I lack the psychology knowledge to know for sure - but isn't it quite normal psychological behavior to go into full rejection-mode, if someone tries to push something down your throat too hard?
Nobody likes being manipulated - and if the manipulation attempts are too obvious and shameless - wouldn't people reject whatever is being pushed at them, just to assert their independence and self-determination?
Even if the product being pushed at them might otherwise be something they'd want to take a closer look at?
For me personally, Microsofts' behavior is definitely pushing me further away from trying or using Edge. Just hearing the word "Edge" creates negative emotions for me - simply because of many years of getting it inappropriately shoved into my face. The first thought that goes through my mind, when I see "Edge" or "Bing" mentioned anywhere in Windows is "Not again. F*k off. Just leave me in peace. Respect my decision to use the browser of MY choice."
As Microsoft is continuing to be so pushy, aren't more and more people going to end up being immediately annoyed just at the bare mention of Edge or Bing?
Probably yes for you and me, but I've observed how my parents (70+) interact with Google's search results, and for them there's no difference between an ad at the top and "real" search results.
I'm pretty sure they would consider this response as something which could be a feasible search result and would engage with it, albeit somewhat confused. They'd very likely discard it as a non-helpful response, but I'm not sure if they would know that Microsoft has injected this huge ad on purpose in order to glue them to Bing, so I don't see how they would go into full rejection-mode.
To them the internet is full of inexplicable annoyances that get in the way all the time, unless they stay in their walled garden, so they've accepted it. Even more so since they don't use an ad-blocker and therefore get bombarded with a lot of trash.
But would your parents switch to Edge/Bing on their own - or would they ask for your help, to do that for them?
Is that really the sort of audience that would actually switch to Edge, if whoever maintains their computer for them has setup a different browser as default?
What you are saying is that your parents would NOT detect this as a manipulation attempt. And my post above says that when people DO detect the attempt, the natural response would be to resist it.
But Microsoft is not exactly subtle in their attempts - and that means more people will be able to detect it, right?
It seemed like they were doing better when they were running leenucks servers in Azure. But you can't upload images on LinkedIn with firefox (at least on leenucks.) And there were some UI weirdness on GitHub, so yeah... Playing dirty is in their genome. And I was just getting to the point where I liked C#.
No, the internet heavily biases towards people who are on the spectrum for Oppositional Defiant Disorder because only the top 1% of people who are the most passionate about any topic ever post and ODD biases people into being passionate about things most people don't care about.
Thus, if you read internet comments, you get the impression that some significant fraction of the world has a massive chip on their shoulder and are willing to go to great lengths to defy authority whereas if you ever run analytics for a company, you realize that group of people are almost always a rounding error in terms of impact.
Well, most people would not accept the generous offer from the African prince, just because he wrote them an email.
And not everyone would buy everything some market crier advertises to them - or order anything that's hyped on some shopping channel.
And hopefully not too many would not fall for those scam calls, were the caller claims to be from Microsoft and to need their help (and password) to fix a Virus on their Computer.
And not everyone will just blindly agree to every single upsell that any company offers them.
Most people are kind of conditioned to be at least somewhat suspicious of anyone trying very hard to convince them of something.
I don't know if it's correct to call that a "disorder", kinda implying that this is the "abnormal" behavior - and also implying that agreeing and accepting all of the above is what a "normal" person (with no disorder) would do.
Probably not everyone does so, but I certainly do.
The more MS tries to reinstate MS-EdgeExplorer as a windows locked default,
the greater lengths I go to, to ensure it is continously disabled and uninstalled. My experience so far is that this has to be repeated
frequently, as some mechanism in Windows or Windows Update
enthusiastically re-adds Edge often :-/.
Microsoft is very hostile toward its users. They added Ads in the paid version of the operating system. You can't uninstall Edge. Even if you remove Edge, which is difficult, the following Windows update will reinstall it. Instead of searching for the next big idea, how about you fix your dam OS first and stop installing stupid games and showing Ads? Keep it Microsoft with your stupid games, and Google has nothing to worry about you. LOL.
Gosh yes. Even for blind users, now they're doing this awful thing where even the File Explorer context menu (shift + F10) is this weird preview of "options most people will need" where at the bottom there's a "view more" thing which opens the actual context menu, where my 7Zip, Dropbox, open in terminal, and stuff are. Ugh can't wait until either Linux is accessible enough for non-programmers and advanced users, or MacOS VoiceOver can work well enough with the web to work with Google Docs and Salesforce. Windows 11 is not the most accessible version of Windows yet, Microsoft, and wasn't built from the ground up to be accessible. Just look at this Kaiju dung!
