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Trying to set yourself as the default handler for anything should pop up a system preferences box. Beating a dead horse perhaps but in the Apple world this work
by fwlr 3y ago
Trying to set yourself as the default handler for anything should pop up a system preferences box. Beating a dead horse perhaps but in the Apple world this works quite well: there are various permissions like “read folders”, “capture keyboard input”, “access location” and so on. When a programs wants to use these, all it can do is put in a request, and pop up a dialog box offering to take you System Preferences. When you’re in System Preferences you can look at e.g. “read folders” permissions and see all the programs that have requested this, and you can check or uncheck each program to decide its access. This is how default handlers should work, too (although it doesn’t in MacOS at the moment, probably because they couldn’t solve the UI issue of having a list of every possible file type, each with a sub list of every program that can open it).
If that was what Windows was intending, and Google found a way around it with sneaky automatic API calls, and Windows fixed the exploit which then resulted in those sneaky calls popping open Settings every time, that would be fine and Google would be the bad guy.
Sounds like that was not what happened here, Windows did some ugly hack (up to and including ‘relying on a Chrome.exe process name’, like, come on) and in fact doesn’t even have a “make request then approve in Settings” workflow, so yeah Windows is the bad guy here. Google is still a little bit bad - you’re fucking up my UI by forcing a self-promotion button into my tab bar, that’s not cool - but overall this situation is a point against Microsoft.
(Personally I’m glad the extent of browser wars for Mac is some apps doing some trick to make you choose between “Chrome”, “Safari”, or “the default browser [Safari]” every time you click a link. I want to use the default option every time automatically, that’s what default means.)
- nr2x 3y agoEh, iOS doesn’t allow any alternative rendering engines, which isn’t exactly user choice.
- zamnos 3y agoAh yes, the Henry Ford of user choices. "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black". -Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922)
- yarg 3y agoTe be honest, the most unreasonable part wasn't choosing a single colour, it was choosing black over grey.
- tracker1 3y agoThe better to hide the oil... those early cars were very messy.
- yarg 3y agoBut not so much the bird shit from needing to park in the shade.
- fbdab103 3y agoI believe it was a limitation of paint technology at the time. Colored paints took more skill and time to apply than black. Additionally, the color would chip and deteriorate in a short amount of time.
- ubermonkey 3y agoiOS <> MacOS
- 908B64B197 3y ago> Sounds like that was not what happened here, Windows did some ugly hack (up to and including ‘relying on a Chrome.exe process name’, like, come on) and in fact doesn’t even have a “make request then approve in Settings” workflow, so yeah Windows is the bad guy here. Google is still a little bit bad - you’re fucking up my UI by forcing a self-promotion button into my tab bar, that’s not cool - but overall this situation is a point against Microsoft. I suspect Chrome was misusing an API, because according to the article "the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient." Enterprise maybe didn't like settings getting changed that way (conflict with group policy?). If it was constantly opening new windows, it's probably because it was constantly calling an API (probably in the wrong or an undocumented way). So it would make sense to change how the API works based on a known bugged application.
- Pxtl 3y agoAndroid is back and forth on this. Some items just get a simple prompt, and others get "no you have to get forwarded to a built-in system page within the settings system and set the value there". Generally, things that an app is "unreasonable" to ask for (like background use of camera or mic, avoiding being cycled out when in background, or access to the filesystem) need to go through the full OS settings menu, while common things (active in-app use of GPS or Camera) get a simple pop-up prompt. Which makes sense.
- gondaloof 3y ago> make you choose between “Chrome”, “Safari”, or “the default browser [Safari]” every time you click a link Apple oughta put a stop to this nonsense. 1. There's a global default browser setting: follow it. 2. Almost no app needs an embedded SFSafariViewController just to open random links 2b. Extend this to photo pickers (especially those that expect access to the entire library)
- saagarjha 3y agoI actually like chat apps that embed SFSafariViewController, mostly because I get sent a lot of links in the middle of conversations that I’d like to go back to.
- RajT88 3y ago> (up to and including ‘relying on a Chrome.exe process name’, like, come on) I would bet this is an application shim of some sort. Hardcoding behavior like this into the shell is risky. Shims often target based on process name and executable path on disk (but can be configured to also match resource info). I would dig into it, but I cannot repro the issue on Win10.