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Windows 11 system components use the default browser to open links in Europe
- djbusby 3y agoNeat! But why not respect the users choice everywhere on earth?
- AraceliHarker 3y agoMicrosoft is determined to make users use Edge + Bing.
- baz00 3y agoFor lack of a better response, as a customer I'd like to tell them to fuck off because both are terrible user experiences. It's like wading through trash.
- nottheengineer 3y agoTelling them to fuck off means using linux. It's a hard step at first, but I highly recommend giving it a shot. After learning the basics, I can't go back to windows anymore because I know how a proper OS works and can see how terrible windows actually is as an operating system, not just in terms of user experience. That alone keeps me motivated to push through any difficulties I face with linux.
- baz00 3y agoOr a Mac.
- zb3 3y agoThis is a very good thing for Linux on desktop. I wish MS was way more aggressive here, hopefully it's just the begining.
- Biganon 3y agoIt's not. The huge majority of users simply doesn't care.
- aqme28 3y agoRegulations that were passed in the EU but not e.g. the US.
- capableweb 3y agoThe announcement is talking about EEA rather than EU though, which smells a bit weird. I'm not sure what regulation they're trying to resolve the conflict with that is not EU wide but rather EEA and targets the usage of default browsers.
- pavlov 3y agoThe EEA is practically “EU + a handful of countries that apply EU rules but don’t get to participate in decision making for historical reasons”. That’s why Britain didn’t even consider joining the EEA after they left the Union. From their point of view, it would still be the regulatory burden of EU membership without most of the benefits they enjoyed as a full member. When they’d decided to take the economic impact of leaving the free trade area, it wouldn’t really make sense to stay on worse terms than they already had.
- nicbou 3y agoEEA countries get freedom of movement with the EU, among other things. An EEA citizen can work in an EU country without any other requirements.
- aqme28 3y agoThere are some benefits. The article that we're commenting about, for example.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beardyw 3y agoYes, getting Microsoft's disrespect was worth it.
- 3y ago
- Mistletoe 3y agoWe don’t police tech monopolies in the USA, they are actually in charge because all of Congress owns the SP500, which is dominated by tech. We have to find a way out of this dystopia spiral.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoThat's not quite it. The US doesn't, in general, give any extra rights or protections to its people without a bit of force, and then one is lucky. Hence, no real consumer protection (which would include this). No signing of a thing giving rights for children, and so on. The rights folks legally have were grand enough 200 years ago, but have become substandard over time with little upgrading.
- alex7734 3y agoIt wasn't that long ago when Microsoft got sued (in the US) for not allowing people to uninstall and replace Internet Explorer. Something has changed since then that has made US anti-trust much "lazier".
- teddyh 3y agoAs I recall, there was an election during the trial, where Bill Clinton was replaced by George Bush, whose administration was not as keen to prosecute monopolists.
- orwin 3y agoI had a call yesterday night from a West Virginian friend, and surprisingly the US just extanded worker protection? Or something, at least that was the first time he was exited by US politics since I met him.
- passwordoops 3y agoIn case you're getting downvoted: https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-report-2022 https://unusualwhales.com/politics/article/congress-trading-... https://campaignlegal.org/update/stock-act-failed-effort-stop-insider-trading-congress https://campaignlegal.org/update/stock-act-failed-effort-sto... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/congress-stock-trading-investigation.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/13/us/politics/c...
- lnxg33k1 3y agoBecause other places have thriving tech industry which can’t waste time checking what browser to run
- hardware2win 3y agoNot supporting major browsers doesnt feel like "thriving tech industry" Sounds like cheap ass startups or poorly executing corpos
- lnxg33k1 3y agoYeah mine was a citation of those saying EU hasn’t big tech due to regulations
- cwales95 3y agoYour argument doesn’t hold at all. The functionality is already there, so ask yourself, why are they depriving people outside of the EU this functionality when it’s already there?
