- Users of Google Chrome on Windows 10 and 11 are reporting that they have suddenly found themselves using Microsoft Edge, with their Chrome browsing sessions appearing in Edge.
- This may be due to a bug or an accidentally clicked-through dialog box related to a feature in Edge that imports browsing data from Chrome.
- The setting, called “Import browsing data from Chrome,” continually imports data from Chrome every time Edge is launched, unlike the one-time import offered for Firefox.
- There have been concerns about Microsoft’s tactics for pushing its own browser, including notifications, pop-ups, and full-screen messages promoting Edge and Bing.
- Microsoft has become more aggressive in pushing various subscriptions and features in recent years, making a “clean” Windows install feel less so.
- It remains unclear whether the Edge data-import issue is intentional or a bug, highlighting concerns about Microsoft’s methods for promoting its own software.
Windows problems 😄
Well both browsers suck balls, so there’s that.
This is so unlike MS /s
No Duh
It’s litterally just another Chromium except with Hardware Acceleration capability that Google Chrome lacks. You can’t watch real 1080p Netflix on Google Chrome in 90% of desktops.
L for using chrome honestly
I love how Outlook opens your links in Edge and gives you a little message about how it knows it’s not your default browser but it thought you’d like to open in Edge anyway.
I can always count on Microsoft to help me fix my default browser settings which I keep changing by accident. Silly me.
Same thing with MS Teams, except it didn’t give me any messages. It just started opening all my links on Edge overnight. I was very confused when I double checked my OS settings and Edge wasn’t my default browser. I had to manually set Teams to use the same as my OS default instead of Edge.
This whole thing reeks of higher execs pushing stuff no one wants or needs, while a poor dev has to implement shit like this and cry in bed at night.
This has been annoying the shit out of me recently. I use several different computers so I keep running into this dumb shit. I feel like I’m in an endless fight to not use Edge. Microsoft knows I don’t want to use it but they keep shoving it in my face again and again regardless. I really wish regulators would step in and put a stop to this nonsense.
They’re not going to step in to fix it. They have no justification for daring to stand up to a 3 trillion dollar company.
They might throw a 5 million fine at them or something, but nothing that’s actually going to stop this horrible anti-consumer monolith of practices
You don’t seem to be familiar with the history of browsers or the billion dollar fine Microsoft received in the 90s.
EU regulators can and will make Microsoft hurt if they want to.
Or this fine from 2013 which related to Microsoft breaching the settlement agreement from the first fine: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-fined-731m-by-eu-in-browser-choice-screw-up/
Bitch please. Those fines are barely parking tickets to a 3 trillion dollar company.
And you don’t know me so stfu
The other muppet clearly mentioned those fines as an example, that fines can harm Microsoft if so desired. Of course they’d need to be scaled up given that MS is considerably more wealthy than back then.
Aside from the fact that they were being condescending in their reply, that 900 some odd million dollar fine was only a small fraction of the profits they made from doing crimes and misdemeanors.
If you can rob a house and the only penalty is that you have to give the cops some of your loot then there’s not really a reason to not rob houses.
Anybody with a lick of sense would say that if you do a crime you don’t get to keep any of the profit.
So while 900 million looks really good on paper and it really looks like you’re sticking it to the big bad Microsoft, when they made tens of billions of dollars off of those crimes it’s a giant nothing Burger.
Now that Microsoft is a 3 trillion dollar company, any fine that isn’t over a hundred billion dollars is something that they can easily ignore.
If you’re talking about these fines: it was 1.35 billion euros in total, the “900 million” number only refers to the biggest one. And there were two complicating factors:
- It’s for the EU only. I can’t demand a thief to give me back what he stole from you.
- It’s about the Windows Media Player only. If I prove that the thief stole my hammer, but not my sickle, I can only demand my hammer back.
I do agree that it’s a bit small, considering their size back then (they were already a 300B company), but the case still triggered some action from MS, forcing it to release a WMP-less version of Windows.
And, if this happened today, with Edge, I predict that the fine would be considerably larger, since MS has today ten times the market share that it had in 07, and because browsers are seen as a bigger deal than media players. Perhaps not hundreds of billions, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 50B.
I also predict that it would be far more effective because their strategy with Edge is to push it down your throat until you don’t spit it back, so an “Edge-less version” would be actually seen as desirable by the customers.
You were presented with proof that your claims are wrong and you respond immediately with ad-hominem attacks.
You are a low quality contributor and Lemmy would be better off without you.
On-topic: I agree with your claim that EU regulators can and will make Microsoft hurt if they want to, and that both fines are examples of that.
