The very latest MS Windows 10 update (last weeks) is down right deceptive in its Edge pimping.
After reboot I had a notification message "Make your Computer Faster".
I wouldn't touch one of them with a 40 foot pole on the open web but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look as it might be some general advice about official new MS tools for tweaking, booting faster, cleaning dead files, newest iteration of the usual stuff.
It immediately launched into an MS Edge installation that had to be killed via process explorer. no dialog about "do you want to?" etc.
> but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look
What infuriates me the most is that this is aimed at nudging those who don’t know better. With older family members, a savvy relative or workshop can help them set up a functional environment, to pay bills, check Facebook etc.
Previously, I’ve advised to ignore messaging from web sites, but official OS notifications are important - like updates. Now, they can update the OS, click next/accept/ok and they end up with a different browser/bookmarks/ui and that be enough to take away their ability to do their errands.
So my mom, for instance, can no longer be self-sufficient. I have to tell her “oh that one is important” or “no this is just Microsoft trying to sell you stuff you don’t need/will be worse”. They’ve tricked her into the Edge default several times, because every update is an opportunity for MS to prey on her with full screen Microsoft-branded marketing posing as security/performance improvements.
I went through the whole "install Linux on Grandma's old desktop" thing a while ago, totally convinced it was a valid alternative, but there were too many bumps in the road. Linux isn't there yet to allow average users to upgrade major distribution versions. There's been architecture differences (32-bit packages disappearing or no longer being supported), broken packages because it was third-party and not upgraded for the latest release or unsupported, Xorg vs Wayland nonsense, etc. Trying to explain why Zoom doesn't work because it's not requesting a Wayland portal and they need to switch to Xorg but then HiDPI breaks is the type of user experience we're dealing with. That was not fun to debug over a phone during COVID.
Chromebooks are fine, but you need to trust Google. Macs are mostly okay if you're willing to eat the expense, because there's a limited amount of nonsense in the OS and a wide network of Apple Stores for support.
Hm. Personally my mother has been a happy Ubuntu user for over a decade, even going through the installer and upgrades herself.
The only customisation has been to switch to MATE desktop every time, which she finds more familiar. That might also imply sticking with Xorg? Overall though her experience has been good. But perhaps your grandmother uses a wider variety of apps. For her, it's mostly about videos (she does use the ISO automount feature in MATE and CD ripping), some document editing, a web browser, and video conferencing.
The last support call was about plugging in a projector. Turns out the projector was not turned on, and once it was on, it autodetected just fine. I then mentioned mirrored mode and monitor positioning, and that was about it.
Ubuntu is offering 5 years of LTS maintenance on 22.04, and if in 5 years she needs help with the upgrade, I don't feel that's a huge imposition, but she may well manage it on her own just fine.
> Linux isn't there yet to allow average users to upgrade major distribution versions.
I hate to say it, but ... don’t? Go the full managed-workstation route, put an LTS on there, and hope you’ll have a chance to do a version upgrade sometime in the coming years. I usually dislike the idea of using an LTS on a personal machine, but here, when the person using the computer isn’t the one maintaining it, it feels appropriate.
I agree it should be better, but it doesn’t feel like a grandma problem, it feels like a smart-and-willing-but-not-savvy problem. (Not that grandmas can’t be in the latter category, it just doesn’t sound like that’s what you’re describing.)
> Linux isn't there yet to allow average users to upgrade major distribution versions.
Which distro was this? The major-version-upgrade flow is very different for different distros.
IMO it would be difficult to make upgrading between major versions much easier than Fedora Silverblue — literally 3 clicks. (If you want to try it out, now is a convenient time to install Silverblue 38, because 39 is due out next week.)
I had a super old laptop that I installed Ubuntu Mate and gave it to my mom who needed a laptop for simple web browsing/email/YouTube. My mom is totally illiterate when it comes to computers btw.
Worked like a charm for a few years until the laptop finally stopped working for good.
I think Mint would have beem even better. Hell, I use Mint myself. Best OS available by any metrics I can think of. I like it so much that I now donate some yearly 20 bucks to the project. Using it for free feels almost like a steal.
