> In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links.
That shows such complete and utter contempt for the wishes of their users. The user has actively selected a browser as the one they want to use by default, but windows only uses it in the EEA because they were forced to.
As it will be used by EEA system components, there's presumably no technical/compatibility issues that would stop the rest of the world using it to.
Not to mention that MS already went out of their way and spent considerable technical effort to not have the system apps respect the default browser setting - such as introducing a separate URL scheme for "edge-only" links, then later patching the scheme registry so that no other app could register itself as a handler for that scheme.
I feel like there are two Microsofts. There are parts that make some honestly good software. And then there are parts touched by Bing and MSN, and they're some of the most hideous, dark patterny piles of user hostile garbage. Win11 search, widgets. Edge. Now Skype. They just ruin things that might otherwise even be great. Edge has a bunch of good ideas going on the UI but it hates user choice so much it just feels bad to use.
Same with most companies. The business side tends to steer, resist and fight the creative side. The irony is that in the long run, these two are aligned.
Sad that higher management feels the need to use short-term mechanisms for profit at the expense of reputation and what's best for their users in the long run.
Not completely correct. In the past there were technical issues opening "system service sites" with any other browser, because ActiveX controls only worked in Internet Explorer
I have to ask a really basic question: Why does Microsoft have such a vested interest in users using Edge over competitors?
I get the argument: "it's their browser, of course they want people to use it" but for me that answer isn't satisfactory. What is the financial motive to go through all the trouble of pushing Edge? The only reason I can think of is "your data" but even then, what sort of data might MS want to extract from your browser that they can't get from the underlying OS?
Yeah, I've reorganized and edited a bit some ChatGPT answers—it's quick at sketching out the big picture, and it's easy to fact- or logic-check if needed. Also helps me catch stuff I might miss if I'm in a hurry.
> I have to ask a really basic question: Why does Microsoft have such a vested interest in users using Edge over competitors?
FOMO and Paranoia. Anything that looks like a market they might miss out on they get scared, freak out, create a shit product and jump in the market with HUGE marketing/info campaigns to convince everyone theirs is the best product, and then it turns out it's not really a profitable market at all. But at least they weren't usurped.
Have you used Microsoft Edge recently? It is a dumping ground for all things that Microsoft wants to try in a way that is easier to do than sending A/B testing out via Windows Update.
They have a OneNote feed sidebar now, too. Actually great for quick notes during browsing. Except that it's part of Edge, which is a privacy disaster full of dark patterns.
Advertising is really lucrative. MS wants to get a bigger share of the pie, and that's done by driving people to use Bing. Also, if Bing Chat gets people used to using AI chatbots for search, that dramatically increases the cost of delivering search. Search results are not a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue, but they are Google's main source of income. Search standardizing on LLM chatbots would take a huge chunk out of Google's margins.
Just see chrome current intention now? What purpose they promote chrome crazily in the early days. It's to monopolize and becoming the dominant player which control how the policy of interneting favor to their ads activity
A generous interpretation is that they don't want to worry about the resources used by internal OS components being compatible across infinite variety of browser vendors, versions, add-ons (and those versions), etc.
Is the idea that it would have been really good if the person who organized the insurrection also had the ability to censor people who disagreed with him?
Ok man whatever you say. I’m just saying while you think you’re making some major point here it’s just pushing people away because it sounds so ridiculous.
I think the stance is that while what the EU does is good for the consumer it's annoying as hell for American tech companies to be assessed billion dollar fines all the time. If the punishment was "comply in 180 days or we'll suspend your business charter" I think you'd see a lot more support.
> If the punishment was "comply in 180 days or we'll suspend your business charter"
The punishment is generally "comply in 180 days [actually it's usually measured in years] or we'll fine you". And they often don't comply, and then get fined and sometimes end up complying.
If they obeyed the rules to begin with they wouldn't be fined. It's literally a calculated risk by the big tech companies that the cost of compliance will be less than the profits during the time of non-compliance.
Sadly it pays off. The biggest ones are the worst. Windows has been rewriting boot loaders and bullying smaller companies with SmartScreen Application Reputation. Android has forced everyone through FCM (or suffer degraded experience). Apple adds software glitches if you replace iPhone parts.
Where are the regulators? Asleep, underfunded, or being paid off to close their eyes. And then, these companies get to write the laws through lobbying because of their scale.
I hope someone manages to write a crack or something that enables the same behaviour in non-EEA locales, if only to see what mental gymnastics MS will engage in to explain why that would be bad for users.
Microsoft is unwilling to evolve ethically as a company on this point. They don't understand that we remember who they are, and you don't have to use the wayback machine to remind yourself: https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/5/18/17362452/microsoft-...
I'm loving M$ having to admit they're intentionally abusing their users by disrespecting their preferences even when it would cost them nothing to do so.
On the windows front, it actually costs them more to make the feature geographic dependent. But on the browser dominance, the choice would actually cost M$.
Apple doesn’t disrespect set user preferences in the same way that Microsoft does. This sort of oversimplified drive-by whataboutism isn’t great for conversation.
Oh, they do. On my iPhone, I've:
-changed the 'default browser'
-'uninstalled' Safari
Yet, whenever I want to search for a highlighted word, it opens Safari. This is such an absurd situation where I am browsing a site and want to do a search for something I just read and, instead of just opening a new tab or replacing the active tab with a web search, it opens a different browser app I do not want to use.
This is just not the way any reasonable user would expect a system app to behave once all browser selection settings are configured to use a different browser.
> Yet, whenever I want to search for a highlighted word, it opens Safari.
I cannot replicate, it opens Firefox for me BUT it completely disregards my search engine choice, so it opens Google even though Kagi is my default search engine.
Highlight a word or phrase in Firefox, in the popup there's a "Search" option. It will always search in Safari. Firefox had to add their own "Search in Firefox" option, that appears at the end of the popup (and sometimes not at all).
I can verify this. Setting Firefox to my default browser doesn’t change the behavior of “Search on internet” word lookup on long press: it still opens in Safari.
Firefox on iPhone is Firefox on iPhone, but it uses WebKit instead of Gecko.
Chrome on iPhone is Chrome on iPhone, but it uses WebKit instead of Blink.
The reason this is important for you to keep in mind is because Firefox is whatever Mozilla says Firefox is, and Chrome is whatever Google says Chrome is. There's no reason to suppose the iPhone version of some product should share any code with the Android version of the same product.
And yet the experience of Safari on iOS is overall pretty good. I think I would not hate the Edge experience quite so much if it did not shove MSN content in my face, display a garish bing search page, and aghressively promote their browser. Also it does not help that I have 25 years of experience avoiding MS browsers for various other reasons. I’m not saying it’s great that Apple does this, but I do think Microsoft could make fewer technically minded people (and legislators) complain about it if they were less aggressive with their tactics.
Only in part - and it would certainly not be “just fine”. Edge is pretty nice nowadays. It’s the tactics to promote it as the default - now and in the past - that have drawn so much scrutiny. And IE did used to be objectively inferior to the competition.
I’m saying the people at MS promoting this in this particular way are, well, dumb.
As a developer targeting Edge is fine, there's not really any significant difference between building a page that supports it versus any other Chrome derivatives.
