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Microsoft’s new Windows prompts try to stop people downloading Chrome
- tlhunter 5y agoI could have sworn this started years ago, albeit with different messaging.
- JCWasmx86 5y ago> “‘I hate saving money,’ said no one ever. Microsoft Edge is the best browser for online shopping.” This is really cringe
- prepend 5y agoI don’t like this new form of writing, I’m not sure what it’s called. It’s not just informal, it’s cringy. I especially hate funny error messages as they just frustrate me. It’s ok when Reddit has a funny image because they can’t show my video game forum, but it’s infuriating when Microsoft shows a “whoops, what happened” when it just failed to sync the last 30 minutes of my work document.
- throwaway4220 5y agoMaybe it's a generation gap, but I've seen this in other places. I got a text message from my student loan servicer - It "needs 2know if U wish 2stay in Autopay". I thought it was spam, but it's real. Do Gen Zers really think this is okay, or am I getting too old
- pseudalopex 5y agoWould the words have been over 160 characters?
- howdydoo 5y agoThe 160 character limit is an ancient relic of 2008 (unlike Chrome)
- f0rmatfunction 5y agoThe 160 limit per message segment is absolutely still a thing, but when you receive a message >160 characters your phone stitches the segments back together for you so you don't notice. Why this matters: SMS delivery is usually priced per message segment. Going over the 160 limit ~doubles the cost to deliver the text. (Source: I am the CEO of a company which sends millions of text messages and avoiding 2 segment messages saves us thousands each month!) All that said, the text from the above commenter's loan servicer is unprofessional nonsense regardless of its length.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago> I am the CEO of a company which sends millions of text messages and avoiding 2 segment messages saves us thousands each month! How much is each customer worth to you? Which is worse for your business - all your customers getting a cringey needs 2know if U wish 2stay in Autopay text and thinking that your entire business is unprofessional, or spending an extra $0.001 per customer per month to send them a message that reads F0rmatFunction can automatically pay your bill each month, but we need your approval. Change your mind? Cancellation is easy, just text "No" to this number. Respond "OK" to enable auto-pay! I'd rather get the latter for sure! Sure, it's good to let those generating the messages know where the threshold is. Concise communication is best, sometimes you can be equally professional and just pick a different synonym or structure, and save the company some money. But sacrificing quality of a $20/mo service to save $0.001 per customer seems unwise, even if it adds up to a thousand-dollar bill.
- willcipriano 5y agoYou are a executive, you could work really hard and find new lines of business, talk to customers and understand their needs to craft better offerings, or find another firm to form a strategic partnership with. But you won't, you'll just say "Start using 2day in the text messages, we will save 500k a year!" and move on to a new company in 18 months.
- arbitrage 5y agogen Zers know it's stupid, but have the ability to cope with reality and just go on with their business, instead of obstinately pretending to be 'baffled' by something that's been in common usage for twenty years, then complainging about it on the internet. you're thinking really hard about paying your student loans now, so it worked. who doesn't understand what's going on? doesn't sound like it's your loan-servicer, to me.
- throwaway4220 5y agoNo I really thought it was spam!
- NobodyNada 5y ago> Do Gen Zers really think this is okay No, we don't think this is OK. It looks ridiculous. Remember that "textspeak" is just shorthand used to save keystrokes. I haven't seen anyone unironically use "2" instead of "to" since the days of flip phones -- on a smartphone keyboard, it's harder to type the number 2 than the word "to" because you have to switch to the numeral keyboard and then back. Writing "u" instead of "you" is less common than it used to be, though some people still do it sometimes. But capitalizing the U is absurd -- remember, the whole point of shorthand is to save a small number of keystrokes, so you wouldn't waste keystrokes on unnecessary capitalization. Any kind of shorthand like this looks ridiculous and out-of-place in a professional context, like a text message from a corporation. It signifies that you don't care enough to type out the whole message, which comes across as relaxed and casual between friends but as lazy and unprofessional in a form letter. If I received a message liked this, I would immediately think it was written by some middle-aged manager who is trying to be "cool" and "relate to the kids." But a poor imitation of low-effort texting shorthand doesn't come across as "cool" at all; it's just silly and disrespectful. It gives the distinct impression that the whoever wrote the message thinks of me as "just a kid" rather than a normal, adult peer; as if I don't deserve the dignity of a normal, professional message.
