I just saw some clickbait article this week that said by some metric I don't remember, desktop safari moved to number two (presumably number one is Google Chrome) beating Microsoft Edge.
I remember how reaction was relatively swift with Apple and book publishers' illegal collusion even though Apple was not a major player yet, or maybe I am just wrong on this which is possible, I didn't follow the news closely.
In any case, I think Microsoft is doing a fine job by itself getting people turned off on edge by adding all sorts of bloatware that I doubt people will use edge as their only web browser.
Microsoft is shoving their software down people's throats with impunity. Just yesterday I had to install VS Code for a Homebridge integration, and out of nowhere they slapped a Bing search bar bang in the middle of the desktop.
I usually go overboard with uninstalling anything related to Microsoft on my Windows installs (bar the OS obviously), but this time, I didn't have a say, the plugin required that.
VS Codium and other forks don't (maybe can't) use the official VSCode extension market. Because a lot of goodness, like the ability to refactor and debug PHP, is coming from the extensions and the extension ecosystem, it can be a big deal.
However, one can still add that marketplace, if one wants to do so. So people could still have access to the same extensions (which might be a privacy and telemetry or spyware risk), but at least not have the in-built telemetry.
Many of the interesting extensions (Microsoft's language plugins, the remote extension pack, the .NET debugger) are licensed only for use with Visual Studio Code. Even if you hook into the VSCode marketplace, they could sue. They probably won't unless you're rehosting VSCode externally or something, but the risk is something most companies probably don't want to take when the software is free as in beer anyway for the "real" builds. (And if you're telemetry sensitive... just block the domains? I know, easier said than done, but you can do it.)
Initially you just didn't get Settings Sync as it uses a Microsoft account and you had to use a different extensions gallery (but the MS one still lets you download extensions as a file to install into Codium). Nowadays you also lose Remote Development, Codespaces, Pylance, some C# features, and various other MS authored extensions.
There are so many people out there, who should know better, or even do know better. Yet, for whatever reason install VS Code instead of VS Codium. Even when you inform people about the existence of VS Codium, they still don't move and keep using VS Code. It is like they do not even care at all.
That this is even allowed to happen in organizations is already an oversight. It should not even be allowed to install VS Code on organization machines or use it to ever view or work on the code of an organization.
To me it looks very unprofessional. It is like a shiny toy has been dangled in front of their eyes and they reach for it, never willing to let go of it, even when they are being told that there is telemetry and non-reproducible builds and whatever other mistreatment of them as useds. Like children they stick to their shiny toy, even if they could have the same features, same UI, just without built in telemetry. (And they can still install any extensions they want later, if they trust that extension or marketplace of extensions.) It is very similar to people installing Chrome instead of Ungoogled Chromium. I have personally experienced how uninformed people at a university went wide-eyed, thinking I was talking crazy stuff, when I told them that it should not be installed on university computers, since it is spyware.
I wish I could get people to get off their behinds and improve the situation. But it is of course very difficult to always create awareness and people are so damn ignorant. Often I am not even suggesting, that they should switch to free software tools yet. They could literally have the same experience, but no, most of the time you cannot tell them anything and they continue to take us with them into dystopia of our own making as a society with collective uninformedness and ignorance.
Some extensions by Microsoft are proprietary (such as their C# debugger and C++ extension) and can only be used with VSCode. For other extensions, you may be able to use them. See the docs at https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#ext...
I didn't know about https://open-vsx.org/. Very nice! But besides those languages, they are also missing things like the remote ssh extension, which is a big deal breaker for me (and I assume many others regardless of language).
Well, how do you know that? How do you verify, that all telemetry is really turned off, without being able to reproduce the build? How many people truly turn it off after install? How do you know whether there are any other unwanted parts in the software you just installed? What about the next update? Do you want to run a package sniffer after each update, over the course of a month or so, checking all traffic in detail, to be sure that it only ever communicates to the outside world, when there was a justified purpose?
You are giving away sovereignty of your own device/machine.
> Who cares? Most users don’t need a reproducible build of software they want to use, they need working software.
It it this kind of mentality that is the problem. Your "who cares" is not going to fly, because it leads right into the abyss of surveillance and spyware. "who cares" is the basis for not being informed about ones tech choices. The basis for not being aware of issues regarding privacy. At a properly managed software making company it would also result in you being told, that it is part of your job to care. To answer the question, if there was any question: I care. Informed people care. People with ideals care.
The issue with not caring is also, that organizations will draw the wrong conclusions. They might impose rules, which force me to use some tool I do not want to use, simply because "everyone is OK with it", while those people all don't even care. If they don't care, they should not get a say in the matter and should not be a decision basis or a point of reasoning for making a decision. This is how the collective uninformedness and carelessness results in bad decisions. Basically the majority drags down the minority, for the worse of all of us.
> Calling people “useds” isn’t going to help your case.
Well, that is what we are, when we allow ourselves to be spied on. They use us and our data to drive data mining, profiling and ultimately profits. Besides, I wouldn't throw it into faces in 1-on-1 conversations, for the sake of a constructive conversation, even if it is the truth, because it runs the risk of the other person (a) not even understanding what it means, (b) thinking they misheard and replace with "users", and (c) risking them to be offended and turning deaf.
How do you verify that VSCodium has no hidden telemetry or other spyware features? Do you simply trust the anonymous people behind it?
If you build it yourself, how do you verify that there is no spyware and no new spyware is added on every update? Do you have the energy to read every single new commit?
I am not using VS Codium myself (nor VS Code), but if I was using it, then yes, I would trust those people more than MS. For 2 reasons: MS people are working for MS, so at some point in their lives they must have made the decision, that working for MS is acceptable, with all the history MS has. The second reason is, that MS people built in the telemetry in the first place, and for a reason, so they have no incentive to remove or disable it, while others might.
A having a reproducible build means, that the hidden telemetry would need to be hidden in the publicly available code. Whereas telemetry in VS Code can be bundled in and no one would ever see that code, except for MS. If I was using it, I might actually, in a motivated night, look at the code and try to grasp the general picture of where goes what. Or perhaps see the diff between VS Code code and VS Codium code, to see, whether they added anything and from where they removed things.
The dependences I was installing were for a plugin to control Xiaomi hygrometer through Homebridge to be able to use it in HomeKit. Among those packages there was VS Code (for some reason) some C++ redists, Python and some updates from Microsoft as well. But I can confirm the bar was official and from Microsoft.
Upon uninstalling, those dependencies, the bar never appeared again.
"bar" is an overstatement if you like me were reading that as one of those early 2000s era browser toolbars. A recent Edge update added a fairly large and persistent Bing icon to the right end of the browser's menu bar. It uses a speech bubble design and is likely part of the push for AI chat powered Bing search. It's obnoxious that you can't hide it but it's more of an eyesore than an actual problem.
Oh thanks! Frankly the most annoying parts of it were that it made it harder to reach for the overflow menu (which was previously the right-most icon) and that it auto-opens the sidebar on hover delay (which then requires clicking to dismiss).
I had been using Swiftkey on my iPhone and in the middle of typing something, my keys disappear and is replaced with, what is effectively, an ad to use "Microsoft Speech Recognition". Extremely annoying to be in the middle of typing something and having to say "no thanks" to extra MS crap they are trying to shove onto you.
Previously, they also added a Bing AI button to the keyboard, but they did actually make a setting to disable that.
Edit: Upon mentioning this to a coworker and digging into this a bit more, it may have been that I accidentally clicked the microphone to bring up that screen, and that it didn't target an ad. I'm not quite sure what happened though, so I'm leaving my comment as is :)
Because they can do that. No surprises there and as I said before, Microsoft has not 'changed' as the methods are different but the strategy has always been the same and they have gotten very clever over the decades.
As long as their stock goes up, techies are always last place.
I have no skin in the game, but even I am starting to think the obvious thing here:
Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine.
The equivalent Microsoft apps on mobile OSs aren't degraded - they aren't even allowed to exist in the first place.
Microsoft is bringing the desktop experience in line with mobile here. Doesn't make it less terrible but contrasting Apple and Google as better actors in this sense is an odd take.
Microsoft apps exist on Android and they're not forced to open links in Chrome on Android. If the user chooses, they can open on Microsoft Edge on Android.
The user can set their own browser preference - and Google doesn't force them.
Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but it's on them.
None of these bug tech corps are in the right here, but MS is being more anti-competitive than most.
So the correct iOS parallel is not Apple’s refusal to allow non-WebKit engines. But Apple’s hypothetical refusal to allow links to be opened in WebKit-flavored Firefox. Which, for the record, it does let you do.
To be precise: No, they don't. Their engines are based on the same codebase, but they still are running their own installed engines.
In contrast, Apple doesn't just refuse to allow non-WebKit engines. It requires everyone to use the pre-installed, Apple-provided engine. You can't use your own build of WebKit.
I know I'm comparing a turd sandwich to a puke pancake here, but in what way is "Apple doesn't allow other browser engines" less anti-competitive than what MS is doing?
Umm, MS Teams on Adroid forced me to install Edge to open links. Even the copy action pushes "haha, we wont give away this link you moron" (in corp speak) to the clipboard.
I use Teams on my phone regularly and have never seen this happen. Clicking on a link takes me to the web page without any problems, even in my default browser which is Firefox.
I think they are using a dark pattern now. I opened a link in Outlook (Android) after a recent update and I got a popup to open with Edge. I didn't have Edge installed so I was confused for a moment. Just below the big colorful edge icon was (a much less visually prominent) option to open in my default browser.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought that they were forcing me to install Edge too.
One variable many people don’t consider is that Microsoft gives organizations an incredible amount of control over application behavior when trying to maintain a through line for rights protection of organizational data. Like not allowing organizational data to be opened in apps that aren’t approved, authenticated with user creds, and supportive of rights management (no printing, no saving, etc.).
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with GP’s experience with Teams, but just pointing out that when thinking about MS app behavior on any platform, it’s a variable that can be present in the corporate context which many “users” remain blissfully unaware of, or see it manifest as these weird rules and behaviors and not acting like other apps. But there can be an entirely different set of user stories at play beneath the surface.
The equivalent apps on iOS aren't even allowed, Android allows other browsers (including their browser engines) just fine. Firefox is the only browser to bother though, as most of the chromium wrappers, including edge for android, are happy to just build a skin around the default web view.
I have that setting set, and various links still open in chrome instead of firefox for me. In particular, links that are opened via gmail, maps or the "google" search widget.
Maps open links in Firefox for me; Gmail by default in-process with webview, but that is disable-able in settings and then it opens links in the default browser. For the google search widget, I don't use it, but after a quick check yes, it does use webview too, but also has the option to open in browser.
I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.
It is not chrome webview. It is android webview. Yes, it is similar to chrome engine, but it is not chrome. Just like edge is not chrome.
It is also per-app choice. If an app decides doing something in a particular way, it is not the system's fault -- some reddit readers do the same, for some reason. For now, apps do have preferences to open in browser instead, and that option respects the default one.
Microsoft has been playing the vendor lock-in game for his entire life and they were and are very successful. It is an interesting exercise to think if this time is different. Again, Microsoft always compete with better technologies from other vendors.
One aggresive move that Google or Apple could do is to really help companies in the migration to their technology beyond saying RTFM and use our support. For example, augmenting these locked companies with Google staff. You cannot expect a big corporation to move all the gears alone to change their technology.
It is not the technology, it is the business execution.
Virginia Tech recently notified everyone that they are ditching Gmail in favor of outlook because of large cost increases coming. Google seems to be going backward in that regard:
“ A key factor in the decision was cost. Under the new Google license model, an equivalent amount of Google cloud storage would cost more than seven times what it will cost the university on the Microsoft platform.”
I think people care more about their phones than wether they use Goole docs or Word to put together a report at work which nobody is really going to read and if they do they'll ask for a PDF print out anyway and not the document itself.
Same for other products. If OneDrive or MS Teams was all of a sudden really annoying to use on iOS and Android, but Slack and Google Meet would work really reliably and smoothly then I think a lot of people would just starting to use the non Microsoft alternative because nobody likes to deal with annoyances on a daily basis. We have seen this already, when Zoom came about it captured a huge part of the market really rapidly because it did something so much better than Teams did before. It didn't even require a dark pattern, now imagine how many more would have left Teams if dark patterns would have helped on top of that.
You massively underestimate how much business world (corporate especially) depends on MS Office and how deeply integrated it is into companies eco systems.
Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me.
They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but enough for me to be consistently reminded that generally their incentives and goals run counter to what I'd prefer.
my understanding is that within microsoft there are different factions competing with each other for i don't know what, dominance maybe. it kind of makes sense since microsoft has several different strong products that can stand on their own (unlike google whose main income is from advertising so really all google products subsume to that), and some of these factions may well genuinely love FOSS.
They're FOSS friendly because they don't have a choice.
They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in. Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees, becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that hosts a lot of open projects.
According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace open source now" argument:
* their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous attempt to discredit their competition that took over a decade
* the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu and other spyware with settings that reset after random upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS
* if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its boot menu.
Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the changes are just superficial.
> According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates.
Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?
> Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems.
You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to install Windows?
In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to boot automatically. It won't mess with secureboot keys or anything. In my case, I removed the pc's default ones and installed my own and signed ms's key with mine. It works fine.
But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated bootloader).
If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big" updates.
I had OSes on separate disks. Win7 and Arch, used UEFI to choose who to boot.
Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux
I have rEFInd installed on window's EFI partition, and it boots either windows or linux (on separate drive though). It's been like that since skylake came out, and I never had issues with it.
As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues. If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing it.
The whole stack of .NET Core, WSL 1/2, Windows Terminal, and Visual Studio Code has been an effort to keep Windows relevant as a development environment for web apps. Nothing more. It was desperation, but well done. Given their history, I'm quite sure that many people in their ranks pinched their noses at being forced into these moves, but the PR department did fine work in spinning this as a "kinder, gentler" Microsoft. The people who haven't been around since the 90's took the bait, but organizations don't change like that. Old timers are still there (looking at you, Brad Smith), and people who have left have invariably been replaced by similar people. That's how hiring works.
The big difference is that Google and Apple are largely in the consumer space. MS, with Teams, is in the enterprise space where user experience isn't part of the buy decision.