But as a user wow is it the most trashy and abusive program I routinely encounter. Start it for the first time and you're confronted with tabloid news and advertising. Sponsored links are mixed into your frequently visited sites by default. It injects itself into your online shopping and sends all your images and browser behavior to their servers for various weak justifications. You can turn it into a passable experience by scrolling through and configuring something in nearly every single settings tab, but then they just ignore you and inject new advertising sidebars or icons in a random update. Keeping it restricted to "just a browser" requires constant vigilance. It's clearly first and foremost just an advertising revenue funnel for Microsoft, which is completely pathetic of them. At least IE was mostly just a browser even if it did that pretty badly most years.
The hard and fast rule is: you're not permitted to have a source code interpreter.
That's the "rules of engagement", same way you can't run Flash or Linux binaries; the same way you can't touch windows kernel space without a code-signing certificate from a eye-gouging authority.
Exceptions to apples rule are rarely given, even for educational purposes; such as pythonista.
When taken though that lens; if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app: alternative interpreters of HTML/CSS could exist.
Unrelated, but: Ironically the original vision for the iPhone was web-apps not native ones (as there was only an app store created after community backlash over Apple pushing people to the web).
> if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app
It's rich to hear this used as a defense of any corporation. Everything is a web app now because nobody got their act together to ship a true "write once, ship anywhere" platform. Microsoft smugly profited off this in the short term with Windows, and Apple used it as an excuse to double-down on their proprietary SDKs. It's obvious why everything is a webapp; what's the realistic alternative? Developing native apps for every platform on one device isn't even feasible nowadays. Then you'd need the developer subscriptions, a cross-platform app architecture and the willingness to write n number of UI mockups, where n is the number of target platforms you intend to hit. It's a veritable waste of time to do anything else.
It's not better anywhere. That's the problem, everything is a game of compromise and when you try to fix things for yourself a big company gives you the stink-eye. The web is the last place left where developers feel they have freedom, which should make us all feel very sad considering they run a whole-ass computer that they effectively ignore because of arbitrary restrictions.
> The web is the last place left where developers feel they have freedom
Come on, we have excellent open computing platforms; it's just not where the money is right now.
Nobody can see passed their nose for profits though so we end up with lowest common denominator everything: which forces you to run a whole code interpreter on everything.
Apple said "no, you can't" and that's where the money is, so you had (and continue to have) a choice and your business chooses to use it.
So, you have to play by those rules.
I mean, I'm not taking a stand here; despite people believing that I'm defending apple. You don't get the sit around though and reap the benefits of the system they built (and developers helped build) while simultaneously trying to tear it down.
They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them; so why are we complaining?
If you actually care you would make programs on one of the many open standards platforms which in turn would turn them into more attractive platforms as the ecosystem improved.
But nobody does, everyone just wants the money now.
Largely, I don't disagree with you. Apple's stance is entirely business-oriented. My original point isn't taking a stand here either; this is just why native apps suck and why people disregard them to make Electron apps. We both seem to agree that business is the core concern.
Apple is at least complicit in the status-quo as a vendor of native app SDKs, and it's something they could probably fix with the right initiative. At the business layer, they have no motivation to fix this issue. On an individual level, it's a black hole of annoyance, confusion and hand-wavey abstraction as to why certain things are off-limits or why certain apps aren't on iPhone. Treating your userbase as a hostage situation is an obvious ploy, and one I can't encourage even to fix another problem. If we rely on the altruism of businesses to fix our market problems, then we are subject to their whims when they want to change things for themselves.
If we can both agree that Apple can and does make decisions that harm their users, then we're basically on the same page. I want to scrutinize that harm, and hopefully spread enough awareness to codify a change. You're free to feel however you want on the topic, but I would object to this behavior from any company.
> They set the rules, you all agreed to play by them
The internet did not agree to "Apple's rules". That's like saying Sony made their "rules" with the Playstation 3 browser, and now everyone has to play by that. They released a client, and their customers agreed to their Terms of Service. The internet will do whatever it wants, including whittle itself down to the lowest common denominator of 'document rendering' to hit Apple's platforms. If that's an undesired outcome for them or their users, maybe they should change their approach.
Thin clients with 2007-era javascript interpreters as the only code execution framework (vs local MACH-O binaries) does seem to be a bit of a weird choice if "slow" was the problem and you intended to have thin clients.
There's also a backend. Back in 2007 a web app was mostly backend code that would send you HTML to display, and at worst it would have some AJAX for a chatbox/autoreload.
Not really. I mean, iPhones were slower than laptops back then but that’s not saying much as all phones were in the same ballpark at best. The actual reasons are well documented: it was a ressource hog (on all platforms, not only phones; there were still netbooks around), sucked batteries dry (including on both Windows and Mac laptops with much better batteries than phones), and was unstable (being the leading cause of crashes on Macs at the time). Jobs even wrote an open letter about it.
It was not practical on Android either, mostly a stunt, and faded quietly into obscurity over the course of a couple of years.
Eh. Jobs was disingenuous at the best of times, I had Flash Lite running fine on Symbian a year or so before the iPhone hit the market.
I'm not saying it was great, but performance/efficiency was massively better than similar code in JS at the time. (And several years later, I rewrote a Flash app for ancient Tivo boxes in HTML/JS - same functionality, half the performance even after a lot of fine tuning.)
He was on firmer ground complaining about the bugs & security issues admittedly!
>> if we hadn't turned everything into a fucking web-app
> Could you elaborate?
I run a web browser with JS turned off and the web is mostly unusable for me, even things that should be plain documents like news reports try to choke down a dozen or so megabytes of obfuscated garbage that it insists must run on my CPU doing goodness knows what to render a document in common markdown.
So, despite being "free" you just run any old garbage you happen to come across on the internet and hope the "Fantastically optimised awesomely sandboxed" runtime that is definitely not too complicated to have issues (despite being one of the most complicated interpreters in history), definitely has no security bugs and will protect you.
I'm not pro apple here. I'm anti the enshittification of everything because some arsehat decided it was necessary for me to run whatever arbitrary shite they managed to vomit onto a web-server.
That Apple makes it hard for you? Fine. Enemy of my enemy.
> I'm not pro apple here. I'm anti the enshittification of everything
That's a highly contradictory stance. Accepting one brand of enshittification to solve another, less-significant problem is an indefensible position. You can't ignore Apple's arbitrary shite while complaining about the prevalence of other arbitrary decisions, it's a go-nowhere fallacy. There is no point; you are just promoting something that you think can help you, and then refusing to rationalize it in the greater context beyond browsers.
There's no reason to paint this as an "enemy of my enemy" situation, either. You either think browser clients are a powerful tool that deserves better scrutiny, or you think the status quo is fine. Nobody is putting on armor and picking up a sword to go to war for their favorite corporate-sponsored browser. If anyone has you believe that, they're probably manipulating you.
Apple doing shitty things is irrelevant because ultimately that applies to people who buy apple products and people who want to sell products that work on apple devices.
What Web Developers are doing affects me daily.
Apple pisses off web developers who want to turn a browser into an OS with crap like WebUSB? Not seeing a problem.
Apple actively prevents the monopoly position of v8/blink/Chrome? Not seeing a problem.
Apple has my support in-so-far as its the only company that seems to tell web developers "no".
