5 ms·
"The new Copilot app for Windows 11 is really just Microsoft Edge"
- BoredPositron 6mo agoThat's hilarious. I wonder how many edge versions are deployed in a standard install.
- throwuxiytayq 6mo ago[flagged]
- illusive4080 6mo agoChill, not everything has to be political on HN. Edit: OP edited out the political message from their post
- ses1984 6mo agoI strongly appreciate being able to see the thread without logging in (or ever visiting that site).
- ToucanLoucan 6mo agoEspecially since without an account they won't even let you see replies anymore. This is excellent
- pessimizer 6mo agoThere are only two big instances that work any more, everybody is aware of them including twitter, and they exist only because twitter allows them as a safety valve for upper middle class people who believe that political consumption is a thing that works. By the grace of Musk, a few thousand* 1) nerds who don't register on any invasive social media and 2) libs with the admirable self-control not to spend all day on twitter yelling about twitter, get a tiny trickle of nitter that can be cut off at will. Meanwhile, we're on ycombinator.com. Boycotting is not a thing that works under monopoly (especially with "free" products.) Monopolies boycott you. ----- [*] I'm making this up, it could literally be hundreds, not even thousands. I don't think nitter has a sane caching strategy, and if it were more than a few users the servers would catch on fire. Although I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turned out that the last nitter instances were being run from "X" headquarters as a project to track and study individual behavior (When do nitter users join X? When people quit X, do they still use nitter? When do people who have X accounts use nitter to conceal what they're looking at? Which accounts are especially popular for nitter users? What are the political opinions and demographics of nitter users, etc...). Or instead of X, it could be feds doing the same thing. If so, they would have plenty of processor and the real user numbers could be tens or hundreds of thousands.
- zamadatix 6mo agoIt's not always as deep as a principled stance on a boycott, political consumption, monopolies, or the general politics of X/Twitter. Many of us never had a Twitter account either. The only time we've used the site is when someone shared a link and we tried to view it. It can be as simple as the idea of having to sign up for a site to see some link that has been shared is annoying and nitter (for now, for whatever the reasons of continued existence) is also a link to the same content without said annoyance.
- nekusar 6mo ago[flagged]
- illusive4080 6mo agoI’m a conservative, not a nazi. You don’t need to be attacking people on this site. This isn’t Reddit.
- sheikhnbake 6mo ago> a conservative, not a nazi who regurgitates pro-billionaire talking points and thinks the poor just need to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, with some christian persecution complex sprinkled in You aren't fooling anyone, except maybe yourself
- illusive4080 6mo agoYou’re projecting that on me. All I’m saying is this isn’t Reddit; HN is for civil discourse.
- sheikhnbake 6mo agoIt's not projecting when it's based directly on your comment history. I used to spout the same things about two decades ago. Hopefully you wise up at some point.
- illusive4080 6mo agoCondescending dismissal of others based on a quick comment sleuthing is not a good behavior on HN. Take care.
- sheikhnbake 6mo agoThe dismissal is based on decades of lived experience and seeing the same things over and over again. You aren't attempting to engage in good faith and clearly aren't interested in discussing anything more in-depth so my dismissal seems to be well placed.
- xigoi 6mo agoA link that allows you to actually read the content has nothing to do with politics.
- illusive4080 6mo agoThe poster edited their post. Originally there was a political message in it.
- hagbard_c 6mo agoIt seems to be there still unless you don't count his expression of severe MDS to be political. I run my own bitter instance which mostly works although it has to be restarted frequently due to it claiming to be 'out of tokens'.
- josefresco 6mo agoThere's also a browser extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirector/pgbegepjkmpcolalkpbakcbjlkodakie https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xcancelcom-redirect...
- elwray 6mo agowow. I wonder how this was found out originally?
- snitch182 6mo agoFirst thought: 'i wonder what the app is made from'. Followed by looking at the exe in a hex editor... Oh that looks like edge .. renaming the file and the rest is HN history
- layer8 6mo agoSee https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/05/new-copilot-for-windows-11-includes-a-full-microsoft-edge-package-uses-more-ram/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/05/new-copilot-for-win....