Same here, installed Ubuntu Mate on six super cheap Windows laptops for a psychology practice. All they needed was Firefox to access webmail and Firefox ESR for their cloud electronic medical records system (yep, using Silverlight in 2020).
I heard not a peep for tech support for years. One time someone thought she forgot her password, but it turned out she just had someone else’s computer.
Eventually the practice made enough money to get everyone on MacBooks, which honestly has given me more trouble (especially around all the system-level permissions for webcam and mic access seemingly resetting on random updates).
Never underestimate how many users just basically need a mobile kiosk instead of an actual computer.
My grandmother bought a laptop a while back and decided she instead wanted a tablet. So she gave the laptop to me and I blew out the Win 8 install with Linux Mint and gave it to my mother who still runs it to this day. She has no idea its Linux because the cinnamon DE is Windows-like enough that she has no issue navigating to programs like Firefox. She only browses the web on it so I just setup auto updates and left it alone. She does not use social media, banking, or anything with an account really. She isn't computer savvy so Linux + FF is a low maintenance win.
Don't take me wrong, but it certainly sounds that your mom needs some Linux in her life. Pick a stable distro, set things up once, leave them be. For basic stuff like web browsing Linux is stable, reliable and won't do any surprises for you.
She has Ubuntu for a long time and it was really good. I forgot why I left Windows in the new machine, but I think she’s dependent on Zoom at least, maybe a couple of other apps. I may give Ubuntu or Mint another go when I’m visiting next time.
In either case, it’s insane that it’s come to the point where Linux is recommended on the basis of UX for non-savvy people. I wish vendors has these options and support, but people who don’t have a savvy friend or family member will probably never even have a chance to consider it.
Where are all the people telling us about the _new microsoft_ which loves open source now?
It's a huge company, don't anthropomorphize it. It hasn't changed, it's a system for maximizing profits, it does what some people in it determined to be most efficient for that goal. If saying it "loves open source now" on their websites to "befriend" and attract a new wave of devs is most efficient, then that's what it'll do. When the situation changes, it'll kill competition using any means it can get away with just like it always did.
From my experience with Firefox (which is better) and Chrome (which is faster, especially on old CPUs, compared to Firefox after installing a similar set of extensions) and the knowledge of Edge being a customized Chromium build (notably with some awesome features added, e.g. a vertical tabs bar) I once speculated Edge probably is fast, also modern-standard, so in many cases there probably is no rational reason to install another web browser on a Windows machine which has Edge anyway. I then found out I was wrong: Egde turnt out to be slower than Firefox, let alone Chrome. All my slower/faster ratings are subjective though, I didn't run any benchmarks, it just really feels slow. Curious to mention that even on a low-RAM (4GB) PC Chrome feels the fastest even though it consumes more RAM than Firefox does.
Cynical take but… maybe excessive telemetry is causing it to chug? Especially if it somehow is waiting for a telemetry server response on a critical path rather than sending async?
It may be pretty good for previous-gen games and hardware, and that too after various compromises.
Current and next-gen PC hardware will always be optimized for Windows first, with some technologies being straight-up limited exclusively to Windows.
Not that gamers are losing out on anything valuable, of course. I run Debian stable and spend quite a few times gaming on it, and it turns out almost all the games that won't run on it aren't games worth playing altogether. But this is an opinion of the negligible minority like you and me. The Consumers will obviously care for the latest.
The Steam Deck is, at least for Valve, a first-class citizen of its platform. Tons of money and effort has been put in to bring it up to Windows. It’s not quite there yet, but it is a lot closer than you’re making it seem.
No DLSS or ray tracing. Those might work if I imported the game into Steam; the it would use the Steam settings where I think they do work, from what I've heard. But I don't care that much about DLSS or ray tracing.
Otherwise, I think I've got the highest graphics settings, though I haven't checked them.
The only app still making me want Windows is Paint.Net. It really feels by far the best, if not say perfect, non-pro picture editor ever. I would even pay for really good (Pinta is quirky although indispensable) Linux and Mac ports. I also love Visual Studio but JetBrains Rider seems more than a match. Games indeed have ended being a problem long ago. Perhaps some latest and greatest games still are, I dunno. Have anybopdy tried something like Hogwarts Legacy or Baldurs Gate 3 on Linux?
