1y ago

MS Edge browser wants really hard to stay

www.theverge.com How to change your default browser in Windows 11

Get your favorite browser back in Windows 11.

Look at that shit! Before it was here are your two browsers choose! Now it's...how about for the letter A? Suppose a website starts with an A, would you choose Edge to be your default browser?... then you choose chrome or Firefox, and when you click on a link Edge Pops up with some shit like...Are you really sure you wanna use Firefox to view websites that start with the letter A?

Fuck Microsoft! Give us a fucking break you assholes! You are this turd of a company that is just stuck to company's assholes and that's the only reason any fly will ever touch your software.

87 comments

I'll be honest, there was a time when Edge was a really nice browser. Probably the best of the chromium browsers. It had an excellent reader mode, impeccable PDF viewer, and a few small quality of life tweaks that actually improved shopping, privacy, Etc. But then Microsoft did what Microsoft does and filled it with bloat, needless features, an unclosable assistant, and ever more aggressive tracking.
In a year, they'll abandon it and rebrand it the new Bing browser, and the cycle repeats
- Firefox has a really nice reader mode, it will soon get a much better PDF viewer and it doesn't come with much bloat. You can also use LibreWolf to fully minimize bloat in Firefox and enjoy the additional privacy benefits.
  
  That's why I switched back to Firefox. In the end, I always switch back to Firefox.
  
  I love your combos in Melee
  
  PDFs in web browsers shouldn't be a thing.
- Yeah, I'm a browser nerd. I love seeing what's out there, testing different features, etc. So I'm usually jumping between two browsers in addition to my daily driver at any given time. I used Edge as a secondary browser for a few months when the MacOS beta became available and as far as performance is concerned it was a legitimately good browser. You're also right, it had some nice features of its own that made it worthwhile as a Chrome alternative (assuming the obvious privacy issues were not a concern for someone, it was at least a decent lateral option to consider.)
  By the time I eventually got around to revisiting Edge recently I was disappointed to find they've made an absolute mess of it. It's the most bloated piece of crap on the market.
  
  I only started using Edge because people were saying it was the only way to get true HD on Netflix. Now it's a secondary browser, and I can't say I like it much.
  
  Have you tried Thorium? I've heard about it but not tried it.
- there was a time when Edge was a really nice browser. Probably the best of the chromium browsers.
  Except the tracking bits. Like Chrome, but worse.
- It's funny that a lot of this is people with bullshit jobs trying to justify their existence. A company this big gets bloated internally with staff - especially middle management - that will manipulate information to prevent themselves from becoming redundant, so they will insist that their specific project is super important and they absolutely need every engineer working for them, because their prestige and pay are connected to how many people they manage. So then your software fills up with useless junk until the problem gets so bad it can't be ignored. There's a big internal shake-up and products get rebranded but most of the organisational bloat remains, so the cycle starts again.
- You know, there was a time when people used to go to sears for the good stuff and to Kmart too. Then they screwed up big enough among their competition and now there may be like one or two of those places still open somewhere behind a MacDonalds on a refurbished MatCo truck that used to be a Taco truck too.
  I can't wait for the day Microsoft is finally just some shitty ass UPS truck painted over with their logo still showing a little and three guys in it repairing the last known laptops to ever run windows. I'd adopt a dog just to walk him by and let him pee on the tires.
  Microsoft, you've done everyone wrong too many times one last time.

You want us to use Edge? Then stop sucking, and respect our privacy. Oh, wait...that's the antithesis of Microsoft's philosophy.
- Do you consider Edge to be worse than Chrome?
  /edit: I asked because they said "You want us to use Edge" when evidently many people do use Chrome, and I don't see Edge being noticeably worse than Chrome.
  
  It was at least running its own engine until a couple years ago. But now, you may as well use chrome.
  But don't use chrome. Use Firefox.
  
  It is chrome, but bloated with microsoft crap.
  