Enemy of my enemy applies; No other company, especially one with any actual leverage, is preventing the lurch of web crap.
> Apple pisses off web developers who want to turn a browser into an OS with crap like WebUSB? Not seeing a problem.
See, this is the problem. If Apple is going to charge you 30% to use a serialized data cable, they're going to get annihilated legislatively. That's not a choice the market gets to make, it's one market regulators decide on. As we've seen in multiple European countries, Apple doing shitty things is not irrelevant because they get fined for participating in said markets.
Thank god for the Digital Markets Act. Apple can take their performance art and sell it somewhere with proper authoritarianism, like China. Oh wait...
Apple had a pretty clear definition of interpreted code which boiled down to: "Does your interpreted download allow the user to write infinite loops or recursion?"
WebKit is probably the only thing holding the web open at this point. Imagine if this last bastion of non-Chromium went away, and Googles stranglehold on the web was finally total.
Opening up iOS to other browser engines doesn't mean that suddenly Safari stops working. If anything it would force Safari to become competitive with Chrome.
> If anything it would force Safari to become competitive with Chrome.
It would take more than just being competitive, the WebKit team would need to start perfectly reproducing Blink behaviors and quirks. Devs are already more than happy to never test their work against anything that’s not Chrome and that’s only going to intensify when they don’t need to care about WebKit any more — any deviance from Chrome even if it’s technically within spec will be considered an error.
That’s where users feel forced to change browsers, because if they don’t they’ll frequently be running into pages that are broken in browsers that aren’t Blink-based.
Regardless it will mean that Safari will lose a significant proportion its market share.
There will be less incentive for developers to make sure their stuff works on anything but Chrome forcing safari devs to just play catch up all the time.
The web isn't made open by forcing people to run specific client software. It's a bit like arguing that Explorer was the only thing keeping Netscape in line. With Apple shipping private attestation in their browsers and dragging their feet on open standards, it's hard to consider them a friend of the weak.
At the very least they do not allow keychain to interact with browsers other than safari. This means that your autofill does not synchronize easily with your mobile devices.
That's a choice that is not based on technical conditions and is pure disrespect of user preferences.
Well it’s not at all obvious how consumers would benefit from that.
If the deep integration between hardware, software and services is the main reason why people buy Apple’s products the harm from breaking the up might outweigh any of the benefits.
Oh yes they do. Have you ever tried to assign the .mp4 extension to open with something other than QuickTime? It just doesn't work, and it hasn't worked for a looooong time.
What are you talking about? That is complete nonsense.
I've never seen any video open in anything other than my default video player IINA, it's almost like quicktime isn't installed, i've never seen it pop up.
When someone texts me an address, the only option is “Open in Maps” which is for Apple Maps, when I’d clearly prefer Google Maps.
When I click on an address in FB Messenger, I get the “open in google maps or Apple Maps” prompt, but choosing Google Maps just takes me to the Google Maps App Store page, even though I have the app installed and updated.
If there is a solution to this problem (where my attempts failed for some reason), I’d be all ears. :)
There’s no solution here and it’s not Apple’s fault either. This is due to the way Facebook Messenger chooses to open Google Maps via URL to the App Store Page instead of checking if Google Maps is installed, then opening with a Google Maps URL scheme registered by the app.
IIRC, on technical side Android have "intents". An app says to the system : "users wants to navigate to a place" and other apps can say "hey, i have a feature to navigate to a place".
Apple don't provide such system and so you are blocked by what the source app wants to open. On Apple apps, it will open other apple apps, and on tier apps, it's up to what they want to open. Of course Apple have zero incentive to change this so I don't see it changing.
I was just wondering where that happens, since I'm being asked what to open the location with every time. Funny enough, I get most of them over whatsapp which is also owned by Facebook.
Ok, I get that. That's simply Apple not giving the option to set the preference in the first place. But I would argue that's a different thing than giving a user the option to set a default app and then ignoring it or reseting it automatically. When I change my browser or mail app on macOS or iOS it's stays like that.
> When I click on an address in FB Messenger, I get the “open in google maps or Apple Maps” prompt, but choosing Google Maps just takes me to the Google Maps App Store page, even though I have the app installed and updated.
Is it possible that this is only the case on FB Messenger? I think there are other Apps offering this option where it does work.
While I agree there is a bit of difference, it's somewhat inconsequential to the end user having their preferences respected:
* Microsoft: we will let you set a preference, but we will ignore/reset it
* Apple: we won't let you set a preference at all
If someone wanted to say "Microsoft and Apple don't care about your preferences, but Microsoft is slightly worse", I think that'd be a fair thing to say.
Agreed that apple's is a lack of a feature, BUT if you look at the features which apple does support, it feels closer to they don't want to add it for anti-competitve reasons, and not a technical/implementation reason
* ios apps can be deep linked via "apple-app-site-association"
* ios apps can have custom url schemes "comgooglemaps://?parameters"
* android has had "intents" for a very long time
* ios sms is already detecting "this is an address" from free text and is hot linking it to their maps app
The worst part is they have the resources to make a browser that people want, without having to shove it upon everyone. If they did the following in some alt timeline, I'd be a happy Edge user:
- Stuck to EdgeHTML and Chakra for a better diversity of web technologies
- No bloat, tracking, data siphoning, sign in pressure, sketchy financial services, bing integration shitware
- Cross platform (Win/OSX/Lx at least)
- Open source so we know there's no funny business
That would be a genuinely interesting browser that would have a chance of selling itself.
Instead we get a poor Chrome reskin that offers minimal incentive to use it.
Yes, most everyone here understands that. Microsoft understands that better than anyone, and makes their decisions accordingly. The comment I replied to claimed that honoring user preferences had no cost.
The other day I tried to install Chrome on a new laptop. (Insert joke about what Edge is good for.)
However, Edge wasn't letting me actually download the Chrome installer. When I clicked the download button on the Chrome website, instead of any indication of its progress or completion, Edge instead displayed a pop-up that kept reassuring me that Edge was just as good.
So it turns out, Edge isn't even good enough to fulfill its meme.
I just tried it out, Edge showed the banner twice, once over the Chrome download confirmation (when the browsers asks if you're sure you want to keep an .exe file), and the second didn't obey the X to close. I had to click on the downloads list to be able to tell Edge to keep the Chrome installer.
I just tried it out, Edge showed the banner twice, once over the Chrome download confirmation (when the browsers asks if you're sure you want to keep an .exe file), and the second didn't obey the X to close. I had to click on the downloads list to be able to tell Edge to keep the Chrome installer.
The announcement is talking about EEA rather than EU though, which smells a bit weird. I'm not sure what regulation they're trying to resolve the conflict with that is not EU wide but rather EEA and targets the usage of default browsers.
The EEA is practically “EU + a handful of countries that apply EU rules but don’t get to participate in decision making for historical reasons”.
That’s why Britain didn’t even consider joining the EEA after they left the Union. From their point of view, it would still be the regulatory burden of EU membership without most of the benefits they enjoyed as a full member. When they’d decided to take the economic impact of leaving the free trade area, it wouldn’t really make sense to stay on worse terms than they already had.
EEA still has the four freedoms which was not acceptable to the UK.
