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What on Earth are they doing?! The release a new Chromium-based browser, Edge - and it's well received, people actually like it as an alternative to Chrome. Su

What on Earth are they doing?! The release a new Chromium-based browser, Edge - and it's well received, people actually like it as an alternative to Chrome. Sure, it has a very long way to go in terms of market share, but it's on a solid footing. And now they seem determined to give it a bad name - I can imagine corporations not wanting software like this in their networks, and mandating Chrome instead...

qsort 5y ago
I swear I don't get it at all. I'm not even mad, it's just depressing.
Someone1234 5y ago
Greed/impatience. Their major competitors have the smart strategy: Skim a small amount off the top quietly and forever (Apple, Google, and Facebook). The perfect rent-seekers. Microsoft doesn't want to put in the hard work/time/cost to create a comparable skimming operation, so they take ugly shortcuts like this. For one specific example, the Windows Store is trash. It has been trash for years. The visual refresh in Windows 11 hasn't fixed what is wrong with it (e.g. majority scam apps, difficult to locate stuff, difficult to evaluate the legitimacy/low trust). Microsoft needs to work hard/spend resources/put in the time to improve the experience, and then it will be a revenue generator, but why do that when you can do lazy stuff like this? Microsoft could be selling paid upgrades that add legitimately value to Windows that sell themselves, but again that requires actual hard work.
- freediver 5y ago
  .. and this makes it the most valuable company on the planet. How did they achieve that in your opinion?
  - option_greek 5y ago
    Outlook365 + azure ad They didn't need anything else. Till there is no competition for user management and corporate email, they will be in business.
    - matoro 5y ago
      Does Gsuite not count as competition? It even fills the MS Office role with Gdocs.
      - nicce 5y ago
        Does it? It requires internet connection and sends all company data for third party. Smooth perfomance is locked for using Chrome browser.
      - quartesixte 5y ago
        Excel rules the corporate world. And to a certain extent, Outlook. But that’s mostly due to sheer inertia.
      - option_greek 5y ago
        It would and to certain extent it does especially with startups etc. Where they dropped the ball is not being serious about the enterprise support. There are other reasons as well like attaching Google's name to the product there by making it non-serious (as in free/personal vs enterprisey/serious) due to Gmail being associated with personal email. If they are serious they should have gone with a separate brand with competent support. Despite all the above reasons, the main reason for the current zero competition is because for all enterprises,using azure AD is a natural progression from their much abused on-prem AD which has been linked as the primary mechanism for user auth across all kinds of products (MS and non MS). To be honest, MS doesn't have to do anything now. Just sit back and collect the money (and once in a while acquire things that have potential to become enterprisey like the GitHub).
      - flatiron 5y ago
        Have you ever worked at a company that didn’t use office? I haven’t.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        Where I work, Office is being used less & less in favor of Google docs, so I'm not sure what the future holds. MS bundling OS/Office licenses more agressively I'm guessing will be one factor. As a side note, this increased use of Docs is unfortunately out of sync with security policy where I work. Certain types of data are only allowed to be shared through an encrypted portal that auto-deletes the file... Unless you put that data in a Google Sheet and hit the "share" button.
  - bogwog 5y ago
    > How did they achieve that in your opinion? Because the FTC is asleep at the wheel.
  - chasil 5y ago
    Microsoft has never had a primary focus on retail consumers. The tools available on enterprise Windows platforms are vast compared to what an individual user can control on their standalone machine. These intrusive new Edge features have not appeared on my corporate desktop that is joined to Active Directory, and they likely never will. For individual consumers that prefer Chrome, it is likely time to install and learn a new operating system. Google could take some action to stop this. There could be a legal approach involving antitrust, but Google has its own problems with that issue at the moment, and action would likely have to be coordinated with Mozilla. Alternately, Google could force technologies into Chromium that compromise Microsoft, but are not sufficiently hostile to prompt a fork. I have thought that a tight binding of Go into Chromium, similar to Mozilla's actions with Rust, might make the entire market rethink C# and the .NET CLR. Kotlin can also be deployed at the JavaScript layer, and that would be an interesting platform to force-feed to Edge. Google has likely already had extensive internal discussions on transforming Chromium into a poison pill for Windows.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"the Windows Store is trash" Maybe because nobody needs it. People are used to buying Windows software from elsewhere. I am in this category as well. When I need software I look by searching I have no desire to ever visit those stores.
  - tdeck 5y ago