  It is chrome with a different tracking system
  
  Both absolutely suck. Use Firefox or LibreWolf, Mull is a great option on Android!
- And Google's, Apples, etc, etc.
  Mind, I'm not saying that to excuse any of them.
  At least at one time MS "produced" (that is to say, acquired) some really great software (Office 4.2 was a massive game changer). But they couldn't wait for everyone to be always connected to implement their telemetry game (which they were actively developing in the mid 90's).

Maybe someone should sue them for overly tight integration of their browser into their os...
Might work, I mean, it worked once before, lol
- Apple standing on the side: 👀
  
  Apple got its own EU internet browser ruling to deal with recently: https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/apple_safari_browser/

I can't believe Micro$oft is still trying to pull this shit after it was fined for this in the European Union.
Hopefully, they'll fine them again, because this is unacceptable.
No, I don't use Windows, but people who use it and are less tech savvy should not be jumping through so many hoops to make the switch
- Apple is almost as bad with Safari on MacOs and you can't even really change the browser on IOS. But everyone shits on Microsoft.
  
  Android is getting there too You have to jump through a lot of hoops not to use Chrome
  
  Thank you! I don't like either approach but I hate that only one gets this much flack
  
  You can change the default browser, but it doesn't matter since all of them are forced to use Apple's WebKit.
  
  I think the reason for the dichotomy is their purported motivation for doing so.
  I say “purported” because I know Lemmy has a bone to pick with Apple’s privacy claims, and I would prefer to gracefully avoid it, but I will say that, regardless of the extent to which Apple collects user data, it is easy to ensure that they aren’t hyper-aggressively monetizing it.

Interestingly, if you install Chrome or Firefox, you won’t see them as choices. But if you install the Brave browser, you will see it as an option — and if you select that, then whenever you click on a news link in the Widget pane, it will come up in Brave.
Fick everything about this

Naggy advertising pop-ups and forced installs vastly increased resistance to Windows 10. So I don't get how Microsoft doesn't know it would scare users away from Edge.
Giving marketing the benefit of the doubt, I'd blame executive management for the aggressive push. They're the ones who push for draconian DRM and crunching based on their feelings.
- Yeah, it's baffling that they don't learn these lessons, but these kinds of corporations already exist to exploit customers by witholding their products until money is exchanged - in fact they have whole departments dedicated to preventing piracy - so the general lesson of "don't enshittify your product to attempt to exploit customers" is sort of an existential threat to them.
  So they must avoid the lesson, and they do that by replicating that same exploitation relationship internally with their employees, creating a low-information environment where the actual creators of the product cannot be honest with management about what the product needs, and customer service can't relay the feedback they get from customers. Any information that does get to management, they are free to ignore. Every command flows top down, just like the money flows bottom up.

Some may call this malware?
- I would!

Did you guys know you can run Edge on Linux natively? I installed it for shits and giggles once before throwing up and apt purging that shit as fast as I could.
Oh, you can run VS Code as well, but I think that IDE is actually kinda useful. At least for the embedded PlatformIO shit I do. If there's another IDE with that sort of integration as well as Github, then I'm willing to try it.
- VSCodium- all of the perks, None of the telemetry tracking. Minimal tweaks to a config file lets you use the same plugins that “only” work in VSCode.
- For a breif moment, you were the entire user base on Linux.

RIP antitrust laws

Their design philosophy is so bad. They've made probably the most bloated web browser in existence. No wonder people go to Chrome, it doesn't have 90% of the useless clutter.

I just set my default browser and install MSEdgeRedirect. It's like EdgeDeflector, except it's not been abandoned. Its latest version even "grounds CoPilot", as the dev so nicely put it.

The easiest way to get out of this Edge shit is to just replace Windows completely.

I couldn't find a complaint with a quick googling.... probably because Google is now a shitty place to find stuff. But check out the process for changing over to another browser. It's so fucking annoying.
- My solution was changing over to another operating system. I've had it to here with Microsoft, and with Proton on Steam being great as it is I really had no more excuses to stick to Windows.
  
