Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser.
First spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft has been testing the new 3D banner for a while now, but it’s now rolling out to more people. If Edge is not your default browser and you open it directly or through files like PDFs, a new banner will remind you to change your default browser settings.
The banner explains that using Edge as your default browser can help protect you from phishing and malware attacks. It asks you to confirm this change by clicking “Set default,” and then you need to confirm again in the Windows settings app.
The pop-up screen will appear after you install the new Windows updates. If you skip the banner, you’ll get another reminder to use Edge when you open the browser.
and you open it directly or through files like PDFs
As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
I have Win11 in a VM so I can make certain company documents play nice for the Windows users at work, and find it genuinely entertaining how fucky MS have made it. I found the other day that if you link to a document in Excel, but put the link in wrong, it’ll open Edge to warn you about it. Until that point I hadn’t opened Edge at all in that VM. I installed Firefox from an .exe I downloaded in macOS then immediately set it as default.
It’s always nice to shut that VM down and go back to using an OS that doesn’t nag me all the fucking time.
Plus, pdf.js & co. have a couple XSS holes per month. Local pdf viewers don’t have XSS holes.
Btw, why is pdfjs.enableScripting = true by default?
I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
Can that image viewer extract text so that a user could easily copy/paste it? I think if whatever pdf I was opening didn’t allow me to do that I would be really frustrated.
I can only speak for Preview, but yeah, of course. It’s really useful.
As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
I don’t see the difference here. Opening PDFs in an image viewer is wild too to me and I’ve used both Mac and Windows. For the shit that people give Edge, it’s a pretty nice pdf viewer and of all the browsers, it’s the most fully featured one that I know of.
And is it that strange that it opens a link in a browser? That is the default application for handling URLs after all.
It’s not that it opens the link in a browser, it’s that it opens the link in a browser that isn’t the default, and that I’d never used.
macOS has its problems, sure, but I can’t think of a single time when it’s ignored my preference for software.
I’d like to add to this by saying that on my Windows 11 work laptop, I have Firefox set as the default. If I open a link from Outlook or Teams, it will open in Edge. So you’re not wrong, and it’s quite infuriating
PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.
An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.
That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.
It’s not that far-fetched, PDFs in my opinion are closer to vector graphics than to document formats like odt and docx. They have no understanding of format if not using advanced features, like a table in a PDF is just spaced text with lines between them, and text is just independently placed letters. In fact the space symbol doesn’t exist in most PDFs, it’s just that two letters were spaced further apart. So they basically are multiple canvases that are being painted on with letters, lines, fill areas and even bitmap graphics.
Modern PDF actually does further in the direction of a document format by providing the content in a structured way, mostly for accessibility, but also for making the format suitable for automatic processing the contained data.
I don’t know what to tell you, Preview is an image viewer that is the default way to view PDFs on a Mac, and does so in a way that I’ve not seen bettered. It opens them without any formatting errors, allows for text selection and copying, and allows for rotation and cropping, as well as combining multiple documents and splitting them up. You just drag pages out and into the Finder to create a new document, or drag a second document into the thumbnail bar to combine.
The rotation ability is the reason I started using my old Mac mini at work. The crappy Dell PCs we’re normally given only have the free version of Acrobat installed, and I got sick of being sent landscape scanned document PDFs in portrait, so used my own MacBook to rotate them.
Time for another anti-trust lawsuit.
This FTC has the balls for it, too.
Amazon. Apple. Who’s next?
Google is next!
And MS wonders why more users are moving to W10…
They pushed me to Linux (Arch btw).
They aren’t targeting people like me though. They are targeting people like my wife that doesn’t read what she clicks and just accepts it.
Microsoft are being really very pushy to get people to use Edge.
I moved from Windows 10 to Fedora/Debian recently. Dual-booting them until I figure out which one I want to use. I’ve used Debian on servers for 20+ years, but Fedora seems like a great distro too. I switched to Fedora at work too, and I’m enjoying it. At work, I can choose between a MacBook or a Lenovo ThinkStation or X1 Carbon / P1 with Windows or Fedora.
The only Windows-specific app I really cared about was Visual Studio, but Jetbrains Rider is looking like a good replacement. I don’t really do any PC gaming any more.
Both Fedora and Debian are excellent choices.
I keep feeling compelled to suggest people try the atomic versions of Fedora. They do upgrades in a way that cannot get stuck halfway, and if the upgrade breaks something you can roll back. I think it’s neat.
For desktop PC use, I think I’m liking Fedora more than Debian. The newer packages have been useful - Wayland seems less buggy for instance (thankfully I’ve got an AMD laptop)
I’ve thought about it, but don’t really have much time to learn a lot of new stuff at the moment. How different is the workflow with the atomic versions vs the regular Fedora?
It depends. For development work it’s literally the same since you usually set up a container for each project that runs regular fedora. Otherwise you usually install software from flatpak.
Installing system wide packages is possible but kind of annoying since they don’t activate until you reboot.
What is 3D about the banner? The mouse cursor graphic?
When did desktop operating systems become a place for live A/B tests of ads?
This is something I expect from a malicious website like Facebook, not the fucking operating system.
As somebody recently reminded me… Think googled android but with more legs!
I don’t think I’ve ever gotten an ad from the OS on Android. I know some manufacturers, Samsung in particular, include ads but that’s not “Android” so much as “Samsung’s shitty skin of Android.”