Off-topic: frankly the other user unleashing at you was deserved. Your “You don’t seem to be familiar […]” boils down to “I assume that you’re an ignorant, so let me enlighten you little thing”. Stick to the argument dammit, your assumptions on the others are irrelevant garbage.
Also, you’d do a great favour for everyone if you didn’t use “ad-hominem” [SIC] as a fancy reword for “waaah, he insulted me!”. The argument is there, alongside the insult.
In the meantime: @Bizarroland@kbin.social, stop bring guns to a sword fight. While the above was patronising (as I am being towards both of you here - except that I’m being explicit on it), your “waaah shut up! shut up!!!” (ipsis ungulis: “stfu”) sounds like a redditor whining.
You bunch of kids, go back to the kindergarten. Both of you are being dead weight hier.
My assumption was that they were unaware rather than wilfully spreading misinformation which is the generous position to take.
People who get upset over being factually corrected are of low value to online communities.
Their response also contained no facts or evidence only further claims which I won’t waste further time addressing.
Since you love ad-hominem with a dash of unsupported claims:
It looks like you’re suggesting we assume every commenter is speaking factually. What an absolute fucking muppet you are. It’s free speech absolutist moral panic driven morons like you eroding society as a whole.
Gasslight Gateskeep Girlboss
Those eyeballs are disturbing 👁️👄👁️
🧿🫦🧿
I think that governments should be tackling both Edge and Chrome at the same time. One of them for underhanded tactics, another for being a monopoly. Tackling only one of them is not enough.
I also think that Microsoft’s strategy is worse than just underhanded - it stinks stupidity from a distance. It’s clearly backfiring - this is not the first Browser Wars any more, people nowadays have a good grasp on what a browser is supposed to be. And while some pressure might convert a few users, too much pressure is bound to create resistance, even on users that would be otherwise inclined to follow you like cattle.
All the big tech firms do this shit all over the place because are sound asleep at the wheel.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
A dark pattern (also known as a “deceptive design pattern”) is “a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills”. User experience designer Harry Brignull coined the neologism on 28 July 2010 with the registration of darkpatterns. org, a “pattern library with the specific goal of naming and shaming deceptive user interfaces”. In 2021 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumer Reports created a tip line to collect information about dark patterns from the public.
Suggestion/request: please, consider making your bot opt-in, or to only act when explicitly requested to do so (e.g. by adding
!wikibotto the post/comment).While this bot outputs good info, and it’s trivial to opt out to a single bot, it’s still adding a bit of unnecessary noise, and a nasty precedent. Eventually Lemmy will get more bots, and some won’t be as useful as this one; the noise will quickly pile up, unless users are expected to opt out to every single one of them.
This would probably also allow you to let the bot operate outside this comm.
Yeah well I did this so that the bot just doesn’t sit idle waiting for someone to mention it because it’s not very well known yet. I might do that as it indeed seems like it’s annoying some users. Thanks for the suggestion.
Got it - for initial discoverability I guess that it’s fine.
I wish that we had some page or similar where people could actually look for bots, and how to trigger them.
Alright, thanks for your suggestion. The main program is not only now smaller but also faster. Anyone can use it anytime by writing their comment with their wikipedia link and mentioning the bot anywhere in the comment.
Test:
Read this to learn about computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer @wikibot@lemmy.world
That’s great! Thank you for taking feedback into account; I genuinely can see myself using your bot in the future, it’s good stuff.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. The term computer system may refer to a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, operating system, software, and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation; or to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems.
Maybe some are awake but corrupt.
I was against all regulation and IP at some point, and yes, in such a situation MS would have much less power, because nobody would buy, say, Windows, only pirate it. Similar with many other products.
But the next best thing is to split and regulate the crap out of Apple, Google, MS etc.
But then the question arises:
When, say, regulators split AT&T, they did have some understanding of what they were doing.
Today all these companies are dealing in things which most lawmakers are unable to comprehend and won’t ever be able.
So maybe the way to deal with this all still is in aggressive action against IP laws, and not in anti-monopoly regulations, simply because there’s no way socially to make the majority of people - the pool from which lawmakers come - understand what exactly they are regulating.
Yup. In this case
- roach motel - it’s considerably easier to switch to Edge than from Edge
- appeal to emotion + appeal to authority + appeal to false authority* - “we recommend Edge, chrust us”
*those are technically fallacies. However, by trying to convince a user on irrational grounds to do something, they become a dark pattern.
Fallacies are called that because they are effective but not based in logic. They are the dark patterns of thought, rather than technology.