If CEOs, CTOs, CFOs all start having annoying issues with Teams, Office, Azure, etc. on their MacBooks and iPhones then you can bet your right arm on it that it will affect corporate buying decisions.
Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently better than another.
Microsoft is actually the one reacting here. They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases; Apple and Google took advantage of that to build two walled gardens, which ended up dwarfing MS's own empire. It was inevitable that, sooner or later, MS would have gone "If this behaviour is now allowed, why should we not do it too?"
This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and Google for that. If you want something different, call your representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.
Simply put, people don't love Edge as much as they love Chrome. The browser bundled with Windows 11 is naturally Edge, but users who use Chrome install Chrome of their own volition, so forcing them to open links in Edge is extremely annoying.
I don't use either chrome or edge but why would I use a clone instead of the real thing?
I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later scams.
> I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption.
It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.
Writing a browser engine is a lot of unprofitable work just to get to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams. Especially when you already wrote one and couldn't keep even that in pace with standards and the evolving web technologies.
Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.
Edge was, initially, Chrome but degoogled and it had (and still has) a lot of great UI innovations, like a vertical tab strip that's just right. Their wide use of hovering menus that can be pinned to become sidebars is honestly good stuff.
Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).
To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.
Previous Edge was a complete refactor of IE with a brand new js engine. Extremely lightweight and low power compared to Chrome. Their goal was to be 100% compatible with the modern web.
Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.
Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.
That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.
I doubt "love" for the software is involved here. I think many users believe Chrome is "the internet" just like they used to believe the Google search page was the internet, or Internet Explorer before that. This impression of Chrome was built on the fact that it's a solid browser but was enforced by Google with the same underhanded practices they applied for years.
My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall, just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for years, so people are used to that. The synergies between those devices and the Google services services makes it easy to stay and hard to leave.
People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome on a fresh Windows install. So I don't think anyone thinks that Chrome is the internet (that's actually something Chrome had to overcome when IE was dominant and installed by default).
Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have been told and essentially trained to install a new browser if they want a good internet experience on Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early 2010s.
Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with Windows is crap" inertia right away.
> People have to use "the internet" to install Chrome
That's not been true for a while. IT preinstall Chrome in most companies nowadays, and obviously it's already on the phones and tablet you buy for the home.
Yes, MS dropped the ball after killing Netscape and being humbled by antitrust laws. But the current situation is as much a product of Google's "growth hacks" and mobile monopoly.
Maybe in a corporate environment. But not when it comes to personal devices.
Most tablets sold are iPads. They don't have Chrome pre-installed. In North America, most phones are iPhones that don't have Chrome pre-installed. Most personal laptops are either Windows machines or Macs which don't have Chrome installed. Its pretty disingenuous to pretend as if Chrome market share comes from devices with Chrome preinstalled. People go out of their way to install Chrome.
There's also the fact that as soon as you touch anything by Google you'll get nagged with adds and pop-up suggesting installing Chrome.
Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!) option to install Chrome and make it the default browser. CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.
People seem to have forgotten how Chrome captured the desktop market to begin with.
For many many years it was effectively almost impossible to download freeware without accidentally installing Chrome. Sites like download.com and even sourceforge wrapped everything in custom installers that would automatically include free trial of an antivirus, maybe some adware, and Google Chrome, unless you were aware and clicked the secret hidden opt-out link that was almost the same color as the background.
Attributing Chrome's popularity to it being included in download.com bundles doesn't sound accurate at all. If anything, the "Download Chrome!" link on Google.com yielded far far more installations.
Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after release when they finally added extensions and themes around 2010.
People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps were moving to.
Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were great bets that were copied by everyone else.
As annoying as for Edge-loving people who then buy a mobile phone and are then forced to "open their links" in Safari or Chrome.
But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people live on phones, and when they have to interact with desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably, the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there is little or no choice in that world.
The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the force of the State.
Granted I haven't used Chrome in years, but I find that firefox integrates remarkably well from phone to pc. The menu of open tabs on other devices is invaluable to me (although idk if Chrome has this too)
Sadly it integrated even better before they rewrote the mobile browser and threw out every useful little feature that had accumulated over the years – with the old mobile Firefox, you were able to forward links from other apps directly by sharing them to Firefox without actually having to open them on your phone.
New Firefox is too dumb for that – you actually have to open that link in a new tab before you can send it to some other Firefox instance (and then close that useless tab again).
Android actually lets you live without even having a default browser. It's great since you can use multiple browsers in place of multiple browser profiles. Apps will just ask what browser to open the link in. It's great.
You can set Edge as the default browser and links will open in Edge.
You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.
Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android is relatively open (certainly more open than any mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For instance, Microsoft added support for running Android Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done completely without any involvement from Google. That is unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets pushed around here is baseless.
> They were effectively forced to let the web be an open field by antitrust cases
They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a factor until years after the fact.
The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that MS "won" with IE (95% market share!) and then pretty much lost the stomach (or focus/budget/etc.) to advance the web in any way.
The specter of further anti-trust action still hung around. It's only been relatively recently that it has become apparent that the country's leadership is not interest in trust breaking anymore. But now Microsoft is playing catchup.
> Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
They could not, because if they did that cartel suits would be opened within hours. I expect both the US and Europe have such suits ready to go just in case, and Microsoft (hypocritically) has amicus briefs on standby.
It probably decreases revenue. Like the Edge "enagement" manipulation with Teams.
Are there managers who has their pay tied to some KPI? I have such a hard time believing there is a from above decision to do all these user hostile changes turning their main product into a BS joke.
Well, it's more likely that it's because the greedy MBAs are unable to chase shareholder value, so they just pushed down the task into fiefdom leaders.
I mean, it's Edge that they are work so hard to push. What do they actually gain from doing that? It's stupid all the way down.
> old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured market they can brutally take advantage of. Even today, Apple has banned all browser competition on iOS, and only Safari is allowed to run. All competitors must just re-skin Safari to obey the monopolistic demands of Apple. Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
But Microsoft, to me, barely has a drop of the anti-competitive evil of its competitors. Apple mints hundreds of billions by banning competitors, locking them out and charging 30% rent on their monopoly. Microsoft... just wants their re-skinned Google Browser to not die.
> Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
They tried; with different means, but they expected the same result. That's what the antitrust case was about.
> Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
While I have the same opinion as you wrt Apple behaviour, there is a difference: Apple doesn't have the market position like Microsoft did. You can function perfectly fine in society without any Apple product. That was not the case with Microsoft, they did everything they could so you had to use Microsoft system. Communicating with your bank or with government or public offices? Microsoft products were required. Apple has not such grip on the market and that makes the difference.
One could argue that offering a walled garden from the outset is more honest than the Microsoft strategy of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and ultimately the latter creates more of a monopolistic threat in practice since walled gardens almost definitionally can't capture most of the market.
Not entirely a correct narrative as both Edge, Safari and Chrome have had their own private link protocols embedded in their own browser products involving other dark patterns.
> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser.
Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one way, continues to act that very way still.
> You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff".
Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.
We often look at companies as a single monolith but that isn't conductive to productive discussions.
OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one.
One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.
Maybe if they stopped trying to become monoliths, people would stop considering them as monoliths?
What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith.
Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
That's sort of like condemning all of the U.S. because one state does something you don't agree with. In a large organization different departments may do different things and have different incentives, and until they overstep too much may have quite a bit of autonomy.
Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
Eh, no. That's a reach. A company policy would be something that the whole company is expected to follow. If only the teams that coordinated on it follow it, that's not a policy in any way, it's just a choice that a portion of the company made, it could be something that the company doesn't care about one way or another or it could be something that wasn't addressed prior to release (if you think every decision a team makes gets complete review and is totally understood, I think you're wrong).
Even a monolith is made up of many atoms all sticking together.
Just because your particular outcropping isn't coated in digital blood doesn't mean you're not part of the problem.
If a company sent out two crews of people and one crew gave out flowers to strangers and the other crew punched little old lady's faces in, would you still crow about how you're only handing out flowers?
A friendly nitpick: the word 'conductive' is a physics term. The term which means "tending to promote or assist" is 'conducive' with no 't', pronounced 'cundoosiv'.
> Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others are conducive to consumer spending. Notice that conducive is almost always followed by to.
I didn't pick .NET, parent did. And regardless if the ecosystem is nice to work in or not, Microsoft tries their true and tested strategy of EEE with that ecosystem as well.
The example is not .NET in general, but that specific event when Microsoft reneged on open development tooling[1]. For some people, that was the moment they stopped trusting "new Microsoft" to keep their word (though for me, it was when the Python language server was replaced with a DRM-locked, LSP-noncompliant one[2] a bit before that; unlike with .NET hot reload, they didn't backtrack there). I can think the company makes great open .NET tools and at the same time not trust them to close those down on a whim.
Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of MIDL[3] went, by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language grammar in the docs, because there is no language grammar in the docs[4].)
[4] I vaguely remember a GitHub issue where a Microsoft employee explicitly refused to provide one ("not a priority" or some such synonym for "we don't care, fuck off"), but I can't find it
The Core and Standard things was just there the aid the transition from Framework, which is now complete, any remains will soon be phased out entirely.
You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1].
Ok, but even if it's about .NET Core; As far as I can tell the creation of .NET Core was a business decision and not because MS suddenly wanted to create a better product.
More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.
Aside from the cost of licensing Windows which makes small-sized non-Windows VMs cheaper, there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.
> there's been a strong pro-Linux bias in academia for a long time that nobody likes to talk about.
Who doesn't like to talk about it? It's so much easier to integrate components on Linux over windows. Why would anyone willingly use windows for data analysis?
I like VSCode too. I use it for Clojure, Python, and C#, which I am working in this year and haven't for a very, very long time. I was pleasantly surprised at the progress it has made.
Ironically compared to Windows, MS has been willing to kill backward compatibility more to improve .NET to make it more cross-platform, something that must come from a very different part of the company, probably the one that got the "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" mandate.
I make no apologies for their history, but I like these tools and I like them much better than Java, which also has its place. (This isn't a throwaway comment, notice I said I use Clojure, it's my favorite, which runs on the JVM.)
VS Code is pretty great, and I agree the remote dev extensions (ssh) are hands down the best feature added. I also like that it had a directory tree and the integrated terminal early on, that's what got me hooked.
C# is nice, but the experience in VS Code is sub-par and I think it's the VS (not code) managers that are responsible for that state of being.
I'm not familiar with another code editor with an integrated terminal, at least not one as complete as VS Code's before VS Code. I could be mistaken though.
This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.
C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.
I spend all my time writing services and HALs and even when I do need a UI, it's in the browser, that I forget there are people who still code actual GUIs for Windows.
How so? Because they sort of open source the tech and made it possible to build for other platforms?
C# is a great language taking over the advances of Java and C/++ making things a bit better, but intentions didn't make it any better: owning the devs.
VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs
Buy out of github, owning the devs
Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.
Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
> Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
> And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?
Can't speak for GP, but the o365 Word is better than Google Docs as well. And while you can view Visio in o365, would be nice if you could edit the diagrams. Odd, but Visio is still imo much better than alternatives in that space.
This is standard business affairs for pretty much every big company. Apple, Google, Amazon, and many other fortune 500 companies, have all bought up dozens of businesses and their products and rebranded them as their own. Not sure why we're solely picking on Microsoft here...
Because Microsoft is the subject of this thread. We could pick on other corporation, MS isn't the only one, but whataboutism isn't an argument.
And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.
The relationship between VSCode and commercial versions of Visual Studio is the worst part of .net, especially the omnisharp debacle.
Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales.
VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work.
Uhm, I'm currently running abour 4 binaries that have that famous `exe` file extension on FreeBSD. C# runs on FreeBSD just fine. There is no bootstrap available for FreeBSD - must either cross-compile or use linux emulation.
Its interesting to look at their 'product' history b/c they have a few shining moments of 'getting it' as far as OP means. .NET especially realizing Linux was a real thing and to at least outwardly 'embrace' it..
Then there are moments like these the OP points to .
Nobody said that they have never made a good product. But in no way does this mean that the company focus has been on making good products vs strong-arming their way into things.
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
> "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft."
> Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades?
> Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?
Like all big companies, when something comes along that is growing fast, where they don't have a product, they might choose to buy an existing one to get in the market. On some of them they might spend lots of time and money building huge amounts of new technology and improving on some of them so they were hardly comparable to the original. SQL Server is one example I worked on. The original sybase product had a pretty nice sql language with stored procedures, but the implementation didn't take us very far. It was basically awful. We spent years building out a new database with that same sybase surface layer, we added lots of new things over time - new execution system, new query optimizer, integrated it with .net, etc. Because we didn't have to develop a new surface or sql language, it helped a lot. I always wondered how much that cost Microsoft to buy it. I'd say even at 100 million it was worth it.
The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is:
> And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
Also arguably, the ubiquity of user agent sniffing is why. You get what you measure. You want your UA to contain "Mozilla". By god, you'll get it one way or another.
Yeah, I was a little hesitant to suggest that this was caused by Microsoft given that. I actually agree that this problem is caused by user agent sniffing. I could see someone arguing the other way, though.
Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
Switching to a system of "user agent claims" have been up to any one of the browsers, when they had a majority of marketshare, to push through. Mosaic/Netscape/IE all had a chance in the Web 1.0 world, unfortunately, none of them did.
I agree with that too, and admitted to such in my previous comment. Still, being the first practitioner of this comes with a certain responsibility for its proliferation. It's not a sole responsibility to your point, but it is primary in a way. It's a lot easier for others to decide to copy what someone else did than to decide to be the first to do it.
To the same point, Google is arguably the reason it persists today given the popularity of Chrome. Just as Microsoft is arguably the reason it started. (I suppose I could have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment since "is so useless" could imply both but I don't think it's particularly egregious.)
One thing I have always wondered about the story - were servers in the mid-1990s really sniffing user agents to decide what pages to send through? I remember most sites were static .html files back then.
I think user agent strings were a terrible idea from the get-go, so I'm OK with Microsoft (and everyone else) fudging them this way. I think it'd be even better if everyone used the exact same UA string.
Apple controls the browser on iOS with an iron fist. Even if you are using a different app, its still Safari under the hood. And even though they control the rendering, they still open all links from Apple apps in Safari.
Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I choose to. That doesn’t stop Apple music from being the auto play choice even when I don’t use Apple Music.
If Apple’s products are so much better they should allow choice and bot be threatened by it.
If you don't use Apple Music at all, you can uninstall it from your phone and it will stop being the default choice. I do this on my phone without any problems.
I don't have an extensive list, but Apple preferring their own apps on iOS is not hyperbole and evident in lots of places.
Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list.
And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to install Apple Maps...
I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.
Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.
URL types for geo locations are standardized. And even if they weren't or the standard isn't sufficient (which one could reasonably argue), you are talking about features made by the platform owner. Apple can trivially declare "this is the iOS geo share format, apps intending to share or handle shared geolocations should use this format" and expect the ecosystem to deal with it.
That’s a good point, although it seems that this kind of behavior, at least specifically to map apps, is quite common.
Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS, searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes straight to Google Maps.
I haven’t been able to find the correct MIME type or URL protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me suspect that there is more to it than it seems.
> I may be wrong, but audio types are standardized, while geo or map ones are not.
Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others can?
Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do the same, if they wanted to.
Music settings like the Equaliser actually only apply to Apple Music. You can uninstall it but there is no systemwide equaliser, because why would you need one when you can use Apple Music?
Somehow they manage to control it with an iron fist but still allow apps to intercept links, opening them in their nasty embedded version with injected JS.
But they didn’t. There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.
Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
Google did user agent detection and would actively redirect Windows Phone users to degraded experience versions of things like YouTube and Maps even if the full versions would work fine.
That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.
Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]
I'm speaking from my own experiences. Proxying the requests to rewrite the user agent, the full mobile version of YouTube and Maps worked properly. Without rewriting the user agent I would be redirected to the minimal versions of the websites which had poor experiences.
> There were PWAs of the most popular Google products that worked just fine in Windows Phone.
No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time. User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google properties with Windows Phone IE.
Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube apps for Android and iOS were native.
> Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs.
I think it never broke past 5% of smart phone market. If this was a reason, I never heard. I feel like most people just were interested in something else and never even really considered it as an alternative.
>They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.
Sorry, but Google really isn't a saint regarding degraded experience. The shenanigans around UX for example using Google services in Firefox have a long, well documented tradition. They just aren't as overt and clumsy with it as MS.
yes on phones this has tradition to a point it started to got legislation involved
but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least tried, and it wasn't a problem for years
honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation, world wide
and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in monopoly (because with today markets you can have more power then a classical single market monopoly while not being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)
XKCD isn’t relevant to the sentence before, as comic notes, it’s about Apple.
the “Android makes you tap something to change your default browser!” was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped spreading because it was generating backlash.
Much like the “you have to confirm you enable sideloading!” alert in Android, it’s not clear what people want otherwise, a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult.
I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it harder to have the real conversations needed to get things back on track
> a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult
The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm before downloading each app. And then it will confirm before installing each app. And then it will confirm again because, well, I have no idea.
One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult. Piles and piles of them is.
Not entirely true on the latest version of Android. I'm not sure what the pattern is, but for most of the apps I've installed via Droidify, I don't have to confirm anything when installing updates.
Apple has an ads unit, there have been multiple other times when they have shown that user privacy is a thing that really only applies to other companies.
Apple's reasoning is that browser engines need JIT to run JS with acceptable performance, but if they were to give apps JIT capabilities, that would significantly open up the attack surface.
Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only. Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing people away from Macs.
They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts them in a similar position.
Google has a slightly different issue, in that for instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser taking the android world by storm is nothing good for them.
Firefox and Chrome accounted for a third of browser marker share when the iPhone came out. It came out with no App Store, and there was no guarantee MS would develop IE for iOS.
afaik, pretty much any user-agent changer works. At least that's what one of my colleagues uses to join MS Teams meetings on Firefox. Simply switch your user-agent to Chrome, and it should do the trick.
I'm not trying to excuse Google, but feature detection is really hard and browsers sometimes suck with their APIs.
I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.
There's no excuse for not being able to read the user-agent strings of the top five browsers in the world, especially when 2 of them (at least) are your own code base.
For a while downloading a lot of freeware would result in installing Chrome and setting it up as the default browser on Windows.
Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed the issue).
> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
I disagree here. Despite me using firefox on my android device and it being set to my default browser, many apps will still open in chrome (usually google apps - maps, gmail, etc) despite me explicitly asking it _not_ to do that. It's also not clear that it's using chrome, as it's the "generic" browser modal. The way that google services are bundled together on android and have limited interop (Samsung and Google Pay regularly fight with each other on my device for "who is the default payment method", and google is _not_ happy to not be my default).
Google have been pushing manifest v3 despite massive objections, introducing undocumented "fair usage" limits [0], require third party cookies to use some of their services to download files (gmail, gdrive). Google are drowning in dark patterns.
Microsoft make a ton of products that are still great to use. Microsoft Flight Sim? No jokes, it's just good fun from what I hear. Their Visual Whatever IDEs? They built that by creating great things like the LSP.
And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind of walled garden incentive mechanism.
I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we get there, the journey, matters.
Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that. Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me towards a troll state.
But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into something else.
And I see that happening with other things I love too.
Sorry, just to add: Those new OSes and new languages and the entire growing ecosystem of computer engineering may be beautiful. And this statement can be viewed as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns. And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to different outcomes afterwards.
Microsoft’s stock price over the last 10 years has soared consistently. They have a lot of admins at small/medium companies very very willfully and loyally locked in to their ecosystem.
Microsoft does not care if they piss off most of these people because they not the ones signing the contracts and the lock-in is SO BAD that even if they piss off the right people, making any change is way more trouble than they are willing to deal with.
There is an entire side of the tech industry with admins who only want to learn powershell and still think you can’t “lock down” Linux and mac machines.
I would replace "learn powershell" with "click buttons in some wizard". I have rarely seen IT person that wants to "learn" something new or automate some process.
I've been fortunate enough work with some people who REALLY wanted to automate and do things "right" but believed so whole heartedly in microsoft they anticipated every powershell release.... But I've seen more of the "click button in some wizard"
> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft
How? I mean, how does a degraded experience on android cause people to abandon windows desktops?
I just don't see the connection here: if Google, tomorrow, outright rejected any MSFT software on android phones, how does it hurt windows desktop deployment numbers? Maybe if everyone switched to Mac, but that would kill of android too...
This is what a working monopoly looks like. We've seen before this exactly how much crap users would put up with on the desktop, and still they didn't abandon windows.
There is nothing the mobile market can do that they haven't already tried to take windows market share.
In fact, there is nothing that the mobile world can do to Windows users that is worse than what Microsoft did to them, and yet those users are still chugging along happily paying for Windows every year.
Probably inherent because they'll fire you if you don't perform so you put dark patterns in or you get cut. I know they quit the official stack ranking... but I wonder
I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox.
Same with many other things - I can install whatever browser I want as long as it's a skin on their browser.
I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
I can install any app I want as long as it comes from Apple store.
Etc etc etc.
Yep, I vehemently disagree with your premise :). I think MS is looking at Apple's walled garden and saying "what if we could get away with some of that?"
(not disagreeing that dark patterns are despicable! My wife knows the scream that comes from my home office when I try to get iPhone or windows to do something I want! I just disagree that mobile os world is some paragon of user centric benevolence :)
For clicking addresses, I kind of get it: the author of the text didn't link it at all, so the OS (or whatever) gets to decide how to enhance the presentation which can include promoting a specific app. Not great, but fine.
For clicking links, it should definitely just use the browser unless an installed app's manifest has the domain registered.
Apple doesn't make it easy, but they don't make it impossible either, and at this point it's on the ecosystem to show Apple they want more of this by embracing what they have. So, sure, map links tend to open Apple Maps by default, but they can offer the user the choice to use other mapping apps, which they can check for by seeing if the OS will respond to their open url scheme. Harder? Sure. Impossible? Nope.
And for what it's worth, open a directions link from Google some time - for me, it opens Google Maps, which I do have installed, but don't prefer using. I choose Apple Maps because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive, but Google doesn't offer me that choice.
If you're navigating with a watch on, it'll notify you of upcoming turns (either through vibrations or by making a turn signal-like noise) without ducking/pausing your music.
No I am not. The Watch taps my wrist as I drive with different patterns for left or right. If I can't tell which it's indicating, I can quickly look at my infotainment screen and see the map. But I am not driving while looking at my Watch, no. That would be very dangerous.
I’d personally like the choice to be enforced by the OS. I’m sick of Google’s popup for opening links in gmail. It confuses my partner into thinking she has the link open in her regular safari, but the option to actually do that is the only one with no icon. On top of that they’re really trying to railroad people into using chrome, and she’s accidentally hit that option a few times. I wish the justice department would treat that as anti-competitive.
They are the same, but Firefox on my iPad syncs with my real firefox on: linux, windows and android. I can send tabs to and from it, sync passwords etc. What rendering engine is used is completely irrelevant to me most of the time.
Is this true for Maps and most critically Voice Assistants?
How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? How do I replace Siri with a different voice assistant?
You can't for either of those questions.
Nevermind that changing the browser doesn't actually change jack because Apple doesn't allow competition in the browser engine space.
All in all, it is just hard for me to take seriously an opinion saying that Apple allows for unrestrained competition on its devices and Microsoft is the big bad in this space. Historically, maybe true - but not even close to true now imo.
You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
However, clicking an address in a message and being told to install Apple Maps is super aggravating and I'm not sure if there's a way around that...
> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
Yeah, and its easy to open the link from Outlook and Teams in Chrome - just copy the link & paste into the chrome URL bar.
> How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? .... You can't
> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
Oh yeah, I forgot that the default browser app, should be under the settings for a different browser. Putting that shit under the Safari settings is deceptive and hides it while keeping it in plain site.
You can also do it from the settings of whatever browser you want. It exists under Settings > Chrome, and Settings > Firefox, but only if you have those browser installed. The option is always under Settings > Safari, though.
I've done a fair bit of trying over the years; based on your comment I retried today I still cannot find it under Settings -> Safari -> Default Browser App.
To be fair though, I did find it on my wife's iPhone, though under Chrome (she does not have it under Safari (or General either, where I would've expected it)). Still don't have it anywhere on my iPhone. I'll try to see if that's because she's ahead of me on OS updates or some other reason.
> I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control over the keyboard UI and how each key (if it even has keys — your “keyboard” can be literally anything) interacts with text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to “skin” the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult and that’d reduce the workload quite a lot.
I'm extremely interested in this; how come none of the keyboards I've tried depart from the same layout as Apple? Is it strict adherence to guidelines rather than technical restriction then?
To wit, some of the features that same-named apps/keyboards give me on android but not on iPhone include "hold key for alternative character" or button to "force" numpad. As well all keyboards I've tried have same layout and sizing as the original one.
I assumed it was imposed on them in some way I guess?
I don't think there's much, if anything, in the way of App Store guidelines for keyboards except that they do things with the text field the user currently has highlighted.
For instance the app Fantastical comes with a "keyboard" that inputs dates that are open on your calendar[0] and there exist a few rather nonstandard keyboards like Typewise[1].
Absence of features common on Android boards I would guess comes down to those patterns not being familiar to (and thus, not desired by) iOS users or in some cases software patents (there have been a few cases of keyboard devs receiving cease and desist notices from patent holders for using some UI pattern).
This is most likely due to developers of certain apps/inputs and not iOS/Apple themselves, there is a simple line of code to do this and from what I've noticed some overly-secure-wannabe-apps force system keyboard for certain inputs.
Yes, developers can disable third party keyboards throughout their entire app with an application delegate method[0], and when secureTextEntry[1] is enabled on UITextField the system automatically disables third party keyboards on both that text field as well as any immediately adjacent text field (likely for username+password combos).
The idea is that because keyboards can connect to the internet (with user permission), there's potential for data theft. It may also be possible to exfiltrate data from a keyboard extension by saving the data to an app container shared by the host app, which the host app can then send out with its network access.
Devs who don't know how or care to properly accommodate the variable height of third-party keyboards may use the app-wide opt-out to eliminate bugs relating to that, though I haven't personally encountered this.
For many years the keyboards were only skins, and for many years after that they would periodically lose their default status and revert to the built in keyboard.
Now it seems that the keyboards randomly hang / crash and don't come up when requested on the first try.
Apple goes out of their way to screw with third party competitors.
Yes, but Apple offers a neat well maintained garden that is the greatest thing as long as everything you need is there, and you don't eat any apples.
MS looks at it and thinks their frat party mansion (3 bedroom duplex) can do the same.
Apple gets away with it because that what their target audience want. MS target audience doesn't want it. If I wanted a walled garden - I would use Apple, they clearly know how to maintain it.
Actually I don't get how Apple always gets away with the sh*t they are doing.
All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.
Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
No, I am not a big fan of that Microsoft move, because I think they should respect the users browser choice. But I am even less a fan of Apple doing things nobody else is allowed (for good reason).
> All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.
The law you're talking about here specified that the charger itself must have a standard USB-C port. Apple gets away with it because 1. they don't even bundle a charger anymore, and 2. they ship a cable that allows the phone to be connected to a USB-C charger (Lightning to USB-C cable).
The new law that takes effect some time in 2024 for smartphones (amongst other devices) stipulates that the port on the smart device must be USB-C. Under this new law, essentially if a device is large enough then the port must be USB-C.
> Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
Another new EU law (the Digital Markets Act) takes aim at this specific issue actually.
I get where you're coming from, and yeah sure one could argue that giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft should do better, but in the end they are corporations who will do what is best for their shareholders, as such I am not in the least surprised over actions they take like the ones discussed in your comment and the article that started this discussion.
I think it's great that governmental regulation is finally coming to set the game rules for things like how general purpose operating systems must allow device owners the ability to install their own software (including real actual browsers with their own engines and everything), how communication apps must support cross-network communication upon request, and to standardise how we charge our smart devices.
For me it shows what kind of a company Apple is. Even companies like Sony (who install rootkits on your devices without your consent), comply with the spirit of the charging adapter law. But Apple tries to find a loophole, just to push their own agenda, at whatever cost for society.
But as you said, the other large corporations probably do it in some way too.