    It can be really nice to have an official way to download and install software in one click. For a few years after the windows store was released, I used to look there first for software but I was always disappointed. They never managed to make it good enough that anything I wanted would be published there.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      When I used to use windows 10+ years ago, ninite.com did this job perfectly.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      >"It can be really nice to have an official way..." Windows store started with only being able to serve UWP applications that were really constrained in what they could do. I just laughed when my competitors went that way as they'd lost some rather important features. As a person I just hate an "official ways" as in my opinion they are detrimental to customers but to each their own.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    It could be really awesome. Imagine if you could take a plain APPX package [1] and publish it on your website. That could be set up to integrate with the whole store platform so users could optionally get the benefit of auto-updates and optionally log in and make in app purchases. There's so much low hanging fruit when it comes to improving the user experience on Windows that I can't even understand what Microsoft is trying to do. 1. http://woshub.com/how-to-download-appx-installation-file-for-any-windows-store-app/ http://woshub.com/how-to-download-appx-installation-file-for...
- vetinari 5y ago
  > The visual refresh in Windows 11 hasn't fixed what is wrong with it They made it even worse. In the old store, it was possible to install stuff like python or powershell without an account. With the new one, it insists on Microsoft account.
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
What choice does a corporation have? Use any windows products in your corporation? Edge will get installed whether you like it or not. This is an abusive position tbh.
walrus01 5y ago
microsoft is often the very definition of something like "a camel is a horse designed by committee"
wpietri 5y ago
It makes sense if you are an amoral product manager at a large company with monopolistic tendencies. The way I see it, there are two basic economic activities: value creation and money extraction. Classic open source is totally the former. Ditto the sort of artist painting murals in the alleys of San Francisco. [1] Most things end up with some of both. E.g., all the entrepreneurs on HN who have a good idea and make a product. Value creation is where they start, but they need to pay the bills, so they then turn to monetization. But for some people, they start with cash extraction. Their first question looking at anything is, "How do I get money from this?" Value creation is done grudgingly if at all. So when they see something like a browser, they think, "Wow, look at all the money flowing through this. How do I deflect a portion of that money into my pockets?" Whether it harms the user or the ecosystem is irrelevant to them except to the extent there will be blowback that harms the cash extraction. To me that's the ethics of a parasite and it's revolting. But to a disturbing number of people, that's just good sense. [1] E.g. https://www.precitaeyes.org/ https://www.precitaeyes.org/
FormerBandmate 5y ago
Edge is incredible in terms of UI (vertical tabs and collections are incredible), but I switched from Chrome because it was less bloaty and spyish. It's quickly becoming worse than Chrome here, it's like they're doing everything they can to make me switch to Vivaldi or Brave
- michalstanko 5y ago
  Both Vivaldi and Brave have their advantages, but I had switched away from them. Vivaldi was too slow at times and some keyboard shortcuts in some apps (Google Docs, etc.) didn't work. Brave doesn't support Netflix and some other streaming services (for a noble reason, I believe, but - in the end, it just didn't work). I used to love and use Opera back in 2000's. These days, I can't find a single browser that has all I want, so I ended up using multiple ones all the time.
  - MrZander 5y ago
    What do you mean Brave doesn't support Netflix? I've never had any issues.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    The world revolves on the Internet, and all browsers are absolute crap, for one reason or the other. As software engineers, we should be ashamed it's got to this point. The thing that saddens me the most is what Mozilla has become. Now the choice is who we get spied from, or Safari which is available only if you're willing to be tied to Apple's walled garden. If only Brave could pull their head out of the crypto ass and release a decent, crypto free and paid version of their browser. But crypto pays more, like spying pays more, so we're left with shitty software running the world. /rant
    - pid-1 5y ago
      +1 I want to pay for stuff so I know the services I buy have good incentives. I'm currently using Fastmail, 1Password and trying out Zorin OS. A paid browser would be an awesome addition to the stack.
shados 5y ago
Bad product management. You can bet the team is like "WTF are you doing asking for this?!", and they're like "we need to hit or OKRs and I need an impactful $$$ win to get my promotion, deal with it".
- Oddskar 5y ago
  Yupp. This reeks of a bad PM that is doing everything they can do get the next promotion and completely disregarding the big picture.
- warning26 5y ago
  Exactly this -- Edge is clearly being ruined by PMs + OKRs. You can see it in every bad decision they make. "But see! Offering a misleading 'switch to recommended settings?' dialog has increased Bing use by 5% since last quarter! Promote me!"
- charles_f 5y ago
  I can picture with hi-fi some CVP in a meeting asking "how do we monetize that? " and a "pm" presenting their fantastic idea
warner25 5y ago
I've used Windows and Linux interchangeably since 2005, but for the past year I was very happy with Windows 10 and the new Chromium-based Edge. I was able to turn off or remove all the distracting elements, and it was clean and fast. Then I got a new laptop recently and decided, for various reasons, to use Linux again as my host operating system, but it was honestly not easy to justify because my old Windows 10 install was so good. Now, from everything I've seen about Windows 11 (haven't tried it yet myself, admittedly) and things like this about Edge, I'm feeling like I escaped the Microsoft ecosystem just in time!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

qsort 5y ago

I swear I don't get it at all. I'm not even mad, it's just depressing.