- formerly_proven 5y ago"OOPSIE WOOPSIE!! Uwu We made a fucky wucky!! A wittle fucko boingo! The code monkeys at our headquarters are working VEWY HAWD to fix this!"
- Spivak 5y agoAt least this tone accurately conveys the seriousness of the average dev team and is more fun than “this error has been sent to an unmonitored Slack channel, if you want to scream into the void here’s a link to our community forums.”
- prepend 5y agoI would rather have a message of “we piped this error to /dev/null and will ignore it until someone important manually brings it to our attention” than whatever this is. I also don’t think it reflects the dev team tone as it seems so fake fun and probably means the dev team is in terror of saying the wrong thing. I’d rather see the localization resource bundle value than whatever this is. It’s about as honest as the Costco greeter in Idiocracy saying “Welcome…I love you.”
- howdydoo 5y agoFrom what I've seen of Edge, it should be the project managers working vewy hawd to fix things, not the developers.
- 1_player 5y agoOh shit, corporate Twitter is going to adopt this kind of meme language in 5 years or so. Not even Idiocracy went that far.
- boomboomsubban 5y agoMicrosoft has been doing that for years, the blue screen of death contained an emoticon starting around Windows 7.
- arbitrage 5y agofollowing in sad mac's footsteps ... decades after.
- dgellow 5y agoI call it “fellow kids writing“. It feels really patronizing when used in a serious context. On the opposite, I started using Discord recently and they manage their funny tone very well, but it is used consistently through the application. And it stays informative.
- bityard 5y ago> I’m not sure what it’s called. I call it "meme speak". It's the style of writing used on meme image captions or in tweets designed to generate the most number of shares and "likes".
- marginalia_nu 5y agoIt sounds like a 2010 rage comic. Only thing missing is that guy eating cereal.
- Quarrelsome 5y agoIt sounds like the sales prompt I was forced to use in my telesales job in 2003.
- retskrad 5y agoGoogle used same tactics to grow Chrome market share. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI think it is totally ok to hate the player too.
- selfhoster11 5y agoI hate that saying, usually because both the game and the players are utterly trash. Which is the case here, by the way.
- prepend 5y agoI can hate both Google and Microsoft for using the same tactic.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Dudeman112 5y ago"Should I show up any speck of decency? No, the game lets me get away with it anyway, so who cares" - Approximately everyone who uses that saying unironically. If the only environment where someone will not be an asshole is an environment that punishes assholery, they are an asshole.
- DashAnimal 5y agoWhat is an example of Google using a similar tactic to grow Chrome market share?
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoYet more Microsoft Garbage. No wonder The M$ CEO is cashing out his chips.
- Jyaif 5y agoAdditional ideas for Edge's PMs: silently corrupt Chrome's binary at download time, and mark the website and the binary as dangerous.
- majkinetor 5y agoBetter, use Youtube tactic and slow down the chrome processes by setting their priority lower, but make it look like it has normal one.
- yrro 5y ago"Windows ain't done 'till Chrome don't run (fast)"
- IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y agoWindows can force Chrome to use software rendering for "stability" reasons.
- OldHand2018 5y agoI, for one, would love to see the two face off in a lawsuit that costs millions and saps the attention and focus of both sides for years on end.
- maltalex 5y agoHow about just creating an icon with the Chrome logo that opens Edge?
- N19PEDL2 5y agoI bet that many people would not notice that they are actually using Edge.
- quink 5y agoHow about a friendly reminder about best practices. A very innocent statement, don't mean no harm by it. Just helping out a friend. "Did you know that personal files can disappear just like that, just like that? Oh, I just noticed you are downloading Chrome. By the way, you sure those backups are working? You have backups, right? Just saying."
