Current-era Microsoft continuing to push the boundaries of consent.
Microsoft Edge is a good browser but for some reason Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down everyone’s throat and make it more difficult to use rivals like Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft has now started notifying IT admins that it will force Outlook and Teams to ignore the default web browser on Windows and open links in Microsoft Edge instead.
“continuing to push the boundaries of consent.”
If by “push the boundaries” you meant “completely ignore them”, then yes. This kind of behavior from MS, or any vendor, should always be considered strictly unacceptable.
This kind of behavior from MS, or any vendor, should always be considered strictly unacceptable.
Yep but especially from MS since their OS is just so incredibly widespread that they pretty much have a monopoly that they abuse.
@Pechente somebody needs to sue them as a reminder.Maybe 23 years is a long time to forget?
Ran into this about two weeks ago. It can be turned off.
Here’s the setting to change. It’s under File -> Options -> Advanced
God I hate Windows and their dance with monopolistic behaviour. They’ll bring out a “feature” that changes how a program works so you have to change it back, in the hopes that most people don’t do it. They keep doing it with browsers because they siphon away enough users each time that it’s worth it for them.
Windows should have a default browser choice in settings, and any program you use should automatically use it no matter what, unless you physically change it yourself. It shouldn’t even be possible for them to do. I really need to learn how to use Linux. I’ve got a spare SSD. Fuck it
Linux is not even difficult to use and there is no telemetry slowing down the hardware you paid for and feeding some greedy org with your user data. Ubuntu desktop is perfectly fine as a daily driver as long as you don’t use it for gaming or windows apps through Wine. Thats when it becomes more complicated and error prone.
When Windows 10 hits EOL we might actually arrive at the year of Linux. I’ve been daily driving Arch (obligatory, I use arch btw) for the past 7 months and aside from a few hiccups where I tried to tweak absolutely everything and NVIDIA shenanigans, neither of which was the fault of the underlying kernel or OS, it has been dreamy. Never going back.
Ah you must be from the IUseArchLinux.FYI instance. Lol
They have a point. After the Win10 EOL, the only secure option for hardware that doesn’t meet Win11 requirements will be Linux.
Gaming works surprisingly well. The last few years have made it a one-click affair for thousands of games with the efforts of the Proton team.
Even then, with the effort Steam has put in, there is a lot more support for games on Linux, one way or the other, than there was before, and not necessarily as difficult, either. All of my admittedly small collection of frequently played games should work on Linux. I need to refresh my Windows, maybe it’s time to try Linux out for my gaming machine.
The day I can play all my games on Linux and know the games i want to play will come to it, I will rejoice. I want so badly not to be stuck on Windows.
This is why, while I’ll probably never get a steam deck myself, I am all for people buying it en masse.
More users will force game publishers to opt for native Linux support, just so they can advertise their products as deck-compatible.
It’s not that hard to use and it’s worth the transition. Gaming on Linux is pretty reasonable at this point, most stuff is in the browser or has a Linux app now too.
Do it brother, try out a “just works” distro like ubuntu or mint. I switched to linux 1,5 years ago, im never looking back again.
That is a terrible dark pattern. “Let me just change the defaults away from the option that literally is the default setting (default browser) to the thing I want users to use instead”.
Straight up maliciously ignoring “default browser”.
Good to see. And if there’s a setting, there’s probably a registry key behind it storing the value…it’s about 30 seconds in group policy to set it back to “Default Browser” for everyone at my company once I know which one it is.
Had to do the same thing to uncheck the “Also set up outlook on mobile device” box when Outlook initially adds the mail account last year…
MS’s main goal nowadays seems to be to find new ways to annoy users by advertising their own crap instead of producing a useful product that gets our of your way and just works.
wow… this is hot garbage, windows products should auto-register the default programs… why!!!
Good to know, but this is trash. Sucks, because Edge is good now.
It’s fucking annoying, admittedly edge is good on its own merits, but you know what pushes me to not want to ever use your product? Anti-consumer practices.
I have been very happy in using FF for my main browsing. It has adblock, NoScript and SponsorBlock. Since I use NoScript I jump on Edge when I want to use a trusted website for payments but I really want to use it less when it does this shit.