One could argue that the spirit of the law is an aim to reduce e-waste, and changing iPhones to USB-C will render literally billions of Lightning to USB-A/C cables useless within a few years. But there's obviously the argument that the existence of a need for those cables is in itself a source of e-waste production...
I swing both ways honestly, I love many engineering aspects of the Lightning port, and at the same time I recognise that having only USB-C to care about would obviously simplify my life a bit, even if I think for the purpose of a mobile phone it is an inferior port.
Uhm, I had pixel phone is the first Pixel. Once it started using wireless charging, I only use usb-c in three scenarios: I'm traveling and using a powerbank, I'm in a car and want to use Android Auto (for some reason my car has wireless Car Play, but not AA), or I'm on a couch and my phone is low on battery (never happened when I iPhone tho). For this reason, I travel with cables that have adapters for lightning. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
I realistically don't care what port is on my phone, but my wife's phone has USB-C and I have 9000 and 1 usbc cables at home.
> Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
This is due to security imposed on App Store apps: can't do JIT, and you can't have a reasonable JavaScript engine today without it. Frankly, I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses as long as everything synced.
I have plenty of annoyances with Apple, but what people usually bring up are from people just looking for reasons to hate on Apple for no reason.
Actually, I prefer wireless charging as well (started with my Samsung S3 around 2014), in part because I can use the same charger for Apple as well as for Samsung, but also because they have no wearout and I don't like cables. However, the point is, that all manufacturers had their own adapters in the past (pre-2007) and all but Apple switched to Micro USB and later to USB-C (because the law demands it). So if Apple would also have switched to USB-C we wouldn't have the discussion.
> I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses
Just to give one example from the top of my head: For years (5+), Apple did not implement a proper Push-API for Safari. All other major browsers had it, but because on iOS all browsers are just Safari, there was no way to have it on iOS, which is a pretty big market share. Push-API sound like some marketing stuff, but in reality it is pretty fundamental to a lot of use-cases like multi-user synchronization, chats, etc. So you might think that you don't care about the rendering engine, but in reality Apple can abuse the browser situation to control the whole JS ecosystem.
So I don't hate Apple for no reason. Instead, I hate them for very specific reasons. They also do good stuff (primarily for their users/customers), but for me the bad far outweighs the good, because it affects everybody who has contact with their customers and not just the people who decided they want to have an Apple device.
There all doing the same shit just in vary levels of degree and focus. If anyone thinks different, they are only fooling themselves.
Apple is the most user-hostile company I have ever seen from a individual freedom centric standpoint, but they are good at hiding it. They think everyone outside of the organization should follow their line of thinking. Apple wants to be the gatekeeper of everything and that doesn't work in a free society. Deep down, I think people want to be free of external influence. Microsoft only cares about maximizing profits and doing whatever it takes to get there. I guess there is no difference between the two except that apple tries to justify there behavior behind a superiority complex.
Email is the most annoying one. There's an old API that some apps use that always uses Mail.app, regardless of what my "default email client" is set to. SUPER annoying as I only have my work email in Mail.app and it's usually for things like bug reports or news article feedback, you know, things I do on my free time which have nothing to do with work.
The bug report ones is especially annoying as those emails are often pre-populated with a bunch of data that isn't so easy to just copy into a new email in a different mail client, like support attachments, etc.
I can't believe this is the top comment on hacker news. Some of the replies are already covered but as much as I use my Android phone and Microsoft at work, I have never had anything other than Outlook 365 on Android. How is Google going to "literally destroy Microsoft"?
And then there's no need to comment on the Apple portion in your comment, considering the critique is that Microsoft isn't playing nice because they try to default to Edge.
They aren't doing that not for the goodness of their hearts, but because Microsoft has them by the cojones when it comes to anything related to Cloud, OS used by millions of Android devs and productivity tools.
> Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
I mean... yes. But that happened in the late 90s. Hasn't changed since then.
The entire crux of any discussion on Microsoft's behaviors hinges on one figure: What percentage of their Windows and Office revenues are coming from end users versus corporate sales? I mean, I think it's kind of obvious, but yet we still have arguments about why they would screw users with these sorts of decisions. It makes no sense to me. Further, (and deference to Tom Warren), but I would bet that a lot more IT admins are happy with this change than there are those who are angry.
What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari, the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you from collecting any sort of payment without passing through their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?
> Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game.
I think this is already happening. Google pushes non-stop for you to use the Gmail app, then once you do all the links prompt you to open Google Maps, and all the rest. It's annoying and there's no way to change it.
I think Microsoft is just taking a step out of Google's playbook here. Doing exactly what Google does on mobile, but doing that same shitty behavior on desktops. "If you made the choice to use a Microsoft app, you're making the choice to be in the Microsoft ecosystem."
I hate it, it's trash, all the rest... but it feels like -- shocking -- Microsoft is just copying something they saw someone else doing.
> They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft.
I have been investing in MSFT under the assumption that they have completely abandoned these markets. What mobile market does Microsoft require when they have an increasing number of SMBs locked entirely into their death star?
> given up on making products which people enjoy to use
Building new apps in with .NET/Azure/GitHub is a dream. The laser focus of the tech community on principled Windows OS issues and other product concerns is completely missing the overarching universe that is being forged by Microsoft.
Azure in 2023 is like Disneyland for a SMB CTO/CIO. If you go all-in you can actually enjoy your weekends and auditors can't really figure out how to ruin your free time as much as they used to be able to. Sure, there are specific technological or economic things that might be better on-prem (or in a different cloud), but overall I have never seen something this unified, stable, confidence-inspiring, etc.
I believe that the first cloud which can be largely delegated out to non-wizards is going to be the one that wipes the floor with the others. I suspect Microsoft is already hard at work integrating the LLM features they acquired into their Azure administration use cases. Simply having a bot integrated into the portal that can provide suggested configurations in a few hotspots (e.g. make a VM like XYZ but with ABC changes) would be incredible.
I mean, they actually do though. Apple and Google both do similar things, they just get less media coverage because they are seen as normal to the mobile ecosystem, while this seems abnormal because it's in a desktop environment. That's no excuse for Microsoft, I wish they'd stop doing some of this garbage, but to act like Apple and Google have clean hands is laughable.
You're operating under the assumption that Microsoft is the only one doing this.
This sort of thing happens regularly on Android though it's perhaps more subtle. I don't know how many times I've had to set the default browser, photo viewer, pdf viewer, etc only to be prompted to choose how to open a file and Google's App is first in the list.
Certain features like STT for the entire operating system require Google Assistant. And image search or real-time translation require the Google Search App to be installed. So you have to choose between being harassed by Assistant and Search prompts at ever turn, or disabling core OS features.
Are you totally unaware of the history of Microsoft all the way back to the 80s?
Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom line. As long as they can increase revenues and market penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game since IE.
I'm sure I'm biased but the old school pm culture at Microsoft is still alive and well. The new hires are forced to play the old stupid games of doing anything to get the metrics to show what they want in the short term and the cycle continues. Windows and Office both have this problem and I think will continue to until they get someone up top who's sole purpose is to root out this culture from middle management through low level execs.
I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)
> I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
They were always that, thru entirety of their history they have used anticompetitive practices on any chance they could.
> Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't.
Until very recently you couldn't even change the default browser on iOS, I think the idea Apple are playing "fairier" than Microsoft is a lot more nuanced than you make it seem with this statement.
Even after adding ability to change default browser to iOS, there's still the limitation that only the webkit rendering engine provided by Apple can be used - Firefox and Chrome on iOS are wrappers around the OS level Webkit implementation - the rendering engine is still Safari/webkit - they aren't using their own rendering engines as they do on all other OSes.
There's also the agreement between Apple and Google for default search on iOS too, which absolutely costs Bing marketshare.
Apple does plenty of dark patterns. You are locked into their store, they decide what programs you can run on your phone, they decide what browser you can use, all the other browsers are actually just skinned safari.
"Microsoft" is not a person with emotions and desires. People too often anthropomorphize, and it is a natural thing to do imo, because we still think with human brains. Microsoft, like any other company, is a far more complex system than I think our brains are ever meant to comprehend, let alone create. Is it food to eat? A fire to warm up? Is it a leader to follow? A book to read?
Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office, and Xbox.
Sure, they tried to break into the mobile sector, but they seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in 2002.
Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room. Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".
Google and Apple have to be careful not to sink to the historical levels of that other company.
One nice thing about the last decade or so is that other company has had to rein in its historical behavior, and also care about PR a bit.
We'll see how that plays out, given the increasing power that might come with the intimate relationship with OpenAI, and the frenzy of market interest around what's shipping there.
Microsoft is a schizophrenic company. For each employee who tries to do things well, clean, and respectful of privacy, there is another one with the same amount of power who won't hesitate engaging in the worst tactics (dark UI patterns, fake/ambiguous statements, regular settings resets, etc.) to earn a few more points in a performance objective. Both crowds probably hate each other, but the working conditions are so great when you work there that the "nice" guys will probably always prefer to walk away, rather than engaging into a conflict to try convincing a moron that forcing a specific browser is a very very very bad idea.
This thing of forcing Edge for opening links, it's clearly an idea successfully forced by a small group of bullies upon other employees, and they probably get a reward from the increased Edge traffic/usage.
Ultimately, there is only one person responsible for this toxic culture and it's the CEO.
>Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
Change that from a question to a statement and it becomes one of the better single sentence summaries of the windows 11 design methodology.
The only instance of Apple doing that I’m aware of is the “Search for (term)” in the terminal’s right click menu always defaulting to Safari. In every other instance, they’ve respected the defaults.
Microsoft on the other hands seems to have no boundaries, going as far as injecting ads on Chrome’s homepage[1] promoting their browser.
For the purposes of this discussion I don’t think the underlying engine really matters (I’m not supporting Apple’s rule here). 99% of users are going to be downloading Chrome or FF to have a consistent UX and sync their bookmarks, history and passwords. iOS respects the default browser and mail client in this case.
> I don’t think the underlying engine really matters
It is what makes all the difference here.
Many features that are a Web Standard are unsupported on iOS precisely because Apple refuses to allow alternative engines because they don't want those features on their platform (mostly to favor native apps under the pretext of security, like if Google is not capable of making a secure browser, at least as secure as Safari).
Chrome and Firefox on iOS are not the same Chrome and iOS that run on all the other platforms, they are basically Safari.
99% of users don’t care that it’s the same engine. They probably don’t even know. Looks the same, works the same, what does it matter? They just want to pick the browser name they trust, log in to its account and have all their favorites/bookmarks there. Whichever engine the browser happens to use is the least of their concerns.
it matters in the same way a Honda disguised as a Mercedes it's not a Mercedes. It's a Honda.
> Whichever engine the browser happens to use is the least of their concerns.
Not disagreeing with you on this, that's the way it should be.
OTOH, using simple logic, if it doesn't matter Apple would allow other browser engines on their platform, because it doesn't matter. But apparently it does matter. It matters so much that EU is trying to force Apple to permit alternative implementations of the software called "a Web browser".
Anyway, we have a precedent:
"Microsoft distributed its browser software, Internet Explorer, among consumers for free. It led to a concentration of the market share and the eventual downfall of Netscape, the company’s top competitor at the time. The DoJ case alleged that Microsoft was intentionally making it extremely difficult for consumers to install software by other companies on personal computers that ran on Microsoft’s operating system."
I don’t think that’s a good analogy. Mercedes and Hondas have tangible differences in performance and amenities. On the other hand, Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc. are built to operate to the same standard and work identically on approximately 100% of websites anyone ever uses.
So why is Apple scared of other browser engines that "work identically on approximately 100% of websites anyone ever uses"?
The point of my analogy wasn't to prove that Chrome is better than Safari, but that if I want an Honda, I do not want a car that looks like an Honda, I want an Honda (or a Mercedes or a Renault).
Android has the same problem with WebView, it's Chrome by default, but at least on Android GeckoView exists.
There must be a reason why Apple resists so much to making alternative engines available and nobody is buying that it is about security.
Because one is a clearly declared policy that anyone can look up (even though you, or regulators of a certain country, disagree with it). I’m sure there’d be a lot less outrage if it was Microsoft’s policy that other rendering engines (or browsers) were disallowed, instead of being sneaky and trying to fake error messages, degrading user experiences, and the like.
Further, it could be argued that dynamic code execution, whether through an app downloading additional modules on the file system with the executable bit set, or in memory, with the mmap(PROT_EXEC) syscall opens up potential avenues for abuse, and alternative browsers are an unfortunate collateral damage in such a policy.
Regardless, no action can be justified because another entity is also doing it; it only serves to cheapen the discourse.
Sure, but one week it's a first run screen recommending Edge, the next it's pop ups when visiting Firefox download page from Edge, the next it's a notification icon about "Microsoft recommended" settings, then it's a notice before running the installer, etc. There is no rhyme or reason besides their business interest and no timeline besides "let's boil this frog"
> Not allowing alternative browsers on their most successful platform: iOS
The huge difference is that this is the blanket application of a rule which has reasonable justifications. You can certainly criticise Apple for being a control-freak company, but that's not exactly a new trait.
And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new entrant. iOS started from the position of being completely locked down.
Quite different from the events of, say, US v. Microsoft Corp, which Microsoft seem to assume is not relevant anymore.
> - EU forced Apple to use USB-C like everybody else
Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
> - EU is forcing Apple to allow side loading of apps
> Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago. Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on iPhones, prior to the EU ruling. The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a fun little profit exercise, if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
> They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago. Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on iPhones, prior to the EU ruling.
Utter nonsense, which completely ignores the historical and third-party background: the replacement of the dock connector by Lightning was a huge shift as it was very common for devices to have built-in dock connectors which became useless pins overnight (there were literally cars with dock connectors). As necessary as the transition was in the long run, it basically made apple swear to keep lightning alive for at least as long as the DC was.
And there is a clear counter-example: they've been slowly inching support in from the devices least likely to use hard-set connectors: first the 3rd gen ipad pro in 2018, then the 10th gen ipad in 2020, 6th gen mini in 2021, 5th gen Air in 2022.
> The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a fun little profit exercise
More nonsense, apple literally doesn't want you to plug one into the other, they've been stripping wired phone-related features from macos as fast as they could be bothered to, moving them to either wireless (airdrop) or cloud.