- zingplex 5y agoDoes anyone know if they're displaying similar popups on the Firefox download page?
- IiydAbITMvJkqKf 5y agoFirefox' market share is low enough that I'd be surprised if Microsoft wasted even one developer hour implementing this for Firefox downloads.
- catfishx 5y agoWell, its almost as high as Edges market share
- bityard 5y ago"Almost as high" is a strange way to put it since its popularity has been dropping steadily over the last decade. And Edge market share is only going up. Now that Firefox is no longer in the top 3 (in the Western market, further down world-wide), we can expect it to lose relevance even more quickly. Especially since Mozilla leadership has studiously avoided any effort to differentiate themselves from from Google/Chrome. They missed a huge chance to become The Privacy Browser that puts users in control of their web experience when Google and Facebook recently got all that bad press about privacy violations and monopolistic behavior.
- zamadatix 5y agoAn Edge's worth of desktop browser usage share of users are searching for different browsers is why it wouldn't even be worth an hour of dev time to show the message? The point GP made was Firefox was worth targeting not that Firefox is going to be more popular the Edge.
- fsflover 5y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288599
- thesuperbigfrog 5y ago"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft." They named their user tracking, telemetry, and "Buy Now, Pay Later" add-ons "trust"? That's really Orwellian.
- MMS21 5y agoI'm struggling to understand how that quote could be anything but satire
- maltalex 5y agoGoogle's has been bashed so consistently on privacy issues on mainstream media that non-techies often associate them with creepy data collection. Microsoft hasn't been in the news as much, at least not regarding privacy matters. They're often seen by the public as the solid company behind trusted products like Office and Windows.
- fsflover 5y ago> Microsoft hasn't been in the news as much, at least not regarding privacy matters. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12305598 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9976298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10053352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10144733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10144733 ...and many more.
- maltalex 5y agoYou're proving my point. The sources you linked are the eff, a techie's personal blog, arstechnica, and forbes. With the exception of forbes they're all tech niches. Now look at mainstream media. CNN alone has 230K results for google privacy [0]. How many results for microsoft privacy? 16k [1] [0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com%20google%20privacy https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com%20google%20pr... [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com+microsoft+privacy https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Acnn.com+microsoft+pri...
- darepublic 5y agoGotta keep the kids off of windows don't want them to be trapped by Microsoft ecosystem one day
- bityard 5y agoThe laptops I give to my kids have always had Linux (Ubuntu) pre-loaded onto them. To my kids, these are just what normal computers look like. The school uses Chromebooks and Macs so far as I know, my kids have never seen Windows.
- Julius_Caesar 5y agoThank god... Take my upvote kind stranger.
- 0x_rs 5y agoI heard some people having a decent time with Edge in the past with some features implementations. Not that I would use it myself, but I'm firmly convinced these childish plays only ruin whatever good work was done on it. Who on Earth would continue using a browser that has such hostile behavior and dark patterns all over the place e.g., buy-now-pay-later at browser level? It's so hard to trust Microsoft anyway, I'm glad 11 is such a tranwreck dead on arrival. Makes it easier to discourage people from using it, ever.
- nojito 5y agoHow is this any different than what google does in google app?
- dgellow 5y agoThey are both bad.
- kgwxd 5y agoPhone OSes got/get away with it because they came out of the gate doing it. MS and Apple have been trying to convert their PC OSes into the same thing ever since. They're envious of Chrome OS. "Compatibility", "standards based" and "open platform" used to be badges of honor. In my opinion, MS and Google would be better off sticking to being open, because if everyone is forced to chose between walled gardens, Apple is going to beat them both every single time.
- mook 5y agoI've been using Firefox as my browser on my Android phone for something like six or seven years now (I guess I'm weird). I don't recall any hard pushes to switch to Chrome. Using a non-Blink browser there is probably rare enough that making people switch isn't worth it. The websites don't seem to want to support Firefox, so Google definitely isn't blameless, but we should probably at least blame them correctly.