- kstrauser 6mo agoIs that like MS’s version of an Electron app? Aren’t most Electron apps just Chrom{e,ium} plus some JS to run inside it? Asking seriously, not snarkily. That’s my understanding but maybe I’m wrong about it.
- Normal_gaussian 6mo agoElectron is NodeJS + Chromium + Some native control APIs (trays/menus/shortcuts/window management) + update & packaging. So a lot more can be done with an electron app, while still staying mostly in the web based comfort zone.
- FuriouslyAdrift 6mo agoMicrosoft switched from Electron to their own WebView2 a while ago. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2?form=MA13LH https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview...
- cogman10 6mo agoMain difference, electron bundles all of chrome with every app. WebView2 can do that, but the recommended route is one that shares the runtime across multiple apps (what ms does). So you end up with just 1 webview2 on the system + your app specific code ultimately significantly shrinking the distribution size.
- steve1977 6mo agoMSHTML.dll reborn
- Someone1234 6mo agoMostly, yes. But since they upstream Chromium, it is more likely to remain evergreen than MSHTML ever was.
- deafpolygon 6mo ago
- fortran77 6mo agoEvery electron app is really just a browser, isn't it?
- ygra 6mo agoSo, like edit.com and QBasic. What is old is new again.
- eliasson 6mo agoWait. What? Was that the case? Young me never realised that! =)
- bombcar 6mo agoIt was. And you could do things with moving it to previous releases of DOS too if I remember. QB.EXE the actual compiler was compatible, too. See also https://qb64.com/ https://qb64.com/
- rob74 6mo agoExcept that was done to save disk space (according to https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/063/Q63777/ https://jeffpar.github.io/kbarchive/kb/063/Q63777/, "When EDIT.COM is executed in MS-DOS versions 5.0 and later, it invokes QBASIC.EXE with the /EDITOR switch", whereas this installs a whole new copy of the Edge browser (850 MB) on a system where in 90+% of cases it's already installed...
- rbanffy 6mo agoSomeone has their bonus tied to how many copies of Edge are installed.
- fingerlocks 6mo agoThe hilarious side effect of this is that Intune/Defender on MacOS flags the multiple copies of edge for non-compliance. Maybe this is just something that happens to MSFT employees, not sure, but I’ve had to waste many hours filing for false positive exceptions because not a single Microsoft product can figure how to use a Mach-o shared dylib path
- JanneVee 6mo agoIf I was to speculate, this is the result of "rank n' yank" where the performative productivity is more important than actual productivity. If true it says something about why AI is pushed hard by Microsoft, it make performative productivity much more easier.
- steve1977 6mo agoYou cannot really use most Copilot products for actual productivity, even if you wanted to. Last time I checked, Copilot in Outlook did not have access to my calendar data.
- JanneVee 6mo agoYeah, I gave up trying to find productivity uses for the copilot in office because of limitations like that.
- p_ing 6mo agoI have plenty of users using it for real productivity purposes. Yes, it has access to Exchange Online calendars.
- tempodox 6mo agoCould these be different products, like Home edition vs Pro edition?
- p_ing 6mo agoI only have experience with the M365 enterprise services. I don’t use M365 for personal stuff, I’m too cheap for that.
- kjellsbells 6mo agoTrue, but it's so incredibly fragile. 90% of the time copilot returns sensible things, eg when prompted to list all the f2f meetingsI had last month. 10% of the time it fails to find things, makes things up, etc. Problem: if I cant rely on it for administrative tasks like this, I end up having to do more work to verify what it says. which makes the tool pretty useless.
- zamadatix 6mo agoOne of the comments led to an article which really goes into the details of what exactly is packaged here https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/05/new-copilot-for-windows-11-includes-a-full-microsoft-edge-package-uses-more-ram/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/05/new-copilot-for-win...