BG3 works well on my new recent install of Debian Bookworm with nonfree sw on, Nvidia RTX 2080 SUPER, nvidia prop driver 525 or 535 I think, KDE Plasma set to Xorg (Wayland caused some flickering, supposedly bad interaction between Wayland and nvidia drivers).
I think I don't have advanced stuff like DLSS and HDR though, maybe I could if I did some tinkering.
Which may be another motivation for them to buy up so much of the gaming industry. They can probably justify blanket banning anyone playing COD on Linux in the name of banning cheaters.
At the consulting company I work for Linux has been an option for 6+ years together with Mac and Windows.
Hey, even at the customer I work with now (a rather influential directorate), people have the option to choose Mac or Linux.
And: pro-tip, if you are going to work in such a place (public directorate), consider taking the Mac option because unlike with Windows PCs there are limits to how cheap the bean counters can get them and the budgets for hardware is optimised independently of the budget for hiring more people to cover for the fact that they aren't nearly as effective as they could have been and I am afraid - also the hiring budget. (The Linux option is the second best: you get the same hardware but with Linux you make the best out of it.)
That never ceases to amaze me: I mean, as software developers we usually get paid more in a month (or maybe two) than the company hardware we are using costs, so you would think it would be obvious to anyone that money spent on hardware which enables us to be more productive is money well spent?! But no, "do you really have to have the laptop with 32 GB RAM, isn't 16 GB enough?"...
This conversation exasperates me and has happened too often even at profitable and/or well funded companies. I don’t know what it is about ordering upgraded-spec computers that inspires people to desperately want to save money, but even as the decision maker on this I’ve had to repeatedly defend spending, say, and extra $150 on MacBook Pros rather than Airs to people who are oddly fixated on the topic.
That’s like one hour of the person using the machine’s time! To save them tons of frustration and wasted time from their computer thermal throttling while, say, hooked up to multiple monitors, compiling, and running a video call.
> I’ve had to repeatedly defend spending, say, and extra $150 on MacBook Pros rather than Airs
Funnily enough I've sometimes had problems with the reverse. I've got a bad back, and lighter laptops are easier for me to deal with than heavier ones especially when I'm on-call. But sometimes the only option available at work has been a 15" MacBook Pro or similarly sized Linux laptop.
I have a strong preference for Linux laptops but I'd really also like it to be small and lightweight!
My wife sustained a minor head injury when the weight of her new work-issued MacBook Pro caused her wheelchair to flip over backwards when she stood up momentarily. (It was hanging from the backrest.) MacBook Air is not an option currently on the menu.
If they'd see the skill discrepancy between Linux desktop users and Windows desktop users, businesses would never hire anyone with a Windows background again. I work in a heavy Microsoft environment these days and the skill level is just sad. If there's no button to click people are at a loss. If there's no GUI to consume the logs people don't know what to do. Whenever I interview, if you write C#/.NET but your daily driver is Linux, you're practically hired.
Probably a third of my colleagues is using Linux at work, me included.
And it is getting even more widespread as most of the "office" work moves to Office365 and such which are all cloud/web based, so which OS you are running literally doesn't matter anymore.
Fortunately the "corporate desktop world" (cough M$ Office cough) is getting less and less relevant the more things move to web apps. I'm not a big fan of web apps mind you, but at least that's a plus...
Enterprises have been pushing as much work as possible through the browser for a long time. Outside of a few niche applications I don't think they will have much of a problem migrating.
I'm glad to hear there have been some consequences to Microsoft's anti-user product direction. But where we need to see Linux permeate is outside of tech bubbles.
As I understand it, the most significant barriers for having all of the big games run on Linux are the anti-cheat software in multiplayer games.
Many of the games I've tried, just kind of work. Path of Exile, for example, worked on my PopOS system (AMD CPU / Nvidia GPU) with no fiddling. (I switched a couple of weeks ago.)
