The adware isn't just Edge, Windows in general has gotten out of control. The other day I spent a few minutes on high alert because I got a notification about a "Grand Prize Giveaway". I assumed I somehow had malware, but no, the only malware I had was Windows itself [0].
Apparently this was part of Microsoft Rewards, which you can opt out of... in your Microsoft account. If you jumped through the hoops that are now required to get a local account, tough luck.
I love the gall to title the popup as "Suggested." As if this was somehow based upon a careful examination of my habits and profile and some matching algorithm managed to reveal this new and wonderful opportunity that I was _sure_ to want to receive.
Redmond product managers all appear to add pure negative value to me. All of their products do this routine of triumphantly blasting things that I would never want right on top of my experience under the guide of somehow helping or benefiting me.
Windows 10 started this with Candy Crush in the start menu and it drove me to desktop mac/linux to the exclusion of windows where I could, there are exceptions. It’s the last place I want distractions/noise/adverts/...
The way MacOS throws notifications for shit like app store software updates at the top right of the screen (by default) drives me up a wall lol. It feels like there's always something wanting to float around up there on one of my computers these days.
I miss the old days when Mac OS X was the ultimate "leave me alone and let me get my work done" OS.
At least the do not disturb modes have reasonable options and actually work. My last few months of using Windows at work I just stopped trying to disable crap because every time I would wake up to a forced update it would just reset anyway.
Because windows sysadmins are way more common, I feel like it's impossible to avoid being in the disaster path of an inexperienced windows sysadmin (or security person or IT person) -- even if the mean well! And stuff! ... one day you won't be able to get any work done because they enact some silly change that BREEAAAKS EVERYTHING.
Oh god, don't get me started. Had to help my 80 year old dad get his new windows 11 laptop setup recently. All he wants in his golden years is to click an icon and play solitaire from time to time.
Now it's all in one Microsoft store app with a collection of classic games, fine. But when you click minesweeper it doesn't start minesweeper, it opens the microsoft store, even after it's installed.
And he accidentally clicks a banner ad instead of the Spider freecell icon because they're identical and placed over each other. And instead of just changing the number of decks he has to answer questions about settings, coins to collect or something... it's insane.
My dad is a brilliant 73yo electrical engineer but he gets fooled by those fake ad “download now!” buttons when looking for, say, an old driver for old hardware. It makes me mad that people are making money taking advantage of people who don’t know better than to click the ad, esp when it installs adware.
My go-to recommendation for older folks is ChromeOS. Say what you want about their privacy and stuff, but my mom hasn't been able to download any malware, and it's very easy to use and do office stuff on.
I did this for my elderly dad, and told him to contact me if anything was amiss. He had some hardware issue with a cheap USB mouse and told my mom about it. My mom promptly took the whole thing to some box office store tech support place. They told her they couldn’t install the drivers for the new mouse she bought, and their proposed remedy was to charge her to wipe the laptop with Windows. She did so “as to not trouble me.”
Everyone with the potential to cause you trouble if they don't contact you soon enough, must be told repeatedly to contact you as soon as possible. I emphasize this repeatedly with clients and family. It's enlightened self-interest, and I emphasize that it will be faster for me and much faster for them to involve me sooner.
Valid point, in a logical world. But some 80 year olds are just so hard headed that instead of calling one of their THREE children who work in IT they just head into the closest electronics store and buy the laptop recommended by their favorite sales rep. And then they call us to complain about it.
He would scoff at my suggestion to install anything other than what he's known for 30+ years.
> He would scoff at my suggestion to install anything other than what he's known for 30+ years.
Very fair. I've started earlier, but I've been trying to remind my parents that if they want to have a good relationship with their, non-existent as of yet, grandkids - they need to have a good relationship with new tech. That's what the grandkids are going to want from them.
Im glad people find success with Linux. But in my decade of professional use and trying to use it at home, I’ve got to squint very hard to see it as remotely viable.
