You cannot rely on everyone doing the right thing.
I don't think it's fair to place the blame on consumers when WA/IG were bought as competition killing moves (and it's hard for the average person to see that they are the same)
Discovered Linux when I bought an old Dell i5 laptop from ebay. Loved it - it just doesn't get in my way and gave me some time back. Almost like I'm retiring from the world of working bullshit. Then bought a another old desktop with W10 on it and immediately repurposed as a Linux project box. Didn't even finish Win setup. Just immediately popped in a Mint cd and install was nothing to it.
While Win now controls my computing experience like I'm some crofter on some clan chief's land, in 2021, linux actually handed back control and gave me more capacity to not have to deal with stupid windows shit. Time, time, time. Now I'm intent on getting rid of android. Google is starting to creep me out. Want to move to a linux phone. Just not quite there yet. Time, freedom, personal sovereignty.
How is this different from Apple ? You can't even install a custom browser engine on iOS. If Microsoft forced everyone to use trident or whatever people would be up in arms, but when it's Apple then it's suddenly about "tailoring your experience". Meanwhile WebKit is the worst engine available and is intentionally gimping features to prevent you from bypassing app store tax.
Agreed, Apple is far worse on being monopolistic and draconian, but people give them a pass because they have cool design. Everything they're doing with iMessage, the iOS and Mac App Stores, AirPods, Safari, etc. are all extend and embrace, without the trepidation that Microsoft has had.
I think it is because using Apple is not mandatory. Apple is an aspirational brand, you use their products because you want to. Microsoft's products are not; they pushed hard their product everywhere, and were difficult to avoid, if you wanted something else. That itself caused a much friction, and when they start to steer you somewhere you don't want to go, their products are not exactly going to be your favorites.
This is a desktop OS. You're comparing Windows 11 not letting users select which browser they'd prefer on a PC OS to iOS, which is a phone OS. A more apt comparison would obviously be to compare Windows 11 and macOS. macOS doesn't force you to use Safari, lets you specify which browser you'd like as a default, and respects that decision, only bothering you about it on major updates. Even then, only bothering you with a popup that asks if you'd like to try it.
This issue isn't about which browser you prefer it's which browser gets opened by built in search on start menu. Not a fan of the decision but I would never use this feature and turn it off anyway.
I agree. My jump was from Windows 7, when MS announced requirements for Windows 11 that seemed to try the trusted computing thing again. I have Windows 10 in a VM. It is not horrible once debloated, but my daily driver at this point is PopOS, which I can happily recommend.
If only we could now get linux phone done ( and no, mobile ubuntu does not count ) to where desktop is today, I think I would be content.
Sarcasm is exactly what I wanted to show. You do not like the price as if there was a wide choice of options. In reality, this is the price of a change. Otherwise it's is akin to free, because the company would have to pay the difference for you.
Not sure what is meant by where "desktop is today" unless you have a desktop that consists of thouchscreen display and no keyboard and mouse, but I would not want a phone that is operated as Linux desktop, because phone has to be phone first.
There are some others - Sailfish OS, Pure OS, Plasma Mobile and Manjaro for ARM - there are a lot of Linux based phones nowadays(Android is one of them).
By phrase reference to desktop, I mean that desktop experience on Linux for me is now comparable, if not noticeably better than Windows. I am genuinely more productive now despite certain gripes with Gnome. Stuff generally just works. The stuff that does not work, I can emulate or put in VM.
Now when I try to compare my current linux phone ( Pine ) with default Ubuntu to a cheapest android phone, the experience is just lacking. I know other OSs are available, and they were still underwhelming at the time. Has it gotten any better? I would love to try Librem, but I can't justify dropping $1999 for US version ( the non-US version has heavy lead time now ).
I am not saying the option is not there. It is just not ready for prime time.
What makes me incredibly cautious is every time I log into teams from my personal (only) computer it presents me with the option (defaulted to yes) to "Allow My Organization To Manage My Device". Very creepy and regardless of what rights it grants to the company, I don't like it. If the company wants to have power over my device then give me a work laptop.