A smart person who has read up on EU/UK and some European migration situations will note that migration to e.g: Denmark/Switzerland is still difficult despite being part of those four freedoms. This is because they bothered to mitigate migration within the parameters of the law; since the right to work under EU's four freedoms only applies for 6 months.
But tariff free trade for goods benefits the EU more as the UK service sector is bigger than their goods sector. UK services companies (especially regulated services like finance, law, etc) are at a disadvantage to EU companies because the UK companies don't have equivalency (i.e. the either need extra checks (costs) to operate in the EU, or need to open a corporate office in the EU).
And, the UK recently decided to forgo their UKCA mark to replace the CE mark as it would cost UK businesses too much to support both.
And lastly the UK has yet to impose sanitary and phyto-sanitary rules on imports into the UK because it would cost consumers in the UK too much (UK food inflation is still higher than just about all EU countries even without the checks). But the EU does impose sanitary and phyto-sanitary checks on food imports to the EU from the UK. So, in net the EU benefits from this as well.
So in balance the UK doesn't benefit. And it's a huge deal.
I don’t anyone here is arguing that leaving the single market was a great idea. Rather that it doesn’t make much sense to stay in it if you want to leave the EU.
That was my exact point; it's somewhat more expensive to import food into the UK now because of Brexit. And far more expensive to export (in relative terms to EU sourced food in the EU).
I phrased my previous comment wrong (and should edit it). There’s of course a benefit to adopting the regulations and following the rules — you get to participate in the free trade area. But without a say in how those regulations and rules are formed.
It’s strictly the regulatory burden of EU membership without any of the benefits of the club.
That's not really true if you are living in one of those countries (I live in one of those countries). In general, we get the protections that the EU gives its people and I get free travel within the zone. Lots of little things like my phone working without outrageous charges when I travel to most places here, too.
Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland are EEA members, and roaming is fine for those.
Switzerland has its own arrangement, and the roaming deal doesn't apply.
Andorra, Monaco, the United Kingdom, the Faroe Islands, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Belarus, Russia, North Macedonia, Ukraine and Moldova are not in the EU or EEA.
Well, you could plausibly argue right this moment that those strict regulatory burdens are a benefit of the club - since in this case they're benefiting from those regulations curbing abuse from international companies
Something which almost certainly wouldn't happen if they passed these laws by themselves, rather than as part of a much larger economic area.
But otherwise... I mostly agree with you. Lots of laws, not much representation.
The regulatory "burden" is also a benefit, in general, which a lot of people fail to understand and is also the reason Brexit Britain hasn't significantly diverged from EU rules.
Yes, it's hard to explain to people just how much of a saving being in the EU makes on regulations. It outweighs having the odd regulation that you don't agree with. If the UK does move away from EU regulations then they'll have to duplicate a lot of effort.
It's because people also think of directives, which are the EU thing of "do this, but write all your own slightly different laws." All the EU stuff in total is not as useful as you're making it sound. It's getting better now, but it's taking a long time.
And the UK follows EU regulations anyway, by not controlling imports (latest climbdown, delayed food checks until 2024, 5th time of delaying) and indefinitely accepting CE certification mark (meant to be superseded in the UK by UKCA).
True, but in this case I suspect that since the UK isn't n the EEA then MS Windows won't honour the user browser settings in the UK (even if the UK voluntarily follows some EEA / EU laws).
We don’t police tech monopolies in the USA, they are actually in charge because all of Congress owns the SP500, which is dominated by tech. We have to find a way out of this dystopia spiral.
The US doesn't, in general, give any extra rights or protections to its people without a bit of force, and then one is lucky.
Hence, no real consumer protection (which would include this). No signing of a thing giving rights for children, and so on. The rights folks legally have were grand enough 200 years ago, but have become substandard over time with little upgrading.
As I recall, there was an election during the trial, where Bill Clinton was replaced by George Bush, whose administration was not as keen to prosecute monopolists.
I had a call yesterday night from a West Virginian friend, and surprisingly the US just extanded worker protection? Or something, at least that was the first time he was exited by US politics since I met him.
Microsoft decided they would rather to extract more value from their captive users than the users are will to hand over if the law doesn't make it too expensive.
I love Microsoft, but I hate whoever is controlling all these awful choices for their OS. Lets be real its probably a marketing team trying to sell office and whatever else. I just want a version of Windows for actual professionals with no nonsense on it. Slim it down, make it feel like I'm on a 2023 machine with the minimalism of like idk Windows XP or Windows 7. No nonsense.
You can’t “love Microsoft” as if it is a homogeneous entity whilst carving out sections of it for the purpose of attributing everything you’re against. Not only is this simply a sign that Microsoft is a bloated old tech company like a bunch of others, looking to make more money, but it is also consistent with a pattern of Microsoft’s behaviour over the last few decades.
I can appreciate the good utilities they build can I not?
I love Visual Studio, and I love .NET which went way more open source than I thought it would, I for sure assumed it would be licensed under the MS-PL which is far less demanding than the GPL but not as a free as MIT, but no, they went straight for the MIT license.
I also appreciate VS Code, I know some people will still find some reason to hate on it, but its blatantly clear that it has taken the industry, the number of times I meet a developer who loves using it for programming is much higher than the number of developers I used to see using literally any other range of editors, it all seems to be uniform towards VS code. If you take away the OS, Microsoft still builds amazing products.
I also enjoy Azure more than I do thinking about what half of AWS services mean or do. I seriously have to google a service every time someone brings one up just to remind myself what its for. I rarely do that with Microsoft services, some of it is I'm used to them, but some services have blatantly obvious names as well.
Remember back when Nadella took over Microsoft. HN was all over it like the second coming of Jesus. I complained that it doesn't change the organisation and this is just marketing. I was completely right. I remember being downvoted over and over again suggesting this is the end game of the takeover and the push that was promoted.
Microsoft wants to be a subscription company and will try and funnel you down any route to keep that revenue. Shareholders and management are driving this because the platform was the product and the product is worth absolutely fuck all at the end of the day. Ergo now it's a subscription delivery mechanism for Office, OneDrive and Edge etc which are all data gathering mechanisms themselves.
Being downvoted doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, it can also mean that people just didn't like what you wrote. In the light of some positive news, keeping the same negative attitude towards an entity may invoke dislike. If later it becomes clear that you were right doesn't make that first reaction unjustified. Being downvoted is for me usually an urge to rethink how I'm saying things rather than what I'm saying, although, as always, YMMV.
I mean, you were wrong and he was the second coming of Jesus in many ways. The Microsoft of today isn't the Microsoft of yesteryear.
It just doesn't change the fact that they're in the advertising business, and that the advertising business is really lucrative so they started pushing for it hardcore.
I mean, I work for a company that has amazing developers, but its all marketing driving things at the end of the day. So no, it's not as simple as blaming the company. There are people who are literally dreading as they write the code to features we all love to hate.
Not a marketing team trying to sell Office. They're trying to grow in the advertising sector, which means funneling people into Bing, since search ads are really profitable.
Because companies only ever respect user choice for two reasons. 1. it coincidentally makes them money, 2. they're forced to by government. In the US it's interesting to see that state governments are increasingly pushing on several issues (albeit sometimes for dubious reasons), but the federal government is somehow chronically AFK.
