12 ms·

I’m a longtime Windows fan, and initially I was quite enamored by Edge as well. Base UX is excellent, lots of settings and they’re easy to find. Vertical tab ba

I’m a longtime Windows fan, and initially I was quite enamored by Edge as well. Base UX is excellent, lots of settings and they’re easy to find. Vertical tab bar, profiles, and it all Just Works. I flat out love its “turn this website into a desktop app” feature. But by now they've shoved their core consumer products so chock full of crap that even I am starting to look for a way out. I got my son a new laptop recently and it has Windows 11. Did you know that Windows 11 has a feature called “widgets”, a popup from the left bottom which has weather, traffic warnings nearby etc? It makes a fair bit of sense, except that it’s filled to the rim with terrible clickbaity news headlines and you can’t turn it off! Someone at Microsoft decided that the entire Windows install base, ie nearly everybody, must really read news about foreign celebrities doing questionable things. The only way to get rid of it is a Powershell incantation that removes the entire Widgets feature. Better than terrible news, but still nuts. Edge has this too. There’s now a Bing button in the toolbar full of “discover” and “suggest” type features that nobody wants. I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. The core of both Edge and Windows 11 are tastefully designed. You can really see that it’s been built by people who want to ship great software. Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work? Who at Microsoft benefits from me seeing the latest Taylor Swift gossip when I just want to know when it’ll rain? Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)?