- lnxg33k1 3y agoMine was a sarcastic joke, but to reply seriously to your questions, it's not about the effort to implement the functionality imho, it's more about missed revenue, Microsoft is using Edge as a way to monetize windows users traffic, so this is going to affect somehow their profits
- cwales95 3y agoApologies, I totally missed the sarcasm. And I get what you mea. Personally sick of companies forcing things on users for the sake of profit.
- Barrin92 3y agoBecause companies only ever respect user choice for two reasons. 1. it coincidentally makes them money, 2. they're forced to by government. In the US it's interesting to see that state governments are increasingly pushing on several issues (albeit sometimes for dubious reasons), but the federal government is somehow chronically AFK.
- baz00 3y agoBecause they do not respect you as a user anywhere out of choice.
- justapassenger 3y ago$
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI love Microsoft, but I hate whoever is controlling all these awful choices for their OS. Lets be real its probably a marketing team trying to sell office and whatever else. I just want a version of Windows for actual professionals with no nonsense on it. Slim it down, make it feel like I'm on a 2023 machine with the minimalism of like idk Windows XP or Windows 7. No nonsense.
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoYou can’t “love Microsoft” as if it is a homogeneous entity whilst carving out sections of it for the purpose of attributing everything you’re against. Not only is this simply a sign that Microsoft is a bloated old tech company like a bunch of others, looking to make more money, but it is also consistent with a pattern of Microsoft’s behaviour over the last few decades.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI can appreciate the good utilities they build can I not? I love Visual Studio, and I love .NET which went way more open source than I thought it would, I for sure assumed it would be licensed under the MS-PL which is far less demanding than the GPL but not as a free as MIT, but no, they went straight for the MIT license. https://github.com/dotnet https://github.com/dotnet Every single repo is MIT licensed. I also appreciate VS Code, I know some people will still find some reason to hate on it, but its blatantly clear that it has taken the industry, the number of times I meet a developer who loves using it for programming is much higher than the number of developers I used to see using literally any other range of editors, it all seems to be uniform towards VS code. If you take away the OS, Microsoft still builds amazing products. I also enjoy Azure more than I do thinking about what half of AWS services mean or do. I seriously have to google a service every time someone brings one up just to remind myself what its for. I rarely do that with Microsoft services, some of it is I'm used to them, but some services have blatantly obvious names as well.
- Jowsey 3y agoI'm in the same boat; I want to love Microsoft, but it seems internally split into two very opposing groups with very different ways of thinking. I swear by a lot of their developer tooling and open source work but abhor the Windows ecosystem
- crest 3y agoMicrosoft decided they would rather to extract more value from their captive users than the users are will to hand over if the law doesn't make it too expensive.
- Karellen 3y agoBecause fuck you, that's why
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoI can tell you that it's because in the US, some people have vested interest in a dysfunctional government.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Lalabadie 3y agoYes, that changelog entry is basically "We will do the decent thing only when forced to."
- bux93 3y agoTo be fair, they also don't respect your choice in the EU, it's just that they can't legally act on their disrespect in this particular way.
- LegitShady 3y agothe goal isn't respect, the goal is to leverage their position to try to trick you into something against your interest but in theirs.
- pjerem 3y agoTechnically it's in the European Economic Area (EEA) but the title was too long.
- capableweb 3y agoThat's strange, I wonder why not EU but rather EEA. Probably the smallest target amount compared to EU and aimed at resolving some conflict with a regulation that only affects EEA rather than EU?