I need an OS where I never ever have to think about the OS. I’m there with my very limited time to do something. Not figure out compatibility or updates or why my monitors don’t come online in the same order and same resolution every time or the fear of closing the lid or plugging in a TV for a bit. This month’s issue is that a quarter of the time my wifi just doesn’t exist as a feature and I have to reboot.
I want to hook myself up into an alternate reality where I’m just frozen in time with OSX 10.6 =)
Get an AMD gpu. If you don’t need a strong GPU get an Intel CPU that has an integrated GPU.
Install fedora silverblue. Use your computer how nature intended. You can do everything from the GUI.
If you’re using your PC as your development machine then you’re probably already fucking around with it. Especially on windows (PATH variable is a very fun one there)
I got an AMD gpu recently, as I had just recently switched to Linux. Seems there is a bug in the AMDGPU driver as I will get a driver crash during roughly 1 out of 10 game starts for certain games. After trying everything I could think of I switched back to Windows and have not had any crashing for a week.
I had Nvidia card before that whilst it had other issues on linux, at least it didn't crash.
> I need an OS where I never ever have to think about the OS.
After one malware too many I confiscated my wife's Windows PC and gave here my old PC and installed Ubuntu on it (FWIW I don't use Ubuntu, I use Debian since the nineties).
It's been, what, 18 months? If my wife can use Ubuntu, I think nearly anyone can.
It's been literally fire and forget: zero issue.
Now it's desktop Linux, as in actually running on a desktop (with an Ethernet cable), with a dual-monitor setup (I prefer a single ultra-wide monitor but the wife prefers to have two monitors).
I got a call from an ex-girlfriend about a year ago. We had been broken up for at least 5 or 6 years. Hadn't spoken since then. She calls out of the blue to ask if I can come try to fix her computer; she had taken it to the local repair shop and they didn't know what to do with it. She remembered that I had done "a bunch of weird stuff" to it, so she though I might be able to help.
I opened it up, and sat before me was Ubuntu 12.04. It hadn't been updated since before we broke up. The only real issue was some weird stuff going on with the networking, so it wouldn't connect to WiFi. Got it fixed, and I assume she's still going strong with it.
That said, I absolutely wouldn't trust modern Ubuntu (at least back to 20.04, maybe farther) to remain so stable. Ubuntu is now nothing more than a Rube Goldberg machine.
Yep, and the ads are especially frustrating for me because I personally forked over $200 to buy Windows Pro when I built this gaming PC. This isn't a case of ads supporting a free product, it's ads layered on top of a piece of software that was decidedly not free.
I think we're just over one decade for true Windows-integrated crapware. I don't believe they were really doing this before Windows 8. When it first started it was mostly limited to ads embedded in a handful of preloaded "Modern UI"/Windows Store applications, but MS has gotten progressively more brazen with it over the years.
Windows is mandatory at work and Edge is making life ever more annoying. It is setup as the default browser, the personalizations (don't show me your crappy news, background, or helpful links...) always come back, and simple things like "set new tabs to be a blank page" aren't allowed. Not looking forward to Windows 11 when presumably everything will get ever worse.
What's bizarre is that the employer is outwardly very security conscious and surfing random websites is a route to dismissal. Yet the porous and intrusive Edge is allowed to run amok. Of course, extensions to minimize the suck aren't permitted, either.
But Chrome desperately needs to tell you it’s Earth Day or Indigenous People’s Day or something equally unimportant with a breathless enthusiasm that would make a Southern Baptist Preacher on a Telethon blush.
I’ve finally hit a wall with “enhancements” in chrome I can’t shut off. If I type “man” in the Omnibar I don’t want to know about Manchester United and get an icon with the team. In fact I don’t want any pictures at all in the omnibar.
Apparently my Google Fu isn’t good enough or it’s just flat out impossible to change, because I still get what I feel are ads for brands in the Omnibar when I search for stuff.