- cryptos 5y agoIt is a somewhat silly game, but I like it anyway. It is just good entertainment.
- sofixa 5y agoI hope Margrethe Vestager is paying attention, this bullshit is getting egregious. Microsoft not only deserve a fine, but a thorough breaking up into multiple separate entities.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoI mean they were already thoroughly whipped and fined, forced to add a browser choice window, then made to pay a fine again after this browser choice window 'accidentally' didn't work anymore. Time for another fine? I mean I have no clue where that money ends up at, I like to think it goes into IT subsidies, but still.
- bacchusracine 5y ago>Time for another fine? Sure! I mean it's working so well at changing corporate behavior, why would we want to stop now? Things like this are why I advocate for Corporate Jail time and a Corporate Death Penalty.
- sofixa 5y agoIf the fines are more regular and serious, they will mould corporate behaviour ( e.g. see GDPR). If MS get fined a couple of billion each for this Edge crap, and for bundling Edge and Teams into Windows 11, they might think again and take another decade before trying again. But as i said, the best solution is to break them up. Split them into Azure; Windows+enterprise software à la AD; Exchange, etc., Office365; Surface.
- creshal 5y agoMicrosoft can probably argue that they worked very hard to no longer be a monopolist, and as such can't be fined any longer.
- zvrba 5y agoReally? What does Google deserve when it nags me about switching to chrome whenever I use any of their pages from a browser that's not chrome?
- easton 5y agoHumorously, using tools built into Windows 10 and 11 now, you can open a PowerShell window, type winget install Google.Chrome, and never open Edge once if you don't want to.
- majkinetor 5y agoYou could do that almost 10 years ago with chocolatey the exactly same way, here is one liner iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 | iex; cinst googlechrome
- dotancohen 5y agoAnd how did you get chocolatey on that new install? I'm guessing that the vast majority of users opened IE and downloaded it through that browser.
- vadfa 5y ago"iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 | iex" installs chocolatey without having to open IE
- dotancohen 5y agoI see. That's why my comment was worded so carefully: though I'm sure one _could_ install chocolatey from the Windows CLI, a tiny minority ever would do so. But that's for introducing me to the iwr command. I don't use Windows often, but it's good to know what tools are available in the rare instances that I need to. Now I need a mnemonic to remember it... "I Want Real (curl)"
- easton 5y agoC:\Windows\System32\curl.exe exists if you want real curl. (or just run curl from a command prompt. curl in powershell is an alias for iwr.
- mc32 5y agoMicrosoft has had a good few years of building up their reputation after their self inflicted blemishes from the IE integration fiasco as well as their EEE mode of operation. Now they are throwing away their good will with smarmy tactics --why? for some short term gains? They were passing Google reputation-wise, of late, but these moves undercut their work of the last few years. It seems they see Google, FB, even Apple, etc., eating this cake (using market to undercut competition) and can't stand the temptation. I can only hope the DOJ will find some will to take on tech and do something about their behavior, but I am not holding my breath. If only companies would have principles they could stand on and we could count on.
- arbitrage 5y agoAnd what is good will worth these days? What does that get them?
- jimbob45 5y agoMy personal theory is that they see Apple brazenly pushing anti-competitive features with their browser such as disallowing extensions on anything but Safari and they realize that they can't be called out themselves unless the corrupt courts are willing to call out their darling Apple as well.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago> Now they are throwing away their good will with smarmy tactics --why? for some short term gains? I mean... if you're paid to increase the usage of X, do you really care about long-term reputation, if you'll be five companies away by then?
- throw_m239339 5y ago> Microsoft has had a good few years of building up their reputation after their self inflicted blemishes from the IE integration fiasco as well as their EEE mode of operation. Microsoft never changed. There was never a "new Microsoft". Only a new strategy with the same goals as ever: anti competitive behavior, bullying "partners", and what not. Just because they made this or that opensource changes nothing to the nature of that company. Windows 11 is basically just adware at that point.