- heliumtera 6mo agoAny webpage you see is really just chromium. All new product you see from today startups are really just post request to the cheapest inference provider
- nchmy 6mo agoI used edge ever since it was chromium-based, but I moved to linux and vivaldi 6 months ago and never looked back.
- naikrovek 6mo agoCool. Why did you post this? Genuinely asking. I’m autistic and I don’t understand why people do things.
- aquir 6mo agothis is hilarious! I wish I was a fly on the wall when this decision was made...
- layer8 6mo agoMore informative article: https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/05/new-copilot-for-windows-11-includes-a-full-microsoft-edge-package-uses-more-ram/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/04/05/new-copilot-for-win... It seems to actually use a modified copy of Edge in a subfolder.
- seemaze 6mo agoIt's worse than that. On my corporate mac when I try to login with Entra, the only option I get is a hyperlink to 'experience Copilot on the web'. Also, it seems like all the Copilot 'connected experiences' are really just a chat window without any real integration with the applications they are embedded in. Claude is more useful in Excel than Copilot.. how? Microsoft's consistently incoherent and hobbled rollout of Copilot is why I find Anthropic's offerings so much better. It just allow me to get stuff done. My one hope was that Copilot would solve the Microsoft documentation tarpit by leveraging enormous context to root out the answers to my questions. When chatGPT can finally one-shot Microsoft product queries with the correct platform, release, license, and 'gotchas'.. I'll know we've hit AGI.
- hagbard_c 6mo ago> When chatGPT can finally one-shot Microsoft product queries with the correct platform, release, license, and 'gotchas'.. I'll know we've hit AGI. In that case a simple few lines of whatever language you prefer would class as "AGI". Here's a sample session using the non-existing oracle.sh tool; oracle.sh 'tell me how to do ${thing} in Microsoft ${product} and which licence requirements that brings' (computer noises) oracle: Avoid using Microsoft ${product}, use one of the alternatives listed in this web search: https://search.engine.org/search?q=alternatives%20to%20Microsoft%20${product}
- jerf 6mo ago"Also, it seems like all the Copilot 'connected experiences' are really just a chat window without any real integration with the applications they are embedded in." I was triple-booked today. Two of the meetings in question should have had significant overlap between attendees. I figured, hey, there's this Copilot thing here, I'll ask it what the overlap is, that's the sort of thing an AI should be able to do. It comes back and reports that there is one person in both meetings, and that "one person" isn't even me. That doesn't seem right. One of the autocompleted suggestions for the next thing to ask is "show me the entire list of attendees" so I'm like, sure, do that. It turns out that the API Copilot has access to can only access the first ten attendees of the meetings. Both meetings were much larger than that. Insert rant here about hobbling 2026 servers with random "plucked out of my bum" limits on processing based on the capabilities of roughly 2000-era servers for the sheer silliness of a default 10-attendee limit being imposed on any API into Outlook. But also in general what a complete waste of hooking up an amazingly sophisticated AI model to such an impoverished view of the world.
- Ciantic 6mo agoWhat is the reason they don't use the WebView2? Microsoft Teams uses WebView2, surely it should be enough for Copilot. This defeats the whole point of having WebView builtin and shipped with the Windows 11.
- BorisMelnik 6mo agowhy does Microsoft just not listen to its people
- OnionBlender 6mo agoI'm forced to use Copilot at work. I can't resize the font size and there is usually a delay when typing in it for the first time. In Outlook, it often opens the side panel on its own.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6mo agohttps://xcancel.com/TheBobPony/status/2041112541909205001 https://xcancel.com/TheBobPony/status/2041112541909205001
- adornKey 6mo agoÄtsch!
- Simulacra 6mo agoDoes this mean that Edge is only for entertainment purposes, too?
- deafpolygon 6mo agoThat's really pushing the boundaries on what a "minimum viable product" can be.
- gradientsrneat 6mo agobusybox does a similar trick where it executes a different program based on the program's name. But it uses symlinks for the different names, so it doesn't use significantly more space by doing this.