Your argument doesn’t hold at all. The functionality is already there, so ask yourself, why are they depriving people outside of the EU this functionality when it’s already there?
Mine was a sarcastic joke, but to reply seriously to your questions, it's not about the effort to implement the functionality imho, it's more about missed revenue, Microsoft is using Edge as a way to monetize windows users traffic, so this is going to affect somehow their profits
For lack of a better response, as a customer I'd like to tell them to fuck off because both are terrible user experiences. It's like wading through trash.
Telling them to fuck off means using linux. It's a hard step at first, but I highly recommend giving it a shot.
After learning the basics, I can't go back to windows anymore because I know how a proper OS works and can see how terrible windows actually is as an operating system, not just in terms of user experience.
That alone keeps me motivated to push through any difficulties I face with linux.
As an American, I'm more annoyed that our government isn't working to protect consumers than I am at Microsoft. Microsoft is acting predictably from a business perspective. This is just a repeat of the Internet Explorer debacle decades ago.
> Microsoft is acting predictably from a business perspective
A business can be predictable without being shitty to the core. Microsoft has been a shitty scofflaw company since the day it was founded. Apple and Google are pretty shitty, but they weren't in their early days. Microsoft has always been a criminal racket.
We just need a new era of trust-busting. It's what pulled our economic system back from where it was headed in the "robber baron" era of the early 1900's, and allowed for the post-war boom. The Fortune 500 has learned to stop at duopolies and triopolies, but private equity is quietly trying to monopolize literally everything else. Lina Kahn and the current FTC have been trying, but they are hampered by the economic forces, corporations, and billionaires that have gotten us to this place already, and I just don't see them making much substantive progress. It certainly doesn't help that the public is also filled with Microsoft stans who think allowing them to buy Activision somehow "increases competition," when what they really mean is that they just hate that Microsoft is in third place behind Sony and Nintendo, as if this means the gaming division is somehow a failure, and pressure the FTC to back off of preventing more consolidation.
I think this is the smart way to see it. Tax avoidance is another example. Being angry with Amazon for not paying tax is like being angry at the sea for sinking your ship. The absolute best case scenario is that boycotting Amazon leads to Amazon paying marginaly more taxes, and every other company and billionaire on earth continues to avoid it.
Instead, it makes more sense to direct your energy towards the government that's letting them get away with it.
Same with monopolies; it's absolutely fundamental to their nature that we don't have any leverage over them as consumers. We can either cry impotently about Google and MS being bad guys or we can actually demand our governments do something about it. It's bizarre how often people choose the former!
This hits the nail on the head. The issue is that the system is shitty - the entities within the system practically have to act shitty, otherwise the other one that does goes ahead and takes the profit. Doing the right thing is often not just orthogonal to business, but is actually hurting it directly. So not only is there no incentive to do the right thing, there's direct incentive to do the opposite.
They should have never done this in the first place and it was 100% intentional to try and trick you into using Edge. Secondly it is morally objectionable to just turn this off in the EEA. Thirdly, they still try and force Edge down your throat all the time.
That shows that the user is only being respected when pressured by legislation, not because you're the customer.
Microsoft does not respect its customers and does not deserve our business.
I would also urge people to wonder: why do they care so much?
I don't have the answer. Especially in the past, it seemed like a cost factor to keep up a modern browser (just ask Mozilla) if people might as well install anything else and still buy your OS and use your services. That may have just been going with the flow, not wanting to miss the boat.
My best guess for nowadays is the same as why Google hijacked a login to any google service (from gmail to youtube) as a log in to the Chrome browser, after which all the data on any website is up for grabs and they can facilitate privacy extensions all they want without compromising their own market position. Does Microsoft (plan to) run an ad business? Is it built-in Cortana integration which can answer with ads included or ranking own services higher? Is it just to be able to shove any new future service into more people's faces? To steer web standards, like if you have >70% market share on Windows desktops can you just build in a new ActiveX for WebOffice (as an example) and you'd force others to follow?
Or maybe a combination of all of the above. Either way, I think it would be good to know what strategy is behind this relentless pushing
> I don't have the answer. Especially in the past, it seemed like a cost factor to keep up a modern browser (just ask Mozilla) if people might as well install anything else and still buy your OS and use your services.
Microsoft ditched their own browser engine and the current version of edge is just using chromium, so it's cheap to maintain.
Edge uses bing by default so Microsoft can serve you ads, and it has a shopping plugin built in which also probably generates revenue. They can also try to redirect people to other microsoft services whenever they want in the future.
These companies are all about efficiencies and supporting a single setting globally is more efficient than having per country settings.
They also like to take choice away from power users with the same excuse.
But regarding browser choice, they are happy to support different behaviors depending on geographic location... which already tells me that current Microsoft's practice of forcing Edge onto users does actually make a difference.
The marketshare figures will just be the cherry on top.
This is the expected, most intuitive, and only sensible behavior, and yet Microsoft somehow, for some reason, decides it is okay not to use the default browser?
Wait a minute. Are they trying to cause me to have a complete meltdown? This is so irritating. The task bar can also no longer be placed vertically on the left or right. Imo. Microsoft should be forced to open source important parts of Windows so that these processes can be more democratized by users of the system.
And it's not even happy if you're using Edge already (as I have to for work). When you're browsing in Edge, it will sometimes - mid-typing - just pop up a tab with an add for Bing and it's new AI features.
And it's a real tab, not a pop-up, so I haven't figured out how to tell uBlock to suppress it yet.
When you're at the point of tricking your operating system into thinking you're in a different country in order to make it function properly, it may be time to try a new OS. GNU/Linux has excellent compatibility with 95% of windows software through wine
That last 5% is killer, because it’s just enough to make rebooting into Windows a pain in the rear, and much of it is the type of software that refuses to run in VMs due to things like anticheat.
You're missing the point. These are all games you likely play because your peer group does.
Also, the experience on Wine/Proton isn't always the best. If you have high-end hardware, you probably want features that just don't work because of your GPU driver of implementation gaps in Wine/Proton.
"You're missing the point. These are all games you likely play because your peer group does."
No, I'm not missing the point. I'm not really big on activism or proving points or things like that - but this is something which is something you don't do if you have principles.
These games make people addicted because your friends play them. Learning to say "no" to these exploitative practices is a very useful thing. Make your friends play better games, or simply refuse to play their games.
(Full disclosure: I use windows myself, I'm not disagreeing with you on that regard about proton)
I used to run Debian, but gaming was always worse than Windows for me (new AMD graphics card, yes photon is great but it's not a replacement for me). My end users are all on Windows too, and I could never properly emulate their experience on Debian (short of _emulating_ Windows).
WSL2 works really well for my needs. I get the best of both worlds. I also hate all of the data collection and dark patterns.
Probably a combination of different inputs, like timezone, regional, GPS (if computer supports that) and figuring out public IP. Knowing Microsoft, they'll try their hardest to avoid flagging a computer as within EEA if they possibly could.
I wonder how this works, if I buy a laptop in the EU as a EU citizen and travel to for example the US, I still expect them to adhere to the rules where I bought it.
I don't think that's how regulations apply in general. Usually they're scoped to the geographical location + your sovereign status, but not just your sovereign status.