HL² on pop-os was ok (tried it last week), a bit glitchy though. Portal completely froze and had to be killed. Probably better with Nvidia; I was using intel graphics. Interesting to try it though
> Decided it's time to switch to Linux because everyone says windows games now work on Linux thanks to Valve's efforts
> Installed Nobara (fork of Fedora made for gaming) and proceeded to install my copy of Red Alert 2 (my most played game) via Wine
> Try to run game, 'Error: xxx32.dll not found' or something
> Spent over an hour looking up forum posts on fixing that error, manually copying that dll and other modded variants of that dll to the install directory, but no cigar, still same error or other error, don't remember exactly
> Throw in the towel and went back to Windows where Red Alert 2 'Just Works TM'. Definitely no "year of the Linux" for me. I don't care how many thousands of Steam games work on Linux if they're not the games and apps I own and play. But good luck.
Edit: nice to see I'm getting downvoted for telling a personal story on this topic. Very emotionally mature of you guys.
More generally, I usually have more success running older games under Wine than on Windows 10 or 11 - DXVK helps a lot with early directx9 games in particular, in my experience.
I use the DODI patched variant of Red Alert 2 which works out of the box on Windows 11 as it ships with all the necessary patched DLLs to work on modern Windows.
Maybe. But I ran out of patience after about an hour. If gaming on Linux is advertised to "just works TM" then it really must just work without hours of tinkering.
Always check protondb first. That will tell you how well the game works, and how to get it working. (I haven't checked what it says about RA2; there are games that really don't work.)
I actually thought the launchers (Steam and Heroic) would automatically take care of that, but that doesn't always seem to be the case.
My experience with RA2 is that it doesn't work on Windows or Linux without some patching. I redid the game lately and just applied some patch that I found to make it work on Windows and it worked out of the box on Proton for me.
Not sure if it's why you get downvoted but RA2 definitely doesn't work out of the box on Windows.
If I could have total control of the OS I would undo all of that bullshit. An OS shouldnt feel like it was made by Google full of ads nobody wants or is asking for. Also the insane telemetry considering telemetry left Microsoft with Windows 8 one of the more hated versions after Windows Millenium Me which was a buggy piece of trash.
Microsoft has always been full of marketing shitfucks. Like when they rebranded Lync to Skype just because and dumped a whole communication campaign on their paying customers just for one marketing goon's KPI.
But they get away with it. Nobody buys Microsoft because they're good. It's because they have so many fingers in the pie that you can't do without them. They know it and make their products just good enough to not be dropped in favour of something much better.
Microsoft updated Office 365 earlier this year so that all the Office apps also load an Edge-based version of Electron, because letting their developers build UI elements as if they were web page content is more efficient for Microsoft.
The tradeoff is that every Office user has an additional 10+ processes that consume enormous amounts of RAM, but looks like someone in MS Marketing managed to turn that into lemonade, because it means that the "make your computer faster" ad is likely accurate (for Office users). Thanks to the magic of caches and shared libraries, running Edge probably does use fewer system resources than running Firefox or Chrome when Edge-Electron is already running.
Microsoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge).
Legal..? I'm sure their lawyers think it is?
I posted about this before, but MS got fined before by the EU for this kind of OS/Browser bundling in the late 2000s. For a while, we had an option at installation on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 to choose our browser.
These were still the days of Internet Explorer, so I don't know how much MS not having a competent browser factored into this decision, but I was really surprised that with a recent fresh install I did, this browser choice prompt was gone. Not to mention all the roadblocks thrown up by MS while trying to install an alternative browser...
Google has been doing this in search as well. Not sure where the comedy is.
On top of that they peddled their browser in all their products (gmail, youtube, maps, docs, ...), claiming better and faster experience, more features. Sometimes they had to check user agent to deliver worse experience to make that claim truthful.
Do you have a screenshot of "this"? Is it Google telling a user searching for Firefox (or another browser), specifically for that search, that they're using Chrome already?
It's interesting, that second option seems too malicious, how would you even coordinate a common understanding of this?
Perhaps it's just enough in the grey-zone that it is a "cross that bridge when we come to it" issue and that they don't need to figure out the specifics of any laws/regulation, because if they are on the wrong side of it, in the past it has been proven that these types of regulations are quite toothless.