> if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
Yes indeed, the anti-consumer and anti-environment move of letting users upgrading from one iphone to the next not have to replace all their cables.
> And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new entrant. iOS started from the position of being completely locked down.
Apple is absolutely trying to leverage their OS in order to drive usage in other markets. One big example of this is Apple Maps, which is being used as a default on iOS no matter if you like it or not. Both "Contacts" and "Find My" uses Apple Maps as the only option for starting navigating to another address, and if the application is not installed, but Google Maps or any other app, they still ask you to install Apple Maps instead of doing what everyone else in the ecosystem is doing, which is to ask which navigation app to use.
> Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
Yes, absolutely. The manufacturer who almost never use standard connectors were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
> The manufacturer who almost never use standard connectors
Except for all the times they do?
> were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
Yes? Or are you saying regulations forced them to use USB-C on macbooks, to the exception of every other port including the beloved but non-standard magsafe?
Or that regulations forced them to add type C to the ipad pro in 2018? The ipad in 2020? The ipad mini in 2021? The ipad air in 2022?
Hell, back in 1998 they released the iMac with essentially only USB support. Was that also regulations forcing them?
Sure, but for individual users business features things don't matter, it is users that need choice.
Myself, I just want a browser that doesn't close multiple tabs when I want to close just one when tapping on a touch screen. That is one thing with Edge that irritates me to high hell, and a reason for me to switch.
Used to be good but they’ve crapped it up with shit like coupons, follow this creator (what the fuck?), the “smart” text selection menu and “rich” link copying.
I don’t set up a new Edge profile often but I have to remember to turn off like 5 or 6 things each time to make it somewhat usable.
I'm forced to use Edge on work PC and that context menu when selecting text is wildly unpredictable -- sometimes the only "Search for (selected text)" is Search Bing Sidebar. And its slow as molasses if you ever make the mistake of clicking it.
The only experience I have of edge is opening it on a new installation of Windows, seeing trashy clickbait with thumbnails of half-naked women to go along with it; after which I proceeded to promptly close the window and download Chrome via Powershell.
I don’t know how a company can take good products and turn them into tacky products that no one would want to use if they had the knowledge to download an alternative.
If you find Edge convenient, you can continue to use Edge. No one will deny that. But for those who use Chrome, Microsoft's pushing of Edge is annoying.
Well its great if you love being spied upon, Edge is filled with spyware tools which Microsoft tries to make you enable with dark patterns each time you update windows.
The issue is that it's the way Microsoft conduct business at all. The default should be opt-in not hard to find opt-outs for every patch.
I would say no, there is no way to make it more tolerable unless you run something like shutup10 or https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy but then again if you care that much you should simply just run Linux because in reality there is no real good solution since spyware is baked right into the product.
I don't get the anger, at this point Edge is interchangeable with Chrome. The only thing I "miss" are my saved password and extensions which can be easily imported. Complaining online is an international pastime though.
It's not about the quality of the browser. The user has a setting to choose which browser to use, and they are disregarding it for their own convenience. It's anti-consumer and anti-competitive.
My daily driver is Firefox but I also have Chrome open (for Google products) and Vivaldi for personal surfing. Easy switch considering I'm already juggling browsers.
20 years ago this was a problem you could blame exclusively on MS. These days, they'd be negligent not to leverage their platforms to promote other products because the competition (Google/Apple) does so on a similar level.
Good! This needs to go on, and it needs to hurt even more. This is what you will get for making yourselves dependent on a single monopolistic vendor. Just continue laughing about the Year of Linux on Desktops, and suffer.
Urgh. Did they forget the lessons of the Ballmer era that forcing choices doesn’t give more usage. It’s making sure you meet people’s choices where they are. That was the big change that seemed to be in the air when Satya took over. Not entirely sure what is happening here.
It does give more usage by their own measurements so some internal VP gets to post themselves on the back and cash some bonus. While deprecating the image of the company overall.
Ubuntu also displays an advertisement every time I log in:
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
* Introducing Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications.
Receive updates to over 25,000 software packages with your
Ubuntu Pro subscription. Free for personal use.
https://ubuntu.com/pro
Expanded Security Maintenance for Applications is not enabled.
A simple and fundamental bit: downgrading the OS is a PITA (is it even still possible ?), and dealing with the T2 side of it makes it a million times more complicated.
On more pet peeves level of hostility:
Still haven't found a clean way to get rid of Apple Music. Every single time I accidentally click the play button on my headphones it brings up Apple Music.
2FA verification being bound to Apple devices.
Phasing out kext support under the security reasoning also means decent low level extensions are now a dream of the past. Stuff like Karabiner are notably worse when system perfs degrade, and I'm not holding my breath for linux partition mounting.
I permanently switched to Linux because Windows was acting as the owner of my computer.
The change took some work, but it was well worth it.
Now I'm using Mint with KDE. My regret is not having done this sooner. I'm satisfied.
If shit hits the fan and Microsoft gets sued for Anti Competitive behaviour (again) I suspect their main defence would be: Google doesn't even let users uninstall their apps and apple doesn't even let users install other browser.
Rooting a phone will lock you out of most financial and secure NFC applications.
It can be a no brainer depending on your life style (I mean, some people are trying to get back to dumb phones, so why not), I personally see it as big nope.
> Apple not allowing other browsers is a bit much…
Apple is paranoid about being dependent on other companies. If Chrome becomes a "must have" Google will have leverage over them by threatening to pull Chrome from the iPhone.
Instead of letting that happen, they use the iPhone's market share to push an alternative they control and pressure developers to support it (with its market share).
Google is already using such tactics against Android phone makers. They keep them in line by threatening to not license them their services.
> He (Gates) knew that Donn's Basic was way ahead of Microsoft's, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBasic, buying it from Apple for the price of $1, and then burying it.
Not exactly EEE, but I see where the inspiration comes from. I always thought the mistrust of MSFT in the community started mainly because of how it pushed IE and its Windows OEM licensing terms, but it goes far beyond that.
I don't use Windows, but can you fully uninstall Defender (or whatever it's called) in Windows 10/11, never have malicious software something scanner or updates run automatically?
I'm an IT Admin with 15+ sites across my country. I'm not angry about this change.
Myself and most of the people I've networked with either have or are transitioning away from other browsers, towards Edge. As a browser, it's fine. It has good PDF viewing/editing features, performant and works well with organisational SSO.
Are you serious?
The best /useful things for you are PDFs and SSO?
Both of these features are not what makes a web browser super duper.
PDF viewing is available in all major browsers.
<rant> SSO works in all web browsers - unless you’re using Windows XP as your enterprise cloud server running java and oracle and your asp.net web app requires a microsoft browser running in internet explorer legacy mode. </rant>
I stated two things I like about it over it's competitors, I didn't brand them as the best or most important features on offer.
I specifically stated PDF editing, not just viewing PDF files.
SSO works better on Edge in a work environment, mainly as it connects to the Windows profile. This means that I do not need to make changes to additional browsers or have end users struggling to sign in to various applications. Specifically with Edge, I can simply provide each user profile a folder with shortcuts to the likes of email quarantine, support, Outlook etcetera and they will either see their account listed or only need to enter their email address.
Coupled with appropriate training, this has cut down on users signing into Microsoft login pages that have been designed to look like the legitimate organisation using logo's and other branding. When in doubt, the users can visit the shortcut provided to them.
I always saw it as Microsoft is clearly two (or more) companies now. Some of those companies are very much what Microsoft was always like. Some others aren't at all like microsoft in anything but name.
That might not be a good way to look at it, there might be some people that want to just deliver some good products, but the company itself is not something that should be given the benefit because of those few employees. Microsoft == Microsoft
That might be a useful point of view if you happen to work at GitHub and you don't really want to wake up to the fact that you actually work for Microsoft now. But for anyone else, everything Microsoft owns is Microsoft, and they'll use the products and properties they owned to further the goal of Microsoft, which is maximizing shareholder profits, just like any other public company.
Companies compete like boxers in a ring. You win some, you lose some. MS is the boxer who would hit below the belt if no one is looking and will try to main/kill you if they can.
> maximizing shareholder profits, just like any other public company
Show me one of these big technology companies that doesn't act to benefit their shareholders?
Microsoft is Google is Apple is Amazon. They're all the same internally. The only difference is their optics when you're looking at them as an outsider. But really, they all work toward the same goal, increasing their stock price.
Yes, you said that Microsoft is "just like any other public company" but "Except way more mercenary".
I'm saying that no, Microsoft is just like the others. They're all like that. All of them would hit below the belt if the risk/reward calculation is correct for shareholders.
Recall that Microsoft initially tried to make the hot reload feature of .NET 6 available only in Visual Studio. Their 3E strategy continues to this day.
I recently noticed I can only browse some parts of our company infra on Azure (e.g. Azure Devops) via Edge on iOS too. So I have to use that browser for some specific sites while I use Safari for everything else.
Am I the only one who sees the technical aspect here: They literally write in this article that this is about embedding web pages next to the chat/email/whatever. That means in-memory over contracted hosting api etc. When I would own, e.g. MS Teams or Outlook, the hell I would love to have a dependency on the internal Firefox hosting API which can break any other day (just a example ... firefox is cool) or introducing unwanted side behavior.
Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage. Same also goes for App Store deploy to desktop: a stable html/css/js SDK is needed there as well.
I would absolutely hate Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but this thing, IMHO, it is not. There are better example (e.g. what they do with VS Code or the .NET Debugger/HotReload) then this concrete case.
Aren't you sort of saying that it's okay because they have a vision where you use their products for everything? Hard to tickle that out from antitrust, no?
The worst thing about the integration is that their safelink checker thing is slow as hell.
How about only enabling this functionality when Edge is the user's default browser? We somehow managed without it for several decades.
Force-opening another browser despite user-configured defaults is utterly disrespectful to the user. You're trying to frame it as something helpful but it's not helpful in any way whatsoever. It interferes with the user getting their job done using a tool you made.
This is the correct take that should be at the top. They aren't opening the links in Edge, they are opening the links in an embedded window implemented using Edge.
As far as I can tell, what they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.
The behaviour the user wants is to open a link. The idea of displaying the email again beside the webpage is valuable, but to the user their preferred browser is more valuable. Realistically, they already have their browser open, if they do anything other than read and close the web page their browsing is now split across two browsers without rhyme or reason. Say they switch to Excel and need to switch back to the webpage to double check something, it'll immediately be "oh, this one page is open in Edge, not Chrome where I first looked".
I hate this pattern, even if it's not monopolistic. If I want to open a link, I want it to go to my browser, not some embedded pane. It completely breaks my workflow. I can't bookmark, use password managers, any of my extensions.
> Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage.
Once again, MS with the browser balkanization. MS is on all the consortia, they can push for browser standards too.
It won't go to an embedded pane. What they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.
> The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all
Maybe, but if I have the Outlook app, a browser, and a windowing desktop environment, it seems a little superfluous.
The new policy is to ignore your default browser from Office and Teams and open Edge. There is an option to turn off this policy to use your default browser.
Microsoft is setting the default browser as Edge with an option to change it to other browsers.
> Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT admins will be able to alter the policy, but those on Microsoft 365 for business will have to manage this change on individual machines.
This experience needs more clarification on how it works. So if I single click a link it won't open a browser but render content within Outlook App? Okay, what happens if I middle click? I should preferably get default browser.
As to having Edge WebView2 engine in Outlook and no other - well, that is understandable [1]. Albeit Internet Explorer and Edge Legacy are still used by addins [2]. Actually it was about time to ditch the old IE Trident engine from Outlook and Office apps. On Mac it uses Safari with WKWebView[2]
So is this outrage caused by just introducing a feature where links open within app and it happens to use whatever rendering engine is there for that purpose?
Edit: I re-read the announcment and it is actually something different than an engine - yeah, opens in Edge and presumably shows your email in Edge Sidebar. So nothing to do with outlook rendering engines.
The problem Microsoft is creating for itself is that with these kind of antics, they will _never_ land any developers using their browser. That's hundreds of millions of users they're spitting in the face directly.
Second, them constantly being in the news about peddling the Bing search engine also doesn't help. Most people like and prefer Google (and when I say most, I mean the 95% percentile), so if they read news like, "Microsoft is showing Bing ads on Google pages" - you can rest assured nobody is going to use Edge because at the back of they minds they will be thinking, "Hmm, does this mean my Google experience will be disturbed with this browser?".
I think I lost some gray matter just typing that out and reflecting on how stupid Microsoft is.
> they will _never_ land any developers using their browser
I honestly don't think they care. They get the benefit of all the work devs do to support Chrome for free and get the much more lucrative "regular user" market.
Apparently I'm not a developer as I've been using the new Edge ever since moving to Windows a few years ago when WSL came around. It's actually a remarkably good browser and at this point I prefer it over Chrome (in part because I'm already using Windows so Microsoft telemetry is a given and Google's is extra).
It is however a shame that Microsoft keeps insisting to shoot itself in the foot. There's a very developer-friendly and professional and sleek side of Microsoft that is constantly sabotaged by the "used car salesman" side of the company that insists on adding noise like Microsoft Rewards to Edge or Candy Crush to Start.
750 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadI remember how reaction was relatively swift with Apple and book publishers' illegal collusion even though Apple was not a major player yet, or maybe I am just wrong on this which is possible, I didn't follow the news closely.
In any case, I think Microsoft is doing a fine job by itself getting people turned off on edge by adding all sorts of bloatware that I doubt people will use edge as their only web browser.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35786080
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#how...
> Found running server...
>
> *
> * Visual Studio Code Server
> *
> * By using the software, you agree to
> * the Visual Studio Code Server License Terms (https://aka.ms/vscode-server-license) and
> * the Microsoft Privacy Statement (https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/privacystatement).
> *
>
Many of the interesting extensions (Microsoft's language plugins, the remote extension pack, the .NET debugger) are licensed only for use with Visual Studio Code. Even if you hook into the VSCode marketplace, they could sue. They probably won't unless you're rehosting VSCode externally or something, but the risk is something most companies probably don't want to take when the software is free as in beer anyway for the "real" builds. (And if you're telemetry sensitive... just block the domains? I know, easier said than done, but you can do it.)