- martinald 3y agoThe EEA contains EU countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago+ Switzerland and Turkey
- pmontra 3y agoNo Switzerland and no Turkey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Area
- theonlybutlet 3y agoEEA is larger than the EU. The EEA concerns the single market, the reason Microsoft is doing this (to avoid breaching antitrust/competition law).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ritzaco 3y agoCountries in the EEA but not EU (e.g. Switzerland) tend to have bilateral agreements with the EU which cover most EU laws, so I think legally it's often easier to group EEA together E.g. EU enforces free data roaming for cellphone providers, but many providers allow free roaming to Switzerland and the Nordic countries too - not sure if it's just practically easier than trying to geofence those areas into a different tariff or if it's legally too complicated, but I'm fairly certain they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
- eimrine 3y agoDefault browser has to be something as lite as possible, probably Pale Moon. Because random apps use to call the browser any time they want and if the default browser is browser I use, it eats a lot of time and laptop battery trying to start my hundreds-tab monster.
- mrweasel 3y agoThat makes me wonder: What are the rules for something to be considered a browser? Does it need to provide certain functionality, or can I register anything as a browser and just have links open in an editor?
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoAfaik to make a program selectable as default browser, one needs to register it as a protocol handler for http and https urls in the registry. https://stackoverflow.com/a/38205984/2306536 https://stackoverflow.com/a/38205984/2306536
- aziaziazi 3y agoDoes that mean I can use a headless browser as default ?
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoYou can probably put any cmd-executable command as default, including headless browsers.
- numpad0 3y agoI tried exactly that. Turns out it can't be a .bat or .ps1 for understandable reasons, it has to be an executable. So, my "default browser" on this machine I'm on is now an .exe that prints $1. It works.
- kroltan 3y ago
- Pesthuf 3y ago[flagged]
- vuavu 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- candiddevmike 3y agoHow do I make Windows 11 think I'm in the EU?
- layer8 3y agoRegion settings, possibly: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/adjust-region-settings-on-windows-11/ https://www.groovypost.com/howto/adjust-region-settings-on-w...
- capableweb 3y agoProbably a combination of different inputs, like timezone, regional, GPS (if computer supports that) and figuring out public IP. Knowing Microsoft, they'll try their hardest to avoid flagging a computer as within EEA if they possibly could.
- FredPret 3y agoMy decision to move to Mac when the M1 came out is starting to pay more and more dividends!
- cgeier 3y agoWhat does using a Mac have to do with the article?
- baz00 3y agoWell avoiding the problem to start with is a perfectly good solution.
- horsawlarway 3y agoApple avoids the problem of not respecting my browser choice how, exactly? Apple open webviews in Safari, does not respect the user's choice at all, and doesn't even allow you to install a non-safari browser on their mobile OS. This is like peak irony. Apple is the walking definition of this problem.
- fh9302 3y agoWhy are you comparing a desktop operating system to a mobile operating system? On macOS Apple lets you trivially set a different default browser and doesn't annoy you about it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yomlica8 3y agoWhat I've learned about tech tribalism arguments is that for some reason some one else doing something first means you can't be mad about it when it happens again. Its like if you cheated on your wife and told her she can't get mad because your neighbor cheated on his wife first. Somehow that is a rebuttal even though she was never married to the neighbor and may have even started dating you in the first place because you didn't cheat.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoI wonder how much money Microsoft is making by not respecting user choices in non European countries. I also wonder how much money they invested in the legal handlings of this topic and how many developer/sales hours are and were wasted to make this "split" possible.
- formerly_proven 3y agoMicrosoft is clearly playing on Ultra Violence level here in an attempt to force as much Edge market share as technically possible. I guess someone pretty high up has their bonuses tied to those numbers.
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoIt's on the same embarrassing level as putting candy crush in the start menu.
- formerly_proven 3y agoAfter installing some updates (on a 10 Pro machine) recently I got a nice modal pop-up begging me to change my default search engine in Chrome (which I don't even use) to Bing. (Hey, at least they asked, I guess - next security update will just set bing as the search engine in all browsers, just like IE toolbar malware from 2004). Whole operating system just comes off as super shady and desperate since Windows 10 - feels a lot like fake antivirus malwares from the 2000s. It has always been pushy in this millennium, sometimes for a good reason (updates are important), but all of this is without any decent reason. Installing those updates of course also re-enabled automatically installing drivers without any prompt, which promptly caused the Nahamic malware to be re-installed through Windows Update. Somehow most IT people are not bothered by this. I imagine if you would tell this stuff to a mid-2000s IT person their head would simply explode.
