Windows is mandatory at work and Edge is making life ever more annoying. It is setup as the default browser, the personalizations (don't show me your crappy news, background, or helpful links...) always come back, and simple things like "set new tabs to be a blank page" aren't allowed. Not looking forward to Windows 11 when presumably everything will get ever worse.
What's bizarre is that the employer is outwardly very security conscious and surfing random websites is a route to dismissal. Yet the porous and intrusive Edge is allowed to run amok. Of course, extensions to minimize the suck aren't permitted, either.
But Chrome desperately needs to tell you it’s Earth Day or Indigenous People’s Day or something equally unimportant with a breathless enthusiasm that would make a Southern Baptist Preacher on a Telethon blush.
I’ve finally hit a wall with “enhancements” in chrome I can’t shut off. If I type “man” in the Omnibar I don’t want to know about Manchester United and get an icon with the team. In fact I don’t want any pictures at all in the omnibar.
Apparently my Google Fu isn’t good enough or it’s just flat out impossible to change, because I still get what I feel are ads for brands in the Omnibar when I search for stuff.
Microsoft is intentionally taking aim directly at IT departments by creating a situation where it’s impossible to keep up. Every monthly update adds another nag pop up, or disables, moves, or “accidentally” resets the switches to turn them off. Unless you have someone working full time to manage Edge and these nags, it’s impossible to keep up. They’re doing this on purpose.
You can even see it in the error messages they show. For example, if you disable the App Store, it shows a big message to the user “This feature has been disabled by your IT department”, which drives animosity where people complain that “IT is blocking me, and if we just got rid of them (i.e. used the cloud instead), we would all be happy and run the apps we want like I can on my phone”.
IT controls directly prevent users from signing up with other paid services, so their incentive is to get rid of IT.
Microsoft's Cloud is so grisly I don't think anyone on the technical side at my shop would want any more of it than has been shoved down our throats. Office365 takes the already bad Office "experience" to new lows. Sharepoint is the 40% solution to problems we don't actually have. The Cloud Drive is so clunktacular it is a chore to load or save anything. No way to map any of that to a shortcut so it is click, wait, click, wait, click wait. Per file. Teams does everything Skype does worse and more slowly.
We actually think that our IT and Microsoft are in it together and that we, the users, are their mutual enemy.
End users are locked down from changing almost anything. Many things could be done I'm sure but nothing IS done. Who knows, maybe money is changing hands to leave this crap as is.
Huge corporation, centralized IT, sanity doesn't enter into it. There are no admins with any clout, only some with slightly elevated privileges to execute tasks approved at a much higher level. Requests like this will filter up through the ticketing system and get autorejected as not compatible with security policies.
Quite likely but our Mordacs won't do anything about it. Many of us have pointed out that a robust .hosts file and/or ad blocking extensions would go a long way towards improving security not to mention the user experience. Might as well be Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.
What's bizarre is that the employer is outwardly very security conscious and surfing random websites is a route to dismissal. Yet the porous and intrusive Edge is allowed to run amok. Of course, extensions to minimize the suck aren't permitted, either.