There are so many people out there, who should know better, or even do know better. Yet, for whatever reason install VS Code instead of VS Codium. Even when you inform people about the existence of VS Codium, they still don't move and keep using VS Code. It is like they do not even care at all.
That this is even allowed to happen in organizations is already an oversight. It should not even be allowed to install VS Code on organization machines or use it to ever view or work on the code of an organization.
To me it looks very unprofessional. It is like a shiny toy has been dangled in front of their eyes and they reach for it, never willing to let go of it, even when they are being told that there is telemetry and non-reproducible builds and whatever other mistreatment of them as useds. Like children they stick to their shiny toy, even if they could have the same features, same UI, just without built in telemetry. (And they can still install any extensions they want later, if they trust that extension or marketplace of extensions.) It is very similar to people installing Chrome instead of Ungoogled Chromium. I have personally experienced how uninformed people at a university went wide-eyed, thinking I was talking crazy stuff, when I told them that it should not be installed on university computers, since it is spyware.
I wish I could get people to get off their behinds and improve the situation. But it is of course very difficult to always create awareness and people are so damn ignorant. Often I am not even suggesting, that they should switch to free software tools yet. They could literally have the same experience, but no, most of the time you cannot tell them anything and they continue to take us with them into dystopia of our own making as a society with collective uninformedness and ignorance.
VSCode telemetry can be fully disabled.
> and non-reproducible builds
Who cares? Most users don’t need a reproducible build of software they want to use, they need working software.
> and whatever other mistreatment of them as useds.
Calling people “useds” isn’t going to help your case.
Well, how do you know that? How do you verify, that all telemetry is really turned off, without being able to reproduce the build? How many people truly turn it off after install? How do you know whether there are any other unwanted parts in the software you just installed? What about the next update? Do you want to run a package sniffer after each update, over the course of a month or so, checking all traffic in detail, to be sure that it only ever communicates to the outside world, when there was a justified purpose?
You are giving away sovereignty of your own device/machine.
> Who cares? Most users don’t need a reproducible build of software they want to use, they need working software.
It it this kind of mentality that is the problem. Your "who cares" is not going to fly, because it leads right into the abyss of surveillance and spyware. "who cares" is the basis for not being informed about ones tech choices. The basis for not being aware of issues regarding privacy. At a properly managed software making company it would also result in you being told, that it is part of your job to care. To answer the question, if there was any question: I care. Informed people care. People with ideals care.
The issue with not caring is also, that organizations will draw the wrong conclusions. They might impose rules, which force me to use some tool I do not want to use, simply because "everyone is OK with it", while those people all don't even care. If they don't care, they should not get a say in the matter and should not be a decision basis or a point of reasoning for making a decision. This is how the collective uninformedness and carelessness results in bad decisions. Basically the majority drags down the minority, for the worse of all of us.
> Calling people “useds” isn’t going to help your case.
Well, that is what we are, when we allow ourselves to be spied on. They use us and our data to drive data mining, profiling and ultimately profits. Besides, I wouldn't throw it into faces in 1-on-1 conversations, for the sake of a constructive conversation, even if it is the truth, because it runs the risk of the other person (a) not even understanding what it means, (b) thinking they misheard and replace with "users", and (c) risking them to be offended and turning deaf.
If you build it yourself, how do you verify that there is no spyware and no new spyware is added on every update? Do you have the energy to read every single new commit?
A having a reproducible build means, that the hidden telemetry would need to be hidden in the publicly available code. Whereas telemetry in VS Code can be bundled in and no one would ever see that code, except for MS. If I was using it, I might actually, in a motivated night, look at the code and try to grasp the general picture of where goes what. Or perhaps see the diff between VS Code code and VS Codium code, to see, whether they added anything and from where they removed things.
Still unjustifiable, along with the mess they made of changing default apps/browsers in Win 11.
Are you sure it is the case?
Upon uninstalling, those dependencies, the bar never appeared again.
Previously, they also added a Bing AI button to the keyboard, but they did actually make a setting to disable that.
Edit: Upon mentioning this to a coworker and digging into this a bit more, it may have been that I accidentally clicked the microphone to bring up that screen, and that it didn't target an ad. I'm not quite sure what happened though, so I'm leaving my comment as is :)
As long as their stock goes up, techies are always last place.
Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?
The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine.
The equivalent Microsoft apps on mobile OSs aren't degraded - they aren't even allowed to exist in the first place.
Microsoft is bringing the desktop experience in line with mobile here. Doesn't make it less terrible but contrasting Apple and Google as better actors in this sense is an odd take.
Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but it's on them.
None of these bug tech corps are in the right here, but MS is being more anti-competitive than most.
So the correct iOS parallel is not Apple’s refusal to allow non-WebKit engines. But Apple’s hypothetical refusal to allow links to be opened in WebKit-flavored Firefox. Which, for the record, it does let you do.
To be precise: No, they don't. Their engines are based on the same codebase, but they still are running their own installed engines.
In contrast, Apple doesn't just refuse to allow non-WebKit engines. It requires everyone to use the pre-installed, Apple-provided engine. You can't use your own build of WebKit.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought that they were forcing me to install Edge too.
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with GP’s experience with Teams, but just pointing out that when thinking about MS app behavior on any platform, it’s a variable that can be present in the corporate context which many “users” remain blissfully unaware of, or see it manifest as these weird rules and behaviors and not acting like other apps. But there can be an entirely different set of user stories at play beneath the surface.
In Android, all my links open in Firefox. I don't see any issue there. Might serve as an inspiration to Microsoft ;)
I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.
Except for the things that you just said open in the chrome webview, right?
It is also per-app choice. If an app decides doing something in a particular way, it is not the system's fault -- some reddit readers do the same, for some reason. For now, apps do have preferences to open in browser instead, and that option respects the default one.
One aggresive move that Google or Apple could do is to really help companies in the migration to their technology beyond saying RTFM and use our support. For example, augmenting these locked companies with Google staff. You cannot expect a big corporation to move all the gears alone to change their technology.
It is not the technology, it is the business execution.
“ A key factor in the decision was cost. Under the new Google license model, an equivalent amount of Google cloud storage would cost more than seven times what it will cost the university on the Microsoft platform.”
https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2023/04/google-changes-announcem...
And how is ms degrading googls products? They don't even have a mandatory app store in windows.
When comparing them all, ms has been the most open one
Same for other products. If OneDrive or MS Teams was all of a sudden really annoying to use on iOS and Android, but Slack and Google Meet would work really reliably and smoothly then I think a lot of people would just starting to use the non Microsoft alternative because nobody likes to deal with annoyances on a daily basis. We have seen this already, when Zoom came about it captured a huge part of the market really rapidly because it did something so much better than Teams did before. It didn't even require a dark pattern, now imagine how many more would have left Teams if dark patterns would have helped on top of that.
I suspect many, many more people globally (and in the US) use a smartphone than use a desktop with MS products on it daily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
rampant capitalism, especially in the US of A
the end goal is always to become a monopolist
Microsoft was basically inches away from being broken up in the late '90s due to their anti-competitive practices.
Maybe this time they'll break MS into small pieces. :)
That's my point.
China got their "Antimonopoly law" in 2007.
Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me. They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but enough for me to be consistently reminded that generally their incentives and goals run counter to what I'd prefer.
They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in. Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees, becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that hosts a lot of open projects.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...
According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace open source now" argument:
* their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous attempt to discredit their competition that took over a decade
* the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu and other spyware with settings that reset after random upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS
* if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its boot menu.
Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the changes are just superficial.
*
Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?
> Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems.
You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to install Windows?
In UEFI? If I have the OSes on separate physical disks I'm planning to use the bios to select what boots.
But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated bootloader).
If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big" updates.
Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux
As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues. If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing it.
That might be their problem. They are a great company. Where do they go from there?
Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently better than another.
This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and Google for that. If you want something different, call your representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.
I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later scams.
Has nothing to do with why people don't use Edge (they still didn't use Edge when it was using a custom engine; same for IE before it).
And it's only the techy minority that even knows Edge is built on top of Chromium.
It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.
Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.
Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).
>It's more memory efficient in general
>It supports the Edge Webview2 framework that MSoffice apps use further cutting memory use
>It supports MDAG https://learn.mecrosoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...
To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.
Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.
Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.
That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.
My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall, just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for years, so people are used to that. The synergies between those devices and the Google services services makes it easy to stay and hard to leave.
Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have been told and essentially trained to install a new browser if they want a good internet experience on Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early 2010s.
Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with Windows is crap" inertia right away.
That's not been true for a while. IT preinstall Chrome in most companies nowadays, and obviously it's already on the phones and tablet you buy for the home.
Yes, MS dropped the ball after killing Netscape and being humbled by antitrust laws. But the current situation is as much a product of Google's "growth hacks" and mobile monopoly.
Most tablets sold are iPads. They don't have Chrome pre-installed. In North America, most phones are iPhones that don't have Chrome pre-installed. Most personal laptops are either Windows machines or Macs which don't have Chrome installed. Its pretty disingenuous to pretend as if Chrome market share comes from devices with Chrome preinstalled. People go out of their way to install Chrome.
Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!) option to install Chrome and make it the default browser. CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.
Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after release when they finally added extensions and themes around 2010.
People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps were moving to.
Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were great bets that were copied by everyone else.
1. https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/index.html
But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people live on phones, and when they have to interact with desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably, the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there is little or no choice in that world.
The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the force of the State.
New Firefox is too dumb for that – you actually have to open that link in a new tab before you can send it to some other Firefox instance (and then close that useless tab again).
You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.
Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android is relatively open (certainly more open than any mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For instance, Microsoft added support for running Android Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done completely without any involvement from Google. That is unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets pushed around here is baseless.
They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a factor until years after the fact.
The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that MS "won" with IE (95% market share!) and then pretty much lost the stomach (or focus/budget/etc.) to advance the web in any way.
>Monopolistic practices on mobile
Most of my phones have shipped with Samsung Internet.
They could not, because if they did that cartel suits would be opened within hours. I expect both the US and Europe have such suits ready to go just in case, and Microsoft (hypocritically) has amicus briefs on standby.
The last 30 years of MS shows that they are not interested in the non-hostile approach
Few things:
- Microsoft Java Virtual Machine scandal
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Foundation_Classes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_J%2B%2B#The_WFC
I wonder how much money this shameful bottom of the barrel company behaviour makes them.
Are there managers who has their pay tied to some KPI? I have such a hard time believing there is a from above decision to do all these user hostile changes turning their main product into a BS joke.
I mean, it's Edge that they are work so hard to push. What do they actually gain from doing that? It's stupid all the way down.
I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured market they can brutally take advantage of. Even today, Apple has banned all browser competition on iOS, and only Safari is allowed to run. All competitors must just re-skin Safari to obey the monopolistic demands of Apple. Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
But Microsoft, to me, barely has a drop of the anti-competitive evil of its competitors. Apple mints hundreds of billions by banning competitors, locking them out and charging 30% rent on their monopoly. Microsoft... just wants their re-skinned Google Browser to not die.
They tried; with different means, but they expected the same result. That's what the antitrust case was about.
> Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
While I have the same opinion as you wrt Apple behaviour, there is a difference: Apple doesn't have the market position like Microsoft did. You can function perfectly fine in society without any Apple product. That was not the case with Microsoft, they did everything they could so you had to use Microsoft system. Communicating with your bank or with government or public offices? Microsoft products were required. Apple has not such grip on the market and that makes the difference.
One is a healthy market, the other is not.
And Android respects browser choice, iOS will soon be forced to in the EU with the new sideloading mandate.
You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser.
Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one way, continues to act that very way still.
They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff".
Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.
OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one.
One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.
What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith.
Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
It's more like condemning all of the US because it has implemented a national policy that only one state really wanted.
It doesn't matter that only one state wanted it. It's still national policy and thus fair game to criticize the entire nation for.
Do office apps open links in edge? Does VS code?
If they do, then I agree with you. If they don't, then I don't, for what should be obvious reasons.
Just because your particular outcropping isn't coated in digital blood doesn't mean you're not part of the problem.
If a company sent out two crews of people and one crew gave out flowers to strangers and the other crew punched little old lady's faces in, would you still crow about how you're only handing out flowers?
> Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others are conducive to consumer spending. Notice that conducive is almost always followed by to.
* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conducive
How did I go at least half my life without knowing this.
Give me something as sane, coherent and friendly as .NET ecosystem for C and C++ and I would be willing to pay for that
Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of MIDL[3] went, by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language grammar in the docs, because there is no language grammar in the docs[4].)
[1] https://dusted.codes/can-we-trust-microsoft-with-open-source and links there
[2] https://github.com/microsoft/pylance-release/issues/4
[3] https://github.com/microsoft/xlang/pull/529
[4] I vaguely remember a GitHub issue where a Microsoft employee explicitly refused to provide one ("not a priority" or some such synonym for "we don't care, fuck off"), but I can't find it
Is it? This is the same ecosystem that has .Net, .Net Core, .Net Standard, and .Net Framework as all different (and overlapping? who knows) products?
The Core and Standard things was just there the aid the transition from Framework, which is now complete, any remains will soon be phased out entirely.
You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1].
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--micro...
More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.
I don't think that's bias.
It's really nice not having advertisements in my start menu.
Who doesn't like to talk about it? It's so much easier to integrate components on Linux over windows. Why would anyone willingly use windows for data analysis?
The Remote SSH extension has been a game changer for how I do development.
Ironically compared to Windows, MS has been willing to kill backward compatibility more to improve .NET to make it more cross-platform, something that must come from a very different part of the company, probably the one that got the "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" mandate.
I make no apologies for their history, but I like these tools and I like them much better than Java, which also has its place. (This isn't a throwaway comment, notice I said I use Clojure, it's my favorite, which runs on the JVM.)
C# is nice, but the experience in VS Code is sub-par and I think it's the VS (not code) managers that are responsible for that state of being.
This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.
C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.
VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs
Buy out of github, owning the devs
Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.
Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?
https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-for-t...
- Video games: Activision/Blizzard, ZeniMax, Double Fine Productions, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile Entertainment, Playground Games, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Mojang
- Developer ecosystems: npm, Dependabot, GitHub, Playfab, Deis, Xamarin, Havok, HockeyApp
And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.