- londons_explore 3y agoIf the browser market share figures between EU and non-EU now start to diverge, it would really strengthen the case to sue microsoft in the USA...
- eactlyhtj324 3y agoThese companies are all about efficiencies and supporting a single setting globally is more efficient than having per country settings. They also like to take choice away from power users with the same excuse. But regarding browser choice, they are happy to support different behaviors depending on geographic location... which already tells me that current Microsoft's practice of forcing Edge onto users does actually make a difference. The marketshare figures will just be the cherry on top.
- Phileosopher 3y agoYou'd think, but GDPR has done little to nothing to advance a privacy-focused constitutional amendment. The USA's legal system is, plainly, only driven by the interests of the groups willing to pay the insanely high legal fees to do anything about it. Over here, privacy is an afterthought, and I sincerely doubt anyone will discuss it this election: nobody profits financially from it.
- user3939382 3y agoI'm loving M$ having to admit they're intentionally abusing their users by disrespecting their preferences even when it would cost them nothing to do so.
- omeid2 3y agoOn the windows front, it actually costs them more to make the feature geographic dependent. But on the browser dominance, the choice would actually cost M$.
- desi_ninja 3y agoWhen will Apple admit?
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoApple doesn’t disrespect set user preferences in the same way that Microsoft does. This sort of oversimplified drive-by whataboutism isn’t great for conversation.
- jemmyw 3y agoThey respect it on Mac and don't let you have a non WebKit browser on iOS
- dijit 3y agoThe hard and fast rule is: you're not permitted to have a source code interpreter. That's the "rules of engagement", same way you can't run Flash or Linux binaries; the same way you can't touch windows kernel space without a code-signing certificate from a eye-gouging authority. Exceptions to apples rule are rarely given, even for educational purposes; such as pythonista. When taken though that lens; if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app: alternative interpreters of HTML/CSS could exist. Unrelated, but: Ironically the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones (as there was only an app store created after community backlash over Apple pushing people to the web).
- kramerger 3y ago"Respect" but will nag you and refuse to open certain files due to "security" Source: currently on win10 enterprise and it refuse to open certain PDF files outside Edge, because "security"
- Clamchop 3y agoIf it still works like it did for Internet Explorer, then interestingly, these files are tagged by using an auxiliary data fork in NTFS.
- baz00 3y agoThey should have never done this in the first place and it was 100% intentional to try and trick you into using Edge. Secondly it is morally objectionable to just turn this off in the EEA. Thirdly, they still try and force Edge down your throat all the time. That shows that the user is only being respected when pressured by legislation, not because you're the customer. Microsoft does not respect its customers and does not deserve our business.
- kevincox 3y agoA huge admission of not respecting the user. If they didn't support this anywhere they could claim that it was because they can't test and support every browser. But if they can support other browsers in the EEA then they have no legs to stand on for why they disable it elsewhere. It is now clearly that they care about their preferences more than respecting the user's preferences.
- flipbrad 3y agoI'm not sure it's down to the new EU Digital Services Act (which is more focused on "online" behaviour, rather than client-side), but nb Art. 25(1) of the DSA: "1. Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions." Or there might be an argument that downloading instructions to a user's device, causing it to do something they didn't want, is a breach of the EU's anti-malware rule (AKA the much-despised "cookie law", even though that name downplays its significance)
- kypro 3y agoWonder how much this regulation cost to draft, pass, and implement? Several million dollars? Any EU tax payers care to justify this insanity? I mean does any normal person even care about this? Eg, not people on HN with Macbook Pros – your average Windows user. At the end of the day Windows does loads of stuff I don't like. That's why I don't use Windows anymore. Like with most things the EU regulates this just isn't an issue. Windows using a different browser for system apps is so far down on the list of things I don't like about Windows that even if you asked me to write a 100 point list of things I don't like about Windows I'm not sure this would make the list. Guess we need some more regulation. Edit: Please don't downvote simply because you disagree with me. It's better to have a discussion. Different perspectives are good.