The closest I’ve gotten to an ad on Pixel is a thing to review new features after updates.
It’s probably the browser, not the OS, that’s doing this. The teams are separate although someone in upper management oversees them both.
We got click-baited into reading about Microsoft doing shady shit with their browser default settings (again, no less!), but that part wasn’t even mentioned in the article.
Since you asked, and I commented on Lemmy about this before.
Back in the Windows XP and even Windows 7 days Microsoft was trying to sell computers to people. It had to convince people why computers are worth their time.
Fast forward to Windows 10 and now it’s, “ok we now got an audience that’s addicted to our operating system, lets see what we can get away with. We might lose like 1% to Linux and like 5% to mac doing some of these while most of everyone won’t switch at all. and we increase our profits.”
Capitalism be like.
Is there any OS besides Windows doing this?
Most Android skins. Even stock Android can get naggy at times.
And don’t even get me started on iOS if you haven’t done what Apple wants you to do. It’ll give you a pop-up at least once every day.
Oh, and Smart TVs? Don’t even think about having any control; you are a slave to the OS.
I may have done everything Apple wants me to do then. I remember getting a single Apple Music popup in the Music app years ago, but nowadays I’m subscribed to their music service anyway. Do they nag (more than once) nowadays when you’re not subscribed? That’d suck hard.
Should I ever get nagged again and again by my iPhone, I’ll switch phones. This constant nagging and not respecting my settings is the #1 reason I switched from Windows to Linux.
If you aren’t signed into an Apple ID it’ll give you nag pop-ups.
If you don’t accept the iCloud T&C, even if you never use it, it’ll give you nag pop-ups.
If you haven’t set up Apple pay, it’ll give you nag pop-ups.
It’ll also give you a double nag pop-up for every new minor iOS version until you update it.
I’m sure I’m missing a bunch here.
Other than Apple music and iCloud, they’re generally less intrusive about popups than Microsoft. Their tactic is to completely prevent competitors from integrating with the system at all rather than nag you to use a setting. For example, there’s no way to use Google maps or Spotify in all the same ways you can use Apple music or Maps.
<Obligatory Linux plug>
Obligatory people getting mad at you for people suggesting you stop using software that is openly hostile toward you response.
Smug reminder that macOS is best OS
Lol. It’s a close second, but at least Apple isn’t blatantly hostile toward users in the same way that Microsoft is.
Obligatory haggeling which is the best distro
One one hand, this can be pretty annoying.
On the other, when thinking about the lowest common denominator general user that’s been tricked into running some awful PUP-ware browser, I can understand MS’s point.
This banner is the same tactic used by malware. It targets the average Joe that just accepts anything thrown in their face. It’s the same with the cookie popup we see in the EU. People just click accept to get it out their way so they can view the content they came to see.
“Hey you, yes exactly you. Do you wanna accept all cookies or just part of them?”
Fucking bullshit what if I don’t want any of them. I’m glad extensions partially fix this
But again it’s only the minority using extensions or actually taking the time to deny cookies.
You can not seriously believe that’s their primary concern, do you?
Ever since windows 11, edge, and MS’s approach to resetting defaults, I’ve stopped getting support calls from relatives. Yes it’s riddled with annoyances but it’s a net improvement over previous gen software. I see regular people struggle with tech and can tell things have improved dramatically for them.
no. no. no. a
thousandmillion times, NO!!Microsoft could care less about your PCs resources when you’re idk, playing some 4k or even 8k video games. What a joke, but for real, if any of you use WIndows at home and don’t want to jump straight to Linux. You can (temporally jump over to Chromebooks, which will mostly work out of the box, and has support for Linux apps.
Chromebook’s I would argue are perfect for getting users use to Linux apps without having to worry about losing any familiarity they might have with Something like WIndows or Mac.
I get that Edge may not be the preferred browser of many, but calling this a “3D banner” seems a bit sensational at best. It’s just clipart of an arrow.
I have a dream of that time when small MS’s changes won’t get media coverage because even tech journos will not use the latest Windows release anymore.
In our tests, Windows Latest spotted that Microsoft plans to use ChatGPT to generate website suggestions, which will appear below the search bar.
So needlessly wasting resources to provide something that already exists but you can market as AI?
How many ai “improvements” do you think are based on ideas generated by ai at this point?
The answer is definitely not zero. Which is pretty fuckin weird, the more I think about it.
Unfortunately, there are plenty enough humans to come up with stupid shit like this.
yeah but ai means the same stupid ape can excrete 25 times the stupid shit in the same time period. That’s progress.
if they use an LLM to make the suggestions then it’s possible it ends up suggesting websites that don’t even exist. or it could accidentally suggest a malware website, or make a typo, etc.
this could be dangerous if they aren’t very careful
Remember the people who created malicious libraries that ChatGPT made up and suggested, in the hopes someone would blindly install them? You can do this a lot easier here. Check what websites this tends to hallucinate when typing “google” “youtube” “facebook” etc. and if any of them don’t exist yet, register that address and host a phishing version of the corresponding site there.
“3D”…
Wym 3d banner?
It reaches through your monitor and slaps you.
Your monitor arm reaches out and smacks you with itself. If you’re on a laptop, it tells you to get closer and it shuts on you.