For example, I don't think it's realistic to expect a US citizen traveling to a EU country having to follow US regulations and laws, nor the opposite.
So I'm not sure it would apply in this case either, but I'm not even sure what regulation/law made Microsoft add this change to the update in the first place. If we can figure that out, I guess we could figure out the real answer to your question without guessing.
That’s what the “default browser” setting is for. Microsoft just deliberately choses to ignore it in some parts of Windows, and instead hardcodes Edge.
When you're at the point of tricking your operating system into thinking you're in a different country to make it function properly, it may be time to try a new OS.
macOS has excellent compatibility with 95% of windows software through Parallels, and also respects your choice of browser.
I have Firefox, Chrome, Tor Browser and Brave running next to my current browser of preference, Safari. But switching back and forth is easy, and macOS respects my choice when I change the settings.
MacOS, run by Apple, the same company that mandates the Safari engine on iOS? The same company that fights tooth and nail against allowing non-“approved” apps to run on their devices?
Let’s not delude ourselves to thinking that two of the richest tech companies in the world are all that different. Both are working against your interests to monopolize their turf.
The group that truly puts users first is FOSS: Linux and BSD.
I was talking about a full OS, macOS. Not the sealed and sandboxed iOS that you are trying to shift the focus to.
Please, name me one, just one, software that I should want to run on macOS but can't?
> Let’s not delude ourselves to thinking that two of the richest tech companies in the world are all that different. Both are working against your interests to monopolize their turf.
I never said they were. All I was talking about is free choice of browsers, which I have on macOS.
You bypass a lot of Microsoft anti-user crap by setting your Windows during install to en-gb and then set your OS language to “English Worldwide” so presumably you could install Windows 11, set region to “English $SomeCountryStillInEU” and set your language to “English Worldwide”.
A huge admission of not respecting the user. If they didn't support this anywhere they could claim that it was because they can't test and support every browser. But if they can support other browsers in the EEA then they have no legs to stand on for why they disable it elsewhere. It is now clearly that they care about their preferences more than respecting the user's preferences.
I wonder how much money Microsoft is making by not respecting user choices in non European countries.
I also wonder how much money they invested in the legal handlings of this topic and how many developer/sales hours are and were wasted to make this "split" possible.
Microsoft is clearly playing on Ultra Violence level here in an attempt to force as much Edge market share as technically possible. I guess someone pretty high up has their bonuses tied to those numbers.
After installing some updates (on a 10 Pro machine) recently I got a nice modal pop-up begging me to change my default search engine in Chrome (which I don't even use) to Bing. (Hey, at least they asked, I guess - next security update will just set bing as the search engine in all browsers, just like IE toolbar malware from 2004).
Whole operating system just comes off as super shady and desperate since Windows 10 - feels a lot like fake antivirus malwares from the 2000s. It has always been pushy in this millennium, sometimes for a good reason (updates are important), but all of this is without any decent reason.
Installing those updates of course also re-enabled automatically installing drivers without any prompt, which promptly caused the Nahamic malware to be re-installed through Windows Update. Somehow most IT people are not bothered by this. I imagine if you would tell this stuff to a mid-2000s IT person their head would simply explode.
Every time I visit my parents, I find they've reverted to using Edge and don't know why. Despite my best efforts, they don't seem to have the will or technical ability to resist M$ manipulation. It's frustrating.
I mean it is an aggressive set of dark patterns deployed against people with limited time and understanding. It is constantly being adapted through auto updates to obsolete any ability to resist it they have formed. It isn't the fault of the people using this software that they can't keep up with the non-stop deception treadmill run by a team of professionals (guided by their telemetry data) whose whole occupation is to find ways to manipulate users of the software. Well, it might be their fault that they choose to put up with it I guess.
For a lot of consumers, using a computer involves a bunch of incomprehensible popups informing them "heres some bullshit button you have to click on to get on with things" until they finally arrive at their destination. They do not know what any of it does and are effectively lost until they get to somewhere familiar. You can trick them into doing literally anything as long as you put a blue button next to a grey button.
Can I please ask how technical they are, and what distro are you using? And that what are they using the OS for? I'm looking into this passively for years now, and I'm really interested in actual people's experiences.
Based on what I’m seeing from computer usage by my relatives, they wouldn’t care less if they can do these things: 1) Browse the web 2) read pdfs and docx 3) use a word processor (and maybe a spreadsheet 4) play medias like music and videos.
A lot of people are ok using their phone as their primary device. And a chromebook and access to google suite would fill the rest of their needs. I’d install linux mint and they’d only notice the interface is different.
For simple use, Linux is actually pretty simple and useful. It's the inbetween where you require some kind of power user features or specialized software and aren't a developer type where things get hairy.
They are as non-technical as it gets. Debian stable does the automatic security updates for them flawlessly without breaking the workflows. The OS is used for browsing, writing documents in LibreOffice and looking at downloaded pictures/documents.
That sounds good and I myself landed on Debian too, after trying most popular distros over the years. Did you install UnattendedUpgrades, or is automatic updates a setting somewhere?
I have tried Mint, and there was a update mechanism - it was either Ubuntu's do-release-upgrade or something on top of that, I honestly can't remember. But the system didn't look like a normal installation after it, that's for sure. Fonts were a bit weird, some settings were migrated and some weren't, it didn't feel right.
I haven't used mint in ages (I used LMDE for a long time though, exactly because it was rolling release), but back in the day at least, the official upgrade procedure was basically "just reinstall lol", maybe it changed now
Thank god Valve exists for their work getting Steam games to work on Linux. A lot of the captive Windows audience is gamers. With another option, people don't have to put up with Microsoft's OS terrorism.
That's strange, I wonder why not EU but rather EEA. Probably the smallest target amount compared to EU and aimed at resolving some conflict with a regulation that only affects EEA rather than EU?
Countries in the EEA but not EU (e.g. Switzerland) tend to have bilateral agreements with the EU which cover most EU laws, so I think legally it's often easier to group EEA together
E.g. EU enforces free data roaming for cellphone providers, but many providers allow free roaming to Switzerland and the Nordic countries too - not sure if it's just practically easier than trying to geofence those areas into a different tariff or if it's legally too complicated, but I'm fairly certain they don't do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
Switzerland is _not_ in the EEA, it has a sui generis bilateral agreement with the EU that implements some but not all of the EU law that applies to the EEA countries automatically. It's very contentious in EU-Swiss diplomacy, because the EU doesn't like that the agreement with Switzerland keeps needing to be renegotiated to incorporate new EU law, whereas Switzerland sees this as a necessary element of maintaining its sovereignty.
Definitely they don't do it or if the goodness of their hearts, because despite "pssshh, Project Fear, don't be silly, even a Hard Brexit won't reintroduce roaming charges".... Many of them did or will soon reintroduce them.
EEA = EU + EFTA. The EEA forms the “European single market”. The EFTA states adopt most of the relevant legislation from the EU. So it’s normal that product policies apply to the whole of the EEA instead of just to the EU.
I'm not sure it's down to the new EU Digital Services Act (which is more focused on "online" behaviour, rather than client-side), but nb Art. 25(1) of the DSA:
"1. Providers of online platforms shall not design, organise or operate their online interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates the recipients of their service or in a way that otherwise materially distorts or impairs the ability of the recipients of their service to make free and informed decisions."