- userbinator 5y agoThat browser is so 2008! Do you know what’s new? Microsoft Edge. Newer is not always better... if only Microsoft (and the rest of Big Tech) would go back to 2008 or even earlier, when they were far less controlling. Browsers detecting specific sites and acting differently on them, unless specifically requested to do so by the user, should be prohibited. Ditto for operating systems detecting specific applications. There needs to be a word for the equivalent of net neutrality, but applied to software and environments in general.
- speeder 5y agoBack in 2008 MS had a lawsuit punishment against them active. MS in 1997 or so was doing shenanigans like crash Explorer if you attempted to download Netscape (Firefox predecessor) they got sued by the EU and lost. The lawsuit terms expired recently and Microsoft is doing exact same shit they got sued for the first time, I guess they are testing to see for how long they can get away with thsi shit before they get sued again.
- userbinator 5y agolike crash Explorer if you attempted to download Netscape Do you have a source for that? I remember them being sued and losing simply because they bundled the browser with the OS, but don't recall any sort of the "detect user attempting to use competing browsers and kill them" mentality that they now have.
- kryogen1c 5y agoeh. google.com pops up a nearly identical box when using edge. seems like a bit of a nonstory. is it anti-competitive because its on a microsoft OS? hardly seems like consumers are being harmed.
- aquir 5y agoIt's a shame the Linux is still "not there" to be a good replacement for Windows. I keep trying but having stupid issues all time, like my laptop is identified as a mobile device when connected to a Bluetooth multipoint headset so I can't connect to my phone and laptop in the same time :( Scaling is awful and unfortunately simply there are no good drivers for certain hardware. Windows 11 is awful, I went back to 10 within a week - screen flickering, stupid scrolling issues etc.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoI agree. Linux Desktop still has all the same basic usability problems it did in the 90s. In some ways it is even worse since it has massively overcomplicated a lot of its subsystems. Still, I foresee a future where the pain of Linux Desktop for me will be outweighed by the pain of continuing to use Windows. Which is sad. Linux Desktop will have won not on its merits, but because Microsoft just decided it didn't want to make a Desktop OS anymore. If I get extremely lucky, it's possible Haiku will take off in the meantime and implement some of the things I'm still waiting on for it to be a decent desktop for my uses, but I'm not holding my breath.
- aquir 5y agoYes, Haiku would be awesome! The UI is great, it's highly functional. We'll have the same problems re hardware :(
- procinct 5y agoI would imagine surely there’s a distro that is just as functional as what you’re imagining Haiku will be one day right? The main issue I find with Linux is app support but that would be worse again with Haiku. What sort of usability issues would you expect to run into with something like Mint? Btw not saying Haiku isn’t cool, it absolutely is. But I see it being a long way behind even the Linux desktop.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago> I would imagine surely there’s a distro that is just as functional as what you’re imagining Haiku will be one day right? You can imagine it all you want, like most things that are pure fantasy. > The main issue I find with Linux is app support but that would be worse again with Haiku. There are other issues that I consider important. Things like how application management works, coherency of the platform, stability of ABIs, simplicity of the platform, non-bloatedness, lack of fashion-oriented design, etc.
- korginator 5y agoThis brings back memories of their 1990s shenanigans. I guess expecting ethical behaviour from them was always a pipe dream.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoSabotaging Windows95 so that it would fake a crash on DR-DOS was a real high water mark.
- globular-toast 5y agoAs pointed out by the original Neowin article [0], Google has been abusing its power for years in basically the same way. Two wrongs don't make a right, but Google is far from the "good guy" here. [0] https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-says-its-own-edge-browser-is-more-trustworthy-than-so-2008-google-chrome/ https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-says-its-own-edge-brow...