This specific issue on its face seems a security thing, where users are warned against installing software from untrusted (as defined by microsoft) sources. It very handily doubles as a way to scare users into not installing competitors for their own applications (like browsers and office packages), of course.
Just look at Uber, for example. The opportunity cost of obeying the law in the various markets they entered would have far exceeded the cost of penalties they received in practice. So what did they do? They just flat out ignored the law globally, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them.
Unless part of the calculus involves executives behind bars, I don't know what else we should expect from corporate behaviour; they're just following their incentives.
They were hopeful of regulations "catching up" because it hurts future competition. If new regs hit the books after uber has already enjoyed their growth, it's a lot harder for someone else to break in.
Consistent refusal to obey the law should result in fines of ownership of the company. Forced nationalisation. That's the only thing that will get their attention. They have too much money to care about fines.
> It's interesting, that second option seems too malicious, how would you even coordinate a common understanding of this?
You can coordinate this with a coded message, such as:
"Our goal for 2023 is to make Edge a market-leading product, the best browser on Windows, and the customer's browser of choice. All executives ranked Vice President or above will receive $100,000 in shares for every percentage point increase in US browser market share this financial year."
Later you will be shocked - SHOCKED - to learn anti-competitive behaviour happened, when you were "just trying to encourage the OS and browser teams to cooperate on things like power efficiency and security"
> Microsoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge).
Why do they? How do they profit from this?
Why should they not? Their browser market share is munuscule, and I actaully feel good if somebody takes some of it from Chrome, slightly decreasing Google's hold on absolute power in defining the web.
Why should they care to make a competing browser at all?
The answer is simple. The google anti-trust case clearly indicates this is _highly_ profitable. As the browser (chrome) is one of the leading ways of increasing Search Query Volume (SQV). SQV increases ad impressions thus increases ad revenue, thus maximizes shareholder value.
Bing has a similar ad platform and with Edge Microsoft will have many ways to send users to do queries in Bing.
Why leave a big piece of juicy pie like this on the table for google to sweep up?
I don't even understand their value proposition. "Hey here's our knock-off of a product we couldn't make, with a little bit of gloss on it". How does that make me interested as a customer??
Simply a pure Chrome clone with vertical tab bar already is enough to interest me. From my point of view a horizontal tab bar is absurd, making a browser barely usable (I could hardly ever see the tabs captions in Chrome, only comprressed icons, until I've bought a reeeally big display). I feel this way since the days tabs have first been introduced - in Opera on Windows 95 (and it already had vertical tabs bar). Edge has a vertical tabs bar.
Nevertheless I actually use Firefox with a vertical tab extension (there are many) as I find it overall better, also make use of its awesome container tabs (a very nice convenience leap from using multiple browsers for different purposes) and feel nice about using a browser which is kind of (I know it's not really, at least from the financial point of view) independent from privacy&freedom-hostile corporations and actually different from their one technically. Another reason is Edge somehow feels the slowest browser ever to me.
Even if Edge had a bigger slice they're still just a glorified fork. They don't deviate from Blink or Chromium in any ways significant to user freedom or standards independence.
> fined before by the EU for this kind of OS/Browser bundling
And now Apple gets away with only allowing one browser engine on iOS, even if you try to go out of your way to use something else you can’t (third party browsers have to use the Safari engine built into the OS by App Store policy)
The market share of OSX in the EU is too small for anti-competition laws to kick in (5-7% depending on source). They also used this in a shield against Epic in those cases (since iOS is less than 40% on average). If that is a good argument I leave up to the reader to consider.
When Microsoft had it's browser mess it had near saturation level op dominance (>97% if I recall correctly).
Safari has been called out under the "gatekeeper" part of the DMA in the EU, apple's app store as well. the version on the ipad may escape due to a technicality, but I doubt that will persist for long.
I don’t see the point of being able to change the UI skin only? All that does is tricks people into thinking they’re using a different browser when they aren’t, and it gives Apple control over which features and APIs are supported etc. (maybe you can patch new ones in by injecting a polyfill but that’s a terrible solution)
It limits what plugins/extension can do. For example Firefox on iOS doesn’t support plugins at all and thus you can’t use the same Adblock you would use on desktop (unlock origin)
I still fail to understand Microsofts obsession with getting people to use Edge. Apples developers and ships Safari, but if you don't use it who cares, you're still on a mac running macOS (iPhone is a slightly different story).
