5 ms·

All of these practices feel fairly benign compared to what microsoft is doing now. At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this

by cm2187 3y ago

All of these practices feel fairly benign compared to what microsoft is doing now. At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. I don't think this would even raise an eyebrow now. They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers. /s of course this is a problem developers do not need to deal with anymore! The Microsoft we are dealing with now gives you warnings if you are trying to install another browser and makes it difficult to change your default browser. And in that space Apple has done way worse: breaking internet standards by deprecating flash (and other unsupported features), banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely. And using their dominant position to force the deprecation of internet standards is another thing google is not shy about either.

denton-scratch 3y ago
> breaking internet standards by deprecating flash Flash was never an "internet standard"; it was a proprietary product of Adobe. OK, it depends on what you mean by "internet standard"; in general, I take "X standard" to mean a specification for X issued by some standards body, such that a third-party can implement X by following the spec.
- Ygg2 3y ago
  It was a defacto standard. Everyone had Flash. Granted, there were reason to abandon it. But I can understand people being upset with it gone.
  - wolletd 3y ago
    Didn't really take long for replacements like https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ to emerge, though.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > Didn't really take long ... You're meaning that sarcastically, yeah?
prof-dr-ir 3y ago
> At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. > They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers I do not think this is an accurate representation of history. First, Microsoft was fighting against the whole concept of a browser as separate from its OS. The fact that one can 'change your default browser', as you so casually say, without changing your OS was a major victory in itself that people worked very hard to ensure. Second, it was not just 'features' that Microsoft added to IE. They were actively ignoring standards and with Frontpage people could easily generate web pages that looked fine in IE but were a complete mess of impenetrable HTML for other browsers. And when you complained about this the owner would simply add a 'best viewed in IE' icon on their website and start blaming you instead... In short, at the time it was not at all obvious that a large majority of the web would remain accessible using any other browser than IE. (And similarly for email clients, by the way.) I agree with you that there is still plenty of shady behavior going on, but I am not sure that I would classify the old practices as 'fairly benign'.
- ikari_pl 3y ago
  > First, Microsoft was fighting against the whole concept of a browser as separate from its OS you mean, just like the Good Guy ChromeOS?
  - amadeuspagel 3y ago
    You can install other browsers on ChromeOS in the Linux VM.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    It feels like your comment is about 10 years too late, most people here are now very sour towards Google. They no longer have their sterling "good guy" reputation.
    - ikari_pl 3y ago
      Yes, it was a little sarcastic and under an article about Internet Explorer, which isn't exactly the number one public enemy anymore either. A few thoughts: At some point, the ideas of a browser, and an OS, seemed to converge a lot - expose more of the machine to the browser (webapps), provide task and memory management for the sites and webapps... More and more functionality overlapped. From that point of view, maybe the argument to see them as connected made a lot of sense - the deeper the integration, the less double work might be happening, maybe. The cost, however, is always portability, or at least interoperability. But as much as "having common code everywhere is good", I think switching all browsers to Chromium is not the way to go either.
resonious 3y ago
Maybe I'm nuts, but the start menu's web search results seem to ignore default browser settings and only open in Edge. Event better: I had a period of time where Edge would freeze before showing any content. So clicking a web result from start menu would just open an empty, unresponsive window. Windows would then tell me the window is unresponsive and ask if I want to kill it. Classic Microsoft quality. It's like that old org chart meme where Microsoft's departments are pointing guns at each other, played out directly in the OS, Conway's Law style. Very amusing.
- alargemoose 3y ago
  > Maybe I'm nuts, but the start menu's web search results seem to ignore default browser settings and only open in Edge You’re correct on that, Microsoft created a new link type ‘microsoft-edge:’, so that no matter what browser you use. Query’s from the search bar always get sent to Edge. They pulled a very similar move with Outlook where it now opens all links in edge, instead of in the users default browser. But for now, you can still toggle that setting back. If you want windows searches to open in your default browser, you have to use https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
drooopy 3y ago
Helping accelerate the death of Flash was probably Steve Jobs' most important contribution to computing. That said, it's appalling that Apple is getting away with banning 3rd party browser engines on iOS.
- tinus_hn 3y ago
  Then again, iOS is a better OS because it can get away with supporting no third party browser engines.
  - manderley 3y ago
    Why is it a better OS because of that? Not really seeing the logical connection here.
    - tinus_hn 3y ago
      Because there are also advantages. iOS gets away with forbidding JIT execution in third party programs, so they get away with exposing no APIs that allow memory segments to be executable unless they are signed, which is a great thing from a security point of view. Also as there is only one browser engine, the system only contains the bugs that are in one browser engine. Most operating systems have bugs in the browser engine that comes with the OS, and bugs in the engine users actually use which is more bugs.
  - RunSet 3y ago
    Then again, Firefox is worse on iOS because Apple can get away with banning third party browser engines.
    - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
      This really grinds my gears. Recently I was able to install Firefox addons and chrome addons on Orion browser on iPad when both chrome and firefox themselves arent able to. Why? If Orion can do it, why not Firefox ?
scarface_74 3y ago
Flash was an “internet standard”??? Adobe claimed that it could have gotten Flash working on the original iPhone in 2007 if Apple had allowed it. When Flash did finally come to mobile in 2010, it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU on Android and then it barely worked and wrecked hell on the battery. The original iPhone came with 128MB of RAM and a 400 MHz CPU. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
- android42 3y ago
  They probably half assed the android one, but would have allocated more resources to it if it had a future. I had flash 5 running just fine on my 2004 palm with 32MB of RAM and a 312 MHz CPU. This also would have been Macromedia though and not Adobe, not sure how many of the original developers they kept.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    That wasn’t full desktop Flash. That was a very lite version that wasn’t compatible with what was then the latest version. Do you really think that Adobe could have optimized Flash to support hardware that had eight times less RAM and was half as fast four years earlier?
punkybr3wster 3y ago
> deprecating flash How quickly people forget the security nightmare that was Flash at the time. Every other week it was some new exploit that allowed rootkits to be installed straight from flash ads. Adobe couldn’t keep up and was actively encouraging folks to move to HTML5 based web animations or Air/Flex runtimes for local app development and animation. IOS never supported flash. That is not the same as “depreciating” it.
darrmit 3y ago
> All of these practices feel fairly benign So let's say you're running a Linux distro and you install a browser. That browser then overwrites files elsewhere on the system making it nearly impossible to eradicate. That's benign? Sounds more like a cancer to me. Though, I do agree that Microsoft has steadily returned to being somehow even more gross post Windows 7. I've refused to upgrade to Windows 11 on my gaming PC. Never thought I'd be one of those people, but Microsoft's overall trend of gathering data and peddling their own sub-part solutions with blatant disregard for users is just not something I can support. If it gets to a point where Windows 10 no longer supports the games I want to run, I'll revisit then whether they've come to their senses, but all of the recent news seems to indicate that won't be the case, so chances are I'll just give up on PC gaming entirely.
freediver 3y ago
> banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely That is not true, there are over 100 web browsers on iOS, you can find them all through App store. You probably meant they all need to use the same web rendering engine optimized for iOS - WebKit. But that does not prevent them from achieving their purpose for their makers, if anything, arguably helps them as WebKit is much more performant, integrated and optimised to run on Apple devices (including macOS) than other rendering engines. Plus this is the only thing that is keeping us from a world where we have only one web rendering engine, and it would be one created by the world's largest advertising company. That would be, let's say, suboptimal outcome for the web.