I don't know why everyone's always so "wound up" about Microsoft's browsers being forced upon us so much, all of their browsers since IE 6 have been extremely useful, primarily in terms of downloading another (better) browser... :|
How about the fact that some extensions like Remote Development [1] and LiveShare [2] work only on proprietary builds of vscode, and not on code-oss or vscodium? I get it that those are proprietary extensions, but they still show up in the extension marketplace for OSS builds. And I don't see a technical reason why they wont run on OSS builds, other than that the extension builders want it that way. And these extensions are important enough that you will end up downloading the proprietary build while you are too busy solving something with your team mates. This is a very subtle way to push even privacy-aware developers to use the proprietary build with built-in telemetry.
And how about the fact that the de-facto reference implementation of LSP client (most language servers are developed against vscode) uses many undocumented and non-standard extensions [3] that are hard for other clients to implement?
These are dark patterns that claims to be FOSS-friendly. It could be that MS still has split-brains about their approach to open source [4], but that is still an indication that MS still has part of their old anti-user soul in them. Personally, I liked vscode, but I value my freedom even more. Emacs provides all the functionality and the freedom I crave. It is a bit harder to learn and modify - but I can live with that.
It's very nice for you that you can tolerate a Linux desktop. But for an important product like Firefox, the discussion is about the monopolistic tactics that the dominant OS is doing.
What would be interesting to know is what % of Windows users actually want to use Windows (as opposed to being forced to do so through corporate/organizational dictates).
I don't think this is strictly true. There are 2 underlying factors:
1. Public companies have tons of disclosure requirements, which makes it far more likely that someone notices their misconduct. That's a really heavy bias in the data.
2. Private companies are typically smaller, so the range of ways to abuse customers is smaller. Nestle can buy out the water rights for entire regions; the median private company probably couldn't buy enough water to mess up a city.
> got me thinking that maybe there’s some hope for them as an organization
I've gradually come to appreciate that it's a bit silly to anthropomorphise mega-corps like MS, Apple, etc as a single entities, where such thoughts make sense.
At the top a lot of greedy self serving bullshit happens, which seems to be some sort of inevitable capitalistic or economic force of scale. But the effects of scale cuts both ways, hidden away individuals or whole teams will be doing their own thing based on a completely different set of principles and ideals. Although the umbrella they operate under burned my trust and patience long ago, I can still recognise the merit of tech that emerges from the individuals that work there.
The reason that gets brought up in discussions like this is that Microsoft got that flak back when they abused their monopoly position to push IE. Comparing iOS's and Android's market position to Windows' from that time, it's not the same landscape, especially for Apple.
However, as a human being, I hate them all for their practices. If it wasn't for the free software movement, I would have definitely dropped IT as a dear hobby of mine.
Android, where you can make any app default, where you can use any browser engine, where you can sideload any app including alternative app stores? Sounds super anti-competitive...
Totally. Which is why I’d pay over $300 for a dumb phone like the Mudita Pure with its FreeRTOS-based, open source OS.
Call me stupid, but I’d be far happier without Apple or Google in my life, and am willing to pay the price for that in terms of inconvenience. I’m way happier without Microsoft, that’s for sure.
The stuff microsoft got hated for in the 90s is now standard operating procedure for giant tech companies. Not to defend MS, but perhaps 'create a monopoly and then agressively expand sideways into other areas to extinguish competitors" is the default behaviour of these behemoths and it wasn't anything specific about MS apart from them being the first one.
Not for nothing, it seems that various governing bodies are slowly waking up to the idea some of those giants have really gotten a little too big, so there is a chance of some real action similar to action taken on MS.
The main difference is that in the 90s, the US still had real physical activity underlying its economy, and pretty impressive at that. You smack Microsoft, but who cares - there's still a wide industrial base, hundreds of thousands of small to medium enterprises, global monopoly on entertainment, semiconductor supremacy, high-end aircraft and car manufacturing, etc.