- eur0pa 3y agoI agree these grapes look very sour
- iSnow 3y ago>Several million dollars? Any EU tax payers care to justify this insanity? Probably several millions, yes. Considering the EU has 450 inhabitants, that*s increasing my tax bill by cents. Well worth the money to me. Probably, MS will try to backtrack and violate regulations at some point so it will pay for itself too. I'll never get the US masochism where interference by regulators to defend the end-user is somehow seen as odious.
- kypro 3y ago> Probably several millions, yes. Considering the EU has 450 inhabitants, that*s increasing my tax bill by cents. Well worth the money to me. But this never ends. Every week there's a new article here about how the EU is forcing electronics makers implement their preferred charger ports, or displaying cookie notices to EU visitors, or making phone batteries replaceable. It's endless crap that adds drag to businesses trying to operate in EU, costs tax payers hundreds of millions and has almost no significance to the average person's life. I'm not anti-regulation at all. I just think it needs to be limited to places where there's a clear need to regulate. Honestly sometimes it seems like the EU is just looking for the next pointless thing to regulate so they can continue to justify their jobs. Please take this as a separate point on taxation more generally, but I tend to find the most pro-tax people I know are those with the highest incomes. Those in favour of people's income being redistributed to regulators in this way I find are often the same people who argue in favour of spending "a little more" for free ranged eggs, and organic fruits, etc. I'm not suggesting you don't do this already, but we should consider if those pennies would be better in the pockets of workers rather than taken by government regulators so you don't have the displeasure of using Edge when you occasionally need to use Windows instead of your Mac.
- Aachen 3y agoI would also urge people to wonder: why do they care so much? I don't have the answer. Especially in the past, it seemed like a cost factor to keep up a modern browser (just ask Mozilla) if people might as well install anything else and still buy your OS and use your services. That may have just been going with the flow, not wanting to miss the boat. My best guess for nowadays is the same as why Google hijacked a login to any google service (from gmail to youtube) as a log in to the Chrome browser, after which all the data on any website is up for grabs and they can facilitate privacy extensions all they want without compromising their own market position. Does Microsoft (plan to) run an ad business? Is it built-in Cortana integration which can answer with ads included or ranking own services higher? Is it just to be able to shove any new future service into more people's faces? To steer web standards, like if you have >70% market share on Windows desktops can you just build in a new ActiveX for WebOffice (as an example) and you'd force others to follow? Or maybe a combination of all of the above. Either way, I think it would be good to know what strategy is behind this relentless pushing
- resoluteteeth 3y ago> I don't have the answer. Especially in the past, it seemed like a cost factor to keep up a modern browser (just ask Mozilla) if people might as well install anything else and still buy your OS and use your services. Microsoft ditched their own browser engine and the current version of edge is just using chromium, so it's cheap to maintain. Edge uses bing by default so Microsoft can serve you ads, and it has a shopping plugin built in which also probably generates revenue. They can also try to redirect people to other microsoft services whenever they want in the future.
- creshal 3y ago> Does Microsoft (plan to) run an ad business? Microsoft Advertisement is pulling in 10 billion dollars a year (~=5% of total) and Microsoft wants to aggressively expand it.
- foobarbecue 3y agoEvery time I visit my parents, I find they've reverted to using Edge and don't know why. Despite my best efforts, they don't seem to have the will or technical ability to resist M$ manipulation. It's frustrating.
- fsflover 3y agoI installed Linux for my relatives and they never have this problem (or any other problem!).
- npteljes 3y agoCan I please ask how technical they are, and what distro are you using? And that what are they using the OS for? I'm looking into this passively for years now, and I'm really interested in actual people's experiences.