I'm so much happier after doing it. Hard to believe Microsoft thought it was a good move for user happiness. Sure, they should avoid intimidating users with no computer savvy, but I doubt those users often open the context menu.
With each new Windows release we inevitably hear from insiders that Microsoft has several influential designers and PMs who all but refuse to use Windows in their work and home lives. Anti-dogfooding-based development.
> Ugh can't wait until either Linux is accessible enough for non-programmers and advanced users
My 8 year old and 12 year old are both fine using Linux, so I wouldn't call them advanced or technical. What do you need it to do that you can't?
[Edit] Somehow I missed the blind part. I haven't tried those accessibility functions, though I would have thought that corporate customers would have required that so they don't get sued.
> accessible enough for non-programmers and advanced users
I mean unless you also discredit Windows and MacOS as being accessible because there exist pro applications that aren't present on those platforms, Im not sure what your point is.
Instead of searching for the next big idea, how about you fix your dam OS first and stop installing stupid games and showing Ads?
They’re monetizing their install base. All of the things they do that annoy the heck out of people on HN are things they’ve A/B tested to increase revenues. If they listened to you then you’d be happier but they’d be leaving money on the table.
You’re probably right that this sort of “scorched earth” monetization at all costs is bad for the company’s long-term future. But the stock market doesn’t care about that. They only care about the next quarter.
I think to win long-term in any market, it helps tremendously to win the hearts and minds of the “elite” users first. You see this in fashion, in cars, in tech, even in investments.
These top / early / elite consumers tell the rest what to buy. For example, the non-techies in my life use (MS) ChatGPT only because I told them about it and also told them it’s the next big thing.
I will also add that I think the majority of investment money is in the hands of long-term thinkers; a lot of this money is managed on behalf of others. It would behoove every CEO to make the power users happy over the long term.
Like the 1h long video goes into detail, I think that systemd is a definite step in the right direction, but definitely has bad aspects about it. To that end, I think work can be (and is being) done to remedy those deficiencies.
Now to compare "good intending but buggy software" to malicious (and guilty of monopolization exploitation) actions to further cement themselves in the lead is completely and utterly a laughable comparison.
Oh christ, this nonsense again. The switch to systemd was a practical engineering decision. Shoving ads into the Start menu has totally different intentions, and totally different effects on user experience.
I tried Devuan. It sucked. It booted slower, it was more difficult to set up, and apt upgrade made things explode more frequently that it does in Debian. If all you did on your computer was browse the internet, you'd never know the difference. If you use your computer for anything more sophisticated than that, Devuan offered a markedly worse experience. I don't care what you think of Poettering.
Comparing a not-for-profit that made one decision you didn't like to a company that has a long history of screwing over the entire personal computing ecosystem for commercial gain is delusional.
Yeah I think if you’re coming from the startup or less so tech in general you may not realize how ubiquitous Microsoft is at work. A massive amount of companies are Microsoft from the ground up. Not to mention there are some entire industries where to run the necessary software you have to use windows at the very least.
Google did the same thing in the early days of Chrome.. using search to heavily promote Chrome..
They went as far as making so everything else they did would not work correctly on other browsers artificially..
They would introduce random delays or flat out refuse to work in other browsers but all you had to do was change the browser user-agent to mimic Chrome and things would magically start working..
Sorry but i am not sorry at all for Google.. They both are no different from each other.. Just two companies trying to maximize the amount of money they make..
Often the anchor to Microsoft Windows is legacy. Both in existing code and existing knowledge. Takes energy to diverge away from both.
Currently maintain applications because the former developer only knew C#. Also the tools used to configure devices are only Windows based. This dramatically harms quality of the product in the long run and support.
My experience with product is design. Use the solution the fits the problem not the solution you currently know and rely on.
You have to pay me to engage with Microsoft / Windows!
Doesn't Edge on Windows work like Chrome does on Android, with it providing an API that other apps can use to render webpages in something other than Trident?
IE was also impossible to remove backj in the days.. they did have an option uninstall but all it did was remove the icons from start menu, but all the files where still there..
At this day and age the browser is so deeply integrated into the OS that is not really possible to remove it without breaking things..
This is why you cant remove Edge from Windows, Chrome from Android and Safari from apple things.
Even in linux, Gnome has Epiphany (now Gnome WEB) and KDE has Konqueror..