I can’t wait for the excuse “OoOooh wooooops, that’s a bug! Sowwy EU we did not mean to do anti consumer pwactices” as a way to dodge blame
Using Firefox is the only real way to circumvent much of the bloat of the modern web. UBlock only works 100% functionally on Firefox, Chromium-based browsers just don’t give add-ons the functionality that they need to block 100% of nasties. Until that changes (which it likely won’t) I see no reason to switch off Firefox.
brave also works very well for this. Just don’t use any of the other chromium based browsers and you’re fine.
you can use a secondary firefox profile. starting firefox with the
--no-remote -pswitches allows to load it alongside the main profile (-p loads the profile manager and --no-remote suppresses the “open new window in existing profile” behavior
I’ve been using edge since the first chromium beta. I’m considering moving to firefox just out of spite.
Firefox is great! I have never been to a website where it doesn’t work, and the future of the internet relies on people ditching chrome based browsers (don’t kid yourself, chromium = supporting chrome and monopolistic companies)
Sadly haven’t had the same experience. There are some websites that are broken and Canvas particularly didn’t play videos well on Firefox. Also, it has been really laggy for me lately and watching videos has been laggy. There are also no tab sorting options. I love Firefox and still use it, but it’s not all great.
For me the worst part is sites with crappy JavaScript not working in it. It’s like they didn’t even test it in Firefox. Our time tracking and accrual systems at work and my bank system don’t operate particularly well in Firefox. Whenever people do refreshes on websites it’s kind of hit or miss whether they actually work out of the box.
I’ve converted over to mainly running Brave because It’s more aggressive about blocking tracking while still remaining almost completely chrome compatible.
I generally still keep a Firefox browser window open but it’s mainly to play YouTube videos.
When Microsoft offered GPT to edge users I flipped over and started using that for a while. I loaded it down with all my normal Chrome plugins. For me it’s faster unless ram heavy than Firefox, Chrome, or Brave, I just don’t trust openly giving all of my browsing data to Microsoft.
For me the worst part is sites with crappy JavaScript not working in it. It’s like they didn’t even test it in Firefox.
A major issue now is that some sites actually unknowingly rely on bugs in Chrome, so they don’t work properly in other browsers that don’t have the same bugs. Mozilla do ship some workarounds with Firefox (where it detects sites that rely on bugs and patches them to work properly) but obviously they can’t test everything.
I love Firefox, but had to go to Edge due to tab groupings. How Firefox doesn’t have this yet boggles my mind. The day I see they have groups, I’ll be all over it again.
On the Mozilla feature request page, it is the highest voted post and is currently being “investigated” by the team. But it’s been like that for a while, so I stopped holding my breath. It will come one day (hopefully) considering how much demand there is for it.
What so you mean by “tab sorting options”?
Chromium has tab groups where you can easily add or remove tabs from a group. It makes it easy to drag it out to a different window, bring it into an existing window, and the groups are collapsible.
I usually have a lot of forums open, work tabs, and just other stuff. Right now, my solution is dealing with it/creating separate windows, but it gets messy really fast when you have 4-6 different windows. It becomes a game of which one has the tab I’m looking for.
I use an add-on called tab groups for organizing tabs.
I’ve tried them all, but I really prefer how Chromium handles it.
It’s much better. I don’t miss Chrome at all. Also f Google.
For me what did my migration was the frequent crashes and the adding of bloat
I’ve always rotated between edge and Firefox. Some things I like better about each. Firefox usually wins out for me when stuff like this keeps happening haha
Outlook has a separate setting for opening links. It’s very sneaky:
https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/outlook-hyperlinks-edge-default-browser/
Thats a helpful pointer, thanks :)
Thanks for this. Turns out they also made it hard to make anything other than Edge your default browser (you have to set it separately for each file extension). How to fix that here:
https://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-default-web-browser-windows-11
Remember when Microsoft got raked over the coals for this kind of behavior, in the 90s?
Remember how bored everyone got of ignoring news about the massive issues in the 90s that still affect everyone? You still can’t bring it up without people’s eyes glazing over. Drives me nuts that people just don’t give a shit.
I do, and I hope it happens again.
Something something antitrust. Something something browser choice. Microsoft is just asking to be fined €1 billion. Really, someone needs to make a big stink about it in Europe because they’ll act before the US does.
