> Microsoft has introduced a bug into Family Safety that specifically targets the Chrome browser and prevents it from functioning on Windows.

In isolation this is understandable. Bugs happen, and it happens at the worst time. But Microsoft has a pattern on dark patterns to pump up the Edge usage, and cant help but this this is somewhat planned.

Actually I think this is unacceptable even in isolation. Chrome is one of the most popular Windows applications. If they aren't testing for regressions with Chrome, they aren't testing adequately.

Microsoft hasn't been doing testing adequately since 2014, when they ended their software engineer in test position.

> Microsoft hasn't been doing testing adequately since 2014

Maybe since forever. You always had to wait for the latest SP to have something stable. This ended with Win7. Since then they are "agile" and "rolling".

But think of the savings! They got so many rubes to sign up as "insiders" to be yes-men and ignore all the breaking bugs and go LGTM because they got to play with the shiny beta software!

Incompetence reins there. A few years ago I was working on an MSI deployment for something and Defender decided to think it was a virus. Turned out it was an MSFT DLL that we included with it that was tripping it. Took a whole month for them to sort it out.

Who needs unit tests? Push it to prod!

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

> In isolation this is understandable

They did the same with Firefox last year. Then i switched to a local account.

You can browse porn in Edge, but not in Firefox or Chrome. /s

> Other browsers like Firefox or Opera appear to be unaffected, and some users have even found that renaming Chrome.exe to Chrome1.exe works around this issue.

How is this possibly unintentional?

My family safety feature is called linux.

Our product once suffered from a faulty Windows Defender update, and as I remember, it took about two weeks for Microsoft to fix it. During those two weeks, our product was barely usable for many users because access to a file system was slowed down to a crawl.

So, two weeks before the fix might not be that unusual for them.

I wonder if this is related to the errors I saw this week, when I tried to install Chrome on my kid's computer. Apart from all the popups that discouraged switching to Chrome, the installer failed to run with an obscure error message.

Luckily I recalled there is an offline installer, and when I downloaded that, it worked like a charm.

> the installer failed to run with an obscure error message.

Some things never change: "The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would issue a cryptic error message when run on the DR DOS operating system rather than the Microsoft-affiliated MS-DOS" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Feels like a good case for an antitrust complaint if you ask me.

I think this is a legitimate bug. But also that Microsoft is taking its sweet time to fix it.

Google occasionally breaks YouTube in Firefox, and also takes its sweet time to fix it. Just the nature of the beast in this industry it seems.

The nature of the beast is I use yt-dlp and vlc as my YouTube client. If they’re going to be assholes, I’m not bothered.

Like google is any faster when they have issues. Oh wait. They're worse.

My dad called me recently asking why some NBC web site told him he couldn't watch their videos with Edge unless he turned his adblocker off, when he hadn't installed one. It turns out Edge configures their builtin one aggressively by default. I'm happier to help him with tech support for overly aggressive ad blocking than the alternative.

Definitely feels like Microsoft is reverting to old ways recently. Did LLMs bring back excessive greed?

They probably inserted their old plans to a LLM, in hopes of something new.