Bing search in Firefox on Linux, not logged into Microsoft, for "Chrome":
Promoted by Microsoft
Microsoft Edge
Try the latest browser from Microsoft
Microsoft Edge is powered by the same open source technology as Google Chrome,
providing best in class web and extension compatibility.
Bing has become annoying about putting ads before real results, and often hiding the real results. Bing image search is awful about this.
>Bing has become annoying about putting ads before real results, and often hiding the real results. Bing image search is awful about this
Comparing bing to google:
- Google has a number of "sponsored" results at the top of search results, which look identical to the actual search results, other than having a "sponsored".
- Searching for chrome on bing.com produces an Edge advert (the one you mention) at the top, but it has a grey background and is obviously not a search result.
- Searching for anything else (e.g. "online tutor") on bing does produce ads above the search results, similar to google, which look identical to search results, with the word "Ad" in front.
So, from what I can tell, Microsoft isn't really any worse than Google.
> - Google has a number of "sponsored" results at the top of search results, which look identical to the actual search results, other than having a "sponsored".
That was the reason I switched away from Google. Here when I search "apache cassandra" the first result is something something free trial.
edit: I just tried with Bing it gave something similar, oh well.
I tried "apache cassandra" with yahoo and duckduckgo and they both have similar ads that look like search results. Yahoo is even worse, as they just have "Ads related to: apache cassandra" at the top, and then a bunch of ads, where is isn't really obvious where the actual search results begin, just a horizontal line.
Having a look for other search engines, I see all the regular ones from the 90s seem to be dead. There is one called swisscows.com which I hadn't heard of, and it has similar inline ads.
Those are exactly the same top two results, in the same order, as the Brave search screenshot you're responding to. Perhaps you meant to respond to another comment?
The wiki link is second in Brave also, or are you pointing out something else?
Anyway, I also advocate for Kagi, but Brave happens to be free, and I haven't been convinced of the value of what Kagi charges for search, but I have been tempted.
Brave browser tries to do some annoying crypto thing by default and has some questionable privacy settings but you can turn all that off. Other than that it is a great browser which has built in ad-blocking (including for youtube). The search is great and is constantly improving.
Regarding the ads situation, Google Search has been the same in my experience. install UBlock origin and that should take care of that annoying fucking crap.
Regarding Bing - I am still yet to meet anyone who uses Bing on a day to day basis for reasons other than adult content, and the fact that Microsoft "still" has a rewards program for people who use Bing itself makes it very clear that it cannot get enough user growth after all these years and is trying to hard to force it by incentivizing it.
I use bing on my gaming PC not my work computer. I use it specifically for the rewards which I redeem for a an occasional Game Pass month.
I do use edge for my work. It has a few key features that I quite like:
- a very nice inbuilt vertical tab implementation for support for auto-suspending tabs with exclusion rules.
- uBlock Origin Support (at least for a while longer, I’ll re-evaluate if things change).
- Familiar dev tools
- no google tracking built-in. I know I’m trading this for a Microsoft tracking but I trust Microsoft more than google nowadays. All my companies stuff is tied into Office365/Active Directory anyways so it’s not like I can avoid it.
This seems region specific. I tried searching for "chrome" on bing, in incognito with uBlock Origin turned off and all I got was a banner at the top of the search results asking me to try edge, all links below that were pages related to chrome. I'm in India.
I can't reproduce. If I search for 'chrome', the answer I get back from Bing AI:
> Chrome is a web browser developed by Google. It is known for its speed, simplicity, and security features. Would you like to know more about Chrome?
Additionally, I get a proper download link for Chrome as the top result. This is on Edge.
Performing this on Chrome yields a different, arguably better answer from Bing AI.
> Chrome is a web browser developed by Google1. It is fast, secure, and free to download and use. It also has features like bookmarks sync, form autofill, and Google smarts built-in. Chrome supports various operating systems, such as Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chromebook. You can check if your device meets the system requirements to use Chrome3.
> Shortly after we published this story with that comment, Fischel confirmed Microsoft has pulled the plug on this particular idea. “The experience is no longer flighting.” Sure enough, I no longer see it.
But "flighting"? Does that mean "deployed"? I've never heard that before -- I'm guessing a weird variation of "in flight" which itself is an unusual metaphor? Is that something people are saying now?
“Experience” is a common term in software experimentation. It’s a superset of ad, feature, image, etc. It very literally means anything that a user will experience. A broader version of feature flagging is experience management.
Does "mods" mean "modifications" here, as used in the car, vape, gaming scenes? Originally I was thinking perhaps "modernists" or "moderators," but those don't fit your earlier comment. Quite an overloaded abbreviation!
