Paul Thurrott and I were also scratching our heads with this one on August 25. After failing to reproduce the behavior, he wrote up our collective experience [1] the next day. We chalked it up to yet another Windows Insider screw up, marked it as an unsolved case, and moved on.
I certainly hope the change eventually makes it into the OS before the Windows 11 "23H2" release is finalized (imminent).
[1] https://www.thurrott.com/paul/287711/scaling-back-the-terrib... (pay-walled)
Interesting seeing the about-face over a decade later.
---
for those not aware, Rafael's almost a two decade long authority on the topic of smashing Windows internals to bits to see how it all works.
Back then businesses were a lot more scared of the repercussions of anti-competitive behaviour than they are now.
They were successfully sued for favoring their browser over others, and faced being broken up. Though their actions now are not as egregious as those actions 25 years ago, it's obvious that no lesson has been learned.
How so? They still bundle a browser, but now they go a step further and actively ignore user-selected preferences for the default browser.
Which part of the other case do you view as more egregious? They seem similar to me.
Lol.
It sucks.
It was a huge effort for me to switch. Now almost 20 years later, I don't regret it. Wish I had done it sooner.
Gaming was the last bastion of having Windows, but with Proton, Linux can run nearly any "Windows-only" game.
It is a small effort to switch now. There has never been a better time.
Somehow we need to find a balance that allows vendors to tightly integrate their apps but prevent abusing this.
MS is everyone's favorite whipping boy, but I fear what kind of ads Google while shove through if they ever get a dominant market share in desktop OSs. Apple seems to be the only sensible alternative.
A vendor of a web browser and email client, sure. A vendor of an operating system and one (or both) of a web browser and an email client, hell no. If anything, an operating system should be forced _not_ to tightly integrate to vendor-specific apps and instead should provide integration loosely and in a way a user can plug in their choice of app (or disable entirely).
The whole OS is a mess of tightly coupled software with messy boundaries. I don't think the coupling is the thing that matters.
Obviously, I want the best experience as an end-user. But I think it’s ridiculous, at a certain point you should have to invest the billions of dollars to build your own equivalent operating system. You really can’t expect all of that. Microsoft already has a pretty flexible system.
Maybe there is a business model for that massive investment. I don’t think that 100% native integration for third party applications is a big draw to most people. It’s mostly something people complain about on this forum.
Proof of that is Apple. It’s relatively inflexible, and people seem to like it quite a bit. They are doing very well. Then there’s also Linux but then people complain things aren’t tightly integrated enough.
Basically people want to have their cake and eat it too on someone else’s 1 billion dollar investment.
I've seen promoted links in Win10/11, but never anything that harmed my productivity. Most importantly, the OS just fades into the background. I never think about it.
Linux required almost-daily googling and opening up a terminal to fix or change something. It became maddening eventually.
To give you an example - I have a small+fast SSD for my OS and a large+slow spinning disk for data storage. When I install software on Windows I sometimes point to the other drive. This task is easier to do on Windows. The last I looked at it, Linux had a solution, but it was very convoluted. I see computer hardware and software products as purely a means to an end, I will use whatever that gets the job done.
Each person only has a limited quota of things that they can give a lot of energy to, and for me F/OSS is not something that I particularly go out of my way to support. My 'things that I give a shit about' quota is filled to the brim with the work I'm doing in healthcare.
Microsoft already forces ads on Windows users so I guess it'd be something like the current situation.
My Arch box has never once tried to display an ad to me, or coerce me to use any particular piece of software for that matter.
The package manager works well.
The installer is very solid by now.
It comes with absolutely nothing preinstalled, perfect for techie people.
Google is the dominant mobile OS and doesn't cram ads into basic functionality of the device. You won't see ads when opening the app launcher or settings.
On Windows 11, you can see ads if you open the start bar.
Enough complaining about M$, change to Linux and email every company that isnt fully supporting Linux that they need to adopt to 2023 computing.