by cm2187 3y ago

denton-scratch 3y ago

> breaking internet standards by deprecating flash Flash was never an "internet standard"; it was a proprietary product of Adobe. OK, it depends on what you mean by "internet standard"; in general, I take "X standard" to mean a specification for X issued by some standards body, such that a third-party can implement X by following the spec.

Ygg2 3y ago
It was a defacto standard. Everyone had Flash. Granted, there were reason to abandon it. But I can understand people being upset with it gone.
- wolletd 3y ago
  Didn't really take long for replacements like https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ to emerge, though.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > Didn't really take long ... You're meaning that sarcastically, yeah?

prof-dr-ir 3y ago

> At the time they merely shipped the browser with the OS. > They were also accused of adding new features only in IE which forced websites to deal with incompatible browsers I do not think this is an accurate representation of history. First, Microsoft was fighting against the whole concept of a browser as separate from its OS. The fact that one can 'change your default browser', as you so casually say, without changing your OS was a major victory in itself that people worked very hard to ensure. Second, it was not just 'features' that Microsoft added to IE. They were actively ignoring standards and with Frontpage people could easily generate web pages that looked fine in IE but were a complete mess of impenetrable HTML for other browsers. And when you complained about this the owner would simply add a 'best viewed in IE' icon on their website and start blaming you instead... In short, at the time it was not at all obvious that a large majority of the web would remain accessible using any other browser than IE. (And similarly for email clients, by the way.) I agree with you that there is still plenty of shady behavior going on, but I am not sure that I would classify the old practices as 'fairly benign'.

ikari_pl 3y ago
> First, Microsoft was fighting against the whole concept of a browser as separate from its OS you mean, just like the Good Guy ChromeOS?
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  You can install other browsers on ChromeOS in the Linux VM.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  It feels like your comment is about 10 years too late, most people here are now very sour towards Google. They no longer have their sterling "good guy" reputation.
  - ikari_pl 3y ago
    Yes, it was a little sarcastic and under an article about Internet Explorer, which isn't exactly the number one public enemy anymore either. A few thoughts: At some point, the ideas of a browser, and an OS, seemed to converge a lot - expose more of the machine to the browser (webapps), provide task and memory management for the sites and webapps... More and more functionality overlapped. From that point of view, maybe the argument to see them as connected made a lot of sense - the deeper the integration, the less double work might be happening, maybe. The cost, however, is always portability, or at least interoperability. But as much as "having common code everywhere is good", I think switching all browsers to Chromium is not the way to go either.