And VSCode. One thing all three have in common is that they are all FREE to use--they don't make Microsoft any money directly.
And, for the segment of the developer tools market that wrangles C# code, if VSCode gets too good, it becomes a threat to a cash cow: Visual Studio.
Start here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...
Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales.
VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work.
> https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-...
And typescript!
I guess that's about .. literally.. average.
People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
"Flight mode" was a lovely curiosity at that time. Example from Encarta 98, but I thought 96 also had it.
https://youtu.be/7ytQQ4XdQmM?t=131
Before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
They simply cannot resist the urge to cheat in this manner.
> "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft."
> Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades?
[0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
Yes. But their definition of those terms are stuck in the 90s
iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is:
> And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic because, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
To the same point, Google is arguably the reason it persists today given the popularity of Chrome. Just as Microsoft is arguably the reason it started. (I suppose I could have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment since "is so useless" could imply both but I don't think it's particularly egregious.)
Then why send a UA string at all? Save the bytes on the wire.
Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I choose to. That doesn’t stop Apple music from being the auto play choice even when I don’t use Apple Music.
If Apple’s products are so much better they should allow choice and bot be threatened by it.
Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list.
And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to install Apple Maps...
Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.
Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS, searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes straight to Google Maps.
I haven’t been able to find the correct MIME type or URL protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me suspect that there is more to it than it seems.
Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others can?
Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do the same, if they wanted to.
Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.
Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]
It looks to me that the pain was self inflicted.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-phone-8-1-fe...
[1] http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24422_Thestate...
No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time. User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google properties with Windows Phone IE.
Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube apps for Android and iOS were native.
> Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474516/why-is-google-...
> Windows Phone's Achilles Heel is its app gap -- it has far fewer apps than Android and iOS
This was more of an issue than one specific app, especially one that like YT that can be consumed via web browser
I’m just speaking based on intuition and what I remember happening, I might be wrong
Sorry, but Google really isn't a saint regarding degraded experience. The shenanigans around UX for example using Google services in Firefox have a long, well documented tradition. They just aren't as overt and clumsy with it as MS.
Android not exactly making it easy to change the default browser for average users either tbh
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1118/
but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least tried, and it wasn't a problem for years
honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation, world wide
and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in monopoly (because with today markets you can have more power then a classical single market monopoly while not being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)
the “Android makes you tap something to change your default browser!” was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped spreading because it was generating backlash.
Much like the “you have to confirm you enable sideloading!” alert in Android, it’s not clear what people want otherwise, a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult.
I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it harder to have the real conversations needed to get things back on track
The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm before downloading each app. And then it will confirm before installing each app. And then it will confirm again because, well, I have no idea.
One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult. Piles and piles of them is.
Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only. Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing people away from Macs.
They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts them in a similar position.
Google has a slightly different issue, in that for instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser taking the android world by storm is nothing good for them.
Apple doesn't trust third party developers when it comes to running code that Apple has not vetted in advance.
Works without any issues and it's a much nicer product experience.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...
Afair there's also one for YouTube.
I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.
Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed the issue).
I disagree here. Despite me using firefox on my android device and it being set to my default browser, many apps will still open in chrome (usually google apps - maps, gmail, etc) despite me explicitly asking it _not_ to do that. It's also not clear that it's using chrome, as it's the "generic" browser modal. The way that google services are bundled together on android and have limited interop (Samsung and Google Pay regularly fight with each other on my device for "who is the default payment method", and google is _not_ happy to not be my default).
Google have been pushing manifest v3 despite massive objections, introducing undocumented "fair usage" limits [0], require third party cookies to use some of their services to download files (gmail, gdrive). Google are drowning in dark patterns.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135
And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind of walled garden incentive mechanism.
I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we get there, the journey, matters.
Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that. Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me towards a troll state.
But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into something else.
And I see that happening with other things I love too.
But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns. And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to different outcomes afterwards.
They did decades ago in the last century. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Microsoft does not care if they piss off most of these people because they not the ones signing the contracts and the lock-in is SO BAD that even if they piss off the right people, making any change is way more trouble than they are willing to deal with.
There is an entire side of the tech industry with admins who only want to learn powershell and still think you can’t “lock down” Linux and mac machines.
How? I mean, how does a degraded experience on android cause people to abandon windows desktops?
I just don't see the connection here: if Google, tomorrow, outright rejected any MSFT software on android phones, how does it hurt windows desktop deployment numbers? Maybe if everyone switched to Mac, but that would kill of android too...
This is what a working monopoly looks like. We've seen before this exactly how much crap users would put up with on the desktop, and still they didn't abandon windows.
There is nothing the mobile market can do that they haven't already tried to take windows market share.
In fact, there is nothing that the mobile world can do to Windows users that is worse than what Microsoft did to them, and yet those users are still chugging along happily paying for Windows every year.
I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox.
Same with many other things - I can install whatever browser I want as long as it's a skin on their browser.
I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
I can install any app I want as long as it comes from Apple store.
Etc etc etc.
Yep, I vehemently disagree with your premise :). I think MS is looking at Apple's walled garden and saying "what if we could get away with some of that?"
(not disagreeing that dark patterns are despicable! My wife knows the scream that comes from my home office when I try to get iPhone or windows to do something I want! I just disagree that mobile os world is some paragon of user centric benevolence :)
A link to what domain?
For clicking addresses, I kind of get it: the author of the text didn't link it at all, so the OS (or whatever) gets to decide how to enhance the presentation which can include promoting a specific app. Not great, but fine.
For clicking links, it should definitely just use the browser unless an installed app's manifest has the domain registered.
And for what it's worth, open a directions link from Google some time - for me, it opens Google Maps, which I do have installed, but don't prefer using. I choose Apple Maps because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive, but Google doesn't offer me that choice.
Off topic, but you're not actually looking at your watch while you drive right?
How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? How do I replace Siri with a different voice assistant?
You can't for either of those questions.
Nevermind that changing the browser doesn't actually change jack because Apple doesn't allow competition in the browser engine space.
All in all, it is just hard for me to take seriously an opinion saying that Apple allows for unrestrained competition on its devices and Microsoft is the big bad in this space. Historically, maybe true - but not even close to true now imo.
However, clicking an address in a message and being told to install Apple Maps is super aggravating and I'm not sure if there's a way around that...
Yeah, and its easy to open the link from Outlook and Teams in Chrome - just copy the link & paste into the chrome URL bar.
> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
It reads differently now.
To be fair though, I did find it on my wife's iPhone, though under Chrome (she does not have it under Safari (or General either, where I would've expected it)). Still don't have it anywhere on my iPhone. I'll try to see if that's because she's ahead of me on OS updates or some other reason.
Thx!
As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control over the keyboard UI and how each key (if it even has keys — your “keyboard” can be literally anything) interacts with text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to “skin” the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult and that’d reduce the workload quite a lot.
To wit, some of the features that same-named apps/keyboards give me on android but not on iPhone include "hold key for alternative character" or button to "force" numpad. As well all keyboards I've tried have same layout and sizing as the original one.
I assumed it was imposed on them in some way I guess?
For instance the app Fantastical comes with a "keyboard" that inputs dates that are open on your calendar[0] and there exist a few rather nonstandard keyboards like Typewise[1].
Absence of features common on Android boards I would guess comes down to those patterns not being familiar to (and thus, not desired by) iOS users or in some cases software patents (there have been a few cases of keyboard devs receiving cease and desist notices from patent holders for using some UI pattern).
[0]: https://flexibits.com/img/help/fantastical-ios/en/f3-opening... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/typewise-custom-keyboard/id147...
https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php
Somewhat different from the original keyboard layout.
(The paucity of alternatives is probably down to patents and licensing.)
The idea is that because keyboards can connect to the internet (with user permission), there's potential for data theft. It may also be possible to exfiltrate data from a keyboard extension by saving the data to an app container shared by the host app, which the host app can then send out with its network access.
Devs who don't know how or care to properly accommodate the variable height of third-party keyboards may use the app-wide opt-out to eliminate bugs relating to that, though I haven't personally encountered this.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uitextinputt...
Now it seems that the keyboards randomly hang / crash and don't come up when requested on the first try.
Apple goes out of their way to screw with third party competitors.
Walled garden is marketing speak. You should not use it.
>Closed ecosystem
>Restricted platform
>Proprietary systems
>Walled Prison/Jail(this has negative bias, but may fit depending on the context)
>Curated platform
I'm sure you can get objective phrases from chatgpt too.
MS looks at it and thinks their frat party mansion (3 bedroom duplex) can do the same.
Apple gets away with it because that what their target audience want. MS target audience doesn't want it. If I wanted a walled garden - I would use Apple, they clearly know how to maintain it.
All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.
Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
No, I am not a big fan of that Microsoft move, because I think they should respect the users browser choice. But I am even less a fan of Apple doing things nobody else is allowed (for good reason).
The law you're talking about here specified that the charger itself must have a standard USB-C port. Apple gets away with it because 1. they don't even bundle a charger anymore, and 2. they ship a cable that allows the phone to be connected to a USB-C charger (Lightning to USB-C cable).
The new law that takes effect some time in 2024 for smartphones (amongst other devices) stipulates that the port on the smart device must be USB-C. Under this new law, essentially if a device is large enough then the port must be USB-C.
> Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
Another new EU law (the Digital Markets Act) takes aim at this specific issue actually.
I get where you're coming from, and yeah sure one could argue that giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft should do better, but in the end they are corporations who will do what is best for their shareholders, as such I am not in the least surprised over actions they take like the ones discussed in your comment and the article that started this discussion.
I think it's great that governmental regulation is finally coming to set the game rules for things like how general purpose operating systems must allow device owners the ability to install their own software (including real actual browsers with their own engines and everything), how communication apps must support cross-network communication upon request, and to standardise how we charge our smart devices.
For me it shows what kind of a company Apple is. Even companies like Sony (who install rootkits on your devices without your consent), comply with the spirit of the charging adapter law. But Apple tries to find a loophole, just to push their own agenda, at whatever cost for society.
But as you said, the other large corporations probably do it in some way too.
I swing both ways honestly, I love many engineering aspects of the Lightning port, and at the same time I recognise that having only USB-C to care about would obviously simplify my life a bit, even if I think for the purpose of a mobile phone it is an inferior port.
I realistically don't care what port is on my phone, but my wife's phone has USB-C and I have 9000 and 1 usbc cables at home.
> Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
This is due to security imposed on App Store apps: can't do JIT, and you can't have a reasonable JavaScript engine today without it. Frankly, I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses as long as everything synced.
I have plenty of annoyances with Apple, but what people usually bring up are from people just looking for reasons to hate on Apple for no reason.
> I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses
Just to give one example from the top of my head: For years (5+), Apple did not implement a proper Push-API for Safari. All other major browsers had it, but because on iOS all browsers are just Safari, there was no way to have it on iOS, which is a pretty big market share. Push-API sound like some marketing stuff, but in reality it is pretty fundamental to a lot of use-cases like multi-user synchronization, chats, etc. So you might think that you don't care about the rendering engine, but in reality Apple can abuse the browser situation to control the whole JS ecosystem.
So I don't hate Apple for no reason. Instead, I hate them for very specific reasons. They also do good stuff (primarily for their users/customers), but for me the bad far outweighs the good, because it affects everybody who has contact with their customers and not just the people who decided they want to have an Apple device.
Apple is the most user-hostile company I have ever seen from a individual freedom centric standpoint, but they are good at hiding it. They think everyone outside of the organization should follow their line of thinking. Apple wants to be the gatekeeper of everything and that doesn't work in a free society. Deep down, I think people want to be free of external influence. Microsoft only cares about maximizing profits and doing whatever it takes to get there. I guess there is no difference between the two except that apple tries to justify there behavior behind a superiority complex.
The bug report ones is especially annoying as those emails are often pre-populated with a bunch of data that isn't so easy to just copy into a new email in a different mail client, like support attachments, etc.
On your phone, the walled garden approach is fine. On a desktop machine in which you control, it is not.
And then there's no need to comment on the Apple portion in your comment, considering the critique is that Microsoft isn't playing nice because they try to default to Edge.
I mean... yes. But that happened in the late 90s. Hasn't changed since then.
What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari, the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you from collecting any sort of payment without passing through their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?
I think this is already happening. Google pushes non-stop for you to use the Gmail app, then once you do all the links prompt you to open Google Maps, and all the rest. It's annoying and there's no way to change it.
I think Microsoft is just taking a step out of Google's playbook here. Doing exactly what Google does on mobile, but doing that same shitty behavior on desktops. "If you made the choice to use a Microsoft app, you're making the choice to be in the Microsoft ecosystem."
I hate it, it's trash, all the rest... but it feels like -- shocking -- Microsoft is just copying something they saw someone else doing.
I have been investing in MSFT under the assumption that they have completely abandoned these markets. What mobile market does Microsoft require when they have an increasing number of SMBs locked entirely into their death star?
> given up on making products which people enjoy to use
Building new apps in with .NET/Azure/GitHub is a dream. The laser focus of the tech community on principled Windows OS issues and other product concerns is completely missing the overarching universe that is being forged by Microsoft.
Azure in 2023 is like Disneyland for a SMB CTO/CIO. If you go all-in you can actually enjoy your weekends and auditors can't really figure out how to ruin your free time as much as they used to be able to. Sure, there are specific technological or economic things that might be better on-prem (or in a different cloud), but overall I have never seen something this unified, stable, confidence-inspiring, etc.
I believe that the first cloud which can be largely delegated out to non-wizards is going to be the one that wipes the floor with the others. I suspect Microsoft is already hard at work integrating the LLM features they acquired into their Azure administration use cases. Simply having a bot integrated into the portal that can provide suggested configurations in a few hotspots (e.g. make a VM like XYZ but with ABC changes) would be incredible.
I mean, they actually do though. Apple and Google both do similar things, they just get less media coverage because they are seen as normal to the mobile ecosystem, while this seems abnormal because it's in a desktop environment. That's no excuse for Microsoft, I wish they'd stop doing some of this garbage, but to act like Apple and Google have clean hands is laughable.
This sort of thing happens regularly on Android though it's perhaps more subtle. I don't know how many times I've had to set the default browser, photo viewer, pdf viewer, etc only to be prompted to choose how to open a file and Google's App is first in the list.
