Hugo Hacker News

Windows 11 won’t give up on making it super annoying to swap browsers

smackeyacky 2021-08-19 01:25:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Microsoft's strategy at this point seems incredibly confusing. As a developer they haven't had a consistent message on how to target Windows GUI development in .NET core and their own product offerings seem to indicate their is some kind of internal war about the right direction to take. They deliver incredibly cool things like WSL2 and VSCode but the ultimate outcome will probably be that most developers will ditch Windows as their dev operating system of choice and use a Mac or install a Linux. At this stage, the small amount of consulting I do for Microsoft clients really feels like the late 1980s where customers were looking to get off proprietary minicomputers - lots of rehosting on cheaper servers, siloing legacy systems and moving onto more fashionable tech.

Even their preferred development environment, .NET, has an equivalent development and deployment experience on Linux based systems.

Most of the people who were using Windows as their daily driver have shifted to a phone and for most consumers access to a web browser and a mobile app store is everything they need.

On top of all that, their server operating systems seem to get worse with each release (Powershell, you suck) and now they are determined to cripple their flagship desktop operating system against the relentless tide of open-ness. At this stage it looks like they will end up like DEC. Remembered sometimes fondly by people who use any other system than Microsoft in their daily work.

selfhoster11 2021-08-19 02:38:56 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Why is PowerShell a reason why the server OS is getting worse? It seems like a better thought-out alternative to the Unix shell, at least.

smackeyacky 2021-08-19 02:55:41 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I have a personal distaste for it and I'm not alone. It seems deliberately arcane. I mean I get the idea that Microsoft couldn't keep up with their own features via the GUI it just takes too long, so they needed a scripting language. I also get the idea that a lot of the scripting had to cover 25 years of tech choices (registry settings, DCOM and other things that Windows has) and something like Unix shell scripting was inadequate.

I do think they could have encapsulated their DCOM and registry stuff into Unix like utilities instead of the weirdness that is Powershell. Most people from a Unix background (like me) are used to bourne shell like shells and single function utilities and reflexively do things in a particular way.

Powershell seems like you have to have a browser open to accomplish anything. Inexperience sure, but nobody could learn enough Powershell and remember it to be productive.

edit: I also hate, hate, hate that Powershell ISE doesn't work exactly the same as a normal Powershell session. How can you build two things that are ostensibly the same underpinning but work differently? Absolute madness.

selfhoster11 2021-08-19 03:19:09 +0000 UTC [ - ]

> Powershell seems like you have to have a browser open to accomplish anything. Inexperience sure, but nobody could learn enough Powershell and remember it to be productive.

I could level exactly the same criticism against Unix shells, as someone who has used them for over 10 years. I usually either can figure out the command easily, or I have to Google for a Stack Exchange answer.

That said, I agree with your point about the GUI. It seems to me that at some point during the past decade, Windows has gone from an environment where everything is configurable with a GUI and maybe a registry key, to an environment so heavy on mandatory CLI usage for configuration that it's becoming indistinguishable from Linux in this aspect. To be clear, this is a bad thing for those who prefer the GUI approach.

I understand that you see PowerShell's divergence from Unix-ness as something weird, but really I think that an (optionally) structured data output format cannot come to Unix soon enough. Parsing things with tr, awk and cryptic command line switches is a notorious Unix weakness that PowerShell (and some native Linux shells) solves quite easily.

smackeyacky 2021-08-19 03:35:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes, it is just familiarity that makes Powershell seem weird and Unix shells are notoriously cryptic, coming from a background where saving keystrokes was important so all those criticisms are definitely valid.

I still miss that GUI though, when I context switch between a Unix box and a Windows box and then I'm suddenly confronted with some Powershell task, it always make me sigh a little, not least because my old noodle has trouble parsing Powershell as readable. Here's a bit of Powershell I use to go through an Outlook mailbox to look for some stuff (just a snippet) and the where-object and new-object things with dashes in the middle instead of underscores just make it harder to understand. Especially when you have where-object and then you have -eq in the same line.

$account = $namespace.Accounts | where-object {$_.DisplayName -eq "smackeyacky@nowhere.com"}

908B64B197 2021-08-19 01:51:53 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Remember when Google Chrome used to embed itself in unrelated installers? https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

Now that Edge is Chromium based, it's just like using Chrome minus all the tracking and data-mining...

jeroenhd 2021-08-19 02:07:32 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Minus all the tracking and data-mining? There's plenty of tracking and data mining in either browser, the only difference is which company the data gets sent to.

908B64B197 2021-08-19 02:24:29 +0000 UTC [ - ]

And the percentage of their revenues that's derived from tracking and adds.

machinecontrol 2021-08-18 23:02:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

At what point does this become clear violation of antitrust?

g_p 2021-08-18 23:59:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It seems like the previous browser antitrust ruling in Europe was 2010, with the browser ballot screen being required until 2014.