It’s time to fight back against Big Tech by refusing to use it as much as humanly possible. Especially those of us on the software side that could contribute to improving the FOSS space.
I haven't tried it on Win 11 because that was what caused me to drop Windows altogether. (Everyone has their straw).
It's easily solved by installing Power Toys and using the search feature from there instead (activated with alt + space, like in Linux & Mac)
Also on Win 10. I get, in the start menu, "no results for <search term>". I know I turned of web searching when installing, but it's been so long I might have used registry keys[1].
[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to...
If I do Win+aoeuaoeu+enter, nothing at all happens. It just sits with a search box open showing "No results for aoeuaoeu". I can't actually see any way of getting to a browser search window from there (whether my preferred browser or not). So I must have found some way to disable that behaviour completely. Keep trying?
(FWIW yes that is the way I open my browser: win+fire+enter. Nothing bad happens if I do it too fast.)
This drove me so mad I bought a Mac mini to replace my surface pro (which I wasn't using as a tablet anyway). Good job MS!
I'm running a lot of Win builds on VMs for debugging etc. and it's enough for me.
The Tweaks section has a checkbox for removing Edge. I removed mine using that.
I get the feeling more and more that peak Windows is upon us.
That said, for the past couple years I've just run Debian and Arch. But I'll probably use ubuntu again for a while when I get a new framework laptop later this month, the hardware is too new, some special/custom kernel package provided for the latest ubuntu will probably be the most convenient solution initially, and I find trimming back ubuntu isn't too bad. Yes, you have to remove the "desktop" meta-package. It's fine.
Probably. But I don't think Microsoft cares. Just look at where Windows is in their org hierarchy; it's definitely not top dog anymore and it's not a "strategy" like it once was.
The days of Microsoft needing Windows to make money are behind us, that's for sure. Peak Windows is probably correct, but that fact is not going to usher in Microsoft's demise.
Half are having a hard time with learning some of the CAD software because they lack the experience with full featured Desktop OS's like Windows/Linux/Mac. It's surprising how fast generational change occurs
Fedora is my default "easy" Linux install nowadays, the excessively corporate vibes I get from Ubuntu feel very wrong for a Linux distro.
There's nothing wrong with providing an easily skippable option to do that (ubuntu), a completely different thing to make it a mandatory part of the installation (windows).
Second, Fedora uses rpm management, rpm repositories sooner or later corrupt themselves, happened to me and others I know on Red Hat, on Fedora and on SuSE.
I'd use Debian but I've found Ubuntu's driver management to be far more stable and reliable, especially for WiFi.
If only. I remember people saying the same when Vista came out.
I even used it in linux some.
...But I just recently tested it on a brand new Windows desktop, and I can't believe how slow and spammy it feels out-of-the-box compared to Thorium/Chromite now.
Promptly uninstalled it since I have no use for Teams.
I don't think Windows is very suitable for the internet anyway, but I really did like last year's Edge for its built-in PDF handler. That's all I used Edge for, certainly not browsing the web, but for some reason I connected anyway and in came Teams.
Now that the excellent old Edge PDF reader has been replaced by a built-in Adobe joint effort, Edge is now more useless than ever.
With that said, Mac OS isn't entirely innocent either, such as giving users a "Try The New Safari" notification when they run a non-Safari web browser on their machine.[1]
[1] https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/TRYTHENEWSAFARI.html
microsoft-edge:https://www.bing.com/search?showconv=1&sendquery=1&form=MY02...
Can also use it to create your own bing chat links on your home page.
They've promised not to do it anymore in the EU apparently.
About,
> As a group of friends and tech enthusiasts from all over the world, we have dedicated ourselves to the idea of sharing insights and ideas freely among us. Our picture of the internet is that of a country without borders and we cherish cultural diversity without exception. We embrace the concept of open source, open knowledge and collaboration, sharing the belief among us that information should be free and never have a price tag. Where others hoard knowledge to gain an advantage, we share it and where people sell information, we give it away for free.
Still I know nothing.