r12343a_19 4y ago
> Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)? (Internal) metrics say otherwise.
- skrebbel 4y ago
  (Internal) metrics may be short sighted.
  - tetrep 4y ago
    What if they're not? What if it really is economically better for Microsoft to "double dip" and try to monetize Windows beyond its purchase price?
    - vanviegen 4y ago
      Of course they are. It's just not practicle to track long-term consumer sentiment around Microsoft, and life-time customer spending. So they track something else and convince themselves it's close enough.
    - everdrive 4y ago
      I think you raise a very important point. What if it's economically better for you to let men have sex with your wife for money? If you _don't_ do this, you're just sitting on untapped value.
      - fhd2 4y ago
        Not a fan of the analogy, I like to think that would be her own decision, not her partner's. Anyway, companies are capitalist entities, so all that ultimately matters for them is to make more money. The majority of decisions happen along the axis of short term revenue vs long term revenue (e.g. not ruining your brand, not getting fined etc). In an environment of insecurity and fear, I've seen companies focus more on the short term, since it's less speculative. But it sure doesn't look very good from the outside.
        doubled112 4y ago
        She has the choice to get a divorce just like I have the choice to not use Windows.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  How would internal metrics even capture someone using a different computer?
  - AraceliHarker 4y ago
    I think you can track pretty well with just the device ID alone, but you combine it with other identities like location information, IP address, cookies, login information and so on. Is that why Windows 11 recently made it impossible to bypass creating an MS account?
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Yeah but they're speaking about switching to a chromebook or a mac. How is your device ID going to help with that?
      - lozenge 4y ago
        They could summarise the User-Agent s visiting LinkedIn or a couple of other websites they run.
      - imajoredinecon 4y ago
        You estimate how many people use computers and how many people use computers you make. When you subtract the two, you get how many people use computers that your competitors make. Not every “internal metric” is something you can measure directly.
        alpaca128 4y ago
        Most active Linux PCs were made by Windows PC manufacturers.
        marginalia_nu 4y ago
        If that is how sketchy the data they are using to make decisions is, that would explain a lot about their decisions.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  Internal metrics can be cooked to show anything. I read somewhere that "if you torture the data enough, it will confess". Whatever oxygen wasters are pushing for this crap will cook the data in such a way to push for their idea (as their salary depends on it) while "conveniently" not putting forwards data that shows otherwise.
mikub 4y ago
It's just three clicks to disable widgets, "Right click taskbar, select taskbar settings, click on slider to turn widgets off".
- LoganDark 4y ago
  That does not disable widgets. That only hides the button that toggles it. (Edit 29 minutes after, because I can't seem to post anymore:) It still runs its webview in the background and can be toggled with the keyboard shortcut, Win+W, even if the button is hidden. In order to fully disable it you need a Group Policy or a registry hack.
  - binbag 4y ago
    What's the practical difference?
    - numbsafari 4y ago
      Having a web view loading garbage in the background consuming resources and probably leaking your data vs. …none of that?
      - recfab 4y ago
        It consumes a fair amount of resources just idling. I'm currently using a laptop that was mid-to-low spec when I got it a couple years ago. It was chugging, especially during video calls. Uninstalling the Widgets feature was enough to make it useable again.
    - makeitdouble 4y ago
      You still get the widgets in some interactions (like left swipe from the edge of the screen). There must be a way somewhere to customize those as well, but getting rid of widgets altogether is a lot faster.
  - mikub 4y ago
    Good to know, thanks for that.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>and you can’t turn it off! Except you can. Taskbar setting -> toggle Widgets to OFF >I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. Windows sales aren't core moneymakers anymore when they're basically giving them away for free (I have mine registered with a MSDNAA key I found online and it worked). Money is in Azure, O365 subscriptions and ads shown to their Windows userbase. Nadella even said that Google makes more money from Windows users than Microsoft does, so shoving ads in your faces was them taking a slice of that sweet ad revenue. It's unfortunate, but this silent acceptance is our society having been numbed to being bombarded with ads on every computing devie it just became the new norm sadly and it doesn't seem like there's any hope for the trend to be reversing. People just got used to SW & online content being free and ad supported rather than paying upfront for it.
- skrebbel 4y ago
  Except I can’t (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208271). Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Except I can’t Maybe it's a Win Pro edition thing and not on HOme. >Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”. What you don't understand is irelevant to the Microsoft board meetings where they show ad-revenue go up, because money is the only thing they understand, user experience be dammed. What are those users gonna do, install Ubuntu? /s
    - skrebbel 4y ago
      Buy chromebooks most likely
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        I've never seen chromebooks in continental Europe though. Maybe it's an AMerican & UK thing.
neogodless 4y ago
Exactly. While I get that live tiles and universal apps have their limitations, I vastly prefer a weather live tile that opens to a full screen weather app over the news widget that shows me weather in a random location among clickbait. And if you click weather, you go to an ad-infested web page. Remember when places hired UX designer to, you know, design a great user experience? This is not that. This is one hundred percent how can we get ad clicks, with apparently no one to push back. Except unhappy consumers that are ignored.
- b112 4y ago
  Remember when places hired UX designer to, you know, design a great user experience? This is not that Some tortured soul, chained by NDA, not allowed to tell its tale of angst and woe, is hastily linking your comment, to email manager "See!!!! It's rubbish to do this, they hate it, see!!"
  - xattt 4y ago
    I’m thinking that individual has descended into madness by this point and is looking like the Monty Python “It’s” man.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      There's only a certain amount of soul you can extract from people before they become empathy-less ones unable to create things for other people and dangerous to have around. So, corporations cycle the people they use before they reach that level.
tored 4y ago
I recently switched from Edge to Firefox. Edge used to be great, but all "features" it has added the past year is not features I need, like sending my text input to Microsoft, showing online shopping suggestions, discover features, sidebar apps and what not. Edge also has a annoying bug in combination with AMD graphics card where the bottom of the screen flickers when watching certain video content in Edge, like Netflix (YouTube works). This bug has been there for months and still not fixed. I also recently downgraded from Windows 11 to Windows 10. Windows 11 was just too intrusive and many non-configurable features. Windows 11 is also slower, has more bugs and more unstable than Windows 10. I'm guessing that we need to abandon Microsoft's products when Windows 10 reaches end of life, not something I looking forward too because I'm not a big fan of Linux desktop nor the Mac desktop.
- l8rlump 4y ago
  Didn't you hear? 2023 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
- 300bps 4y ago
  I recently switched from Edge to Firefox Right there with you. Somewhere in my comment history here six years ago was my suggestion for Microsoft to give up on Internet Explorer and create their own fork of Chromium. They could’ve gotten massive adoption if they did it right. Instead I had to turn off their useless auto-coupon feature, be ever vigilant to keep them from switching my search provider to Bing, frequently turn off the distracting new tab content, etc. Switched to Firefox and planning to dual-boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu soon.
  - Qem 4y ago
    > Switched to Firefox and planning to dual-boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu soon. It doesn't help Microsoft apparently also managed to make dual boot more difficulty. Some years ago it was quite seamless, you could rely on automatic partition and it just worked. Today windows messes with the Linux bootloader after install, and to make it work I have to resort to advanced partition mode.
    - 4y ago
watwut 4y ago
> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. Because companies are structured so that it never happens. Moreover, professionals who are too angry about direction are expected to leave. Not just in MS ... anywhere including in startups. Companies are not democracies.
foobarbecue 4y ago
It's so bizarre how all the computers at my work have clickbait on the start menu. That's windows 10, so admin could disable it I think, but defaults tend to stick.
alisonatwork 4y ago
I just switched from Edge to Ungoogled Chromium for exactly these reasons. It used to be a slick, lightweight alternative to Google Chrome, but the last 6 months or so have been a disaster, and the beta version is even worse with the useless sidebar that magically appears when you accidentally hover your mouse in the corner and the hideous rounded corners that turn your Surface Pro into a 1950s CRT. Not to mention the default search one day decided to railroad me into using mainland China censored Bing instead of the international version. It's been so disappointing. Meanwhile on Android they also started screwing everything up, which led me to switch from Outlook and Edge to k9 and Bromite. I don't know what's going on in the applications teams at Microsoft, but it's really soured me on the "new" Microsoft, and I've been a fan up until relatively recently too. I just hope VS Code isn't next.
- plagiarist 4y ago
  It's a real shame, I thought they were trending in a different direction by actually releasing large projects as open source under permissive licenses.
everdrive 4y ago
This is the new pattern for almost any successful free software provided by a corporation. Make it nice enough to start building a user base, and then slowly make it more terrible to find a way to extract value from it.
- pseudalopex 4y ago
  Cory Doctorow named it enshittification.[1] [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    This was my reply to the recently flagged article showing a graph of the decline in percentage for Windows' desktop share of the market. I think it was flagged due to questionable consideration of mobile OS's. But it did visually show a marked decline over the most recent year and a half or so, which may be a realistic indicator even if not pefectly accurate numerically. Looks like the downturn accelerated to its current more-rapid decline right after the release of the latest Windows 11 22H2 version in late 2022. This would have been the time the true enthusiasts, who were hoping for some respite from user hostility and compromised privacy, could finally be giving up for good. And it doesn't look like Windows 11 relented at all, when it comes to expanding its support for more older PC hardware than it did with its original release which was so misguided in this respect. Plus more dark patterns in things like online account approach. So now that it's even more plain to see how much faster it's getting worse, even the users who embraced Windows 10 have finally had enough. Now my opinion is based on professional use of W11 since its initial preview. As always, the product of some absolutely outstanding engineers at Microsoft, some of whom add wonderfully to the discussions on HN. But somehow or another, even the most excellent code is still getting Ballmerized by a vestige of the corp that seems to still be in position to compromise "what could have been" before it gets a chance to be considered or deployed by users. Also anecdotally I was the only one using Windows 11 when I presented at a conference a week after W11 was released back in 2021. Didn't notice a single other one this year either. reply