- tiraniddo 5y agoThat dialog is only on Google websites, I'm not sure how that is abusing its power as you can choose not to use Google products (hard but doable). Regardless Microsoft are already doing that to push Edge as well, try going to microsoft.com using a non-Edge browser and you'll see a banner appear. But this goes much further and actively bakes those prompts into the OS and browser, you wonder how far they'll take it?
- twobitshifter 5y agoOk, so I don’t condone this behavior by Microsoft or Google, but I do use edge at work since we are a Microsoft heavy company with Sharepoint, teams, outlook, and all that. If we were using Google I’d surely use Chrome, but edge bakes in your Microsoft work profile to the browser and when searching on Bing you can find documents on your internal network easily. I also like the fact that edge supports vertical tabs out of the box. So here’s my defense of Microsoft taking these steps: * Google promotes Chrome on YouTube, search, and gmail. Strategically Microsoft needs a message to counter the pop ups on Google sites that are leading to the Chrome download page. It would be much more annoying if you saw this message every time you visited YouTube or Google. The author presents it as the case of someone actively seeking to download Chrome but they could have been lead to the download page from another Google property. * Many people don’t know that both edge and Chrome use the same engine. When my company mandated edge, people reflexively complained even though they don’t lose anything in terms of speed, extensions or compatibility. For many people knowing that edge has the same browser engine is informative - most non geeks won’t keep up with that. * if you are working at a Microsoft company, your data is already in the hands of Microsoft and your employer so there’s little privacy to be lost by continuing with edge, but by switching to chrome you bring a 3rd party into the mix. * you could argue a lesser version of this for all windows users with the integrations that Microsoft has been pushing.
- ben_jones 5y ago"these other people are acting shitty so its totally ok for us to do it" - quick way to identify ass holes. We shouldn't always race to the bottom under the guise of "we have to do it to stay competitive". You don't have to do it, you're just an ass hole. - not talking about gp specifically. Just folks who make those sorts of decisions off such busted premises.
- siproprio 5y agoyeah, but instead of removing those banners and supporting ad-blocking and filtering, microsoft chooses to add more pop-ups and banners. indeed this is the added trust of msft.
- quitit 5y ago
- dustinmoris 5y agoIt's interesting how many people here rationalise the trash that Windows 11 is by thinking that Microsoft is purposefully trying things out for Windows 12 which will be much better again. As if Microsoft would actually produce trash on purpose and piss off lots of their remaining customers with some optimistic big picture in mind. Nah, the truth is they actually think it's a great OS which is really the scary thing in this entire thing. You'd think one day they'd manage to hire at least one good UX person from their competitors to clean up the trash Windows has been for years now but they keep thinking they can do it themselves with the same people who have already been doing the same trash for way too long.
- bluedino 5y agoIt's annoying, and kind of sad, how bad Microsoft pushes Edge.
- technobabbler 5y ago> with the added trust of Microsoft lolololol Does someone on their marketing team actually believe that?
- overtonwhy 5y agoEvery feature update they try to get you to reset your browser preferences. And sometimes it'll say "oops! Something went wrong and we had to reset your browser preferences."
- robbrown451 5y ago"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft." Hmmm, can I trust you to not put your own ads onto competitors websites? That is beyond f'd up. Will they never learn?
- Spivak 5y agoI mean they pretty much learned that they can get away with this and their only repercussions will be an HN post, a Reddit post, a few tech blogspam articles, and an EFF doomsday email blast cringier than the ads. I mean this entire thread is a bunch of very angry people screaming to the void and self-congratulatory people stoking their own superiority complex for having the most common opinion in the HN echo chamber. The days of “tech people” being ambassadors and having any influence over the direction of B2C software is over.
- DrBazza 5y agoI'm really having issues with Microsoft now. It just seems to be one dark pattern after another in Windows 11. They're not wrong about it being based on on the same renderer as Chrome, but that's about as far as it goes. The worst thing is that Apple and Google do the same dark patterns and no one seems to care about them. For some reason, Microsoft didn't learn from the early 00s any lessons on how to do this kind of thing with any subtlety. I have a Mac laptop and iPad, an Android phone, and I now run Linux on my PC and haven't booted into Windows 10 since May (checks uptime...). I don't think I have any reason to use Windows at home any more. The changes in Windows 11 are even more unappetizing. It feels like Windows Me, or Vista. The version no one asked for.