(To be fair, Mozilla has done the same shit in the past when they went adware: https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish... --- I'd look for the HN article discussing it and link that here too, but ironically Google is also refusing to find it.)
It must really, really suck to be a Google executive finally seeing their own stunts reversed on them. It's absolutely amazing how much criticism Microsoft pushing Bing gets when Google did it more and worse for longer.
As usual: People who generally use Google products don't even notice how insanely aggressively Google uses it's various monopolies to push their other products. I have a screenshot of Gmail on Firefox which had three separate Chrome banners stacked in my browser at once.
I don’t think any company or fan base is different than any other, really.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al all serve their own best interests first, all in very similar ways. Their fans often have a blind spot for their company’s actions while lambasting the others for doing the same thing.
And it’s just plain human nature; people see fandom as “belonging as part of a group” and any criticism towards an “enemy” is going to reinforce their choice of browser/OS/phone/whatever and that the company they are cheering for is the best. And the deeper you are in the fandom, the more your echo chamber feeds into those same beliefs.
In truth, all companies suck, as do their fans. Some may suck less on a particular day/week/month, but over a long enough time period it’s all the same shit.
From another perspective, over the past decade it must have been really frustrating for Microsoft execs to see their own stunts reversed on them by Google.
Yes, this. I said as much in another comment, but you worded it perfectly. Google pushing their G Suite, Chrome, even ChromeOS far more than Apple/Microsoft and no one bats an eye.
This isn’t a fair comparison. Open Chrome then open Edge. In the former, you see a simple inferface with a search bar and maybe a few icons for frequently visited websites. In the latter, you’re meandering through a Turkish bazaar filled with thousands of knick-knack vendors, newsstands, etc. Microsoft puts no thought into the user experience and every thought into “we can use it to make money!”
> Chrome curates content that may interest you based on your activity. You must be signed in to your Google Account for your Cards to appear on the New Tab page. When you click on an item in a card, it opens the content in the same tab.
It looks like right now it’s limited to recipes and unfinished shopping carts, but the intent seems to be the same in the long run.
FWIW it can easily be disabled, but so can the Bing News ads.
I can’t find Cards … Is it US only? I recently started using Chrome again - like last month - never noticed any “Cards”. There is the weird Journey thing though. No idea what’s that about.
Might be? I think it’s just so limited in scope right now that most people don’t see them or at least not as often. They seem to be triggered based on recent activity rather than Bing News which is always there.
I think I’ve seen the “cart” one once or twice but the recipe one was downright obnoxious. The only reason I know the feature even exists is because I once searched for a street corn recipe and would constantly get the same cards reminding me about the recipe for weeks after.
If I haven’t touched the card in weeks, you’d think they’d get the hint that I no longer want to make street corn.
What I think was going on: Bing opened an A/B test to test a feature (which explains why the author couldn’t reproduce everywhere). The new feature related to how search terms were classified as “Bing features”. Maybe it was some kind of threshold. Because of that change, searches for “chrome” were tagged as “Bing features” and therefore the flow for promoting Bing was triggered.
Ultimately the goal of such an experiment is to increase the uptake of Edge but they overshot it this time.
Not sure which party has no shame, is it the users who continue to get treated like aholes by ms and continue to expect them to change or ms who continue to treat their users as aholes every chance they get.
Just leave their eco systems, reject their products until they treat their customers better.
Why is it so hard to change OS? Which application is holding you back? (Sure there are some critical applications that only work in Windows and that’s fair, just curious to know).
As for the browser - use a different browser, Chrome has the majority of the market but there is choice. There was choice even in the dark days of the First Browser Wars.
As for the browser alternatives I can use on my work machine are
- Chrome (I’m already being tracked by Microsoft through my office365/Active Directory everywhere, might as well not give it all to google too).
- Safari I might consider trying this again starting in the next MacOS version once PWA support lands. Right now I avoid having to install multiple Electron apps with the PWA support.
- Firefox I’ve been off and on with. If uBlock origin support is finally gutted from chromium I’ll switch to this again, but I find the Firefox dev tools inferior and I quite dislike their interface in recent iterations.
Someone had to write about this properly but blaming Bing is shortsighted. This is what LLM based searches are bound to turn into: full page undisclosed ads disguised as helpful summaries. Bing, Bard, and likely others will do the same.
That's why Open Source LLMs are critical. Any commercial LLM you use is going to have advertisements baked in, preferences for particular products, perhaps political biases. Corporations will pay through the nose to have a trusted assistant push their products.