_fat_santa 4y ago
> Base UX is excellent, lots of settings and they’re easy to find. Vertical tab bar, profiles, and it all Just Works. I flat out love its “turn this website into a desktop app” feature. IMO this is one of the great tragedies with MS Edge. The UX is so much better than standard chromium but because of all the other crap that MS puts into it, I just can't use it. If MS open sourced Edge and someone created an "UnMicrosofted Edge", I would use that in a heartbeat. Currently the only place I use it is on my work laptop where I don't have any personal info and just generally don't give a crap about privacy since I'm inside my company intranet, bitbucket or jira all day. It's honestly really great for that sort of thing because the vertical tabs let you have 50+ tabs open and still read what they are, but there's just no way I would use it for anything personal or outside of work.
- pbronez 4y ago
  Same. I use Edge at work because it’s less evil than chrome and I’m logging into O365 anyway. Firefox for personal stuff. I haven’t had too many problems with Edge myself. I use Kagi for search without issue. Don’t see any native ads. It’s fine.
- soundnote 4y ago
  Brave has vertical tabs built in too, though they're behind a flag. But similar implementation as Edge and they work well.
  - permo-w 4y ago
    last time I tried them they were extremely glitchy. have they been fixed?
    - soundnote 4y ago
      I think a lot of the glitchiness had to do with the tab bar changing size if you didn't have the bookmarks bar always on or always off. That's fixed now, and the tabs look pretty, too.
pavel_lishin 4y ago
> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. From whom? They've got two customer bases: - corporate clients, who get this stuff removed, either as part of the purchase or by their various sysadmins who get paid to secure the purchased laptops - personal clients, who purchase desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Windows, and could no more opt out of using it than I could opt out of using electricity in my house. edit: I don't read good, nevermind.
- gregw2 4y ago
  re: "corporate clients, who get this stuff removed"... I am currently at a Fortune 100 company and only wish my IT department would keep up with / disable all the ways automated MS(N) news feeds keep cropping up via Edge and Windows default behaviors, sometimes seemingly as part of automated updates. Every time I think I have turned one off, there is yet another way Microsoft enables some kind of news feed in its system by default. I have been through three rounds of exploring how to disable these sort of features in the last 6 months with windows 10+edge, and resent the time I have to spend trawling and searching how to turn each particular money grab off. I really don't want the distraction at work, thank you! P.S. Edge has been slightly more stable (and memory-efficient with many tabs?) under low-memory conditions than Chrome so I ended up starting to use it to avoid reboots at times. Wake up Google!
  - neltnerb 4y ago
    Same, every time I run windows update on my lab with 22+ computers somehow (to no one's real surprise) OneDrive reappears, Edge keeps getting reset as my default PDF viewer on the regular (acrobat reader DC is installed), and lately the search bar added a bing icon to access AI search. As usual, figuring out how to disable it took an exercise in asking "what would I call this feature if I didn't want anyone to find it and disable it". I hate that I have so much OS specific software, definitely heading towards setting up a test computer with Linux to see how much I can get to work. It will be harder than it sounds but some of this stuff is legacy executables from Windows XP so getting them to run on Windows 11 might be just as much of a stretch.
nicbou 4y ago
It blows my mind how non-consensual the Windows experience has become. I wouldn't let someone with a similar understanding of consent anywhere near my drink. You are right about one thing: I refuse to purchase a Windows computer, and have been refusing for a decade.
- unxdfa 4y ago
  Yep. I’m in the middle of switching from macOS back to windows because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. I’ve had to build out a locked down windows 10 LTSC build to get anywhere near a sensible outcome for me. I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    Start here: > because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. IT departments in huge corporations have purchasing requirements specs. Require any software that you pay money for to run on at least one non-Microsoft operating system. As a second source requirement. If more than a trivial number of large corporations do this, developers make sure their software runs on other systems, which is what allows users to switch. Large IT departments are in a position to actually move the needle here. This also has the side benefit of being a heuristic that excludes primarily low-quality software, because most higher-quality software is already portable.
    - 8ytecoder 4y ago
      I work for a pretty large financial corporation. They sent out the IT roadmap for the next year and in it was casually mentioned that they expect Macs to be the dominant platform in the next five years. Our current mac usage is <15% and as a result support is an afterthought with a very frustrating experience. For them to say that and push for this change in an industry that very strongly favours Windows is the clearest indication I’ve seen that Windows is starting to lose.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. My understanding is that they did, around Windows 8 or so, and all the people who had scruples about the desktop experience left and were replaced by people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place. Yikes, you could be correct. Is this re-Ballmerizing? Wasn't that supposed to be off the table a while ago? Not only Edge, Windows itself is acting uglier every time too. Some of my scientific instruments are over 20 years old and going strong, a few still supported by the latest Windows software from the original vendors. Now some of the new instruments do have lab functions the old ones never will but at least the old ones are on equal footing as data peripherals when you are sitting at a Windows 11 PC. But the very oldest used to work with Windows 98 and Windows XP originally. These things have always had some pretty demanding software, and before installing, the factory instructions had a few paragraphs you were advised to follow in order to configure Windows so it wouldn't have badly compromised performance. You needed to manually disable a number of underlying Windows processes that were totally un-needed by the task at hand, if not highly detrimental. It took about 10 minutes to go through the list and then the high-dollar software installed in 85 MB and worked really snappy on a 300 MHz processor. To run the same old instrument now there are fully updated drivers for the new factory software so the readings can keep coming in to the PC at the same old 100 MB ethernet speed, including all the latest data integrity features from that point which didn't exist originally for these type analyzers. It really does work and it is fully validated on Windows 11, but before it installs it autoruns a script which takes half an hour on a 3GHz PC in order to disable all the detrimental Windows defaults these days. It would take you hours if you wanted to do this manually. Before it unzips its 10 GB package of goodness, which now runs like a dog on a dedicated near-gaming PC, compared to the number of clicks-per-minute you could get 20 years ago on a Windows 98 office machine. For the same raw data being processed the same way which is basically both the state-of-the-art at the time. "Slowing down the speed of scientific progress one Windows version at a time." Now I like Edge since I only use it offline, to open PDF's and web files like HTML help documents.
mgerdts 4y ago
> and you can’t turn it off! At least on windows 11 pro workstation, this is a right click and a preference setting or two away. The start menu can be moved to the left corner where it has long been with a taskbar setting. I did this as recently as yesterday with media dated February 2023.
ChatGTP 4y ago
except that it’s filled to the rim with terrible clickbaity news headlines and you can’t turn it off! Someone at Microsoft decided that the entire Windows install base, ie nearly everybody, must really read news about foreign celebrities doing questionable things. Well they replaced their journalism team with "AI" and that's what their AI thinks you want. My partner helped someone in our family the other day with Edge(tm) and she told me she thought the browser was so weird it looked like one of those "home page hijack" sites from the early 2000's.
lloydatkinson 4y ago
I've been working on automated setup and configuration of Windows for my purposes and for family computers etc. As part of that I wanted to hide the widgets, the pointless search input, move the start menu back to its normal place instead of the dumb place, hide one drive icon from explorer, etc etc This also installs software from Winget. This is what I have so far: https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/windows/standard/Set-StandardConfiguration.ps1 https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/... I have a version for development machines too which is WIP but you can see what I have so far. The repo root has a big readme of what it does and does not do. Once it's done you end up with a consistent Windows setup. I haven't looked into how to disable the bing crap on the start menu search yet as apparently the previous registry keys people found to disable it have been deliberately changed into "touch these values and your start menu search won't work for anything" which is a new level of contempt from the Windows team. Tldr: Automate all this tedious tweaking and turning off of crapware features via PowerShell. The end goal is to be able to run a single command from the windows terminal and leave it to do it's thing.
- alisonatwork 4y ago
  A tip I got on a previous HN thread was to set HKCU:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\DisableSearchBoxSuggestions to 1 so that when you type something into the start menu search box it actually returns installed applications and files on your hard disk instead of internet search results. That's been a huge productivity boost for me, and reverts the behavior to what it used to be a couple years ago. Also from this thread I have now added HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Dsh\IsPrelaunchEnabled to 0 to stop Widgets.exe from executing on startup. Unfortunately it still starts up if you accidentally swipe the touchscreen from the left.
  - lloydatkinson 4y ago
    That first key is the one I was thinking of, a lot of comments online saying it breaks search for local totally by disabling it. That second key is new to me I'll be adding that too thanks.
koromak 4y ago
Microsoft just can't stop doing this. All of their products suffer. I'm happy to fork over the absurd Apple tax just to feel comfortable at my computer, and to know I'm not going to wake up one morning to a forced OS update that has Cortana start screaming black friday deals from my desktop. I mean, ads in the task bar? I spend all of my time on my computer, I do not want all this shovelware pushed in my face at every opportunity. I think this strategy is going to kill them in the long run. I was a pure Windows user, until I was forced to spend some time on mac for a job. What do you know, its just way more pleasant.
- jlarocco 4y ago
  Having used OSX for ~10 years, I can say Apple isn't much better. Both systems treat the user like an idiot, just in different ways. You'll see what I mean when the OSX updates start undoing changes you've made to settings and things like that. For your own good, of course.