Given the scale of the fine Microsoft received after breaking their agreement by breaking the ballot system and not showing it to users (over 500m EUR I believe), it seems strange to me that Microsoft is really so willing to get back into this area of making it harder to switch browser, given the ample past precedent.

Is user data gathered from the web browser under default settings really valuable enough to justify the risk?

dane-pgp 2021-08-19 00:37:37 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Obviously €500m wasn't enough of a deterrent, and anti-trust authorities need to be able to issue exponentially increasing fines to produce either compliance from or the dissolution of the repeat offender.

The only question up for debate is what the base of the exponential function should be.

908B64B197 2021-08-19 01:57:34 +0000 UTC [ - ]

If you can't innovate, time to regulate! Why bootstrap an ecosystem when you can just fine evil foreign tech giants?

€500m to hire more bureaucrats...

dane-pgp 2021-08-19 02:04:27 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Would you use that response to oppose any regulation in any sector?

2021-08-19 02:42:20 +0000 UTC [ - ]

jeroenhd 2021-08-19 02:12:15 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Honestly, I don't expect antitrust to trigger here. With Apple's treatment of browsers on their phones being considered perfectly acceptable somehow (and the same can be said about pretty much every type of app store category, to be honest), I don't think there are any government bodies that even care about this type of antitrust anymore.

The fight for free access to app stores has replaced the fight for browser bundling.

aitchnyu 2021-08-19 06:24:17 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Outlook and Teams on Android force me to install Edge to view links. Pasting text into an unblessed app shows a warning text.

anakaine 2021-08-19 10:17:48 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Seconded. This also happens on IOS. Another bug bear is being forced to accept company device management policies just to access a video call via teams - whilst i understand we can get chat and files etc, can we not have a Teams Lite where I can just attend to video chat, since this is 99% of what most of use use it for. The other stuff is useful, but not always necessary.

j_walter 2021-08-18 23:15:08 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Is it annoying...yes. Does it take more than 2 minutes to remove the pinned Edge and change the different default file types...no.

C'mon...Microsoft is trying to get you to use what they view as a superior product. It could certainly be A LOT worse.

semperdark 2021-08-19 01:37:12 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's "annoying" when Microsoft continually cons your dementia-suffering family members into switching their browser back to Edge, which has none of their logins or bookmarks. Confusing them, worrying them, and doing real human harm.

Here's to dark patterns built into the OS! UI decisions matter.

grandpoobah 2021-08-19 11:54:50 +0000 UTC [ - ]

I've previously posted my experience with that - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25121668

semperdark 2021-08-19 15:38:00 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Computer-savvy people dismiss dark patterns like this as mostly-harmless prodding, but it really disorients the less able.

For all industry pats itself on the back for accessibility, they still have absolutely no shame about this open and obvious UX manipulativeness.

I hope your grandfather comes to understand he's not at fault for this absolute bullshit. My father is almost afraid to ask me to fix his systems because he's too proud to keep coming to me with issues - he used to be the technical one!

bobakanoosh 2021-08-19 03:28:44 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Yes because so many dementia suffering people are intentionally downloading chrome or Firefox, instead of using whatever is already given to them.

Tajnymag 2021-08-19 06:31:31 +0000 UTC [ - ]

Op didn't say anything about such people downloading the browsers. Their children or associates can do that. The point is, that an automatic unskippable system update will change the settings the child has done for their ill parent. The parent won't understand what happened or at least won't know how to change the desired setting back.

This is a bit of tangent, but hear me out, if the user was blind, for example, and was using some specific accessible tools, it would be really bad if the OS decided to change the tools by itself. The end-user would have no way to use their computer anymore. At least until a healthy person could revert the system settings back to their old state.

kayxspre 2021-08-19 01:52:49 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It's even more annoying (and takes more than 2 minutes) to do so in Windows 11. I got a hand on it some time ago (though reverted, not due to this behavior) and spend some time to change the default browser to what I'm using (Vivaldi)

Apparently, there's no option to set default app for common file types (Audio, Video, Browser etc...) in Windows 11. Instead, to change default apps, you have to track down all file types using that app and change it. Considering web browser can handle more than HTML, it's time consuming to change them all. Granted, it may be one-time change, but I find my default browser got reset quite often in Windows 10. If this happens in Windows 11, it will be a nightmare to fix.

fartcannon 2021-08-19 01:02:58 +0000 UTC [ - ]

It already is a lot worse. Consider how much worse windows privacy is, or how many more dark patterns Microsoft uses today than when they originally tried this shit.

So, c'mon, Microsoft is as anti competitive as ever.

2021-08-19 01:15:19 +0000 UTC [ - ]

dzonga 2021-08-18 23:06:55 +0000 UTC [ - ]

at microsoft it seems employees there are pointing guns well, bazookas at each other. they do good work on one end, and shit on the other. maybe lack of strong united leadership ?