- sznio 3y agoI installed Linux Mint for my parents a few years ago. They still haven't noticed.
- bgdam 3y agoLinux Mint is the distro you're looking for. Especially if you're looking to set it up for non technical users.
- asddubs 3y agothe only problem with linux mint is that you constantly have to reinstall it because there's no update mechanism
- npteljes 3y agoI have tried Mint, and there was a update mechanism - it was either Ubuntu's do-release-upgrade or something on top of that, I honestly can't remember. But the system didn't look like a normal installation after it, that's for sure. Fonts were a bit weird, some settings were migrated and some weren't, it didn't feel right.
- 65 3y agoThank god Valve exists for their work getting Steam games to work on Linux. A lot of the captive Windows audience is gamers. With another option, people don't have to put up with Microsoft's OS terrorism.
- RajBhai 3y agoThe other day I tried to install Chrome on a new laptop. (Insert joke about what Edge is good for.) However, Edge wasn't letting me actually download the Chrome installer. When I clicked the download button on the Chrome website, instead of any indication of its progress or completion, Edge instead displayed a pop-up that kept reassuring me that Edge was just as good. So it turns out, Edge isn't even good enough to fulfill its meme.
- LeanderK 3y agowait a minute...were you able to download chrome in the end? Or was edge straight up refusing to download it?
- ivanmontillam 3y agoI got curious and tried it. Yes, the installer is downloaded, but there are a bunch of banners when attempting it.
- RajBhai 3y agoIf I recall, the automatic download didn't work. I had to click the manual download link. The pop-up said Edge was based on Chrome with the added trust of MS. I really wish I could get others to use Firefox, but they're too used to Chrome.
- coffeeling 3y agoI just tried it out, Edge showed the banner twice, once over the Chrome download confirmation (when the browsers asks if you're sure you want to keep an .exe file), and the second didn't obey the X to close. I had to click on the downloads list to be able to tell Edge to keep the Chrome installer.
- spuz 3y agoInterestingly those banners telling you Edge is just as good only appear when you Bing Chrome, not Firefox.
- 3y ago
- puskavi 3y agoBut not W10? Of course not, because that's what everyone is using.
- prng2021 3y agoAs an American, I'm more annoyed that our government isn't working to protect consumers than I am at Microsoft. Microsoft is acting predictably from a business perspective. This is just a repeat of the Internet Explorer debacle decades ago.
- denton-scratch 3y ago> Microsoft is acting predictably from a business perspective A business can be predictable without being shitty to the core. Microsoft has been a shitty scofflaw company since the day it was founded. Apple and Google are pretty shitty, but they weren't in their early days. Microsoft has always been a criminal racket.
- npteljes 3y agoThis hits the nail on the head. The issue is that the system is shitty - the entities within the system practically have to act shitty, otherwise the other one that does goes ahead and takes the profit. Doing the right thing is often not just orthogonal to business, but is actually hurting it directly. So not only is there no incentive to do the right thing, there's direct incentive to do the opposite.
- moistoreos 3y agoI wouldn't expect this to ever happen post-Citizens United.
- bjackman 3y agoI think this is the smart way to see it. Tax avoidance is another example. Being angry with Amazon for not paying tax is like being angry at the sea for sinking your ship. The absolute best case scenario is that boycotting Amazon leads to Amazon paying marginaly more taxes, and every other company and billionaire on earth continues to avoid it. Instead, it makes more sense to direct your energy towards the government that's letting them get away with it. Same with monopolies; it's absolutely fundamental to their nature that we don't have any leverage over them as consumers. We can either cry impotently about Google and MS being bad guys or we can actually demand our governments do something about it. It's bizarre how often people choose the former!
- denton-scratch 3y agoMuch too little, much too late. Nothing I own runs Windows any more. I now swear at computers much less often.