resonious 3y ago

Maybe I'm nuts, but the start menu's web search results seem to ignore default browser settings and only open in Edge. Event better: I had a period of time where Edge would freeze before showing any content. So clicking a web result from start menu would just open an empty, unresponsive window. Windows would then tell me the window is unresponsive and ask if I want to kill it. Classic Microsoft quality. It's like that old org chart meme where Microsoft's departments are pointing guns at each other, played out directly in the OS, Conway's Law style. Very amusing.

alargemoose 3y ago
> Maybe I'm nuts, but the start menu's web search results seem to ignore default browser settings and only open in Edge You’re correct on that, Microsoft created a new link type ‘microsoft-edge:’, so that no matter what browser you use. Query’s from the search bar always get sent to Edge. They pulled a very similar move with Outlook where it now opens all links in edge, instead of in the users default browser. But for now, you can still toggle that setting back. If you want windows searches to open in your default browser, you have to use https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

drooopy 3y ago

Helping accelerate the death of Flash was probably Steve Jobs' most important contribution to computing. That said, it's appalling that Apple is getting away with banning 3rd party browser engines on iOS.

tinus_hn 3y ago
Then again, iOS is a better OS because it can get away with supporting no third party browser engines.
- manderley 3y ago
  Why is it a better OS because of that? Not really seeing the logical connection here.
  - tinus_hn 3y ago
    Because there are also advantages. iOS gets away with forbidding JIT execution in third party programs, so they get away with exposing no APIs that allow memory segments to be executable unless they are signed, which is a great thing from a security point of view. Also as there is only one browser engine, the system only contains the bugs that are in one browser engine. Most operating systems have bugs in the browser engine that comes with the OS, and bugs in the engine users actually use which is more bugs.
- RunSet 3y ago
  Then again, Firefox is worse on iOS because Apple can get away with banning third party browser engines.
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    This really grinds my gears. Recently I was able to install Firefox addons and chrome addons on Orion browser on iPad when both chrome and firefox themselves arent able to. Why? If Orion can do it, why not Firefox ?

scarface_74 3y ago

Flash was an “internet standard”??? Adobe claimed that it could have gotten Flash working on the original iPhone in 2007 if Apple had allowed it. When Flash did finally come to mobile in 2010, it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU on Android and then it barely worked and wrecked hell on the battery. The original iPhone came with 128MB of RAM and a 400 MHz CPU. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

android42 3y ago
They probably half assed the android one, but would have allocated more resources to it if it had a future. I had flash 5 running just fine on my 2004 palm with 32MB of RAM and a 312 MHz CPU. This also would have been Macromedia though and not Adobe, not sure how many of the original developers they kept.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  That wasn’t full desktop Flash. That was a very lite version that wasn’t compatible with what was then the latest version. Do you really think that Adobe could have optimized Flash to support hardware that had eight times less RAM and was half as fast four years earlier?

punkybr3wster 3y ago

> deprecating flash How quickly people forget the security nightmare that was Flash at the time. Every other week it was some new exploit that allowed rootkits to be installed straight from flash ads. Adobe couldn’t keep up and was actively encouraging folks to move to HTML5 based web animations or Air/Flex runtimes for local app development and animation. IOS never supported flash. That is not the same as “depreciating” it.

darrmit 3y ago

> All of these practices feel fairly benign So let's say you're running a Linux distro and you install a browser. That browser then overwrites files elsewhere on the system making it nearly impossible to eradicate. That's benign? Sounds more like a cancer to me. Though, I do agree that Microsoft has steadily returned to being somehow even more gross post Windows 7. I've refused to upgrade to Windows 11 on my gaming PC. Never thought I'd be one of those people, but Microsoft's overall trend of gathering data and peddling their own sub-part solutions with blatant disregard for users is just not something I can support. If it gets to a point where Windows 10 no longer supports the games I want to run, I'll revisit then whether they've come to their senses, but all of the recent news seems to indicate that won't be the case, so chances are I'll just give up on PC gaming entirely.

freediver 3y ago

> banning 3rd party browsers on iOS completely That is not true, there are over 100 web browsers on iOS, you can find them all through App store. You probably meant they all need to use the same web rendering engine optimized for iOS - WebKit. But that does not prevent them from achieving their purpose for their makers, if anything, arguably helps them as WebKit is much more performant, integrated and optimised to run on Apple devices (including macOS) than other rendering engines. Plus this is the only thing that is keeping us from a world where we have only one web rendering engine, and it would be one created by the world's largest advertising company. That would be, let's say, suboptimal outcome for the web.