Microsoft is intentionally taking aim directly at IT departments by creating a situation where it’s impossible to keep up. Every monthly update adds another nag pop up, or disables, moves, or “accidentally” resets the switches to turn them off. Unless you have someone working full time to manage Edge and these nags, it’s impossible to keep up. They’re doing this on purpose.
You can even see it in the error messages they show. For example, if you disable the App Store, it shows a big message to the user “This feature has been disabled by your IT department”, which drives animosity where people complain that “IT is blocking me, and if we just got rid of them (i.e. used the cloud instead), we would all be happy and run the apps we want like I can on my phone”.
IT controls directly prevent users from signing up with other paid services, so their incentive is to get rid of IT.
Microsoft's Cloud is so grisly I don't think anyone on the technical side at my shop would want any more of it than has been shoved down our throats. Office365 takes the already bad Office "experience" to new lows. Sharepoint is the 40% solution to problems we don't actually have. The Cloud Drive is so clunktacular it is a chore to load or save anything. No way to map any of that to a shortcut so it is click, wait, click, wait, click wait. Per file. Teams does everything Skype does worse and more slowly.
We actually think that our IT and Microsoft are in it together and that we, the users, are their mutual enemy.
End users are locked down from changing almost anything. Many things could be done I'm sure but nothing IS done. Who knows, maybe money is changing hands to leave this crap as is.
Huge corporation, centralized IT, sanity doesn't enter into it. There are no admins with any clout, only some with slightly elevated privileges to execute tasks approved at a much higher level. Requests like this will filter up through the ticketing system and get autorejected as not compatible with security policies.
Quite likely but our Mordacs won't do anything about it. Many of us have pointed out that a robust .hosts file and/or ad blocking extensions would go a long way towards improving security not to mention the user experience. Might as well be Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.
Monkey business with button lables, and redefinition of language--again
>> Now, let's talk about the prompt message and the buttons ...
It says: "With your permission, we'll collect and use ...". Now, the reason for this prompt is because I disabled this very option in the browser. But Microsoft seems to not like that, so it prompts me to reconsider, every now and then. Your choices are to click either Got it! or Learn more.
The latter takes you into the Settings, ergo disrupts your browsing and usage flow. You are FORCED to interact with the browser's shitty attempt to force you to give up your data, instead of you browsing like a normal human being. The former is worse. It TOGGLES the option on. So it's not an explicit YES. It's a vague indirect approval, which supposed stems from your "understanding" the message "With your permission" and that you're OK with it. <<
Group policy settings will keep it off. Can be set if you have a pro version of windows or a business/enterprise version. It's the only way I will trust using MS Edge.
I noticed a similar thing when disabling anti-virus, realtime protection. In the notifications if you use the "Dismiss" option label, it will re-enable it. But if you dismiss the category of messages (or all messages) in your notifications sidebar it stays off.
It's starting to bleed out of Edge, too. Recently Outlook showed me a popup explaining that they're going to start ignoring my system default browser setting and open all hyperlinks in Edge instead, on the pretense that Edge offers a better browsing experience for Sharepoint.
Mind you, it didn't just do this for Sharepoint links; it did it for all links. They did create a special, "no, really, respect my browser choice," but it took me a hot minute to find.
> They did create a special, "no, really, respect my browser choice," but it took me a hot minute to find.
I'll be impressed if that option lasts more than, say, 18 months. They also had a "don't integrate Bing search into the Start Menu" option, until they didn't.
This happened to me at work recently and I genuinely lost my shit for a few minutes. Started ranting a bit with colleagues. We all hate it. There's an option in there somewhere to flip it back to the system default but then you need to make sure Edge doesn't magically become your default during some update or whatever. Hate it so much.
I sure wish there was a little more protection over what's considered a yes/no versus what's considered harassment and dark patterns in order to coerce that behaviour into profitable funnels. But then, who's dollar as developers do we fight for? The same one's that enable this crap. The thumbs are big.