Or there might be an argument that downloading instructions to a user's device, causing it to do something they didn't want, is a breach of the EU's anti-malware rule (AKA the much-despised "cookie law", even though that name downplays its significance)
I am very irritated that I have made it very clear that I wish to use Firefox as my default browser in Windows 11. However, tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Office keep trying to force me into Edge by opening links in it by default. You don't gain converts by forcing something onto users.
> You don't gain converts by forcing something onto users.
You're not looking for converts when you're forcing somebody to do something. Most of Microsoft's business has always been about forcing people to use things. The other choice is a company that you have to pay a premium to choose, but then you're forced to stay or else lose your stake. None of this is competition, it's all market manipulation.
In my experience, Microsoft is in weekly meetings with supervisory authorities, and they have a constant risk assessment of just ignoring EU regulations beyond GDPR going on.
I've submitted a few GDPR requests that had an impact on Microsoft too - so if you're an EU citizen, make a good habit of complaining about bad data hygiene and anticompetitive behavior.
I mean... this is a hugely ironic comment given the topic is discussing respect for the user's desired browser.
Something Apple does considerably worse than Microsoft, intentionally and purposefully - entirely for control and profit, mostly to maintain their app store taxes.
Is there a place I missed where macOS does not respect the user's default browser setting? (I'm using work-mandated Chrome as default on work laptop, never had an instance of Safari opening)
(can't comment on iOS since I use Safari there, but then TFA is about Windows 11 i.e desktop-side)
I've had Safari open itself a couple of times when clicking useless Apple links (I think in settings with more info?). Also, if i click the play button on my keyboard without anything recent to play, it will open the piece of shit that is Apple Music that I have never used nor opened by myself. If I open a document or spreadsheet in the default installed apps, saving them will save them in the proprietary shitty Apple formats, instead of the one it came in (thus creating a second document instead of updating the original). In a similar vein, multiple things any other OS and Desktop Environment has, such as different scroll direction between mouse and touchpad, custom keybindings, basic window management features, Display Port daisy chaining over USB C (non-thunderbolt) macOS doesn't just because the gods of Apple have decided you don't need to have them, because fuck you.
I can go on, but macOS is not an OS that respects users or user choice.
Not giving the user choice is a form of not respecting the user when talking about basics such as "don't save a document which came in a normal format into some proprietary nonsense unusable outside of an Apple device". This is actively hostile design.
> If I open a document or spreadsheet in the default installed apps, saving them will save them in the proprietary shitty Apple formats
Do you mean Pages/Keynote/Numbers?
Since these are not 1:1 (neither on feature nor in concepts) with MS Office/OpenOffice opening such a file is by definition a lossy import, so saving in the original format would be destructive, both with regards to the original contents being lossily converted to Apple app concepts and any Apple concept specific change made after opening being lossily converted to the original format.
This is not user hostile, this is saving the user from the impedance mismatch between software that organically grew from Multiplan and software that's been designed from the ground up.
Now, the Apple office suite being "shitty" is largely your personal (and the way you phrased it, judgemental) opinion, I personally prefer the Apple office suite any day to MS Office/OpenOffice/GDocs.
I agree. I have Firefox, Chrome, Tor Browser and Brave running next to my current browser of preference, Safari. But switching back and forth is easy, and macOS respects my choice when I change the settings.
What I've learned about tech tribalism arguments is that for some reason some one else doing something first means you can't be mad about it when it happens again.
Its like if you cheated on your wife and told her she can't get mad because your neighbor cheated on his wife first. Somehow that is a rebuttal even though she was never married to the neighbor and may have even started dating you in the first place because you didn't cheat.
Apple avoids the problem of not respecting my browser choice how, exactly?
Apple open webviews in Safari, does not respect the user's choice at all, and doesn't even allow you to install a non-safari browser on their mobile OS.
This is like peak irony. Apple is the walking definition of this problem.
Why are you comparing a desktop operating system to a mobile operating system? On macOS Apple lets you trivially set a different default browser and doesn't annoy you about it.
Default browser has to be something as lite as possible, probably Pale Moon. Because random apps use to call the browser any time they want and if the default browser is browser I use, it eats a lot of time and laptop battery trying to start my hundreds-tab monster.
Edge was great just after they switched to Chromium and lead the way on battery optimizations. And then every team started an everlasting "who can exhaust the patience of their users the fastest and get them to either give in to microsoft-everything or switch away from edge" contest.
That makes me wonder: What are the rules for something to be considered a browser? Does it need to provide certain functionality, or can I register anything as a browser and just have links open in an editor?
I tried exactly that. Turns out it can't be a .bat or .ps1 for understandable reasons, it has to be an executable. So, my "default browser" on this machine I'm on is now an .exe that prints $1. It works.
In Windows, default applications are registered either by URL scheme (so ftp, http, https, gopher...) or file extension (.txt, .html, .pdf, .mp4...). As far as I know there is no special registration for "browsers" specifically, you just register your application as a handler for whatever protocols and file formats you want.
So if you want to make your random executable be "a browser", my guess is you should register it as a handler for http, https, and .html, at least.
Wonder how much this regulation cost to draft, pass, and implement? Several million dollars? Any EU tax payers care to justify this insanity?
I mean does any normal person even care about this? Eg, not people on HN with Macbook Pros – your average Windows user.
At the end of the day Windows does loads of stuff I don't like. That's why I don't use Windows anymore. Like with most things the EU regulates this just isn't an issue. Windows using a different browser for system apps is so far down on the list of things I don't like about Windows that even if you asked me to write a 100 point list of things I don't like about Windows I'm not sure this would make the list. Guess we need some more regulation.
Edit: Please don't downvote simply because you disagree with me. It's better to have a discussion. Different perspectives are good.
>Several million dollars? Any EU tax payers care to justify this insanity?
Probably several millions, yes. Considering the EU has 450 inhabitants, that*s increasing my tax bill by cents. Well worth the money to me. Probably, MS will try to backtrack and violate regulations at some point so it will pay for itself too.
I'll never get the US masochism where interference by regulators to defend the end-user is somehow seen as odious.
> Probably several millions, yes. Considering the EU has 450 inhabitants, that*s increasing my tax bill by cents. Well worth the money to me.
But this never ends. Every week there's a new article here about how the EU is forcing electronics makers implement their preferred charger ports, or displaying cookie notices to EU visitors, or making phone batteries replaceable. It's endless crap that adds drag to businesses trying to operate in EU, costs tax payers hundreds of millions and has almost no significance to the average person's life.
I'm not anti-regulation at all. I just think it needs to be limited to places where there's a clear need to regulate. Honestly sometimes it seems like the EU is just looking for the next pointless thing to regulate so they can continue to justify their jobs.
Please take this as a separate point on taxation more generally, but I tend to find the most pro-tax people I know are those with the highest incomes. Those in favour of people's income being redistributed to regulators in this way I find are often the same people who argue in favour of spending "a little more" for free ranged eggs, and organic fruits, etc. I'm not suggesting you don't do this already, but we should consider if those pennies would be better in the pockets of workers rather than taken by government regulators so you don't have the displeasure of using Edge when you occasionally need to use Windows instead of your Mac.