Legal Notice,
> By downloading any of these images (ISOs), you agree to Microsoft's Terms of Service regarding (5.) Authorized Software and Activation. None of these pre-tweaked image files are pre-activated.
That's it, ReviOS must be a trimmed down Windows
At that point you might as well just use an illegitimately-activated copy of LTSC — at least you can be sure it wasn’t tampered with.
Especially since installing Windows using customized install media is explicitly prohibited by the EULA of almost all Windows editions. You have to have the same sort of enterprise support contract with Microsoft that would get you access to LTSC to legally use this thing anyway.
Despite this, it does seem like just installing Windows and then attemting to debloat post-install is the least risky option than just trusting a third party Windows installer.
That's what the corporate propaganda wants you to think --- that you are to trust Big Tech unconditionally, including all their user-hostilities, because they are supposed to be "good for you" somehow.
While I have no doubt that some customised ISOs may contain malware, in my experience the "official" malware is really no better, and I can't think of any well-documented instances of trimmed Windows distros actually containing third-party malware, so I suspect the campaign against them, much like the similar one against cracks/patches/keygens, is mostly FUD to advance the interests of Big Tech.
> It aspires to re-create what Windows as an operating system should have been - easy and simple
> ReviOS [is] a capable, efficient yet private operating system
I need to better understand how updates work however, turning off auto updates is a concern. So I'll mostly be focusing on usability and how updates are managed as part of their tooling.
1st edit: Noticed a few broken links on their site regarding updates, I've created an issue on GH: https://github.com/meetrevision/revision-tool/issues/38
2nd edit: I'm not sure how I feel about disabling Windows Defender. https://revi.cc/docs/faq/after/defender/
If you're not using Windows Defender, you'd want to use something else and I don't know what to recommend except Malware Bytes. I do have Malware Bytes running too so perhaps it's redundant, but as far as AVs (antivirus') go, Defender is the best of a very broad, bad bunch.
I mean what else would you need a PC with Windows for?
This ReviOS stuff has all the smoke signals of too good to be true.
Linux still has a very long way to go in gaming - some things still require a bunch of tweaking, some games suffer from poor frame rates or just plain don’t work at all. Also I vastly prefer the windows desktop experience to any Linux distribution I’ve tried over the years.
And everything works? All my hardware, all my apps?
The brazenness and shamelessness is really appalling.
What drives you to claim that it is simply an extortion attempt?
IMHO that is the peak of user-hostile behaviour. The urge to pull the power cord or hit the reset button when I encounter things like that is very hard to resist because of how insulting it feels, but I do wonder if most of the user population have already been beaten into submission and consider it only a minor annoyance and almost trivial.
The web was practically unusable. I guess it's the boiling frog and most people have just got used to having to scroll past three pages of ads to see what they want, but suddenly experiencing "normal" ad loads literally stopped me browsing the web.
Most commonly browsers just open full screen as a captive experience nowadays. There's no need to force me to click buttons before getting it.
The android experience does it pretty well. If you want a second view on the screen, you work for it
So naturally, I just accept almost all defaults. If you just go along with their (sometimes mindbendingly horrible) choices, you get to actually get work done.
Of course it's a wonderful moment to boot up my machine at home, which has ArchLinux on it, with KDE and all the things I chose because I like them, and I'm at least 2x more productive. Reading code is much easier without distractions, with the right font, with the right colorscheme that I'm used to. Writing code is much easier when the IDE doesn't hijack Tab to insert AI autosuggestions (which as I said, I leave on, because I dont want to fight MS as its a waste of time). I can use bash without 194728 incantations of setting up path variables and installing all the tools I want.
Yeah this is a rant, but man, Windows does a lot of work to force its defaults on you, and man, theyre horrible.
At work I eventually stopped caring whether I use chrome or edge, since Edge sets itself as default link everytime after a machine restart.
At home too I’m mostly on Linux.
I get that HTML has taken over the world and that most of Office now is effectively a web app. So Edge is definitely a required piece of library software on any Windows install. But the inability to just open simple hyperlinks in an alternative browser combined with Edge's insistence that every "feature" is basically Microsoft profiling you... I guess it just boggles my mind how they get away with this.