Microsoft is just asking to be fined €1 billion. Really, someone needs to make a big stink about it in Europe
Good luck. Apple restricting iOS to only use Safari’s engine is even worse, yet they haven’t gotten in trouble for it. Every browser on iOS is Safari under-the-hood. At least Microsoft always let you install other browsers.
I tried using outlook this year for the first time in 15 years, and immediately NOPED the fuck out when I noticed it displayed ads in-line with my inbox.
And then there are those rumors that they want to display ads in the settings panel. Fuck Microsoft, they have ZERO trustworthiness in my book
I unfortunatelly have to use outlook and teams at work. If this really becomes the case, I will both write to EU regulators and try to petition our IT to move away from microsoft teams and potentially outlook.
If you work for an EU company using Outlook might be illegal, as they now send all emails unencrypted via their own servers.
At our work place, which is mostly Linux, some people have been using outlook if they opt to use windows or Mac or android or iPhone. And when outlook started to send all emails via their own servers (not respecting your smtp settings and such), we instated a full ban on using all outlook clients on all platform.
It’s really sad, as a Linux user I think outlook used to be the best email client period. Before this privacy hell and before adds in the program of course.
Hi. Do you have some documentation for the unencrypted mail part? Doesn’t sound very GDPR compliant depending on the information sent, off course.
Good to know. I would apreciate any sources for GDPR breaking to show to our IT.
Same for me. My company talks a big game, but is bad at audits or detection for authorized devices / unauthorized access.
I wiped my work pc and ran linux daily for a year. Remina for remote management was far better than the native RDP client in Windows. Web based outlook got the job done. Teams app in Windows is just reskinned chrome anyhow. Works just as good in a browser. Had a remote box set up for any thing that absolutely required Windows.
Gmail does this too. I’m pretty sure my adblocker handles them on my PC but I see them on the mobile app all the time.
We use o365 for work so I’m seeped in that environment already. I tried using o365 for my personal email for about 3 months and finally gave up and went back to gmail.
But Gmail includes ads disguised as emails too?
Does it? Never had one.
Its usually in the separate tab, the “promotion” tab, where they send most subscriptions emails. It’s not good, but it could be miles worse. Yahoo mail for example is a lot worse: you get Ads in the website taking away screen space unless you pay a premium
This is news to me, I don’t see any in my gmail account. I use adblock though. I also do not see any in the gmail app.
email is an open protocol, there is absolutely no reason why an email client should get away with showing ads.
I see a couple of ad “emails” entries in my promotion side of the inbox, usually in the 3-4 rows, and I also use both adblock + uorigin. Again, not really disrupting, because its usually a section of the inbox I dont go into too much, but I can see it being annoying for others
I don’t have a promotions tab either. Or any tab for that matter.
Edit: I turned the tabs on, no ads in the promotions tab either. Maybe it’s not a thing in my country.
Yup.
I have never experienced this with Gmail, though I use ublock as you mentioned. I haven’t seen any through the gmail app on mobile either.
Email is an open protocol, there’s no reason to continue using an email client (web or otherwise) that displays ads. I highly recommend you use something like thunderbird if this is your experience.
Ads are pernicious no matter where they appear, but them being associated with any kind of personal communication is fucking nuts, I wish we wouldn’t normalize it.
Fuck Microsoft, they have ZERO trustworthiness in my book
me in the 90s, the last time I gave them a cent or a moment
deleted by creator
I’ve never seen ads in Outlook ever.
I have been using Outlook for over 15 years and it’s fine. I have never seen an ad in my inbox. Tips aren’t ads. Not sure what you are talking about. I’m running the latest build connected to an EXO mailbox.
Email clients stop innovating 20 years ago. The strength of Outlook is the interoperability with other Microsoft apps. I am sure you think those are cancer, and that’s fine. lol
Free or paid?
There is no free outlook. Windows mail replaced outlook express decades ago, and outlook.com is Hotmail not outlook.
Oh, you should know. Windows 11’s newest version lets you just have Outlook for free. You can just click a button in Mail and have the “new Outlook for Windows.”