- CalRobert 3y agoNow break up Alphabet before attestation really kicks in so we can still use Firefox and not just reskins of Chrome.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JacobSeated 3y agoThis is the expected, most intuitive, and only sensible behavior, and yet Microsoft somehow, for some reason, decides it is okay not to use the default browser? Wait a minute. Are they trying to cause me to have a complete meltdown? This is so irritating. The task bar can also no longer be placed vertically on the left or right. Imo. Microsoft should be forced to open source important parts of Windows so that these processes can be more democratized by users of the system.
- simooooo 3y agoThe other day, I got an explicit “please use Edge” popup on my desktop. They don’t currently care about the EU
- pbmonster 3y agoAnd it's not even happy if you're using Edge already (as I have to for work). When you're browsing in Edge, it will sometimes - mid-typing - just pop up a tab with an add for Bing and it's new AI features. And it's a real tab, not a pop-up, so I haven't figured out how to tell uBlock to suppress it yet.
- userbinator 3y agoThe source of older versions of Windows was "forced open", a long time ago, unfortunately not legally.
- hooby 3y agoSo... does anyone have any good guesses what actually caused them to do this? I mean, obviously they want to push Edge - but for some reason their hands were forced within the EEA. I'd be interested to know that reason :)
- _cenw 3y agoIn my experience, Microsoft is in weekly meetings with supervisory authorities, and they have a constant risk assessment of just ignoring EU regulations beyond GDPR going on. I've submitted a few GDPR requests that had an impact on Microsoft too - so if you're an EU citizen, make a good habit of complaining about bad data hygiene and anticompetitive behavior.
- trimethylpurine 3y agoI wonder which competitor lobbied for this and will now be doing the same thing.
- cowl 3y agoNo competitor lobied for this. it's the users that "lobied".
- trimethylpurine 3y agoHow do we know?
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago> In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. That shows such complete and utter contempt for the wishes of their users. The user has actively selected a browser as the one they want to use by default, but windows only uses it in the EEA because they were forced to. As it will be used by EEA system components, there's presumably no technical/compatibility issues that would stop the rest of the world using it to.
- skummetmaelk 3y agoLet's see what the people always screaming about how the EU only cares about fining American tech companies who do nothing wrong will respond to this.
- danuker 3y agoThe manipulators mostly reach for low-effort high-exposure interventions. They wouldn't actually engage in honest debate.
- whatwhaaaaat 3y agoI think mostly people condemn the eu for its attempt at censorship. The eu would actually have to have a big tech company consumers actually interface with in order to fine them -besides just hardware.
- cyanydeez 3y agoThey have a suspicious lack of coup attempts in the last decade.
- ChadNauseam 3y agoIs the idea that it would have been really good if the person who organized the insurrection also had the ability to censor people who disagreed with him?
- voytec 3y agoIn other words: Microsoft only respect users when forced.
- onemoresoop 3y agoIt seems like we have to do a lot of work in the US to empower the consumer, at least to catch up with Europe.
- cebert 3y agoI am very irritated that I have made it very clear that I wish to use Firefox as my default browser in Windows 11. However, tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Office keep trying to force me into Edge by opening links in it by default. You don't gain converts by forcing something onto users.
- pessimizer 3y ago> You don't gain converts by forcing something onto users. You're not looking for converts when you're forcing somebody to do something. Most of Microsoft's business has always been about forcing people to use things. The other choice is a company that you have to pay a premium to choose, but then you're forced to stay or else lose your stake. None of this is competition, it's all market manipulation.
- stainablesteel 3y agomeanwhile the other article currently on the front page about microsoft is them using malware-like popups to get people to ditch chrome nice
- cbshearer 3y agosad part is that the current iteration of Edge is actually good. these spammy tactics and built in coupon addons make it feel trashy.
- rhizome31 3y agoLots of outraged comments but few will close their GitHub account and stop using VSCode.
- yrro 3y agoNow if only PWAs running in Edge would do the same thing... (Sick of links I click in Teams opening in Edge instead of my system's default browser!)