I don't think open sourceness is relevant here. If the business model of the product is ads, then the thing will eventually serve ads.
I'm also not arguing against LLMs in general if that was the vibe of the previous comment. Just claiming that Google and Microsoft found an excuse to include full screen ads instead of search results.
"Perhaps"? That seems rather unavoidable. Younger generations already are being molded by corporations so think what happens when LLMs will take the lead. Set the parameters of "safety" and there you have it: a trained in a particular way society who is not allowed to think by itself or criticize and is unaware of situation because what they perceive is the norm. Ads baked in are one thing but the potential social implications are much worse, I believe
If Microsoft is this hostile and in your face with its paying users, I'm concerned about what its policies are when it comes to its own employees.
Are Microsoft employees allowed to use Firefox and Chrome internally on a daily basis or is it permitted only for UI tests?
Is there an (un)official internal policy on this? If it is not enforced then I guess they only care about it when money is involved. Not sure how I should feel in that case.
Most of us pirates and hacker types use Yandex or Baidu these days. We get MUCH BETTER quality searches there than the US search engines. And yes, I'm located in the US.
The ONLY problems we have are local-to-us searches. Then again, you're better off with a yellow pages/business phonebook than hoping that scroogle will give you what you ask for.
In my case DDG abilities seriously deteriorated in last 6 months. I'm getting more ads or irrelevant results just because phrase happens to be pointing on something, someone that could bee considered as more "popular". There are also fillers that doesn't even come near my initial inquiry, like I'm seeing sites about Łódź Ghetto because it happens I'm in Poland. Why? I have no idea.
duckduckgo is basically Bing without the AI. They use other sources too, but those seem to be more for like the automatic link to Wikipedia or the calculator that shows up if you type "7*44"
I personally have found both duckduckgo and Google to be terrible recently. I've tried a bit of yandex, but the results weren't immediately superior enough to make me switch. Baidu I haven't tried.
This seems like a gag that wasn't intended for production. Like an inside joke for an internal app used by MS only, which was then forgotten about when converting the system to be public-facing. QA happened to not run this code path (most likely), or overlooked it due to lack of awareness of antitrust law and lack of anticipating the bad vibes.
All of those words are necessary except 'spit'! Come on!
And if you got rid of 'spit' you'd need a different verb.
You could remove "Microsoft has no shame", but I don't think that changes whether the article title in total is clickbait or not. Clickbait would be "Microsoft has no shame" all by itself.
I think your definition of clickbait is too narrow. For me, it includes the headline trying to gin up a controversy. But I don't really want to argue about it.
> They are designed to give you the result you wanted to find.
This is not true anymore... they're designed to give you the result that their paying customers want you to find. Even if that means that most of the search results are irrelevant to what you wanted to find.
That is right. If you search for tarot or astrology, it will send you to the websites that are the most relevant given those search terms, instead of showing you authoritative content from scientists or scholars telling you it's false.
This is an interesting case. While dangerous false information (such as vaccine misinformation) does get effectively replaced with truth, not-generally-dangerous false information doesn't, and that's probably a very good thing.
It would be an interesting option to make available to users, especially with generative stuff if possible.
Honestly, I don't believe this. I know we all get a different search experience, so just because mine is different, doesn't mean author sees the same, but this is so far from what I am seeing and what seems reasonable by any stretch of the imagination.
For what it's worth, on Edge, I see a large banner ad for Edge (no need to change browser), top search result is "download google Chrome" and on the side bing chat explains what the chrome browser is and suggest I go explore on google.com
On Chrome, I see the same, only the add is "Try edge now".
I don't think this is worse than what Google used to do against Firefox (where they'd advertise Google Chrome in a spot not reserved for advertisement, if you where merely visiting from Firefox. Although in fairness, they once upon a time advertised Firefox to IE users in a similar fashion)
Nobody likes being manipulated - and if the manipulation attempts are too obvious and shameless - wouldn't people reject whatever is being pushed at them, just to assert their independence and self-determination?
Even if the product being pushed at them might otherwise be something they'd want to take a closer look at?
For me personally, Microsofts' behavior is definitely pushing me further away from trying or using Edge. Just hearing the word "Edge" creates negative emotions for me - simply because of many years of getting it inappropriately shoved into my face. The first thought that goes through my mind, when I see "Edge" or "Bing" mentioned anywhere in Windows is "Not again. F*k off. Just leave me in peace. Respect my decision to use the browser of MY choice."
As Microsoft is continuing to be so pushy, aren't more and more people going to end up being immediately annoyed just at the bare mention of Edge or Bing?