  - marcellus23 4y ago
    I have to strongly disagree with "not much better." I'm not saying Apple doesn't do some annoying stuff, but it is MUCH much better than Microsoft. Every time I use Windows I am just floored how obnoxious they are with pushing their BS. The difference is night and day.
    - factormeta 4y ago
      I do think the Apple user experience is better, and the hardware is much better designed. I switched from Apple to Linux several times, and really know the difference, but when it comes to privacy, Apple and MS just can't be Linux/*BSD variant (I do know it is not for everyone).
  - chasing 4y ago
    It's called macOS, now that it's no longer on version 10, and it ain't perfect but it is miles beyond Windows when it comes to respecting the user, as far as I'm concerned. And, yes, I'd rather have an operating system that makes things easy for me -- "treats me like an idiot," pejoratively -- rather than one that's unnecessarily convoluted and full of crap.
whoisthemachine 4y ago
Just recently, my partner's PC had to be wiped because BitLocker was surprise enabled by Windows 11, and I hadn't set her PC up with an online Microsoft login, so we couldn't get the BitLocker key that we never knew we needed. So your data is now hostage to Microsoft, and if you didn't read the full manual when setting up your partner's new Windows PC, you now lost her data. Writing about it, it feels like ransomware, except I guess we don't have to pay anything yet, other than an account that Microsoft can gather metrics from.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Doesn't windows make you sign in to an account during the install?
  - ncpa-cpl 4y ago
    It’s possible to skip this by not connecting to the internet until the installation is over
dazc 4y ago
'Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)?' Maybe that ship has already sailed and they know who their core market is?
nokeya 4y ago
Imagine the point of view of Microsoft employee: you have well paid work, revolting is taking a huge risk of losing the job. Almost sure you will be fired IMHO. And in current market conditions when all companies are laying off, are you interested to be fired or laid off? You are not.
CamperBob2 4y ago
I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. For the same reason that Milgram and Zimbardo didn't see a revolt among their test subjects. Whenever anyone objected to the unethical things they were told to do, all the researchers had to do was give the same order to the next subject. They didn't have to go very far down the line to find someone who would cheerfully do the dirty work. And those students weren't getting six-figure paychecks. I will never understand how Nadella gets fellated so felicitiously around here. (Hello, -4 Flagged). He has turned a decent OS into an exploitative nonconsensual experience, in which the user is constantly reminded who really 'owns' the computer they paid for. Even more offensive from a business perspective, he refuses to give the rest of us the obvious option to pay to get rid of the garbage. It is still far too much trouble to run LTSC without pirating it.
- Firmwarrior 4y ago
  Yeah, everyone who really wanted to make quality products or had too much self-respect quit Microsoft years ago. Right at this very second it makes sense to stay put, but most of the time any Microsoft employee can grind Leetcode for a few weeks and hop ship to another company with a 30% raise. Last time I was there, nobody working there was happy about how things are going, except a few random sociopaths.
Dalewyn 4y ago
>Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work? Because Windows is a free-in-practice product and it needs/wants a revenue stream. Remember that Windows 11 can be activated with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 keys; as if that wasn't crazy enough you can straight up not activate it and you won't lose out on anything important. As for install media? You can download those for free any time. No strings attached. As for Edge, that really is a free-as-in-beer product. You literally can't buy it.
- jnsaff2 4y ago
  macOS and Linux are even more ‘free-in-practice’
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    macOS is free only when you bought Apple's computer hardware which comes at some serious markups. Unlike WIndows and Linux I can't legally downloads it and install it on the PC hardware I already own. That's like saying the SW ruining on your car's entertainment unit is free. Sure, that SW didn't cost you anything extra, but you paid for it through the car's purchase price.
    - jnsaff2 4y ago
      Same goes for Windows tho. You need to work to get rid of the windows install in the PC.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        That makes no logical sense unless you're trolling or never used a computer in your life
        jnsaff2 4y ago
        Where have you lived for the past 20 years? Almost all PC laptops and desktops (from Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo and others) have had Windows installed as the default option for that time. Sometimes you can uncheck it and save a little money, sometimes is won't save anything and most of the time you don't have the option to remove it. The innovation has been to install vendor garbage in addition to Microsoft garbage. So it takes even more effort to get a clean system. Only in the last few years has some distro of Linux started being an option.
psychphysic 4y ago
I didn't realise how much this bothered me until you brought it up. On my low end laptop occasionally I can't even close it or click away and it takes a minute or two to decide to go. Insane.
dagaci 4y ago
I really wonder how and by which process Microsoft thinks its Ok to force everyone to look at its garbage bottom feeding msn news feed, do Microsoft exec's atually use Windows and put up with this?
Kwpolska 4y ago
> The only way to get rid of it is a Powershell incantation that removes the entire Widgets feature. Better than terrible news, but still nuts. You don’t need PowerShell to get rid of Widgets. You can disable it with three clicks: right click on the Taskbar, go to Taskbar settings, and toggle the switch next to Widgets at the top of the window.
- gigel82 4y ago
  That hides the UI entry point, but widgets.exe continues running, along with 5-6 edgewebview2.exe processes, taking up valuable resources. If you try to kill widgets.exe, a system service restarts it :( Unfortunately, the powershell incantation is the only way to get rid of it...
  - permo-w 4y ago
    will there not be some registry entry you can change?
    - gigel82 4y ago
      No, there is no way to disable it via registry or group policy that I know of.
      - SpaghettiCthulu 4y ago
        These "powershell incantations" usually modify the registry or group policy, or delete or replace system files behind the scenes. And from my experience the ones that modify system files often don't persist across system updates.
        gigel82 4y ago
        winget uninstall "Windows web experience Pack" Get-AppxPackage *WebExperience* | Remove-AppxPackage
  - benhurmarcel 4y ago
MikeSchurman 4y ago
The news widget is terrible, and the sole reason I haven't switched to windows 11. I spent about 30m turning off news source after news source before giving up. Apparently there is an infinite supply of them. It's actually a problem for me at work because they keep drawing my eye and distracting me from getting work done. It's crazy. What are they thinking?
- permo-w 4y ago
  they were thinking that it would draw your eye
  - CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Which is hilarious, because they always market windows 10 and 11 through the lens of "optimizing your workflow". Except, obviously, when they want the news app to attract your attention and get a few advertising cents.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
drc500free 4y ago
From what I can tell, it's to prop up Bing's advertising. The windows search bar is mixed in with Bing traffic to juice their numbers, even though nearly all clicks from the windows search bar are inadvertent. They are also chasing the Taboolah/Outbrain native advertising space that masquerades as new articles, hence stuffing that box with celebrity news.
MarkSweep 4y ago
It is infuriating. The only way I know of to remove Widgets and Teams Chat is with the Remove-AppxPackage command in PowerShell: https://pureinfotech.com/uninstall-widgets-powershell-windows-11/ https://pureinfotech.com/uninstall-widgets-powershell-window...
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
What I can't wrap my head around is how one of the biggest companies in the entire world is willing to annoy literally everyone who uses their products, and slow down their browsing, in order to make a penny or two a day off of each one. My company just rolled out new laptops, and all of this is on by default -- on a corporate install!? WTF is my IT department thinking? They bastardize the hell out of the install with all the usual "security" crap, spyware, tracking, and scripts that run on login and logoff to make sure that you haven't done anything you shouldn't have. On top of all of this, why do I have to wait for 10 seconds to open Edge to go to the company home page while it loads all this horse pucky? Microsoft will do anything for a corporate purchase, so I'm positive that there's a tickbox or two in the policies that would shut this off. Is Microsoft giving a kickback on that money to companies who leave this on?
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  What I can't wrap my head around is how one of the biggest companies in the entire world is willing to annoy literally everyone who uses their products, and slow down their browsing, in order to make a penny or two a day off of each one. The only thing I can imagine is that they are making a lot more than a penny or two a day from each Windows user they sell down the river. Otherwise the marketshare graph that concinds linked to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212328 ) would be treated as an existential emergency. The only rational conclusion is that they no longer GAF about Windows as a product with paying users.
  - toast0 4y ago
    That marketshare graph is interesting, but what's missing is a graph of the size of the market. Anecodtally, people aren't moving from Windows to Mac, people are moving from desktop platforms to phones. Maybe Microsoft is taking a ride it into the ground approach. Usage growth for desktop Windows is off the table, Windows Phone is dead, so revenue growth for Windows needs to come from throwing users under the bus?
canadaduane 4y ago
I used to think Linux users were ideological, but now I just think they are long-term thinkers, preserving and contributing to both the culture and the code that will enable freedom of choice, and create software whose goals are well-aligned with its users.
Andrex 4y ago
Give Linux a try. Even if you did before and hated it. Flatpaks and Proton are really coming into their own. And not in a "year-of-Linux-desktop" way where it's perpetually "almost ready" for 5 years. So many of my teething problems moving away from Windows have been buttoned up and solved since originally using mainlining Linux 10-15 years ago. I'm a Gnome weirdo though, Gnome 3/4 are easily my favorite complete desktop experiences (Elementary was competing there for a while).
- moritonal 4y ago
  Second this, Kubuntu is an excellent OS that on the whole just works.
bvan 4y ago
Totally agree. And what baffles me even more is that most corporate IT is fine with that. Invest millions on cybersecurity and data protection, but never mind the spyware bloat.
zuminator 4y ago
You can easily turn off widgets from Taskbar settings: Personalization -> Taskbar -> Widgets (Off)
ChoGGi 4y ago
You can hide it in task bar settings, or uninstall it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/x739nt/is_there_a_way_to_fully_disable_widgets_processes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/x739nt/is_there_...
ymolodtsov 4y ago
Here's the truly weird part. I've been using Edge on MacOS for over a year. With each major update it shows me the same basic onboarding like I'm a new user who has just installed it.