Shipping a good and fast browser with Windows is perfectly fine, many will use it, some won't. Why do Microsoft care? The users are still running Windows. If anything this seems to undermine the value Microsoft place on Windows as a platform. Why not focus on making Windows better and if users want to use Windows to run Firefox or Chrome that's their choice.
I really don't see what value pushing Edge has to Microsoft. Are they just pining for the good old days of IE dominance? They dropped their own browser engine, so they obviously don't want to spend that much money on browser development, so why spend any at all?
Because currently they can well track everything you do on your computer,[0] but tracking all your activities on the web is still a bit tricky if you don't use non-MS browser.
[0] Of course they say it's all anonymyzed (at least if you are in Europe...) and no specific info is added to your profile, they are just interested in general trends etc., not individuals - but the fact remains you have little choice here.
Unfortunately the truth. The money isn't in creating the best browser they can, it's in what they can siphon from their users. And how they can pry upon impulsive and impoverished shoppers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/11/micro...
Meanwhile Apple has no problem also prying about impulsive and impoverished shoppers by offering both a credit card they forced Goldman to issue based on lower standards (which they have lost another $1 billion on this year) AND now offering BNPL too.
It's almost like big corporations love to "exploit markets" wrapped in layers of feel good marketing.
Since the spyware and add presenting malware in Windows is apparently insufficient they also want to get your data via bing and web browser usage and present you adds in those regions as well.
I get that ads represent a pretty good chunk of money for Microsoft, but not it terms of percentages. I really do question the long term viability in creating shittier versions of you core products in order to boost one of the smallest parts of you business. Of course that might be why Microsoft have billions of dollars and I don't.
Millions of developer hours and hundreds of millions of dollars spent developing hugely complex software just so that the omnibox's default target is bing.com instead of google.com
Do you see why Google is pushing Chrome so aggressively? If so, that's the same reason. Microsoft, besides selling Windows, is also an advertising provider.
Ads are like 98% of Google revenue, but only around 5% of Microsofts. Microsoft could practically kill Google if they joined Apples privacy crusade.
That's probably what I don't get, why is Microsoft even trying to be in the ad business? Sure there's money to be made, but there's also money in used cars. They are inherently a software company, while Google is a adtech company who happens to build software to support that business at a huge scale.
Consumers have signaled that they don't care enough about privacy/user tracking or ads enough to do much more than whine and continue using the software. So there is no real reason to not grab up the extra revenue.
As more stuff moves to the web and into Chrome, it's getting out of control of Microsoft. Someday if that continues something like a Chromebook will become equivalent or better than a Windows computer. I think they want at least a bit of ownership of the web and some type of alternative somehow. Like how Steam/Valve supports Linux as protection against Microsoft.
Latest "Windows Update" added an Edge icon back to my app bar. They actually had the reasonable behaviour for the search box, "do you want to keep it"; but the Edge icon gets stuffed without any option.
I looked, again, at how to remove Edge ... I don't have the will power for their shenanigans, they won that one.
Over the last few years MS have actually done quite a few things that would have changed my opinion of them. But they always back it to with a reminder they're still awful.
Prior to this was the convoluted process to buy Minecraft, my third time buying it, but first time buying a game from Microsoft. Jeez-louise, I needed three accounts: the child who is getting it, an adult to authorise the child to get it, and an Amazon account (somehow!?) to buy it ... having bought it, it was not simple to install it. They can't sell software, they have to control you, it's like signing up for an abusive relationship.
>I looked, again, at how to remove Edge ... I don't have the will power for their shenanigans, they won that one.
You can't because Edge is also the WebView component on Windows. The IE component is still there in its old broken, insecure glory and they have been replacing it with the Edge based WebView over time.
> I looked, again, at how to remove Edge ... I don't have the will power for their shenanigans, they won that one.