- green-eclipse 5y agoWelcome to the new Microsoft. Same as the old Microsoft.
- tw04 5y agoI'm sure it's in direct response to the popups you get from Google telling you the site works best with chrome when you visit any of their properties with edge or Firefox.
- jeroenhd 5y agoBack when Edgeium was new and just Chrome but with a lot of Google cruft removed, I actually used Edge instead of Chrome when I was on Windows. It was the same browser with some additional tweaks that I quite liked. Then Microsoft started this aggressive, disruptive push to bring it to iOS Safari's level as the only browser people should use. I don't know any good operating systems for normal people anymore. Windows 10 and 11 are hostile, macOS only runs on very expensive hardware and doesn't run most programs people need (because the business world is still Windows oriented) and Linux has been making progress but still isn't a good alternative for the common user unless they have an expert to rely upon when something breaks down. ChromeOS doesn't run on most devices (it can, but the images aren't available) and I wouldn't recommend a Google-oriented OS to most people anyway, if they can avoid it; Android is bad enough already. I miss the Windows 7 days. The Win10/11 kernel may have seen loads of improvements, the UI and basic behaviour has only been regressing for many years now. The Windows 11 window snapping is nice but it doesn't excuse the aggressive spyware that comes with the OS, and neither does it excuse this antitrust lawsuit in waiting.
- r00fus 5y ago> macOS only runs on very expensive hardware and doesn't run most programs people need (because the business world is still Windows oriented) This is an outdated take - it's functionally untrue in most business settings. Gaming on the other hand, is very much still mostly Windows only.
- mackal 5y ago> Gaming on the other hand, is very much still mostly Windows only. I game a lot, I haven't rebooted into Windows in well over a year. Luckily I don't really play games that require stupid DRM/anticheat (although, that is being worked on) I would probably start playing Apex Legends again if they allowed EAC Linux support. Epic added support, the devs just need to support it -.-
- FinalBriefing 5y agoI've had a great experience with Lutris for Linux. https://lutris.net/ https://lutris.net/
- shantnutiwari 5y agoFor people complaining about "Evilz M$"--isnt this roughly the same strategy Chrome used? My question is: Do you see these prompts when downloading Firefox?
- nathanfig 5y agoI’m not sure what you mean- Chrome never tried to prevent me from downloading any other browser.
- itsaride 5y agoIt adds a banner at the top of the search results : “ There's no need to download a new web browser. Microsoft recommends using Microsoft Edge for a fast, secure, and modern web experience that can help save you time and money. Try now” Even more bizarrely it puts Opera as the top result, at least here in the UK.
- qwerty456127 5y agoWhy would anyone prefer Chrome over Edge? I mostly use Firefox but also Edge as the secondary browser on the Windows machine. It's the same engine but better UI (e.g. vertical tabs), both are equally proprietary.
- hardlianotion 5y agoQuite tacky really. Would be interesting to see if that is effective. It seems like it's a one time hit as you download Chrome and annoying enough for people to mark it.
- The_rationalist 5y agoThey've gone too far.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago"With the added trust of Microsoft" You must be borderline and delusional if you work at microsoft and have the guts of thinking that the company deserves even the tiniest amount of trust
- sli 5y agoI distinctly remember Microsoft getting into an anti-trust case[0] over things much more benign than what they're doing right now. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
- zeroz 5y agoSame in Europe. €561 million fine in 2013: "Antitrust: Commission fines Microsoft for non-compliance with browser choice commitments" [0] I'm wondering if it's still a business case for Microsoft despite being sued. [0]: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_13_196 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_13_...