r12343a_19 4y ago

> Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)? (Internal) metrics say otherwise.

skrebbel 4y ago
(Internal) metrics may be short sighted.
- tetrep 4y ago
  What if they're not? What if it really is economically better for Microsoft to "double dip" and try to monetize Windows beyond its purchase price?
  - vanviegen 4y ago
    Of course they are. It's just not practicle to track long-term consumer sentiment around Microsoft, and life-time customer spending. So they track something else and convince themselves it's close enough.
  - everdrive 4y ago
    I think you raise a very important point. What if it's economically better for you to let men have sex with your wife for money? If you _don't_ do this, you're just sitting on untapped value.
    - fhd2 4y ago
      Not a fan of the analogy, I like to think that would be her own decision, not her partner's. Anyway, companies are capitalist entities, so all that ultimately matters for them is to make more money. The majority of decisions happen along the axis of short term revenue vs long term revenue (e.g. not ruining your brand, not getting fined etc). In an environment of insecurity and fear, I've seen companies focus more on the short term, since it's less speculative. But it sure doesn't look very good from the outside.
      - doubled112 4y ago
        She has the choice to get a divorce just like I have the choice to not use Windows.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
How would internal metrics even capture someone using a different computer?
- AraceliHarker 4y ago
  I think you can track pretty well with just the device ID alone, but you combine it with other identities like location information, IP address, cookies, login information and so on. Is that why Windows 11 recently made it impossible to bypass creating an MS account?
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Yeah but they're speaking about switching to a chromebook or a mac. How is your device ID going to help with that?
    - lozenge 4y ago
      They could summarise the User-Agent s visiting LinkedIn or a couple of other websites they run.
    - imajoredinecon 4y ago
      You estimate how many people use computers and how many people use computers you make. When you subtract the two, you get how many people use computers that your competitors make. Not every “internal metric” is something you can measure directly.
      - alpaca128 4y ago
        Most active Linux PCs were made by Windows PC manufacturers.
      - marginalia_nu 4y ago
        If that is how sketchy the data they are using to make decisions is, that would explain a lot about their decisions.
Nextgrid 4y ago
Internal metrics can be cooked to show anything. I read somewhere that "if you torture the data enough, it will confess". Whatever oxygen wasters are pushing for this crap will cook the data in such a way to push for their idea (as their salary depends on it) while "conveniently" not putting forwards data that shows otherwise.

mikub 4y ago

It's just three clicks to disable widgets, "Right click taskbar, select taskbar settings, click on slider to turn widgets off".

LoganDark 4y ago
That does not disable widgets. That only hides the button that toggles it. (Edit 29 minutes after, because I can't seem to post anymore:) It still runs its webview in the background and can be toggled with the keyboard shortcut, Win+W, even if the button is hidden. In order to fully disable it you need a Group Policy or a registry hack.
- binbag 4y ago
  What's the practical difference?
  - numbsafari 4y ago
    Having a web view loading garbage in the background consuming resources and probably leaking your data vs. …none of that?
    - recfab 4y ago
      It consumes a fair amount of resources just idling. I'm currently using a laptop that was mid-to-low spec when I got it a couple years ago. It was chugging, especially during video calls. Uninstalling the Widgets feature was enough to make it useable again.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    You still get the widgets in some interactions (like left swipe from the edge of the screen). There must be a way somewhere to customize those as well, but getting rid of widgets altogether is a lot faster.
- mikub 4y ago
  Good to know, thanks for that.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago

>and you can’t turn it off! Except you can. Taskbar setting -> toggle Widgets to OFF >I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. Windows sales aren't core moneymakers anymore when they're basically giving them away for free (I have mine registered with a MSDNAA key I found online and it worked). Money is in Azure, O365 subscriptions and ads shown to their Windows userbase. Nadella even said that Google makes more money from Windows users than Microsoft does, so shoving ads in your faces was them taking a slice of that sweet ad revenue. It's unfortunate, but this silent acceptance is our society having been numbed to being bombarded with ads on every computing devie it just became the new norm sadly and it doesn't seem like there's any hope for the trend to be reversing. People just got used to SW & online content being free and ad supported rather than paying upfront for it.

skrebbel 4y ago
Except I can’t (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208271). Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Except I can’t Maybe it's a Win Pro edition thing and not on HOme. >Also I don’t understand why “not a core moneymaker” implies “this must be crap-maximized”. What you don't understand is irelevant to the Microsoft board meetings where they show ad-revenue go up, because money is the only thing they understand, user experience be dammed. What are those users gonna do, install Ubuntu? /s
  - skrebbel 4y ago
    Buy chromebooks most likely
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      I've never seen chromebooks in continental Europe though. Maybe it's an AMerican & UK thing.

neogodless 4y ago

Exactly. While I get that live tiles and universal apps have their limitations, I vastly prefer a weather live tile that opens to a full screen weather app over the news widget that shows me weather in a random location among clickbait. And if you click weather, you go to an ad-infested web page. Remember when places hired UX designer to, you know, design a great user experience? This is not that. This is one hundred percent how can we get ad clicks, with apparently no one to push back. Except unhappy consumers that are ignored.

b112 4y ago
Remember when places hired UX designer to, you know, design a great user experience? This is not that Some tortured soul, chained by NDA, not allowed to tell its tale of angst and woe, is hastily linking your comment, to email manager "See!!!! It's rubbish to do this, they hate it, see!!"
- xattt 4y ago
  I’m thinking that individual has descended into madness by this point and is looking like the Monty Python “It’s” man.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    There's only a certain amount of soul you can extract from people before they become empathy-less ones unable to create things for other people and dangerous to have around. So, corporations cycle the people they use before they reach that level.

tored 4y ago

I recently switched from Edge to Firefox. Edge used to be great, but all "features" it has added the past year is not features I need, like sending my text input to Microsoft, showing online shopping suggestions, discover features, sidebar apps and what not. Edge also has a annoying bug in combination with AMD graphics card where the bottom of the screen flickers when watching certain video content in Edge, like Netflix (YouTube works). This bug has been there for months and still not fixed. I also recently downgraded from Windows 11 to Windows 10. Windows 11 was just too intrusive and many non-configurable features. Windows 11 is also slower, has more bugs and more unstable than Windows 10. I'm guessing that we need to abandon Microsoft's products when Windows 10 reaches end of life, not something I looking forward too because I'm not a big fan of Linux desktop nor the Mac desktop.

l8rlump 4y ago
Didn't you hear? 2023 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
300bps 4y ago
I recently switched from Edge to Firefox Right there with you. Somewhere in my comment history here six years ago was my suggestion for Microsoft to give up on Internet Explorer and create their own fork of Chromium. They could’ve gotten massive adoption if they did it right. Instead I had to turn off their useless auto-coupon feature, be ever vigilant to keep them from switching my search provider to Bing, frequently turn off the distracting new tab content, etc. Switched to Firefox and planning to dual-boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu soon.
- Qem 4y ago
  > Switched to Firefox and planning to dual-boot Windows 11 and Ubuntu soon. It doesn't help Microsoft apparently also managed to make dual boot more difficulty. Some years ago it was quite seamless, you could rely on automatic partition and it just worked. Today windows messes with the Linux bootloader after install, and to make it work I have to resort to advanced partition mode.
  - 4y ago

watwut 4y ago

> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. Because companies are structured so that it never happens. Moreover, professionals who are too angry about direction are expected to leave. Not just in MS ... anywhere including in startups. Companies are not democracies.

