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Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser
(www.windowslatest.com)
Time for another anti-trust lawsuit.
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
418 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
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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.
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Switching to Linux is better.
How about using M$ Edge on Linux? /s
Seriously though, one of my friends uses Edge on Windows, Linux, and Android. I still couldn't wrap my head around his decision.
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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.
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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.
The only thing that could get me to switch back to windows would be an animatronic Clippy with LLM hallucinations dialed up to 11.
"Hey, I see that it looks like you're having fun and fun and relaxing in a few days so I don't have a chance to get the remainder of the time in the past"
Dialed up to Windows 11!
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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.
Capitalism be like.
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."
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.
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Only [ Confirm ] and [ Set later ] in the dialog? No way to never set/change/cancel? Rapist mentality?
corporations are people when it comes to "free speech" (read: political bribes) but they aren't when it comes to accountability. this is what happens when you don't treat corporations like people and fucking jail them for shit like this.
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also, [use Linux instead]
I remember when someone posted a joke Slashdot with a fake screenshot of Windows advising a user to switch away from Firefox and back to IE.
Everyone lost their minds on what was an obvious joke. An unthinkable thing for Microsoft to do.
Yet here we are...
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And MS wonders why more users are moving to W10...
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 with MacOS, 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.
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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.
What is 3D about the banner? The mouse cursor graphic?
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.
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 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.
"3D"...
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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no. no. no. a ~~thousand~~ million times, NO!!
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