>has almost no significance to the average person's life.
I very much disagree that prescribing a common charging port for phones has had no significance to the avg. person's life. I am old enough to remember my drawer full of chargers for various phone companies - some even created new plugs for newer generations of phones.
> we should consider if those pennies would be better in the pockets of workers
That's not how it works, those pennies would end up in the pockets of anonymous wealth funds and the family offices of the filthy rich while workers had to buy phone chargers with all their new phones.
> I very much disagree that prescribing a common charging port for phones has had no significance to the avg. person's life. I am old enough to remember my drawer full of chargers for various phone companies - some even created new plugs for newer generations of phones.
The market ultimately fixed this though (mostly anyway). Personally I like Apple's charger ports, but I'll soon no longer have this choice as a consumer because regulators think they know what's best for me.
> That's not how it works, those pennies would end up in the pockets of anonymous wealth funds and the family offices of the filthy rich while workers had to buy phone chargers with all their new phones.
We're getting into an economic debate now. I think generally it's good to assume that the more a business makes, the more people it will be able to employ and the more those employees will make.
I think the problem you're touching on here is that in recent years the bottom line of businesses don't correlate well with the income if its workers. I think there are better ways to solve this problem so that if Apple makes more money on chargers their workers would share in the profits. Regulating phone chargers and browser preferences may not be the best solution here.
>I think the problem you're touching on here is that in recent years the bottom line of businesses don't correlate well with the income if its workers.
Yes, I was attacking your argument that eased regulation would profit the workers - in our current climate, it doesn't. So regulating phone chargers makes a difference to the plutocracy only, not the workers. And you should not forget that a phone that comes without a charger can be cheaper by the BOM of the charger.
Too bad your unregulated ideal free market doesn't work in real life because companies tend to merge until you as a consumer end up with 2 or at most 3 options that are equally shitty.
It would be just fine if you had 20 interchangeable OS vendors competing for your buck indeed. Unfortunately you have 2 or at best 3 if you count the mythical desktop linux. And they're not interchangeable.
Same for phones, can I choose between 10 phone operating systems? Um no, there are just two of them.
Speaking as an American, I'm jealous of the EU approach. Yes, I think some of the EU regulations are silly. But they're taking a default position in favor of the citizens. Not in favor of the corporations. In this day and age, that's kinda heartwarming.
Here in the US we're obviously in the opposite situation. We get some good protections occasionally, but the default position is almost always pro-corporate. With extra favor given to those who donated money to the politicians. I'd so much rather have the EU way of thinking. Even if it leads to more annoying cookie banners.
> Even if it leads to more annoying cookie banners.
Those are not the result of EU regulation; they're not even compliant with EU regs, usually. I don't know for sure why companies put up those stupid banners, but I suspect it's partly a kind of protest, and partly an (illegal) attempt to trick users into consenting to data collection.
Thanks for the correction. I always assumed those banners were to comply with the regulations. Nice to know the companies are being annoying for no reason.
The other guy is wrong. It just takes a simple Google search to confirm this.
I've had to implement and manage these banners at almost every company I've worked for the last several years. It's EU law. Websites that operate in the EU must obtain explicit consent to use tracking cookies. The exception here would be essential cookies which are needed to provide service – although you may still need to consent to do that depending on what data the service is collecting / processing.
Some banners don't comply with EU regulation because they default checkboxes to approve cookies and the EU regulation requires "explicit consent". That said, you almost certainly won't find a major website that doesn't comply for EU visitors and where sites get this wrong it's usually not intentional and is normally because smaller companies don't have the time or resources to comply with the nuances of EU data law. The larger companies who do have the resources hire people like myself to do it for them. There's a sizeable industry around complying with EU GDPR regulation here in Europe. Companies like Usercentrics make millions charging companies for EU-compliant cookie banners, https://www.cookiebot.com/
It's not great for small businesses, but it's great if you're a larger corporate with the money for compliance or an individual riding the EU regulatory gravy train.
The regulation is only 99 articles long and full of fun legal talk if you're interested in reading it yourself. It's just one of the many documents you'll need to familiarise yourself with if you want to do business in the EU:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Thanks for the correction of the correction. I thought the banners were required, but I hadn't done much research. Therefore, I thought I might be wrong after the initial correction. Nice to know my original hunch was correct. Sounds like a good business to be in.
> people's income being redistributed to regulators
You mean, taxpayer funds being used to fund the operation of a regulatory body? I wonder how they should be funded in your ideal world:
* Don't fund them at all; the world is better with no regulators and no regulations.
* Cut them loose from the taxpayer; let them behave like an LE agency, and fund themselves by levying fines.
As far as I'm aware, there's no regulator involved in this, taxpayer-funded or otherwise. This is simply a law (which you can call a "regulation" if you prefer). As such, the only "regulatory" body involved is the EU lawmaking apparatus, and EU citizens seem to be OK with funding that.
Microsoft want to advertise to users because it makes them money. That money will come from the pockets of the people you're describing, and not as a fraction of their income as with many taxes.
> That money will come from the pockets of the people you're describing
Very indirectly maybe. Ad spend is a cost to businesses, not consumers.
I'll also add that making ad spend less inefficient (as this regulation will do) will ultimately cost either the business or consumer as someone will need to eat those extra costs. Assuming that those inefficiencies are not passed to the consumer and is instead is a cost to the business, this would still only be a good thing if you believe companies making more money is bad.
Money spent on ads doesn't cost businesses money, it makes them money. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. That money comes directly from consumers, who are also taxpayers. I haven't said whether this is good or bad.
Those regulations mean the average worker won't have to buy a new phone when the battery degrades, and if they do buy a new one, their existing chargers will continue to work with it, so contrary to your point, it saves the average worker money and improves their life in a very tangible way.
> Any EU tax payers care to justify this insanity?
EU tax payer here. I was asked by the EU if they could use my tax money for this and I was fine with that. I think my neighbour was also asked and he was cool with that, too, so the EU went this way.
Don't worry, it wasn't your money that was spent here...
Yes. The EU has an annual economic output of about 17.4 trillion Euros. A few million dollars in taxes is probably like what, 0.0001% of the zones tax burden, a fraction of a cent of my taxes?
I'll do you one better, if I could kill one of big techs user hostile features with a regulation I will chime in 50 bucks per bill. Windows probably runs on 90%+ of people's home and work devices, no regular user is just switching off Windows, you're not the norm.
what kind of question is that? what user does not care that the OS is not respecting his choice of Browser? It greatly impacts the daily work. You are logged in into services in your browser of choice, you have autofills in your default browser, you have your preferences (language, cookie settings etc) set in your default browser and just because a link is opened from somewhere inside windows you find yourself in another browser where you are not logged in in your services, you don't have saved passwords, you don't have bookmarks or the extensions you use etc, so you have to copy the URL and paste into your browser.
Are you telling me you really don't care about this disruption that happens tens of times per day or just that you are not impacted and so noone else should care?
That shows such complete and utter contempt for the wishes of their users. The user has actively selected a browser as the one they want to use by default, but windows only uses it in the EEA because they were forced to.
As it will be used by EEA system components, there's presumably no technical/compatibility issues that would stop the rest of the world using it to.