5 ms·

I'm not surprised by this anymore. They've gone from full anti-trust lawsuit for Internet Explorer, to just riding the cliff edge of what they believe they can

I'm not surprised by this anymore. They've gone from full anti-trust lawsuit for Internet Explorer, to just riding the cliff edge of what they believe they can get away with. See: Skype, Teams installer, Office. This will continue as long as it's in their interest to be in control of as much of the software stack as possible. Another side of their underhanded marketing is where decision makers looking at collaboration or business apps are faced with the question of, "why bother evaluating something else (i.e. better) when we get this included in our Microsoft E5 license?"

throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
My favorite is how when you right-click some highlighted text in Edge, before the "Search the web for this" button, is an additional "Search Bing for this" button. I'm sure the product designer's thought was, "Maybe they just forgot how excellent Bing is, and they will decide to click this Bing button, rather than using the non-Bing search engine they explicitly configured before!" And not "Let's trap some accidental clicks."
- alexeldeib 5y ago
  Oh this is diabolical IMO. I just tested it to understand what's happening. Below "search the web", there is always a "search in sidebar" option. "Sidebar" basically splits your window and loads your search in the new pane. I assume this is some custom webview, but it looks very, very similar to a new window/tab. The kicker: only Bing search can be loaded in the sidebar. So when you change your default search engine away from Bing, the text changes to "search Bing in sidebar" -- because they didn't implement the sidebar for anyone else, but wanted to keep the option there. Yikes.
  - Gaelan 5y ago
    That seems, for better or for worse, paved with good intentions.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Surprisingly, when I tried Edge this feature was really useful. Of course it would be better if they asked me which search engine should pop up. But given Edge is too far from dominant market position, I don't see what legal recourse one could suggest to force the choice unless you entirely ban cross-promotion and product bundling.
  - hakfoo 5y ago
    I can see a modest excuse for restricting the sidebar view to Bing, in that you need to have a reasonably suitable display format for the results. Microsoft can be aware of and support the case from both sides, but I could imagine Google detecting "User-agent = Edge and the window width=300px", and sending some experience-ruining CSS or JavaScript to try to nudge users back to Chrome. I know there was a while where various Google properties were unreasonably clunky on Firefox, and I can't imagine it was by accident; doubtless a trillion-dollar company can wire up a few CI instances to make sure things load well on non-Chrome browsers.
    - alexeldeib 5y ago
      I agree and did try messing with the views a bit vs. bing.com and realized it's not the same. Fair enough! But to introduce a sidebar in a chrome-based browser just to ship Bing? and then add it to every right click context for only Bing, overriding your other search preferences? and the sidebar just redirects you to open the search in a new tab/window anyway (was at the bottom of the screen for me)? I didn't love it.
ravenstine 5y ago
The anti-trust thing was kind of ridiculous, though. Would you have preferred to have to get a floppy disk in order to install a web browser? How about Acer replacing IE with its own piece of shit browser in OEM builds? (hypothetical) Looking back, I don't think that was a good use of the Sherman antitrust act.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  It wasn’t even really IE. Everyone forgets the bigger issue at play in that case: forcing OEMs to pay for a Windows license even on non-Windows devices. That’s something that anti trust laws are for. The IE thing was just another thing they could tack on as an “abuse”.
gnicholas 5y ago
The Teams installer is the worst. Every time I open Teams, the damn thing installs itself in the login items on my Mac. This is straight up malware behavior. I wish I could report this to Apple.

throwawaaarrgh 5y ago

My favorite is how when you right-click some highlighted text in Edge, before the "Search the web for this" button, is an additional "Search Bing for this" button. I'm sure the product designer's thought was, "Maybe they just forgot how excellent Bing is, and they will decide to click this Bing button, rather than using the non-Bing search engine they explicitly configured before!" And not "Let's trap some accidental clicks."

alexeldeib 5y ago
Oh this is diabolical IMO. I just tested it to understand what's happening. Below "search the web", there is always a "search in sidebar" option. "Sidebar" basically splits your window and loads your search in the new pane. I assume this is some custom webview, but it looks very, very similar to a new window/tab. The kicker: only Bing search can be loaded in the sidebar. So when you change your default search engine away from Bing, the text changes to "search Bing in sidebar" -- because they didn't implement the sidebar for anyone else, but wanted to keep the option there. Yikes.
- Gaelan 5y ago
  That seems, for better or for worse, paved with good intentions.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Surprisingly, when I tried Edge this feature was really useful. Of course it would be better if they asked me which search engine should pop up. But given Edge is too far from dominant market position, I don't see what legal recourse one could suggest to force the choice unless you entirely ban cross-promotion and product bundling.
- hakfoo 5y ago
  I can see a modest excuse for restricting the sidebar view to Bing, in that you need to have a reasonably suitable display format for the results. Microsoft can be aware of and support the case from both sides, but I could imagine Google detecting "User-agent = Edge and the window width=300px", and sending some experience-ruining CSS or JavaScript to try to nudge users back to Chrome. I know there was a while where various Google properties were unreasonably clunky on Firefox, and I can't imagine it was by accident; doubtless a trillion-dollar company can wire up a few CI instances to make sure things load well on non-Chrome browsers.
  - alexeldeib 5y ago
    I agree and did try messing with the views a bit vs. bing.com and realized it's not the same. Fair enough! But to introduce a sidebar in a chrome-based browser just to ship Bing? and then add it to every right click context for only Bing, overriding your other search preferences? and the sidebar just redirects you to open the search in a new tab/window anyway (was at the bottom of the screen for me)? I didn't love it.

ravenstine 5y ago

The anti-trust thing was kind of ridiculous, though. Would you have preferred to have to get a floppy disk in order to install a web browser? How about Acer replacing IE with its own piece of shit browser in OEM builds? (hypothetical) Looking back, I don't think that was a good use of the Sherman antitrust act.

colejohnson66 5y ago
It wasn’t even really IE. Everyone forgets the bigger issue at play in that case: forcing OEMs to pay for a Windows license even on non-Windows devices. That’s something that anti trust laws are for. The IE thing was just another thing they could tack on as an “abuse”.

gnicholas 5y ago

The Teams installer is the worst. Every time I open Teams, the damn thing installs itself in the login items on my Mac. This is straight up malware behavior. I wish I could report this to Apple.