Everyone's getting cute. I was investigating a pet insurer and all of the typical buttons had "wacky" labels with rhymes and so on. To choose the type of animal, you have to select "woof!" or "meow!" Insurance is the last thing I want to be "playful."
The cutesy-wootsy icons add insult to injury. I only recently learned that it is called Alegria or Corporate Memphis[0]. Whatever it is called, the bloated semihumans make me long for the timeless design of Mr. Paperclip.
For how long have Microsoft been about selling me to advertisers, and not only selling me software? For a company that is so much about selling licenses and services, it disgusts me to have to deal with this crap. I understand companies that based their entire existence on this, I try to avoid them, but Microsoft I think should be a safe choice. Disgusting.
The mistake you're making is that you're thinking like a user instead of an MBA. MBAs are taught that when you have a profitable segment of the business that isn't growing (such as Windows license sales), the correct move is to spend as little money as possible maintaining it and spend all of its profits on business segments that are growing (in Microsoft's case, cloud services, gaming, and advertising).
Once you start looking at things through this lens, Microsoft's handling of Windows starts to make sense. For example, they've laid off their full-time Windows QA staff in favor of volunteer "Windows Insiders", and have basically given up on having a consistent look and feel for their operating system. Meanwhile, all their new Windows features and programs exist to drive business to growing business segments. To name a few examples, Visual Studio Code and WSL exist to drive business towards Azure and Github, Edge exists to collect user browsing data to sell to advertisers, and the game bar (Win+G) and preloaded Xbox app exist to drive business towards Xbox. They even replaced the right Windows key on their later (made after ~2019) keyboards with an unremappable button that launches the cloud version of Microsoft Office.
I wonder what happens at microsoft. What do they do all day? I've tried to use microsoft products and follow the happy path that they designed and be a good boy and even then nothing seems to work. Like I remember the other day I changed the configuration on a domain but the changes didn't take effect for over an hour because I was supposed to reboot the client I was working on, even though there were no instructions telling me to do that. Why? Who is this stuff for? Would this stuff make sense to me if I was microsoft certified?
You are a really patient person. There was a tiny interval of time when Edge had some promise, right after it switched to Chromium engine. But it quickly went sideways, probably when management seen rising usage numbers.
Web browser should be as basic as possible by default. Only with minimal set of features, that user expects: bookmarks, history, etc. All other nonsense should come as extensions that user installs if he needs them. I might go as far to say, that notifications or gelocation should be extensions too, that can be easily disabled. So you take "browser base" (engine) and build whatever you desire on top of it. Want Google integration? Use Google extensions. Prefer Microsoft ecosystem? Install Microsoft extensions. Or just install an ad-blocker and browse in peace.
The behavior here is super sketchy. I am glad they brought it up. Dark patterns are everywhere. This reminds me of how a kid gets permission for something in a roundabout way then protests when caught.
That said:
>> As you know, I always neuter my browser's "tracking" activity, as much as I can.
Yet their choice is Edge. (as secondary, definition unknown)
>> it seems I ought to stop using Edge altogether, and uninstall it from my Linux machines
That much is obvious. I feel they should question how they ended up here in the first place. :)
It's funny that Chrome does the same and nobody really cares. I've compared social media posts covering the equivalent anti-privacy features in each browser and Edge gets an order of magnitude more the hate than Chrome. Maybe because the expectation is that a build-in OS browser shouldn't be run for profit?
Once companies reach a certain size, they become actively evil. It's all about money, and they no longer care about their supposed customers.
Governments have forgotten their antitrust responsibilities. We need to make it simple and automatic: Define an upper limit where a company is too big to exist. Companies above this size must divest.
Micrisoft, Alphabet, Apple, Meta - many tech companies are too big, by an order of magnitude. Split them up.
the trouble with big tech for the USA is that everyone else (at least in europe) is unable to compete as long as these companies are able to be so large they squeeze out (or buy out) all possible competition.