They are the dark patterns of thought, rather than technology.
That’s brilliant. Yes, it’s exactly this.
Had to set up a new laptop for someone over the weekend and Jesus they just won’t stop begging you not to switch.
Search for another browser in the URL/search bar, gigantic banner that pushes the actual search results off the page: “There’s no need to switch browsers, Edge is safe, fast, etc etc etc”
Click the download button for Chrome’s installer, a pop-up notification shows up: “Edge is built on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust and security of Microsoft” (fucking lol)
Go to switch the default browser in settings, another pop-up shows up again explaining that Edge is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I have to click either “Try Edge (recommended)” or “switch anyway”.
Then I spend 30 minutes navigating their maze of a settings app to change a bunch of ad preferences, etc.
Then I spend another 30 minutes editing registry entries to disable Cortana, Bing search in the search bar, recommended apps.
God damn I’m glad I switched to Linux.
And if you need to use Microsoft Teams for work it will ignore your preferences and open links in edge by default, so you’ll have to find and disable that, too.
Just found this setting earlier in the day, before seeing your comment. That was annoying and such an unnecessary grab on Microsoft’s part.
O&O ShutUp10 is free and handles all this automatically.
Regional settings > English UK
Bam, most of that shit is taken care of
That’s awful.
…my mum’s laptop being unable to run W10/W11 was a blessing in disguise then. I’m glad that I don’t need to manage this sort of junk.
And the same for a domain joined PC. Fresh install of Windows 11, open edge, find that you are already signed into edge on a Microsoft account that Windows helpfully created for you that mirrors your domain account.
You told edge that you do not want to transfer over your data. And it says okay but you’ll notice a little blue hyperlink that says manage above that.
And if you click that it tells you all the stuff it’s going to copy over anyway.
So you sign out of that and you untick all of the boxes and you close edge and you reopen it and you find that you are still signed in to your Microsoft account that was created for you with your domain credentials in Bing search and you have to sign out of that as well.
Edge has created an account for you, signed you in in two separate locations, and automatically set itself to ingest all of your account credentials and it does not even tell you what it has done unless you click through multiple paths to find it.
The game industry is going hard on “GaaS” or “Games as a Service.” Microsoft is going hard on “OS as a service” because, in the same way, they want your data or your money as you use the product
And then once a quarter as part of their “feature update” they’ll ask if you’re suuuure you don’t want to change your default browser to Edge instead of your normal browser.
The regulators get more money the longer this goes on.
Both are cancer, but at least Microsoft is pushing out less internet standard monopoly bullshit like Google does… well unless you look into them blocking swapping the default browser on windows lol.
Let them fight! Both are bad for tt
The only way of interaction with edge I got is at my work computer which runs windows 10 😑 every time after an update the edge logo sits itself back into the taskbar until I remove it again. So annoying and and encroaching. For real fuck Microsoft.
That’s probably AD Group Policy on a work PC, but yeah
Afaik group policies ensure certain settings are set all the time. This really just happens after a windows update.
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/12/22/msedgeredirects-europe-mode-sets-your-windows-region-to-europe/ this make Edge tamer than usual
Definitely had this happen. Edge imported all my plugins and tabs and started auto launching when I logged into windows. The auto launching made it obvious they were trying to confuse you into just picking up where you left off without hopefully noticing you weren’t actually in chrome anymore. Had been meaning to move to Firefox anyway, this just give me the kick I needed to do it asap.
Seriously, this is a massive MASSIVE security violation. Trying to trick me into putting my passwords into your client instead of where I usually do? Lawsuit. Lawsuit now.
I didn’t even think of that point! That could have teeth in a lawsuit if someone had the time and funding. I’m sure there’s a lot of security and privacy related things with this bait and switch tactic that wouldn’t fly with courts.
Microsoft can pull the same trickery with Firefox users. It’s their OS, after all.
chrome and edge use chromium, so everything is 1:1 compatible. you can’t do the same with firefox: extensions work differently, several options will be different, any custom layouts will be missing so things look different, etc
they can just import bookmarks and open your last session’s tabs.
most extensions will be available too. they could check which ones you have in Firefox and install the ones available for Edge.
there would be some things missing, sure, but most people wouldn’t notice the difference immediately.
Then somebody should make an extension compatible with Firefox and Edge whose sole purpose is to close the browser if it’s running in Edge
Install Linux and be done with this nonsense
I did. Now my internet doesn’t work. Problem solved 👍
…don’t forget needing to troubleshoot for 2 hours with forums and YouTube videos on how to launch any game that’s not steam / proton based.