Someone1234 5y ago

Greed/impatience. Their major competitors have the smart strategy: Skim a small amount off the top quietly and forever (Apple, Google, and Facebook). The perfect rent-seekers. Microsoft doesn't want to put in the hard work/time/cost to create a comparable skimming operation, so they take ugly shortcuts like this. For one specific example, the Windows Store is trash. It has been trash for years. The visual refresh in Windows 11 hasn't fixed what is wrong with it (e.g. majority scam apps, difficult to locate stuff, difficult to evaluate the legitimacy/low trust). Microsoft needs to work hard/spend resources/put in the time to improve the experience, and then it will be a revenue generator, but why do that when you can do lazy stuff like this? Microsoft could be selling paid upgrades that add legitimately value to Windows that sell themselves, but again that requires actual hard work.

freediver 5y ago
.. and this makes it the most valuable company on the planet. How did they achieve that in your opinion?
- option_greek 5y ago
  Outlook365 + azure ad They didn't need anything else. Till there is no competition for user management and corporate email, they will be in business.
  - matoro 5y ago
    Does Gsuite not count as competition? It even fills the MS Office role with Gdocs.
    - nicce 5y ago
      Does it? It requires internet connection and sends all company data for third party. Smooth perfomance is locked for using Chrome browser.
    - quartesixte 5y ago
      Excel rules the corporate world. And to a certain extent, Outlook. But that’s mostly due to sheer inertia.
    - option_greek 5y ago
      It would and to certain extent it does especially with startups etc. Where they dropped the ball is not being serious about the enterprise support. There are other reasons as well like attaching Google's name to the product there by making it non-serious (as in free/personal vs enterprisey/serious) due to Gmail being associated with personal email. If they are serious they should have gone with a separate brand with competent support. Despite all the above reasons, the main reason for the current zero competition is because for all enterprises,using azure AD is a natural progression from their much abused on-prem AD which has been linked as the primary mechanism for user auth across all kinds of products (MS and non MS). To be honest, MS doesn't have to do anything now. Just sit back and collect the money (and once in a while acquire things that have potential to become enterprisey like the GitHub).
    - flatiron 5y ago
      Have you ever worked at a company that didn’t use office? I haven’t.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        Where I work, Office is being used less & less in favor of Google docs, so I'm not sure what the future holds. MS bundling OS/Office licenses more agressively I'm guessing will be one factor. As a side note, this increased use of Docs is unfortunately out of sync with security policy where I work. Certain types of data are only allowed to be shared through an encrypted portal that auto-deletes the file... Unless you put that data in a Google Sheet and hit the "share" button.
- bogwog 5y ago
  > How did they achieve that in your opinion? Because the FTC is asleep at the wheel.
- chasil 5y ago
  Microsoft has never had a primary focus on retail consumers. The tools available on enterprise Windows platforms are vast compared to what an individual user can control on their standalone machine. These intrusive new Edge features have not appeared on my corporate desktop that is joined to Active Directory, and they likely never will. For individual consumers that prefer Chrome, it is likely time to install and learn a new operating system. Google could take some action to stop this. There could be a legal approach involving antitrust, but Google has its own problems with that issue at the moment, and action would likely have to be coordinated with Mozilla. Alternately, Google could force technologies into Chromium that compromise Microsoft, but are not sufficiently hostile to prompt a fork. I have thought that a tight binding of Go into Chromium, similar to Mozilla's actions with Rust, might make the entire market rethink C# and the .NET CLR. Kotlin can also be deployed at the JavaScript layer, and that would be an interesting platform to force-feed to Edge. Google has likely already had extensive internal discussions on transforming Chromium into a poison pill for Windows.
FpUser 5y ago
>"the Windows Store is trash" Maybe because nobody needs it. People are used to buying Windows software from elsewhere. I am in this category as well. When I need software I look by searching I have no desire to ever visit those stores.
- tdeck 5y ago
  It can be really nice to have an official way to download and install software in one click. For a few years after the windows store was released, I used to look there first for software but I was always disappointed. They never managed to make it good enough that anything I wanted would be published there.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    When I used to use windows 10+ years ago, ninite.com did this job perfectly.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"It can be really nice to have an official way..." Windows store started with only being able to serve UWP applications that were really constrained in what they could do. I just laughed when my competitors went that way as they'd lost some rather important features. As a person I just hate an "official ways" as in my opinion they are detrimental to customers but to each their own.
- donmcronald 5y ago
  It could be really awesome. Imagine if you could take a plain APPX package [1] and publish it on your website. That could be set up to integrate with the whole store platform so users could optionally get the benefit of auto-updates and optionally log in and make in app purchases. There's so much low hanging fruit when it comes to improving the user experience on Windows that I can't even understand what Microsoft is trying to do. 1. http://woshub.com/how-to-download-appx-installation-file-for-any-windows-store-app/ http://woshub.com/how-to-download-appx-installation-file-for...
vetinari 5y ago
> The visual refresh in Windows 11 hasn't fixed what is wrong with it They made it even worse. In the old store, it was possible to install stuff like python or powershell without an account. With the new one, it insists on Microsoft account.