foobarbecue 4y ago

It's so bizarre how all the computers at my work have clickbait on the start menu. That's windows 10, so admin could disable it I think, but defaults tend to stick.

alisonatwork 4y ago

I just switched from Edge to Ungoogled Chromium for exactly these reasons. It used to be a slick, lightweight alternative to Google Chrome, but the last 6 months or so have been a disaster, and the beta version is even worse with the useless sidebar that magically appears when you accidentally hover your mouse in the corner and the hideous rounded corners that turn your Surface Pro into a 1950s CRT. Not to mention the default search one day decided to railroad me into using mainland China censored Bing instead of the international version. It's been so disappointing. Meanwhile on Android they also started screwing everything up, which led me to switch from Outlook and Edge to k9 and Bromite. I don't know what's going on in the applications teams at Microsoft, but it's really soured me on the "new" Microsoft, and I've been a fan up until relatively recently too. I just hope VS Code isn't next.

plagiarist 4y ago
It's a real shame, I thought they were trending in a different direction by actually releasing large projects as open source under permissive licenses.

everdrive 4y ago

This is the new pattern for almost any successful free software provided by a corporation. Make it nice enough to start building a user base, and then slowly make it more terrible to find a way to extract value from it.

pseudalopex 4y ago
Cory Doctorow named it enshittification.[1] [1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  This was my reply to the recently flagged article showing a graph of the decline in percentage for Windows' desktop share of the market. I think it was flagged due to questionable consideration of mobile OS's. But it did visually show a marked decline over the most recent year and a half or so, which may be a realistic indicator even if not pefectly accurate numerically. Looks like the downturn accelerated to its current more-rapid decline right after the release of the latest Windows 11 22H2 version in late 2022. This would have been the time the true enthusiasts, who were hoping for some respite from user hostility and compromised privacy, could finally be giving up for good. And it doesn't look like Windows 11 relented at all, when it comes to expanding its support for more older PC hardware than it did with its original release which was so misguided in this respect. Plus more dark patterns in things like online account approach. So now that it's even more plain to see how much faster it's getting worse, even the users who embraced Windows 10 have finally had enough. Now my opinion is based on professional use of W11 since its initial preview. As always, the product of some absolutely outstanding engineers at Microsoft, some of whom add wonderfully to the discussions on HN. But somehow or another, even the most excellent code is still getting Ballmerized by a vestige of the corp that seems to still be in position to compromise "what could have been" before it gets a chance to be considered or deployed by users. Also anecdotally I was the only one using Windows 11 when I presented at a conference a week after W11 was released back in 2021. Didn't notice a single other one this year either. reply

_fat_santa 4y ago

> Base UX is excellent, lots of settings and they’re easy to find. Vertical tab bar, profiles, and it all Just Works. I flat out love its “turn this website into a desktop app” feature. IMO this is one of the great tragedies with MS Edge. The UX is so much better than standard chromium but because of all the other crap that MS puts into it, I just can't use it. If MS open sourced Edge and someone created an "UnMicrosofted Edge", I would use that in a heartbeat. Currently the only place I use it is on my work laptop where I don't have any personal info and just generally don't give a crap about privacy since I'm inside my company intranet, bitbucket or jira all day. It's honestly really great for that sort of thing because the vertical tabs let you have 50+ tabs open and still read what they are, but there's just no way I would use it for anything personal or outside of work.

pbronez 4y ago
Same. I use Edge at work because it’s less evil than chrome and I’m logging into O365 anyway. Firefox for personal stuff. I haven’t had too many problems with Edge myself. I use Kagi for search without issue. Don’t see any native ads. It’s fine.
soundnote 4y ago
Brave has vertical tabs built in too, though they're behind a flag. But similar implementation as Edge and they work well.
- permo-w 4y ago
  last time I tried them they were extremely glitchy. have they been fixed?
  - soundnote 4y ago
    I think a lot of the glitchiness had to do with the tab bar changing size if you didn't have the bookmarks bar always on or always off. That's fixed now, and the tabs look pretty, too.

pavel_lishin 4y ago

> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. From whom? They've got two customer bases: - corporate clients, who get this stuff removed, either as part of the purchase or by their various sysadmins who get paid to secure the purchased laptops - personal clients, who purchase desktops and laptops pre-loaded with Windows, and could no more opt out of using it than I could opt out of using electricity in my house. edit: I don't read good, nevermind.

gregw2 4y ago
re: "corporate clients, who get this stuff removed"... I am currently at a Fortune 100 company and only wish my IT department would keep up with / disable all the ways automated MS(N) news feeds keep cropping up via Edge and Windows default behaviors, sometimes seemingly as part of automated updates. Every time I think I have turned one off, there is yet another way Microsoft enables some kind of news feed in its system by default. I have been through three rounds of exploring how to disable these sort of features in the last 6 months with windows 10+edge, and resent the time I have to spend trawling and searching how to turn each particular money grab off. I really don't want the distraction at work, thank you! P.S. Edge has been slightly more stable (and memory-efficient with many tabs?) under low-memory conditions than Chrome so I ended up starting to use it to avoid reboots at times. Wake up Google!
- neltnerb 4y ago
  Same, every time I run windows update on my lab with 22+ computers somehow (to no one's real surprise) OneDrive reappears, Edge keeps getting reset as my default PDF viewer on the regular (acrobat reader DC is installed), and lately the search bar added a bing icon to access AI search. As usual, figuring out how to disable it took an exercise in asking "what would I call this feature if I didn't want anyone to find it and disable it". I hate that I have so much OS specific software, definitely heading towards setting up a test computer with Linux to see how much I can get to work. It will be harder than it sounds but some of this stuff is legacy executables from Windows XP so getting them to run on Windows 11 might be just as much of a stretch.

nicbou 4y ago

It blows my mind how non-consensual the Windows experience has become. I wouldn't let someone with a similar understanding of consent anywhere near my drink. You are right about one thing: I refuse to purchase a Windows computer, and have been refusing for a decade.

unxdfa 4y ago
Yep. I’m in the middle of switching from macOS back to windows because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. I’ve had to build out a locked down windows 10 LTSC build to get anywhere near a sensible outcome for me. I think we should start a revolt in the IT sector against this shit really. I’d start one but I don’t know where to begin.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  Start here: > because I need to do things I can’t do on macOS. IT departments in huge corporations have purchasing requirements specs. Require any software that you pay money for to run on at least one non-Microsoft operating system. As a second source requirement. If more than a trivial number of large corporations do this, developers make sure their software runs on other systems, which is what allows users to switch. Large IT departments are in a position to actually move the needle here. This also has the side benefit of being a heuristic that excludes primarily low-quality software, because most higher-quality software is already portable.
  - 8ytecoder 4y ago
    I work for a pretty large financial corporation. They sent out the IT roadmap for the next year and in it was casually mentioned that they expect Macs to be the dominant platform in the next five years. Our current mac usage is <15% and as a result support is an afterthought with a very frustrating experience. For them to say that and push for this change in an industry that very strongly favours Windows is the clearest indication I’ve seen that Windows is starting to lose.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