- vesche 5y agoI just bought my ~55 year old mother an HP laptop. It was completely strange how difficult it was to install Chrome on Windows 11. I couldn't run the MSI installer for Chrome and found out that by default the OS was in something called "S mode" which I had to disable by doing an odd series of steps via the Microsoft store. After finally installing, I got all the weird pop-ups that the articles mentions suggesting in various ploys that Edge was the superior browser. It was also made difficult to convenience the OS that I wanted Chrome as the default browser, it required changing several preference options. I then found that there was no way to disable Edge, as you can some other Windows applications. By using the SysInternals tool Autoruns I found that Edge had at least half a dozen means of persistence / continued execution by launching updaters and background processes doing unknown tasks.
- iso1210 5y agoThey should have a popup saying "Try Firefox", then I'll believe it's based on a genuine concern for their users.
- jacquesm 5y agoOperating systems are getting ever more user hostile, even though their main reason to exist is moving more and more in the direction of being there to run a single application: the browser, with ChromeOs being the current representative of that trend. I'll shed a small tear for the people that are still forced to use Windows, but Google is at least as bad with this in pushing Chrome at the expense of other browsers. And users are caught in the middle. OS vendors should STFU, stop pushing their services, ban telemetry and other invasive stuff and put the user centric. Fat chance of that happening any day soon though, after all, the only reason that users exist in the first place is to be ripped of or squeezed like so many lemons until the last penny has been forced out of their pockets.
- randombits0 5y agoThis is an excellent example of violating implied trust. What is implied trust? I expect my software to do what I tell it to do, without any additional, unexpected behaviors, especially those that do not serve my interests. Microsoft violated that trust. This means that they value their interests above my own. They are demonstrably untrustworthy. Again, btw.
- shmerl 5y agoDownload Firefox.
- Datagenerator 5y agoDebian 11 with Firefox for me. Firefox does need some tuning like opting out of any studies and telemetry. Verified with tshark until it really doesn't prefetch all previously visited sites and bookmarks. Some sites are able to request infinite invisible visits somehow but it's stoppable and Firefox at least gives the user the freedom to do something about it.
- sixothree 5y agoSure is a lot of brigading in here.
- dang 5y agoUrl changed from https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22813733/microsoft-windows-edge-download-chrome-prompts https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22813733/microsoft-window..., which points to this.
- tester756 5y agoJust a friendly reminder that whenever I open gmail from Edge, then it asks me about using Chrome too
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- makecheck 5y agoI’ve watched this kind of stuff unfold for several years and this is where I think we went wrong: we allowed software to become “free” or “cheap” when it used to be $300, without acknowledging that this stuff still basically costs $300 to make!! So now, every stupid thing has to be completely free just to be considered by any consumer, and every software maker has to beg, badger and berate users over and over to get them to try things and download things and sign up for things, all because we collectively forgot that we could have just paid them 40 bucks and moved on. You used to have to pay for operating systems, and for a while it actually became more expensive (e.g. macOS was $99 but went up to $129 to everyone’s surprise before becoming “free”). You definitely used to pay through the nose for apps but you got a lot for that money. Mobile devices are largely responsible for the 99-cent-ification of software, most of which is now “free” with “in-app purchases” which is ironic since these “cheap” replacements sometimes cost hundreds of dollars more if you actually add up all the recurring in-app purchases they contain. And, of course, subscriptions. So great, Windows is “free” now and web browsers no longer cost money like Netscape did but instead we get all this crap in our faces. Personally, I think we have lost a lot and we desperately need to re-learn how to pay, once, for software, again.
- suvo 5y agoIt actively refuses to download Chrome since Windows Server 2016. The fastest bypass I do is by first downloading Firefox and then download Chrome from Firefox.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThis is becoming a joke... Along with the tricks hiding firefox from search results, the inclusion of buy-now-pay-later schemes, Microsoft is well on its way proving to us why we shouldn't trust them being a major player on the browser market. A fact they have proven to us once before of course. I really thought they were on a good path when Ballmer stepped down but this is old Microsoft all over again.