It seems like this has since been removed, but what kind of crazy decision is that?
There can be no discussion about the relative quality of Edge without this subject in the foreground. The only word-of-mouth is from the tricked users who don't know the difference and just see it as the button for the internet. It doesn't matter if you introduce a regression that makes it slower, they'll just blame it on the 'wifi'.
It could use better privacy protection but it seems Microsoft & Bing want to make money off ads more than protect users privacy.
It has really good reader mode & read aloud features. I prefer it over Chrome. Firefox, Brave & other browsers have features that make them the right tool for the right job in other areas.
Microsoft is killing their good will & I question what they're getting for it. They're also disrespecting their employees who've put in work to make Edge a great browser.
Man, what a letdown.
Just show some fucking respect to your users, it will be worth more than the 0.003% market share you get from opening Edge when I click a pdf
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/set-gmail-as-browser-defa...
(on windows 10, because of TPM1.2, small blessings)
Like chill, you already got me. I am not going to remove Chrome and Firefox, but you are the default browser already and I use Bing too, now go away.
B: "Users that already have Edge as their default browser also see these, shouldn't we first fix that?"
A: "That wouldn't increase Edge conversions, would it?"
B: "No, but..."
A: "Then we don't have time for that. What can we do to increase them?"
Been there - not at Microsoft, but it's not particularly unique to them.
It's awful.
I just think that the message is quite misleading, because it certainly can run on my hardware. I just need to reformat my drive and activate the TPM. Some people might be inclined to really buy new hardware...
I posted this 2 years ago on HN[1] about how Microsoft goes out of its way to manipulate users when they search for "Firefox" on Bing using Edge:
> Tangentially related, but I recently spun up a Windows VM and used Edge to search Bing for "Firefox" and this is result I got[2].
> It's a giant banner that says, "You're already browsing in Microsoft Edge. Keep using to get world class performance with more privacy, more productivity, and more value."
> That banner is followed by another giant banner image telling me to get "Get Robux using Microsoft Edge. Join Microsoft Rewards and use Microsoft Edge. Get a 100 Robux eGift Card on us when you search with Microsoft Bing on Microsoft Edge for 5 days after you join."
> I had to scroll to even see the relevant search results for my search term. I'm assuming most non-power users won't scroll because they were just assured that they were "already browsing in Microsoft Edge", which is apparently more private, productive and valuable than what they intended to search for.
I have still don't understand what the rewards are for, despite having spent inordinate amount of time removing them from my windows machines, but it's bizarre that some product manager gets to piss a convoluted frequent flier miles scheme all over microsoft's premier product. That's akin to Ferrari covering their very exclusive cars with promo stickers hawking those ferrari licensed asus laptops.
How do we know this wouldn’t lead to firing the CEO? Frankly, I’m inclined to believe that enshittification [1] is the primary strategy of the company right now. They’ve had decades to build Windows market share and now they realize that growth in software license sales has all but dried up. On the other hand, they’ve seen how hard the wind is blowing in the services and adtech direction.
So they’re determined to monetize their Windows install case right up to the hilt. They know they won’t be able to sell these folks expensive software licenses anymore, so they’re selling their users to advertisers instead.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
No it's not, because Windows is not a "premium" or "exclusive" product, at all. It's the textbook example of a mass market product. There are (far) more Windows installations than there are cars in the world. The average Windows user is almost indistinguishable from the average human. And the monetization strategies reflect that.
Right now it's illegal to track users/customers based on payment method. This is more than just an upsell.
It's not insane at all, it's good for business. Who likes it? Microsoft shareholders of course. All these annoyances help to increase Microsoft's profits, so they're good by definition.
If you don't like the modern Windows experience, it's simple: don't use Windows.
You can assume that about 50% of whatever anyone says is either a straight-up lie, misleading, or bullshit.