Similar to how it's difficult to go to war with countries that supply you energy (like.. Germany's recent tough time with Russia): USA being in this position means they dictate the rules of the internet and internet companies. This is an amazing position politically because they are the de facto owners of the economy for the next century.
Imagine making a business without AWS, GCP or Azure? Imagine Making a business without Google Docs or MS Office? -- it's unfathomable to most, I promise, and that's a great amount of power.
I think that this time around it's not actually something that falls under US antitrust law. At the time of the 2001 IE antitrust suit, Internet Explorer had 90% browser marketshare and was using it to prop up the dominance of Windows as well. Many websites relied on IE-only features such as ActiveX controls, so you could get shut out of things if you didn't use IE, which in turn meant you'd be shut out of them if you didn't use Windows.
Nowadays, Microsoft's behavior is undeniably shitty. But Edge's 10% or 15% marketshare is hardly a monopoly, so I don't think it falls under the jurisdiction of antitrust laws. Though I certainly wouldn't cry to find out that it falls under some other kind of consumer protection law.
Yes, antitrust is probably not the best conceptual framework to think about the problems arising from having several very similar vertically integrated platforms.
The EU's upcoming Digital Markets Act seems to more explicitly target that problem – I'm very curious how that will go.
> The EU's upcoming Digital Markets Act seems to more explicitly target that problem
You are naive if you think that this is what DMA is about. DMA is simply about Europe squeezing some money out of American companies. This is evident in the design and how carefully it was written to capture as many American companies and as few European ones as possible.
I had thought that the argument was that bundling was more using Windows (near monopoly) to prop up IE usage, rather than vice-versa. If in 2001 (with no smartphones), IE only runs on Windows, it's kind of hard to have IE have a _higher_ share of the market than Windows.
> Once companies reach a certain size, they become actively evil.
Because they can't just be steady earners. Everyone has to show quarter after quarter after quarter increases. It's madness and it really needs to stop.
> Once companies reach a certain size, they become actively evil.
> Governments have forgotten their antitrust responsibilities.
Is it possible that these are two sides of the same thing? That is, what's the real difference between a corporation versus a government? I'd imagine a lot of similarity in terms of organizational dynamics. If we see a problem from corporations when they grow too large, shouldn't we also expect problems from governments when they get big?
I agree with you and think anything larger than 1% of GDP should be split but the problem is that other countries might not do the same, making it difficult for domestic companies to compete with a foreign company like Samsung, which is over 20% of South Korea's GDP. Even accounting for the difference in national GDPs, Samsung would have an advantage over the five or six Baby Apples that would result from the 1% rule.
It's not size, it's function. Their evil only becomes apparent at scale, it still exists at every level. Capitalists, fundamentally, are parasites. I think a better idea would be to make it so that all companies must be worker-owned coops instead of slavery operations owned by a small group of parasites.
Oh all those - brainwashed? - web developers who love and use vs code and other MS based things. This is what you get for your loyalty. MS gave you Internet Explorer quirks hell for decades. Now that everyone retired IE and finally we could forget about it, Edge is back to do the same shenanigans as IE did. Simply making your life miserable. Go on people, embrace MS, use their products, pay, pay, pay!
Now no matter whether you are a user or a developer, you will suffer. You have a feeling you are part of a human experiment, because nothing makes sense. Oh if Edge will reach a given userbase expect even more madness.
Historians, what a time to be alive! Just sit back and enjoy.
I hate stuff like this. My personal main gripe is with BJs. If you decline to automatically renew, they continue to ask you. I want to run for office to pass a law that makes it a requirement to remember I've opted out of crap.
Apparently this was part of Microsoft Rewards, which you can opt out of... in your Microsoft account. If you jumped through the hoops that are now required to get a local account, tough luck.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/15z6rol/windows_g...