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

What choice does a corporation have? Use any windows products in your corporation? Edge will get installed whether you like it or not. This is an abusive position tbh.

walrus01 5y ago

microsoft is often the very definition of something like "a camel is a horse designed by committee"

wpietri 5y ago

It makes sense if you are an amoral product manager at a large company with monopolistic tendencies. The way I see it, there are two basic economic activities: value creation and money extraction. Classic open source is totally the former. Ditto the sort of artist painting murals in the alleys of San Francisco. [1] Most things end up with some of both. E.g., all the entrepreneurs on HN who have a good idea and make a product. Value creation is where they start, but they need to pay the bills, so they then turn to monetization. But for some people, they start with cash extraction. Their first question looking at anything is, "How do I get money from this?" Value creation is done grudgingly if at all. So when they see something like a browser, they think, "Wow, look at all the money flowing through this. How do I deflect a portion of that money into my pockets?" Whether it harms the user or the ecosystem is irrelevant to them except to the extent there will be blowback that harms the cash extraction. To me that's the ethics of a parasite and it's revolting. But to a disturbing number of people, that's just good sense. [1] E.g. https://www.precitaeyes.org/ https://www.precitaeyes.org/

FormerBandmate 5y ago

Edge is incredible in terms of UI (vertical tabs and collections are incredible), but I switched from Chrome because it was less bloaty and spyish. It's quickly becoming worse than Chrome here, it's like they're doing everything they can to make me switch to Vivaldi or Brave

michalstanko 5y ago
Both Vivaldi and Brave have their advantages, but I had switched away from them. Vivaldi was too slow at times and some keyboard shortcuts in some apps (Google Docs, etc.) didn't work. Brave doesn't support Netflix and some other streaming services (for a noble reason, I believe, but - in the end, it just didn't work). I used to love and use Opera back in 2000's. These days, I can't find a single browser that has all I want, so I ended up using multiple ones all the time.
- MrZander 5y ago
  What do you mean Brave doesn't support Netflix? I've never had any issues.
- 1_player 5y ago
  The world revolves on the Internet, and all browsers are absolute crap, for one reason or the other. As software engineers, we should be ashamed it's got to this point. The thing that saddens me the most is what Mozilla has become. Now the choice is who we get spied from, or Safari which is available only if you're willing to be tied to Apple's walled garden. If only Brave could pull their head out of the crypto ass and release a decent, crypto free and paid version of their browser. But crypto pays more, like spying pays more, so we're left with shitty software running the world. /rant
  - pid-1 5y ago
    +1 I want to pay for stuff so I know the services I buy have good incentives. I'm currently using Fastmail, 1Password and trying out Zorin OS. A paid browser would be an awesome addition to the stack.

shados 5y ago

Bad product management. You can bet the team is like "WTF are you doing asking for this?!", and they're like "we need to hit or OKRs and I need an impactful $$$ win to get my promotion, deal with it".

Oddskar 5y ago
Yupp. This reeks of a bad PM that is doing everything they can do get the next promotion and completely disregarding the big picture.
warning26 5y ago
Exactly this -- Edge is clearly being ruined by PMs + OKRs. You can see it in every bad decision they make. "But see! Offering a misleading 'switch to recommended settings?' dialog has increased Bing use by 5% since last quarter! Promote me!"
charles_f 5y ago
I can picture with hi-fi some CVP in a meeting asking "how do we monetize that? " and a "pm" presenting their fantastic idea

warner25 5y ago

I've used Windows and Linux interchangeably since 2005, but for the past year I was very happy with Windows 10 and the new Chromium-based Edge. I was able to turn off or remove all the distracting elements, and it was clean and fast. Then I got a new laptop recently and decided, for various reasons, to use Linux again as my host operating system, but it was honestly not easy to justify because my old Windows 10 install was so good. Now, from everything I've seen about Windows 11 (haven't tried it yet myself, admittedly) and things like this about Edge, I'm feeling like I escaped the Microsoft ecosystem just in time!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]