> I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. My understanding is that they did, around Windows 8 or so, and all the people who had scruples about the desktop experience left and were replaced by people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
>people who don't mind earning their pay check by making the world a worse place. Yikes, you could be correct. Is this re-Ballmerizing? Wasn't that supposed to be off the table a while ago? Not only Edge, Windows itself is acting uglier every time too. Some of my scientific instruments are over 20 years old and going strong, a few still supported by the latest Windows software from the original vendors. Now some of the new instruments do have lab functions the old ones never will but at least the old ones are on equal footing as data peripherals when you are sitting at a Windows 11 PC. But the very oldest used to work with Windows 98 and Windows XP originally. These things have always had some pretty demanding software, and before installing, the factory instructions had a few paragraphs you were advised to follow in order to configure Windows so it wouldn't have badly compromised performance. You needed to manually disable a number of underlying Windows processes that were totally un-needed by the task at hand, if not highly detrimental. It took about 10 minutes to go through the list and then the high-dollar software installed in 85 MB and worked really snappy on a 300 MHz processor. To run the same old instrument now there are fully updated drivers for the new factory software so the readings can keep coming in to the PC at the same old 100 MB ethernet speed, including all the latest data integrity features from that point which didn't exist originally for these type analyzers. It really does work and it is fully validated on Windows 11, but before it installs it autoruns a script which takes half an hour on a 3GHz PC in order to disable all the detrimental Windows defaults these days. It would take you hours if you wanted to do this manually. Before it unzips its 10 GB package of goodness, which now runs like a dog on a dedicated near-gaming PC, compared to the number of clicks-per-minute you could get 20 years ago on a Windows 98 office machine. For the same raw data being processed the same way which is basically both the state-of-the-art at the time. "Slowing down the speed of scientific progress one Windows version at a time." Now I like Edge since I only use it offline, to open PDF's and web files like HTML help documents.

mgerdts 4y ago

> and you can’t turn it off! At least on windows 11 pro workstation, this is a right click and a preference setting or two away. The start menu can be moved to the left corner where it has long been with a taskbar setting. I did this as recently as yesterday with media dated February 2023.

ChatGTP 4y ago

except that it’s filled to the rim with terrible clickbaity news headlines and you can’t turn it off! Someone at Microsoft decided that the entire Windows install base, ie nearly everybody, must really read news about foreign celebrities doing questionable things. Well they replaced their journalism team with "AI" and that's what their AI thinks you want. My partner helped someone in our family the other day with Edge(tm) and she told me she thought the browser was so weird it looked like one of those "home page hijack" sites from the early 2000's.

lloydatkinson 4y ago

I've been working on automated setup and configuration of Windows for my purposes and for family computers etc. As part of that I wanted to hide the widgets, the pointless search input, move the start menu back to its normal place instead of the dumb place, hide one drive icon from explorer, etc etc This also installs software from Winget. This is what I have so far: https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/windows/standard/Set-StandardConfiguration.ps1 https://github.com/lloydjatkinson/configuration/blob/master/... I have a version for development machines too which is WIP but you can see what I have so far. The repo root has a big readme of what it does and does not do. Once it's done you end up with a consistent Windows setup. I haven't looked into how to disable the bing crap on the start menu search yet as apparently the previous registry keys people found to disable it have been deliberately changed into "touch these values and your start menu search won't work for anything" which is a new level of contempt from the Windows team. Tldr: Automate all this tedious tweaking and turning off of crapware features via PowerShell. The end goal is to be able to run a single command from the windows terminal and leave it to do it's thing.

alisonatwork 4y ago
A tip I got on a previous HN thread was to set HKCU:\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\DisableSearchBoxSuggestions to 1 so that when you type something into the start menu search box it actually returns installed applications and files on your hard disk instead of internet search results. That's been a huge productivity boost for me, and reverts the behavior to what it used to be a couple years ago. Also from this thread I have now added HKCU:\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Dsh\IsPrelaunchEnabled to 0 to stop Widgets.exe from executing on startup. Unfortunately it still starts up if you accidentally swipe the touchscreen from the left.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  That first key is the one I was thinking of, a lot of comments online saying it breaks search for local totally by disabling it. That second key is new to me I'll be adding that too thanks.

koromak 4y ago

Microsoft just can't stop doing this. All of their products suffer. I'm happy to fork over the absurd Apple tax just to feel comfortable at my computer, and to know I'm not going to wake up one morning to a forced OS update that has Cortana start screaming black friday deals from my desktop. I mean, ads in the task bar? I spend all of my time on my computer, I do not want all this shovelware pushed in my face at every opportunity. I think this strategy is going to kill them in the long run. I was a pure Windows user, until I was forced to spend some time on mac for a job. What do you know, its just way more pleasant.

jlarocco 4y ago
Having used OSX for ~10 years, I can say Apple isn't much better. Both systems treat the user like an idiot, just in different ways. You'll see what I mean when the OSX updates start undoing changes you've made to settings and things like that. For your own good, of course.
- marcellus23 4y ago
  I have to strongly disagree with "not much better." I'm not saying Apple doesn't do some annoying stuff, but it is MUCH much better than Microsoft. Every time I use Windows I am just floored how obnoxious they are with pushing their BS. The difference is night and day.
  - factormeta 4y ago
    I do think the Apple user experience is better, and the hardware is much better designed. I switched from Apple to Linux several times, and really know the difference, but when it comes to privacy, Apple and MS just can't be Linux/*BSD variant (I do know it is not for everyone).
- chasing 4y ago
  It's called macOS, now that it's no longer on version 10, and it ain't perfect but it is miles beyond Windows when it comes to respecting the user, as far as I'm concerned. And, yes, I'd rather have an operating system that makes things easy for me -- "treats me like an idiot," pejoratively -- rather than one that's unnecessarily convoluted and full of crap.

whoisthemachine 4y ago

Just recently, my partner's PC had to be wiped because BitLocker was surprise enabled by Windows 11, and I hadn't set her PC up with an online Microsoft login, so we couldn't get the BitLocker key that we never knew we needed. So your data is now hostage to Microsoft, and if you didn't read the full manual when setting up your partner's new Windows PC, you now lost her data. Writing about it, it feels like ransomware, except I guess we don't have to pay anything yet, other than an account that Microsoft can gather metrics from.

charcircuit 4y ago
Doesn't windows make you sign in to an account during the install?
- ncpa-cpl 4y ago
  It’s possible to skip this by not connecting to the internet until the installation is over

dazc 4y ago

'Don’t they understand that this is what drives people to Macs and Chromebooks (and nerds like me to Linux)?' Maybe that ship has already sailed and they know who their core market is?

nokeya 4y ago

Imagine the point of view of Microsoft employee: you have well paid work, revolting is taking a huge risk of losing the job. Almost sure you will be fired IMHO. And in current market conditions when all companies are laying off, are you interested to be fired or laid off? You are not.

CamperBob2 4y ago

I don’t understand why MS doesn’t get some sort of internal revolt. For the same reason that Milgram and Zimbardo didn't see a revolt among their test subjects. Whenever anyone objected to the unethical things they were told to do, all the researchers had to do was give the same order to the next subject. They didn't have to go very far down the line to find someone who would cheerfully do the dirty work. And those students weren't getting six-figure paychecks. I will never understand how Nadella gets fellated so felicitiously around here. (Hello, -4 Flagged). He has turned a decent OS into an exploitative nonconsensual experience, in which the user is constantly reminded who really 'owns' the computer they paid for. Even more offensive from a business perspective, he refuses to give the rest of us the obvious option to pay to get rid of the garbage. It is still far too much trouble to run LTSC without pirating it.