Reboot into "recovery mode" and use the command prompt from there to delete the Edge folder. Alternatively, boot into another OS that can mount NTFS read-write and do the same from it. You can use this "I wasn't asking" method to remove any — and I mean any — component of Windows you don't like. But of course make sure you understand what exactly you're deleting to avoid breaking your Windows installation. Move files instead of deleting them if you aren't 100% sure. I did this to Windows Update on my VM.
Anything having to do with parental controls or kids accounts on windows is just the worst. It’s not just Microsoft but they clearly give no shits about supporting those scenarios. It’s a box to check for them that something resembling parental controls exists.
I’ve given up trying.
Apple actually does a serviceable job there, so that’s where I’ll stay until they’re older.
Thanks for this, I was actually Ctrl+F'ing the page for the year number to no avail. Remembering all the MS antitrust stuff, I thought this Windows popup must be a pretty recent change, can't believe this has been going on for three years already? Where's the investigation? At some point you have to sue for damages when you are the Mozilla foundation.
How in the unholy mother's pillow is this legal?? Didn't MS get pretty heavily sanctioned both in the EU and the US for using its operating system to push for its browser? The US case was only settled when the government threatened to dissolve Microsoft Corp and break it into commercially independent parts (like Standard Oil was dissolved in 1911). And the EU case resulted in Microsoft having to add for European Windows users a post-install dialog where they could directly choose to install any browser of their liking.
It seems like they are at it again. Really hope the DOJ is not gonna settle this time around (repeat offender and all) and actually see it through that Edge, Bing and Windows are actually spun off to independent subsidiaries that can not collude to illegally manipulate the consumers.
All of this started immediately after the U.S./EU’s limitations on MS from their antitrust case ended.
The US /EU protected the world from 20 or so years of this BS. I suspect Google, Firefox, Chrome, Social Media, maybe even Apple’s resurgence, etc as we know it would not have happened if it wasn’t for the them preventing MS from abusing their monopoly in the most blatant manner.
I did a fresh install of Windows for a friend and I spent literally 30 minutes trying to figure out how to download Chrome. Edge refused to download it because it was dangerous, and I could not figure out for the life of me which setting to turn off to allow it. I googled it and found some suggestions, but everything I tried didn't seem to work. It was ultimately many settings changes (not sure which it was that helped) and restarting twice that allowed it.
I will never use Windows again on any computer I own. Even if I want to do desktop PC gaming again, it won't be on Windows.
They should be ordered to pay 45% of the company. Hand over the shares. If shareholders lose ownership, then they'll start to pay attention to how the company is run.
And the penalty for non-compliance, another 0.5% fine?
So long as repercussions aren’t more serious (see EU fines) or more personal (hold C-suite personally responsible for contempt of court or similar), nothing will change.
Threatening to nationalize, restructure, and then sell the company for cheap to someone that agrees to operate it within the bounds of the law… that might have some serious teeth.
I would assume malice but Outlook informed me today that it deactivated the "Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office" because it caused Outlook to open items slowly.
So if halon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") is anything to go by it might be not on purpose, but who knows.
They are out of control because they are receiving more and more free freshly printed money from government, since 2008. So they get the advantage of free money and the Cantillon effect.
These big corps would not last 10 minutes without government helping them. Not in this form anyway.
Thankfully, PCI Passthrough in QEMU/Proxmox is good enough to run games in a Windows sandbox.
I spent the last 1.5 years making Windows a good development environment (supported by a home lab/san that is pure linux,) but I am increasingly frustrated at the user hostility from Microsoft.
I have so many layers of outgoing connection filtering, custom windows rules to disable telemetry, etc, but still cannot get away from the dark patterns that is the modern day Windows experience.
Proton is good enough these days so there is little reason to use gpu passthrough in a windows vm. The kind of games that don't work on proton are typically online games where the anticheats don't work on linux, and those anticheats typically strict enough to disallow use inside a windows vm anyway. There are exceptions though. For example, I can't seem to run single player campaign of Halo: The Master Chief Collection without crashing after a few minutes on proton despite its gold status in protondb. If I really want to run that game, I guess gpu passthrough is the way to go.