I didn’t know, thats terrifying. We don’t allow Win11 in our company. Only Win10. Everyone is on paid outlook connected to our orgs cloud exchange. Unfortunately we will never stop supporting MS. Lucky I don’t have to deal with that stuff anymore as dev ops.
it looks like an outlook skin for mail. It is not proper outlook, and I could ne er see them giving it away since it costs users like $100 a year.
Outlook on windows 11 absolutely has ads in the inbox, though I understand you may not have windows 11 or installed the free outlook through the windows 11 upgrade.
“It’s fine” was always my experience when I used outlook through work. Thunderbird can also be integrated with microsoft programs, i’m not sure why its interoperability is such a standout feature for you. But having advertisements masquerading as unopened mail within my inbox is absolutely not fine.
“This change is designed to create an easier way for Outlook and Microsoft Teams users to reduce task switching across windows and tabs to help stay focused,” says Katy Asher, senior director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “By opening browser links in Microsoft Edge, the original message in Outlook or Teams can also be viewed alongside web content to easily access, read and respond to the message, using the matching authenticated profile. Customers have the option to disable this feature in settings.”
I don’t know if this is a neurodivergent thing but I 500% could never see myself in a position I could say something I knew to be such BS and put my name to it.
Mmm yes, let the snake oil flow through you.
They’d do better finally fixing teams. We’re talking years after release, and there’s still no option to change my status behaviour. It forces DnD when I get called, it puts me afk after only 5min, …
Their software does not fundamentally work very well. So even if this bs would be talking about an actual feature, that’s some stone age project management right there.
At this point it’s better to put it down, like the sick panda it is!
It’s buggy, bloated, slow and with a horrible UI.
My job involves a fair amount of paperwork (I know, I know, what year is this?) and the fact that Teams marks me as inactive when my hands are off the mouse for a couple of minutes borderline offends me.
Why fix, when you can sell?
Maybe that’s why you don’t work in marketing.
Technically, yes, lizard people diverge from ordinary human neurological make-up and marketers are all lizard people.
For real though, someone developed this feature. Like, how soul-crushing must that be, developing such blatant anti-features.
Eh, considering how MS wotks internally, the dev probably didn’t even know what he was developing.
I stopped using Windows and converted to Linux. I’m not going to be “one of those people” and tell you that you should too, but I’ve been using Linux full-time for 3 years for gaming, work, and personal stuff and never felt the need to go on Windows except to use my VR headset, which I haven’t used in months. I just built a new PC and haven’t even bothered installing my Windows SSD into it in the last 4 weeks since I built it. I may never and just sell my VR headset.
I’ve been wanting to switch to Linux but it just looks like one of those things I’d dive head-first into and have no idea what I’m doing, not to mention I have years of random shit on hard drives formatted for Windows.
I’d love to do it, but it all just looks so overwhelming, maybe i’ll think about it more seriously if/when I ever replace my current laptop. What flavor do you recommend? I mainly use my computer for gaming but sometimes school too, plus id like it to be as windows-like as possible just so I don’t have to worry about a major shift in usability.
Is there a way to convert windows content to linux-compatible files? Can I just save the files I want to a USB drive and move them? Nothing I wanna save is specifically windows, mostly game files and/or photos
Just plug it in. Linux will read it. You don’t need to do anything. Also I highly recommend Fedora with KDE Plasma.
This is the way.
was planning on switching to linux but then payday 2 dropped support for it. too bad I guess
All linux distros can read and write windows formatted drives and files.
What kind of files are you concerned by? Pretty much all pictures, videos, docs, etc. will all open on Linux without issue. The only real thing you have to think about is the applications you use and whether they can be run on Linux or have acceptable alternatives.
Not op, but I’ve been using various flavors of Linux off and on for a couple of years.
First I’ll note that in pretty much any flavor you pick should be able to retrieve data off those Windows drives. You’ll probably need NTFS support if you want to read from the drives directly, but I’m not 100% certain about the details so do a little searching before taking the plunge. Files generally should work fine. Images saved in any common format (.jpg, .png, etc) will be fine. Game files could be trickier. If you mean the actual files for running the game, you’ll either need a dedicated Linux version or run them through a compatibility layer like WINE or Proton (this may take a bit of luck to get working). If you mean things like save files then that all depends on the particular game… you’ll need to research moving data across operating systems for each game. For regular computer files, though, it is usually as simple as throwing them on a USB drive and dragging and dropping them.