I remember it was calls to split Microsoft into separate companies, one for the operating system and one for the internet divisions. Looks like it’s time now.
Last time Microsoft had the default web browser they were horrible stewards of the web. I’ll never forget them delaying supporting PNG.
That's an enormous difference to me.
Let's have this cheap Linux phone and my life will be great.
Switching to Linux has saved me sooo much time. I go to my computer, log-on, and it just works. No reopening files, nothing lost, no having to save 'recovered' files, no browsers reopening all your tabs for a few minutes.
Every week with linux has saved me something like 5-10 minutes.
Invest those 5-10 minutes into fixing those random Linux bugs until those random Linux bugs are gone. Now its just pure time savings.
Ohhh wait. Those things don't exist. Just like a bunch of EHR software that I have to support doesn't exist either.
They all run on Windows. Most of this stuff doesn't even run on Mac OS X.
The business world runs on Windows. Period. That'll change when Linux developers start making software of the same caliber and ease-of-use as Windows. Until then, nothing changes. And this childish - and I'm being very generous with that assessment - idea that everyone has a "choice" is ridiculous.
But they're a LOT of those people, and so it gets repeated.
Microsoft edge is bringing me inconvenience. Just because a product is good doesn't mean I'm obligated to use it. I as a customer do not like this browser. I like another one and I want to have the options very clear to download the browser you want. Your browser edge is almost like a virus does not let me download another browser and we know clearly that all this is not to benefit customers and to direct us to the microsoft download store. I can't download another product other than microsoft this seems to me like monopoly syndrome,
I request a change to a list teaching me the steps to have other free browser options, I don't want to remove the edge any more than other options.
This thread is locked. You can follow the question or vote as helpful, but you cannot reply to this thread."
Source: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftedge/forum/all/...
Why not just create a good browser, bundle it Windows, ensure it has excellent privacy features and if people use it then great, if not, to bad. I really fail to see Microsofts end goal here. They don't need people to use Edge, they don't need to spy on people... So why do they feel like they must?
As someone who hasn't daily driven Windows since Windows 7 this statement is hilarious, because back then, it did respect default browser settings.
Leaving QA to a bunch of amateurs is a good thing: it saves MS lots of money, and so increases profitability, and increases shareholder value. Windows users aren't going to stop using Windows because of a bunch of bugs that a dedicated QA department would have caught, so there's no reason to avoid bugginess.
I mean what the hell. My kid just wants to play minecraft for Christ's sake.
I don't think web apps are ideal, but having edge installed and available as a native webview is relevant.
I don't think this dream works yet, I don't think one can actually make THESE kinds of apps without shipping electron yet, but that should definitely be an option. I have no problem with edge used as a random weview in random apps. I only hate it when edge is opened as a dedicated browser.
I don't think an OS API to use Firefox as a webview is a reasonable ask :(.
I just want them to use clippy to force you into going from google sheets back to excel just for the memes. (and don't tell me to stop giving them bad ideas, I know the higher-ups love them)
And it never respects my wishes for a default browser. Any OS embedded help link will open Edge, wasting me time, memory and screen space.
It’s gonna start getting really hard to have all these affairs on the side /s
Yawn... I think people are slowly waking up to Microsoft and their antics and fake people.
Thats all I have to say about these tactics over the last decades
But to be serious, I wonder what sketchy nonsense Microsoft would do if they could only compete on Linux or MacOS.
On steam and other stores they force you to login into Xbox services.
What I didn't like was how it kept asking me to make it the default browser every time it upgraded.
People switching from Chrome to Edge won't help with the browser monoculture. And especially switching from Firefox to Edge will not help.
I know Brave implemented it recently too so Edge is not the only player in town now, but it was the first! Hopefully the rest of browsers will follow the trend.
mark my words, Windows isn't dying a natural death, it's parent is suffocating it in its sleep as a mercy killing.. mercy from having to support it forever
I just don't understand this outrage. I spend 90% of my time in Firefox/Chrome - I've only started using Edge lately to play with Bing "AI" Chat. I had to search for it!