I kinda like sometimes having to mess about. Beats having another browser annexing all of your data without consent or ads in your start menu. And the most important thing IMHO: it’s only ever going to get worse with windows, while Linux steadily improves.
Fuck those games. They have a license agreement with Microsoft and want you to be using their spyware.
So I shouldn’t be able to play any of my GOG games and write them off? Fuck outta here
As a steam deck user, (who is very familiar with Lutris) I am aware that Linux is not yet 100% foolproof for non proton games and downvoting users because you don’t like it just entrenches the stereotyped idea that Linux users are prude.
I’m not saying you should have to. You just gotta put up with the spyware that is Windows if you do. I’m saying that the companies who go out of their way to not work on Linux are bad companies.
Oh yeah for sure we all know the ones that purposely make changes to break steam deck like Ubisoft
Installed Linux Mint. My Bluetooth works. WiFi, Optical Audio Out, My Corsair Fan controller and many other things don’t work. I can’t find certain render options in Blender also. How to fix all these? Have been trying driver and software updates for hours now. I think I would have been better off using Windows with Chris Titus’ debloat tools. Everything worked, and Edge, OneDrive, Cortana etc. could be uninstalled in one go too.
I love Linux, but I don’t think that Linux users should promote it like it’s a free Windows, because it isn’t. You should learn Linux because you want to learn Linux, not because you hate Windows.
Frankly, I didn’t go 100% Linux right away. I dual-booted for several years first.
I get your point, but hating Windows is a great reason to want to learn Linux. People rarely move on from something they are 100% happy with. Folks need to not expect it to be Windows with different branding though.
20 years old but still worth a read. http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
I think they may be forgetting how much of an effort they themselves have put into finding alternative applications, changing their workflow and learning how to use and modify linux to their likings.
There’s no standalone fan controller in existence I’m aware of with Linux support unfortunately, blame manufacturers for that. I use an aquacomputer quadro and just fire up a windows VM with USB passthrough to change settings the once or twice a year I need to. What else isn’t working?
Regarding blender, what render options are missing? If it’s GPU rendering that’s missing, are you using Nvidia or AMD? I’m not familiar with how mint does things but you might need cuda or HIP packages for Nvidia or AMD respectively.
What do you mean by certain render options in Blender? Like HIP, CUDA, etc?
WiFi: is it broadcom? What’s the output of
lspci?Blender render option missing: how did you install blender? from package manager? it could be built using different build options and thus behaves differently from the official build. Try downloading the official linux build from https://www.blender.org/download/
Wow why linux is so broken with multiple package mangers. Is it supposed to be easier than windows? On windows i just type “choco install blender” on terminal and everything just works.
Nah, it’s usually due to licensing issues. Different distros have different policies regarding what the license of the softwares included in their repository. Some requires strict OSS license, others are more lax. When a software can be compiled with non-OSS components to include some features, most package maintainer would choose to not include those components in the package.
So basically linix is a fragmented mess. I will just stick to windows all my games , apps work and i can also uninstall all the microsoft bloat with a single click.
Eh, if that’s your conclusion of Linux ecosystem then maybe you’ll better off using windows afterall. To each their own.
What you see as fragmented mess, others see it as empowered communities able to make their own distros that fit their own needs instead of one size fit all solution.
No wonder the lack of software support.
The whole OS is bloat.
Is it supposed to be easier than windows?
No, but ease of use is not the only consideration.
You can do more with it, and it’s endlessly configurable. The terminal is superior. There’s virtually no bloat and it runs very fast. Most of the software is free open-source. (And if something isn’t, it’s virtually guaranteed that somebody has made a free open-source equivalent.)
But easier to use? I guess that all depends upon what you’re trying to do.
Open source software also works on windows. I use package managers on windows with terminal. I uninstall all the bloat with terminal on windows. Everything just works and is supported better on windows.
It’s the telemetry for me. I don’t like being researched. I do main windows but secondary Linux fedora KDE. I would say that Linux is good but the compatability and learning curve takes more time than what most are willing to, or are able to dedicate.
You would be way better off. All these just use Linux people are trolls. Every time I’ve installed Linux it has been a massive learning experience for my unique hardware.
I am not going to pretend that your poor experiences with Linux aren’t a valid reason not to use it, but if learning how to be in control of your computer is too much work to be worth the reward, complain less that the corporate black box you’re using isn’t designed with user freedom as a priority.
Digital freedom is going to require some amount of digital literacy.
I also run a Linux server lol. Don’t project your anger at windows on me
I didn’t complain lmao.