Given that you want to do some gaming I would be remiss to not mention that, even in the best cases, Linux gaming can still be a little hit-or-miss. This is greatly exaggerated if you have uncommon hardware. For instance, Linux gaming on Intel ARC video cards is pretty rough right now. Sooner or later you will find a game that doesn’t work right, and you may not be able to fix it. Such is life.
As for picking a flavor (colloquially called a “distro”) that can get a bit complicated. If you just want a jumping-off point without the full breakdown, then Pop!-OS is probably a good starting point. They aim at being a more newbie-friendly distro, and they have a big enough community that you should be able to find help if you get stuck on something.
You should know that when you’re installing Linux, you will usually first boot the computer using a USB drive with the distro of your choice. This is called a live environment, and it gives you a chance to test out a distro without making any permanent changes to your computer. Of course, once you actually do install the new OS it will wipe all data from the computer’s drive so make sure you’re ready.
If you want to get a bit out in the weeds of picking a distro then read on, otherwise you can ignore the rest of the comment. If you choose to take the plunge then good luck, and I hope you enjoy it!
There are two major families of Linux that I think you should consider: Debian-based and Arch-based. There are a lot more than that, but IMO these are the most appropriate for your use case. Of the Debian-based distros, I’d recommend the aforementioned Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and Mint. Some good Arch-based options are Manjaro, Endeavour, or possibly Garuda.
When in doubt, a Debian-based distro is probably the right choice. Any of the distros above should do the trick, but all are a little different. I already described Pop!, so I won’t rehash it. Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distros ever. Probably the most popular for home computers. As a result, there is a wealth of forums and other users you can ask for help. If you run into a problem in Ubuntu, someone else has had to deal with the exact same thing and probably made a forum post about it. Linux Mint, in particular with their “Cinnamon” desktop was made to feel a bit like old Windows 7. It’s not exactly like Windows (no distro is) but if you’re a long-time Windows user then Mint feels strangely comfortable. Like Pop! its userbase is smaller than Ubuntu, but still more than substantial enough to help out with the most common hangups.
Anyone who knows about Arch Linux would probably raise an eyebrow at recommending any form of it to someone new to Linux, but in my defense, most of the development in Linux Gaming is being pushed by Valve right now, and their new SteamOS 3 (which is what the Steam Deck runs by default) is Arch-based. AFAIK SteamOS 3 is not yet available for non-steam deck systems. Valve has stated they intend on releasing it as a fully-fledged distro, and if that ever happens then it will likely become the de facto standard gaming Linux distro. Until then, I suspect that running another Arch-based distro might result in fewer issues while gaming. That said, while the distros I’ve named are much more user-friendly than vanilla Arch Linux, the Arch family is generally less beginner-friendly than their Debian counterparts. Some quick notes: Manjaro is fairly popular but a bit weird as far as Arch distros go, Endeavour is clean but I’m not super confident in their noob-friendliness, and Garuda has a gorgeous desktop and is probably the most feature complete for gaming but it includes some power-user tools (chaotic-AUR) out of the box that I wouldn’t recommend for new users.
On a final note, if you want to learn a lot about how to use a Linux system, and in particular the command line, you could try installing vanilla Arch. This is almost certainly a terrible idea; you’d have to be more than a little masochistic to try it. If you want your computer to just work then steer well clear of this option. Arch has a reputation for being non-user friendly and borderline hostile to newbies for a reason. If you decide to try this don’t expect anyone to hold your hand. And don’t ask for help on the Arch forums unless you’ve done everything by the book, to the letter, and you’ve actually tried everything else first. But making vanilla Arch your first distro would be a pretty chad move.
I’ve been using Linux since the first Ubuntu release in 2004. I still use occasionally Windows 11 for work, but about 95% of the time I use Linux.
What distro? Mentioning you love Linux but not saying what distro you use is like when someone posts a still frame of a brick wall pulled from their favorite movie, saying “I love this movie, everyone should see it” but doesn’t say the name of the damn movie. :) I’m curious!
I’ve been using both for a good while by now, Linux is good but damn I know that’s a sacrilege but I still like Windows.