That's gone - industry got outsourced, the gap between Intel and TSMC is growing every year, Boeing's reputation will unlikely to ever recover, Hollywood is a joke, oil and gas extraction is perceived as villains, journalism in terminal decline, finance and pharma pure rent seeking. Software is the only thing left where Americans can say with a straight face that they're proud of it - hence the unwillingness to taint the crown jewels
As a next step, you could order a phone from e solutions, or slap their system on one of the supported phones. You don't lose too much convenience-wise (I think) compared to a normal Android, but you're one step away from the Google ecosystem.
Pinephone is considered enthusiast/experimental. Librem has a 52 week wait and is overpriced. The solution should be Calyx, but they've decided the solution requires paying a bribe to Google in the form of buying a Pixel - talk about missing the point, and missing your target market right out of the gate.
>Facebook, Apple, and Google all got away with their monopolist power grabs because they don't have any 'S's in their names for critics to snarkily replace with '$'s.
Workaround: Fac€book, Appl€ and Googl€. It even works for the parent companies: M€ta, Alphab€t. The European union saves the internet again!
Use case: remember when Googl€'s motto was "don't be evil" rumour says they changed it to "be €vil"
I actually like win11 but this is such a bullshit move. And fuck the corporate speak. Everyone knows why you're doing it: to boost Edge adoption.
Who do you think you're fooling here? Self delusion?
I'm going to side with Microsoft here. I don't want apps to be able to change file/protocol associations on their own. If I want to set a different application as a default browser, I will go to the settings panel and change it myself.
They are removing the option to be able to even set the protocol association. This has nothing to do with protecting users and everything to do with protecting their telemetry gathering.
When I set a default browser, if the OS needs to open a web page I want to it to open in that browser. If Apple can do this properly, so can Microsoft. Tired of the excuses and corporate double speak bullshit.
It's untamed corporation behaviour, not bullshit. Not on this level.
Also, learn from Microsoft astroturfing manual, you should not use harsh sentences nor expletives to convey an idea. Try to frame it as a subtle doubt, in a polite way.
Unless you are a reverse astroturfer, in that case, you're doing well.
No, they've been doing this crap for decades. They don't deserve any respect or courtesy. It needs to be called out for what it is when they just brazenly think they can do whatever the hell they want because they somehow own the computer because it has their software on it.
I think microsoft is in the right here. They own that search box, just like how google owns firefox + ios + android + chrome + safari. Giving the windows box to google would be reducing competition overall, which is sorely needed in the search space. Superficially it appears to reduce user choice, but we know that on the whole that's not true.
As someone heavily invested in Firefox as a user and an extension developer, I think Mozilla deserves what they get. Their product managers have been taking the same anti-user route as a megacorp with a leading product, except Firefox has been bleeding users for years, and they have been alienating long-time users and developers on several fronts.
Take the state of Firefox extensions. Firefox is the only browser where you can't install an extension until you disclose the source code to Mozilla. Both Google and Apple allows users to install an extension from a local source in the release version of Chrome and Safari, without uploading the source code to their servers.
It's not just a privacy issue either. Mozilla employees can and will veto your unlisted extension that you were forced to upload for signing, so that it can be installed in your browser, and you wake up with your private and unlisted extensions having been remotely blocked by Mozilla.
It is reckless and arrogant to have this attitude, especially when you're a small player in such a competitive market.
Of course, in the end users are losing the most, and Microsoft is definitely abusing their position. But we can no longer pretend that Firefox has any chance to survive with the current management, and we should definitely call them out on cultivating the same anti-user stance that they have been fighting against.
It's relevant to point out that while Mozilla is (rightfully) fighting against user-hostile practices, at the same time they treat their users in a similar way.
Browsers have become platforms, just like an operating system, and Firefox is the only browser that took away the freedom to install extensions in your browser, on your own terms. They disrespect their users on their own platform just as much as Microsoft does when it comes to setting a default browser on Windows.
Microsoft to Block Windows 11 Browser Workarounds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29201027 - Nov 2021 (105 comments)
You can no longer bypass microsoft-edge:// links using apps like EdgeDeflector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29191244 - Nov 2021 (171 comments)
This is a lot more obvious once we change the URL from the submitted one (https://www.howtogeek.com/768727/microsoft-calls-firefoxs-br...) to the article it's copying.