This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I can't believe Micro$oft is still trying to pull this shit after it was fined for this in the European Union.
Hopefully, they'll fine them again, because this is unacceptable.
No, I don't use Windows, but people who use it and are less tech savvy should not be jumping through so many hoops to make the switch
Apple is almost as bad with Safari on MacOs and you can't even really change the browser on IOS. But everyone shits on Microsoft.
Android is getting there too You have to jump through a lot of hoops not to use Chrome
Thank you! I don't like either approach but I hate that only one gets this much flack
I think the reason for the dichotomy is their purported motivation for doing so.
I say “purported” because I know Lemmy has a bone to pick with Apple’s privacy claims, and I would prefer to gracefully avoid it, but I will say that, regardless of the extent to which Apple collects user data, it is easy to ensure that they aren’t hyper-aggressively monetizing it.
You can change the default browser, but it doesn't matter since all of them are forced to use Apple's WebKit.
Exactly my point. Pretty much just a different skin
You want us to use Edge? Then stop sucking, and respect our privacy. Oh, wait...that's the antithesis of Microsoft's philosophy.
And Google's, Apples, etc, etc.
Mind, I'm not saying that to excuse any of them.
At least at one time MS "produced" (that is to say, acquired) some really great software (Office 4.2 was a massive game changer). But they couldn't wait for everyone to be always connected to implement their telemetry game (which they were actively developing in the mid 90's).
Interestingly, if you install Chrome or Firefox, you won’t see them as choices. But if you install the Brave browser, you will see it as an option — and if you select that, then whenever you click on a news link in the Widget pane, it will come up in Brave.
Fick everything about this
Maybe someone should sue them for overly tight integration of their browser into their os...
Might work, I mean, it worked once before, lol
Apple standing on the side: 👀
Apple got its own EU internet browser ruling to deal with recently: https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/apple_safari_browser/
Naggy advertising pop-ups and forced installs vastly increased resistance to Windows 10. So I don't get how Microsoft doesn't know it would scare users away from Edge.
Giving marketing the benefit of the doubt, I'd blame executive management for the aggressive push. They're the ones who push for draconian DRM and crunching based on their feelings.
Yeah, it's baffling that they don't learn these lessons, but these kinds of corporations already exist to exploit customers by witholding their products until money is exchanged - in fact they have whole departments dedicated to preventing piracy - so the general lesson of "don't enshittify your product to attempt to exploit customers" is sort of an existential threat to them.
So they must avoid the lesson, and they do that by replicating that same exploitation relationship internally with their employees, creating a low-information environment where the actual creators of the product cannot be honest with management about what the product needs, and customer service can't relay the feedback they get from customers. Any information that does get to management, they are free to ignore. Every command flows top down, just like the money flows bottom up.
Some may call this malware?
I would!
For this example, I’m using Google Chrome
So you wrote this whole article about how to switch to the only browser worse than Edge. Well done.
RIP antitrust laws
I just set my default browser and install MSEdgeRedirect. It's like EdgeDeflector, except it's not been abandoned. Its latest version even "grounds CoPilot", as the dev so nicely put it.
Their design philosophy is so bad. They've made probably the most bloated web browser in existence. No wonder people go to Chrome, it doesn't have 90% of the useless clutter.
Did you guys know you can run Edge on Linux natively? I installed it for shits and giggles once before throwing up and apt purging that shit as fast as I could.
Oh, you can run VS Code as well, but I think that IDE is actually kinda useful. At least for the embedded PlatformIO shit I do. If there's another IDE with that sort of integration as well as Github, then I'm willing to try it.
For a breif moment, you were the entire user base on Linux.
I couldn't find a complaint with a quick googling.... probably because Google is now a shitty place to find stuff. But check out the process for changing over to another browser. It's so fucking annoying.
My solution was changing over to another operating system. I've had it to here with Microsoft, and with Proton on Steam being great as it is I really had no more excuses to stick to Windows.
Yeah my laptop now runs Mint and my pc windows because of reasons (scanner soft, I know Photoshop really well, 3dsmax, I'm lazy, ...).
Every time I open up my windows pc it had rebooted and not stayed in deep sleep, and everything is more and more just complicated.
I spend more and more time on my laptop... where it doesn't feel line I'm on a browser without an adblocker. I also excuse any (rare) problems way easier as I think it's just a bug, not someones feature.
For the average home user, Linux is a possibility. But MS has the office world captured.
Just try to replace Office, their directory services, etc, without having costly (as in time) issues with all sorts of things.
That said, MS is caught in the middle with O365 and Azure - no reason to use Windows if they just host it all for you.
I mean, any time I use one of the browser versions of the office apps, if what I need takes any longer than a few minutes I always switch to the desktop app because the browser apps are frustratingly slow to use.
That said, I'm still switching to Linux because I use LibreOffice at home.
Not just switching the default; have a go at removing Edge entirely, its a huge PITA.
You've gotta manually take ownership of Edges files, including its updater service, force that service to close and delete it, then finally delete the files for Edge itself. If you do that out of order, or you install certain system updates; it'll reinstall itself so you have to do it again.
From there some simple things like the news+weather taskbar widget and the start menu search will no longer open/function. (they ignore your default browser setting and forcibly use Edge)
Wow, that's annoying. I'm gonna hold off for windows 12 when the European union forces Microsoft to not be such an asshole.
Linux all the way.
Windows is only on kid’s computers. Because they need roblox and generally games run better on windows.
Most stuff on Steam runs very well these days. Anti-Cheat and DRM are the main reasons stuff doesn't run.
I agree we should use Linux instead of Windows, but some softwares only work on Windows (mostly games) so...
I do all my gaming on Linux at this point. If you don't play games with invasive anti cheat and even then some of those work now
You can run a Windows VM with KVM and pass through your GPU for Gaming or other GPU-intensive tasks. It works surprisingly well.
To be honest it's quite PITA to make it work this way. I chose to not play games that don't work on Linux at all.
Can you drop a link? It is best if it is Arch linux link. Thanks.
Based Linux runs almost the entire web while cringe Windows is used to play fancy video games
I have Linux on my desktop but still use Windows on my laptop for some classes required for my degree.
Additionally, my partner uses software for her work that isn't supported on Linux. And there's not really a Linux alternative that would work because she needs file compatibility with other people in her career field.
So no, it's not just for kids playing Roblox. It's also for people that have to interact with the proprietary OS space when Linux alternatives won't or can't.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’ve updated your PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you may have noticed that when you click on a link for a website, a PDF document, or a variety of other file types, you will now be sent to Microsoft’s Edge browser.
For example, even when this was written, the first time I opened Firefox, it asked if I wanted it to become the default.
For example, bring up Windows 11’s new Widget pane (by clicking on the Widgets icon in your taskbar, the one that looks like a two-paned window), and click on one of the news items that appear there — and the link will open Edge.
Another possibility is a tool called EdgeDeflector that was originally created to intercept any links in Windows 10 that were Edge-specific and rewrite them on the fly so that they can be opened by the default web browser.
I did a little browsing and read that its latest version, v1.2.3.0, would work with Windows 11.
Update April 15th, 10:23AM ET: This article was originally published on October 8th, 2021, and has been since updated to include directions for allowing the Brave browser to open certain specialized Windows links, to add a note about Microsoft blocking EdgeDeflector, and to reflect changes in the process of switching browser defaults.
The original article contains 635 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