  Yeah my laptop now runs Mint and my pc windows because of reasons (scanner soft, I know Photoshop really well, 3dsmax, I'm lazy, ...).
  Every time I open up my windows pc it had rebooted and not stayed in deep sleep, and everything is more and more just complicated.
  I spend more and more time on my laptop... where it doesn't feel line I'm on a browser without an adblocker. I also excuse any (rare) problems way easier as I think it's just a bug, not someones feature.
  
  For the average home user, Linux is a possibility. But MS has the office world captured.
  Just try to replace Office, their directory services, etc, without having costly (as in time) issues with all sorts of things.
  That said, MS is caught in the middle with O365 and Azure - no reason to use Windows if they just host it all for you.
- Not just switching the default; have a go at removing Edge entirely, its a huge PITA.
  You've gotta manually take ownership of Edges files, including its updater service, force that service to close and delete it, then finally delete the files for Edge itself. If you do that out of order, or you install certain system updates; it'll reinstall itself so you have to do it again.
  From there some simple things like the news+weather taskbar widget and the start menu search will no longer open/function. (they ignore your default browser setting and forcibly use Edge)
  
  Wow, that's annoying. I'm gonna hold off for windows 12 when the European union forces Microsoft to not be such an asshole.
- What's so annoying about this? For me it would be moving a few extensions that I use, and logging into a few sites. The whole process is 15 minutes tops, and an occasional tweaking afterwards.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
If you’ve updated your PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11, you may have noticed that when you click on a link for a website, a PDF document, or a variety of other file types, you will now be sent to Microsoft’s Edge browser.
For example, even when this was written, the first time I opened Firefox, it asked if I wanted it to become the default.
For example, bring up Windows 11’s new Widget pane (by clicking on the Widgets icon in your taskbar, the one that looks like a two-paned window), and click on one of the news items that appear there — and the link will open Edge.
Another possibility is a tool called EdgeDeflector that was originally created to intercept any links in Windows 10 that were Edge-specific and rewrite them on the fly so that they can be opened by the default web browser.
I did a little browsing and read that its latest version, v1.2.3.0, would work with Windows 11.
Update April 15th, 10:23AM ET: This article was originally published on October 8th, 2021, and has been since updated to include directions for allowing the Brave browser to open certain specialized Windows links, to add a note about Microsoft blocking EdgeDeflector, and to reflect changes in the process of switching browser defaults.
The original article contains 635 words, the summary contains 218 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Linux all the way.
Windows is only on kid’s computers. Because they need roblox and generally games run better on windows.
- I'm as pro Linux as they come, using windows for me makes me want to bash my head against the wall because I feel like I'm constantly battling my PC, it's awful to use IMO. But this is just silly.
  Windows is only on kids computers? Windows is on the majority of computers. ~70% of them.
  Linux is on 7-8% of them, half of which is ChromeOS, which funny enough probably has a higher proportion of child users than Windows, given its popularity in schools and as a cheap device for kids.
  The overall amount of kids on Windows and Linux probably isn't very different.
  And if you think kids are the only people who do PC gaming then you're wrong there too lol
  
  I think you misunderstood. Windows is only on the kid's computers in their household.
- Most stuff on Steam runs very well these days. Anti-Cheat and DRM are the main reasons stuff doesn't run.
- I do all my gaming on Linux at this point. If you don't play games with invasive anti cheat and even then some of those work now
  
  You can run a Windows VM with KVM and pass through your GPU for Gaming or other GPU-intensive tasks. It works surprisingly well.
- Based Linux runs almost the entire web while cringe Windows is used to play fancy video games
- Which software is it?
- wInDoWs bAd hUrRdUrR
  
  It is, and it won't get better. Windows is very much in the process of enshittification.
  
  I'm a Windows user (not out of choice), there's no case for recommending Windows if it weren't for the softwares requirement.

So I'm not a big fan of edge, but the addition of their chatgpt search assist to edge has made me start using it instead of google's horrible shit infested search. At least for tech stuff there is no comparison.
- Try Perplexity.AI It can search the web.

87 comments