Granted, I heavily customized my Windows install, made all the adjustments I wanted and threw out most of the nagging garbage and my locked down work computer is definitely worse.
Windows just… works most of the time, and it’s fluent and does what I want.
At the end of the day, most of the direct user interaction with an OS “directly” is task bar, start menu and file manager. And for all of these things, there’s a lot that annoys me on Linux. In Windows, I’m very happy.
Just to give one example. I like the individual entries in the taskbar to fill the entire width dynamically. If there’s one entry, it fills the entire taskbar, you get what I mean. On Windows, that’s a registry tweak. On KDE, that’s basically impossible. Like, I’m sure somewhere in the source code for the panel there’s a way to rewrite that, but frankly, that’s close enough to “basically impossible” for me.
I’m in this same boat. I enjoy gaming too much to be able to ditch Windows completely, but I have it very, very customized.
I enjoy gaming too and do it on Linux just fine. None of my normal games don’t run on Linux thanks to Valve’s work on Proton. Apex Legends, Mechwarrior Online, Halo MCC/Infinite, and much more all run on Linux without a hiccup.
Unless you firewall it… It is pinging bill gates every time you click start…
That sounds illegal, especially since they already lost an anti-trust lawsuit for Internet Explorer browser two decades ago. I guess they have enough power now that they don’t have to worry about silly things like laws.
That whole antitrust thing was just the US gov’t gaining leverage over MS. Once they got that, MS was forced to enable surveillance on their customers by the gov’t. Now that they’ve “played ball” for all this time, they are being allowed to resume their previous activities.
So true. You’d think they’d have learned a lesson for their BS with Internet Explorer. I’m sure we’re all aware, but here’s the Wikipedia link from that case for those that need a refresher.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.
Yeah what the hell is going on?
There was a lawsuit and in Windows 7 Microsoft was forced to offer a browser choice program that allowed users to pick different ones.
Nowadays everyone just forgot about that?
Browser lock in is worse than it ever has been since the 2000s and is approaching levels of monopolistic behavior we haven’t seen since the internet explorer vs Netscape debacle, if not already worse than that.Every ecosystem forces their own browser and the only way to circumvent it is with hacks.
To access certain one drive elements on android in the browser with Firefox, it tells you to open the page in chrome to proceed. If you do that, the Microsoft login page then asks specifically for using edge to sign in.
It’s insane that nobody cares. I went back to Firefox as soon as manifest v3 was announced, but nobody cares.
It’s alarming and once people realize what happened it’s too late.
That’s what we call malware!
That’s how it works with Microsoft. Even search in Windows disregards completely your default browsers settings into opening them straight in Edge.
I mean, do people actually use the search feature for anything besides looking for files IN your system?
And Microsoft thinks that if they don’t find the file we want them to search on a search engine we don’t use on a browser we don’t use.
Microsoft thinks that if you type the full word you must not actually be looking for the thing you typed
It also ignores the files and apps on your PC
They’re always ruining the UX to push their own system.
All aboard the anti-trust train 🚂💨
How many times must they be sued for this exact thing? It would be nice if they faced some real consequences this time.
Removed by mod
Reminds me of Google trying to force everyone with any kind of Google account to use Google+. If you had an account on YouTube, it’d convert that to a Google account, automatically create a Google+ account for it, and start posting your activities to it by itself. I know a ton of people who had active Google+ accounts they didn’t even know about.
Choo choo!!!
I hate it when someone starting edging on my PC without consent.
I’ll keep using Firefox until I’m dead or it’s dead!
i’ll stop using internet if firefox dies.
The internet needs an independent browser like Firefox.
The big issue with Firefox is that most of Mozilla’s funding still comes from Google, via an agreement that makes Google the default search engine in Firefox. Google essentially have the power to shut down Mozilla if they want to.
I wouldn’t mind if they started a subscription model that makes them enough to keep the thing running and be completely independent from Google.
Totally agreed. I would definitely pay to use FF, even a hateful subscription, if the alternative was to shut down. I think enough people are of the same opinion that its not going to be funding that kills it, but a buyout and kill off
@dan But they can’t because that would mean one less competitor and so FCC can use that to sue them.
I can definitely see the antitrust viewpoint. Would the FCC really force Google to keep funding one of their competitors though?