Firmwarrior 4y ago
Yeah, everyone who really wanted to make quality products or had too much self-respect quit Microsoft years ago. Right at this very second it makes sense to stay put, but most of the time any Microsoft employee can grind Leetcode for a few weeks and hop ship to another company with a 30% raise. Last time I was there, nobody working there was happy about how things are going, except a few random sociopaths.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>Why do they allow the Crap And Turds department to piss all over their work? Because Windows is a free-in-practice product and it needs/wants a revenue stream. Remember that Windows 11 can be activated with Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 keys; as if that wasn't crazy enough you can straight up not activate it and you won't lose out on anything important. As for install media? You can download those for free any time. No strings attached. As for Edge, that really is a free-as-in-beer product. You literally can't buy it.

jnsaff2 4y ago
macOS and Linux are even more ‘free-in-practice’
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  macOS is free only when you bought Apple's computer hardware which comes at some serious markups. Unlike WIndows and Linux I can't legally downloads it and install it on the PC hardware I already own. That's like saying the SW ruining on your car's entertainment unit is free. Sure, that SW didn't cost you anything extra, but you paid for it through the car's purchase price.
  - jnsaff2 4y ago
    Same goes for Windows tho. You need to work to get rid of the windows install in the PC.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      That makes no logical sense unless you're trolling or never used a computer in your life
      - jnsaff2 4y ago
        Where have you lived for the past 20 years? Almost all PC laptops and desktops (from Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo and others) have had Windows installed as the default option for that time. Sometimes you can uncheck it and save a little money, sometimes is won't save anything and most of the time you don't have the option to remove it. The innovation has been to install vendor garbage in addition to Microsoft garbage. So it takes even more effort to get a clean system. Only in the last few years has some distro of Linux started being an option.

psychphysic 4y ago

I didn't realise how much this bothered me until you brought it up. On my low end laptop occasionally I can't even close it or click away and it takes a minute or two to decide to go. Insane.

dagaci 4y ago

I really wonder how and by which process Microsoft thinks its Ok to force everyone to look at its garbage bottom feeding msn news feed, do Microsoft exec's atually use Windows and put up with this?

Kwpolska 4y ago

> The only way to get rid of it is a Powershell incantation that removes the entire Widgets feature. Better than terrible news, but still nuts. You don’t need PowerShell to get rid of Widgets. You can disable it with three clicks: right click on the Taskbar, go to Taskbar settings, and toggle the switch next to Widgets at the top of the window.

gigel82 4y ago
That hides the UI entry point, but widgets.exe continues running, along with 5-6 edgewebview2.exe processes, taking up valuable resources. If you try to kill widgets.exe, a system service restarts it :( Unfortunately, the powershell incantation is the only way to get rid of it...
- permo-w 4y ago
  will there not be some registry entry you can change?
  - gigel82 4y ago
    No, there is no way to disable it via registry or group policy that I know of.
    - SpaghettiCthulu 4y ago
      These "powershell incantations" usually modify the registry or group policy, or delete or replace system files behind the scenes. And from my experience the ones that modify system files often don't persist across system updates.
      - gigel82 4y ago
        winget uninstall "Windows web experience Pack" Get-AppxPackage *WebExperience* | Remove-AppxPackage
- benhurmarcel 4y ago

MikeSchurman 4y ago

The news widget is terrible, and the sole reason I haven't switched to windows 11. I spent about 30m turning off news source after news source before giving up. Apparently there is an infinite supply of them. It's actually a problem for me at work because they keep drawing my eye and distracting me from getting work done. It's crazy. What are they thinking?

permo-w 4y ago
they were thinking that it would draw your eye
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Which is hilarious, because they always market windows 10 and 11 through the lens of "optimizing your workflow". Except, obviously, when they want the news app to attract your attention and get a few advertising cents.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

drc500free 4y ago

From what I can tell, it's to prop up Bing's advertising. The windows search bar is mixed in with Bing traffic to juice their numbers, even though nearly all clicks from the windows search bar are inadvertent. They are also chasing the Taboolah/Outbrain native advertising space that masquerades as new articles, hence stuffing that box with celebrity news.

MarkSweep 4y ago

It is infuriating. The only way I know of to remove Widgets and Teams Chat is with the Remove-AppxPackage command in PowerShell: https://pureinfotech.com/uninstall-widgets-powershell-windows-11/ https://pureinfotech.com/uninstall-widgets-powershell-window...

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

What I can't wrap my head around is how one of the biggest companies in the entire world is willing to annoy literally everyone who uses their products, and slow down their browsing, in order to make a penny or two a day off of each one. My company just rolled out new laptops, and all of this is on by default -- on a corporate install!? WTF is my IT department thinking? They bastardize the hell out of the install with all the usual "security" crap, spyware, tracking, and scripts that run on login and logoff to make sure that you haven't done anything you shouldn't have. On top of all of this, why do I have to wait for 10 seconds to open Edge to go to the company home page while it loads all this horse pucky? Microsoft will do anything for a corporate purchase, so I'm positive that there's a tickbox or two in the policies that would shut this off. Is Microsoft giving a kickback on that money to companies who leave this on?

CamperBob2 4y ago
What I can't wrap my head around is how one of the biggest companies in the entire world is willing to annoy literally everyone who uses their products, and slow down their browsing, in order to make a penny or two a day off of each one. The only thing I can imagine is that they are making a lot more than a penny or two a day from each Windows user they sell down the river. Otherwise the marketshare graph that concinds linked to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212328 ) would be treated as an existential emergency. The only rational conclusion is that they no longer GAF about Windows as a product with paying users.
- toast0 4y ago
  That marketshare graph is interesting, but what's missing is a graph of the size of the market. Anecodtally, people aren't moving from Windows to Mac, people are moving from desktop platforms to phones. Maybe Microsoft is taking a ride it into the ground approach. Usage growth for desktop Windows is off the table, Windows Phone is dead, so revenue growth for Windows needs to come from throwing users under the bus?

canadaduane 4y ago

I used to think Linux users were ideological, but now I just think they are long-term thinkers, preserving and contributing to both the culture and the code that will enable freedom of choice, and create software whose goals are well-aligned with its users.

Andrex 4y ago

Give Linux a try. Even if you did before and hated it. Flatpaks and Proton are really coming into their own. And not in a "year-of-Linux-desktop" way where it's perpetually "almost ready" for 5 years. So many of my teething problems moving away from Windows have been buttoned up and solved since originally using mainlining Linux 10-15 years ago. I'm a Gnome weirdo though, Gnome 3/4 are easily my favorite complete desktop experiences (Elementary was competing there for a while).

moritonal 4y ago
Second this, Kubuntu is an excellent OS that on the whole just works.

bvan 4y ago

Totally agree. And what baffles me even more is that most corporate IT is fine with that. Invest millions on cybersecurity and data protection, but never mind the spyware bloat.

zuminator 4y ago

You can easily turn off widgets from Taskbar settings: Personalization -> Taskbar -> Widgets (Off)

ChoGGi 4y ago

You can hide it in task bar settings, or uninstall it. https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/x739nt/is_there_a_way_to_fully_disable_widgets_processes/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/x739nt/is_there_...

ymolodtsov 4y ago

Here's the truly weird part. I've been using Edge on MacOS for over a year. With each major update it shows me the same basic onboarding like I'm a new user who has just installed it.