They also implement features in their Apps to avoid your defaults: https://i.imgur.com/9nzpTPG.png
Certain features like STT for the entire operating system require Google Assistant. And image search or real-time translation require the Google Search App to be installed. So you have to choose between being harassed by Assistant and Search prompts at ever turn, or disabling core OS features.
Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom line. As long as they can increase revenues and market penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game since IE.
I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)
They were always that, thru entirety of their history they have used anticompetitive practices on any chance they could.
Microsoft just really abused it bundling in IE and was penalized hard for it.
These other players have learned to push the limits of anti-competitive behavior while maintaining a plausible defense against government action.
Until very recently you couldn't even change the default browser on iOS, I think the idea Apple are playing "fairier" than Microsoft is a lot more nuanced than you make it seem with this statement.
Even after adding ability to change default browser to iOS, there's still the limitation that only the webkit rendering engine provided by Apple can be used - Firefox and Chrome on iOS are wrappers around the OS level Webkit implementation - the rendering engine is still Safari/webkit - they aren't using their own rendering engines as they do on all other OSes.
There's also the agreement between Apple and Google for default search on iOS too, which absolutely costs Bing marketshare.
> https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/01/web-developers-challenge-appl...
What even is Microsoft?
Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office, and Xbox.
Sure, they tried to break into the mobile sector, but they seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in 2002.
Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room. Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".
One nice thing about the last decade or so is that other company has had to rein in its historical behavior, and also care about PR a bit.
We'll see how that plays out, given the increasing power that might come with the intimate relationship with OpenAI, and the frenzy of market interest around what's shipping there.
This thing of forcing Edge for opening links, it's clearly an idea successfully forced by a small group of bullies upon other employees, and they probably get a reward from the increased Edge traffic/usage.
Ultimately, there is only one person responsible for this toxic culture and it's the CEO.
Change that from a question to a statement and it becomes one of the better single sentence summaries of the windows 11 design methodology.
Microsoft on the other hands seems to have no boundaries, going as far as injecting ads on Chrome’s homepage[1] promoting their browser.
[1] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-is-now-injecting-full-...
Not allowing alternative browsers on their most successful platform: iOS
also:
- EU forced Apple to use USB-C like everybody else
- EU is forcing Apple to allow side loading of apps
Apple is one of the worst offenders ever when it's about vendor lock in
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT211336
Alternative browser engines are still disallowed.
They are a skin on Apple's Webkit
see: https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/07/mozilla_google_apple_...
GP was talking about how Apple does not force you to open links with Safari except in one case.
The situation with webkit is a different thing.
It's always Safari.
In a different skin, but it's Safari nonetheless.
Do Firefox or Chrome on iOS support web apis that Apple does not support?
No, they don't, because it's Safari.
Sorry if I skipped a few steps and went straight to the conclusion, that's why it probably looked off topic to you.
It is what makes all the difference here.
Many features that are a Web Standard are unsupported on iOS precisely because Apple refuses to allow alternative engines because they don't want those features on their platform (mostly to favor native apps under the pretext of security, like if Google is not capable of making a secure browser, at least as secure as Safari).
Chrome and Firefox on iOS are not the same Chrome and iOS that run on all the other platforms, they are basically Safari.
It does matters.
it matters in the same way a Honda disguised as a Mercedes it's not a Mercedes. It's a Honda.
> Whichever engine the browser happens to use is the least of their concerns.
Not disagreeing with you on this, that's the way it should be.
OTOH, using simple logic, if it doesn't matter Apple would allow other browser engines on their platform, because it doesn't matter. But apparently it does matter. It matters so much that EU is trying to force Apple to permit alternative implementations of the software called "a Web browser".
Anyway, we have a precedent:
"Microsoft distributed its browser software, Internet Explorer, among consumers for free. It led to a concentration of the market share and the eventual downfall of Netscape, the company’s top competitor at the time. The DoJ case alleged that Microsoft was intentionally making it extremely difficult for consumers to install software by other companies on personal computers that ran on Microsoft’s operating system."
The point of my analogy wasn't to prove that Chrome is better than Safari, but that if I want an Honda, I do not want a car that looks like an Honda, I want an Honda (or a Mercedes or a Renault).
Android has the same problem with WebView, it's Chrome by default, but at least on Android GeckoView exists.
There must be a reason why Apple resists so much to making alternative engines available and nobody is buying that it is about security.
Further, it could be argued that dynamic code execution, whether through an app downloading additional modules on the file system with the executable bit set, or in memory, with the mmap(PROT_EXEC) syscall opens up potential avenues for abuse, and alternative browsers are an unfortunate collateral damage in such a policy.
Regardless, no action can be justified because another entity is also doing it; it only serves to cheapen the discourse.
Microsoft has now clearly declared this policy. The basis of the article is the message sent to IT admins clearly declaring it.
The huge difference is that this is the blanket application of a rule which has reasonable justifications. You can certainly criticise Apple for being a control-freak company, but that's not exactly a new trait.
And it's not Apple leveraging one monopoly (they don't have) into trying to take over an other domain as a new entrant. iOS started from the position of being completely locked down.
Quite different from the events of, say, US v. Microsoft Corp, which Microsoft seem to assume is not relevant anymore.
> - EU forced Apple to use USB-C like everybody else
Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
> - EU is forcing Apple to allow side loading of apps
See (1).
They released USB-C macbooks in 2015, 8 years ago. Clearly they had no intention of moving to USB-C on iPhones, prior to the EU ruling. The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a fun little profit exercise, if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
Utter nonsense, which completely ignores the historical and third-party background: the replacement of the dock connector by Lightning was a huge shift as it was very common for devices to have built-in dock connectors which became useless pins overnight (there were literally cars with dock connectors). As necessary as the transition was in the long run, it basically made apple swear to keep lightning alive for at least as long as the DC was.
And there is a clear counter-example: they've been slowly inching support in from the devices least likely to use hard-set connectors: first the 3rd gen ipad pro in 2018, then the 10th gen ipad in 2020, 6th gen mini in 2021, 5th gen Air in 2022.
> The extra few years selling cables so that you can plug your brand new Apple laptop in to your brand new Apple phone was probably a fun little profit exercise
More nonsense, apple literally doesn't want you to plug one into the other, they've been stripping wired phone-related features from macos as fast as they could be bothered to, moving them to either wireless (airdrop) or cloud.
> if not comically anti-consumer/anti-environment.
Yes indeed, the anti-consumer and anti-environment move of letting users upgrading from one iphone to the next not have to replace all their cables.
Apple is absolutely trying to leverage their OS in order to drive usage in other markets. One big example of this is Apple Maps, which is being used as a default on iOS no matter if you like it or not. Both "Contacts" and "Find My" uses Apple Maps as the only option for starting navigating to another address, and if the application is not installed, but Google Maps or any other app, they still ask you to install Apple Maps instead of doing what everyone else in the ecosystem is doing, which is to ask which navigation app to use.
> Which was almost certainly on Apple's timeline anyway, though we'll never know for sure.
Yes, absolutely. The manufacturer who almost never use standard connectors were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
Except for all the times they do?
> were gonna start using standard connectors suddenly, no because regulation forced them to, but because that was in their timeline anyways...
Yes? Or are you saying regulations forced them to use USB-C on macbooks, to the exception of every other port including the beloved but non-standard magsafe?
Or that regulations forced them to add type C to the ipad pro in 2018? The ipad in 2020? The ipad mini in 2021? The ipad air in 2022?
Hell, back in 1998 they released the iMac with essentially only USB support. Was that also regulations forcing them?
Especially when deploying it for a small business. It allows for easy integration with azure, profile syncing etc.
Myself, I just want a browser that doesn't close multiple tabs when I want to close just one when tapping on a touch screen. That is one thing with Edge that irritates me to high hell, and a reason for me to switch.
I don’t set up a new Edge profile often but I have to remember to turn off like 5 or 6 things each time to make it somewhat usable.
I don’t know how a company can take good products and turn them into tacky products that no one would want to use if they had the knowledge to download an alternative.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-...
I would say no, there is no way to make it more tolerable unless you run something like shutup10 or https://github.com/TemporalAgent7/awesome-windows-privacy but then again if you care that much you should simply just run Linux because in reality there is no real good solution since spyware is baked right into the product.
Then why would MSFT release Edge at all? maybe they should default to Chrome.
Okay. What if I want to use Firefox though?
It's more of an ideology about Microsoft forcing whatever they want on users.
Playing rough in the sandbox hurts all their products. See what’s happened to Bing since they won’t let you use it in Safari or Chrome.
How does Microsoft think that they can get away with all of this shit?
People keep buying it, so they can get away with almost anything.
While I use Fedora, I believe most frustrated people will look to Apple ecosystem.
On more pet peeves level of hostility:
Still haven't found a clean way to get rid of Apple Music. Every single time I accidentally click the play button on my headphones it brings up Apple Music.
2FA verification being bound to Apple devices.
Phasing out kext support under the security reasoning also means decent low level extensions are now a dream of the past. Stuff like Karabiner are notably worse when system perfs degrade, and I'm not holding my breath for linux partition mounting.
I suggest using their default DE, it will give you more streamlined experience.
Are they really? We dumped chrome for edge a year ago at the least...
Apple not allowing other browsers is a bit much…
It can be a no brainer depending on your life style (I mean, some people are trying to get back to dumb phones, so why not), I personally see it as big nope.
Apple is paranoid about being dependent on other companies. If Chrome becomes a "must have" Google will have leverage over them by threatening to pull Chrome from the iPhone.
They have been burned badly before: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
Instead of letting that happen, they use the iPhone's market share to push an alternative they control and pressure developers to support it (with its market share).
Google is already using such tactics against Android phone makers. They keep them in line by threatening to not license them their services.
Not exactly EEE, but I see where the inspiration comes from. I always thought the mistrust of MSFT in the community started mainly because of how it pushed IE and its Windows OEM licensing terms, but it goes far beyond that.
Myself and most of the people I've networked with either have or are transitioning away from other browsers, towards Edge. As a browser, it's fine. It has good PDF viewing/editing features, performant and works well with organisational SSO.
I specifically stated PDF editing, not just viewing PDF files.
SSO works better on Edge in a work environment, mainly as it connects to the Windows profile. This means that I do not need to make changes to additional browsers or have end users struggling to sign in to various applications. Specifically with Edge, I can simply provide each user profile a folder with shortcuts to the likes of email quarantine, support, Outlook etcetera and they will either see their account listed or only need to enter their email address.
Coupled with appropriate training, this has cut down on users signing into Microsoft login pages that have been designed to look like the legitimate organisation using logo's and other branding. When in doubt, the users can visit the shortcut provided to them.
Also, not entirely clear that verge isn't just knee jerk reporting. Any sys admins that have actual first hand experience with this and can confirm?
Remember "Microsoft loves open source" phrase from just few years ago? Guess what, Ike also loved Tina.
Except way more mercenary.
Companies compete like boxers in a ring. You win some, you lose some. MS is the boxer who would hit below the belt if no one is looking and will try to main/kill you if they can.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt
Show me one of these big technology companies that doesn't act to benefit their shareholders?
Microsoft is Google is Apple is Amazon. They're all the same internally. The only difference is their optics when you're looking at them as an outsider. But really, they all work toward the same goal, increasing their stock price.
I'm saying that no, Microsoft is just like the others. They're all like that. All of them would hit below the belt if the risk/reward calculation is correct for shareholders.
Can you give an example of another company as mercenary as Microsoft?
P.S. The Halloween Documents give a good overview of how Microsoft thinks.
The owners seems to be in a constant power struggle with executives and management. Also, future to be shareholder are ripped off by current.
I companies would focus on (long term) profitability many of their problems would be solved.
Having exclusive features in a product they would prefer you to use because it makes them more money isn't EEE.
Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage. Same also goes for App Store deploy to desktop: a stable html/css/js SDK is needed there as well.
I would absolutely hate Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but this thing, IMHO, it is not. There are better example (e.g. what they do with VS Code or the .NET Debugger/HotReload) then this concrete case.
The worst thing about the integration is that their safelink checker thing is slow as hell.
Force-opening another browser despite user-configured defaults is utterly disrespectful to the user. You're trying to frame it as something helpful but it's not helpful in any way whatsoever. It interferes with the user getting their job done using a tool you made.
> Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage.
Once again, MS with the browser balkanization. MS is on all the consortia, they can push for browser standards too.
Maybe, but if I have the Outlook app, a browser, and a windowing desktop environment, it seems a little superfluous.
The new policy is to ignore your default browser from Office and Teams and open Edge. There is an option to turn off this policy to use your default browser.
Microsoft is setting the default browser as Edge with an option to change it to other browsers.
> Microsoft 365 Enterprise IT admins will be able to alter the policy, but those on Microsoft 365 for business will have to manage this change on individual machines.
As to having Edge WebView2 engine in Outlook and no other - well, that is understandable [1]. Albeit Internet Explorer and Edge Legacy are still used by addins [2]. Actually it was about time to ditch the old IE Trident engine from Outlook and Office apps. On Mac it uses Safari with WKWebView[2]
So is this outrage caused by just introducing a feature where links open within app and it happens to use whatever rendering engine is there for that purpose?
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/webview2-inst...
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/concept...
Edit: I re-read the announcment and it is actually something different than an engine - yeah, opens in Edge and presumably shows your email in Edge Sidebar. So nothing to do with outlook rendering engines.
Second, them constantly being in the news about peddling the Bing search engine also doesn't help. Most people like and prefer Google (and when I say most, I mean the 95% percentile), so if they read news like, "Microsoft is showing Bing ads on Google pages" - you can rest assured nobody is going to use Edge because at the back of they minds they will be thinking, "Hmm, does this mean my Google experience will be disturbed with this browser?".
I think I lost some gray matter just typing that out and reflecting on how stupid Microsoft is.
I honestly don't think they care. They get the benefit of all the work devs do to support Chrome for free and get the much more lucrative "regular user" market.
It is however a shame that Microsoft keeps insisting to shoot itself in the foot. There's a very developer-friendly and professional and sleek side of Microsoft that is constantly sabotaged by the "used car salesman" side of the company that insists on adding noise like Microsoft Rewards to Edge or Candy Crush to Start.