I have a GPU passthrough setup but I hardly used it as I was able to run most of my games in with proton anyway. When I start the VM up it spends so long installing updates I couldn't really use it. I did eventually rig it to download updates and shut itself down in the middle of the night. This involved installing a third party power shell package because somehow Windows has no way to trigger running all updates from the command line by default. Mind blowing considering how obsessed they are with updates.
But based on my experience with my work machine, the whole OS does seem to have it as a design goal that the user be forced to watch the PC reboot and install updates while they sit around twiddling their thumbs. Why else would "Install updates and shutdown" actually shutdown and then start installing updates when you startup again? Maybe they're planning to place ads on the update screen so they wan the user to be there to look at them.
It's probably have something to do with windows' inability to replace files and executables for currently running process, so they'll have to shutdown first and actually applying the updates before those processes launched by the normal startup procedure.
I'm generally in favour of OSes encouraging signed executables from known developers with basic oversight by default. Apple do this, I can and do bypass it, but many don't need to. It's not a huge burden for the sort of software most people tend to run.
But that's not what this is.
By saying "oh by the way go and get our browser instead" it's clear that Microsoft aren't just checking known signing keys, they are directly targeting Firefox and using that knowledge to present high-intent users with an alternative.
It betrays their real intentions, and that's something lawyers love.
These days, Windows Defender has a habit of declaring almost any executable a virus. I can compile a simple 'hello world' C++ code using the Microsoft C++ compiler and the resulting executable is immediately quarantined by Windows Defender as a virus.
These numerous false positives begs the question, why is Windows Defender so bad at identifying a virus? Windows Defender appears to be so bad at identifying a virus threat it seems almost worthless? With so many false positives, what happened to Windows Defender to make it so bad at detecting an actual virus?
Seems that this is triggered when you have a specific setting in Installing Apps from Windows Store and that this happens by default is specific Windows 10 versions
So doesn't seem widespread to start with - outside of the MS tactics in general which are bull as always. If anyone knows which Win10 version have a restrictive installation method to start with, it will be useful to understand the actual impact
It's hilarious because had Microsoft not pushed Edge so insanely hard, very likely more people would have used it just out of convenience.
Once you disable the annoying parts it's not a bad browser at all, in fact it leaves both Chrome and Firefox in dust in terms of resource efficiency and speed on Windows.
Interesting that they say that users should select to install applications from "Anywhere", but don't tell the user to revert the changes afterwords, or explain what the implications of this change are.
And Apple has their own Apple Approved app store? Hell they even force all browsers to use webkit. I remember they were considering dropping that requirement, but have they?
Happened to me years ago with a Windows 10 update which made it crash all the time on my desktop. Reinstall didn't help because the installation image of course already included the update so it was broken from the start. I don't use Windows anymore either, its stability was the one feature that had kept me from switching away for years.
Windows also loves installing garbage drivers by default. I remember it was obsessed with installing an AMD GPU driver update )that only ever showed a black screen on boot) since it was newer than the working version I was using. I disabled the driver updates (this option in buried in a sub-dialog of a classic control panel option at the time) but since it had previously sniffed out that the driver existed it obsessively continued to download and install it in the background, re-bricking the install. None of the guides on clearing the download cache seemed to be able to convince it to give up, I eventually just reinstalled the OS without and internet connection and disabled the option before running updates.
I've kept Windows only for gaming and specific software, today most software is multiplatform or has a web version, and Steam uses WINE/Proton which makes probably over 90% of my game library playable, and for the rest there has many alternative ways.
It's only been a few weeks, but I don't have Windows installed on any of my PCs now. It's a shame that I still need lots of fiddling to figure out Nvidia drivers and why Wayland is not there yet, so for now I have to use Xorg, but for experienced users, it works really well.
I really wish it could be the same for newbies tough.
After reboot I had a notification message "Make your Computer Faster".
I wouldn't touch one of them with a 40 foot pole on the open web but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look as it might be some general advice about official new MS tools for tweaking, booting faster, cleaning dead files, newest iteration of the usual stuff.
It immediately launched into an MS Edge installation that had to be killed via process explorer. no dialog about "do you want to?" etc.
MS really has gone beyond the pale here.