I'm not ready to absolve Microsoft of this blame, though. Yes, every operating system is a complex beast, and no single person comprehends it all. But Microsoft seems to have a particular fondness for non-transparency in all its machinations, whether it's pricing, licensing, telemetry, file formats, product usage documentation or even its APIs.

Not to mention that Microsoft is a repeat offender in this particular space, so I would probably have jumped to the same conclusion.

Despite that, Windows is easily one of the least annoying OSes that I have to deal with.

I wish I could run it on my phone.

Instead I either have to accept the walled gardens where there is zero transparency or spend all my time hacking my phone to give me the same kinds of freedoms that I enjoy on Windows.

Considering how annoying Windows 10 can be (scheduled reboot which you then can't disable, update downloading in the background without asking and at the most annoying of time, impossible to disable telemetry), I feel sorry that you use OSes which are actually worth.

It was painful as hell to develop for Windows Phone. You had to use Windows on the laptop you were developing on, and go through licensing crap for that. Then you had to install Visual Studio, and then some weird addon to that. They were losing developers at every stage of this process, and would never admit that the process was a pain or try to simplify it. (My guess is that all three of these were handled by different departments at Microsoft who were forced to integrate with each other's products).

So in my opinion, it has nothing to do with anti-Microsoft culture, but more to do with the fact that Microsoft was too arrogant to realize that they were the underdog in this race by a significant margin.

MS really could have owned that market. ActiveSync made sure they didn't. They were a good 3-4 years ahead of everyone else tech wise. However, their dev stack was awful and full of gotchas. Apple and Google imploded that and made it easy to dev for. Their crazy BOM build system was a fork of visual studio 6 which was cobbled together with CMD scripts. Then on top of that the OS arch was different than pretty much anything else. There were some seriously bad spots where if you used the wrong system dll you could crash the box. Oh you need a new firmware to fix that good luck as there is no built in firmware update on your box. Have fun spending 2 months getting that patched firmware out of the company too.

Your guess about different depts is almost right. They also outsourced portions of it. Some parts were internal. The licencing around it was byzantine. Also portability was shoddy. That was due to the MIPS/ARM ISA environment. Every phone was slightly different from each other (you can see similar issues today with ARM dev boards). x86 did not end up there as IBM compat was king and if you didnt have that no one bought your board, ARM/MIPS do not have that type of market force. You had to in some cases ship an executable for each phone. Then on top of that the phone carriers wanted to charge 40-50 dollars per megabyte sent/recv.

WincCE, WinCE, you cannot be serious. WinCE was produced as a response to the ‘Palm Pilot’. WinCE ran on a “Palm PC”, not to be confused with the “Palm Pilot”. Palm sued and Microsoft renamed it to "Palm-sized PC" or the ‘Palm PC’. MS really could have owned the market with the TRON real-time operating. Microsoft did joint the TRON consortium and then lobbied to have it excluded from the North American market.

https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/microsoft-settles-palm...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/microsoftjoinst-engineforum....

And secondly, remember what I said around being the underdog. Apple had first mover advantage in this field, they could afford to make their tools a little more annoying and still have developers sign up. Microsoft was the underdog, they should have given away a free copy of Windows with all the Visual Studio crap preloaded to developers; that would have gone a long way towards getting developer mindshare. But that would not have made sense to the revenue obsessed execs at Microsoft, and so did not happen.

Edge getting a special category at the top is central to the problem. If Firefox 80 added a PDF reader and Windows is being so nice as to let you choose whether you want to use it instead of whatever you currently use, then in the list of PDF reader applications, a user should see it at the top (which will invite them to think "Hey cool, Firefox can now be used for PDFs!") so they are given a choice of sticking with their current thing, or choosing the shiny new capability that was just added.

If you force Edge to the top of your app preference screens, users are obviously going to see the update and go "Yep, that's Microsoft trying to force their crap on me again". Microsoft's well known behavior of forcing updates on the user has already given it a bad reputation in this regard, and has resulted in court cases in the past.

So yeah, it's not "user stupidity", it's the stupidity of whoever made the decision to promote Edge by shoving it in users' faces all the time including filetype handler updates.

But also because Microsoft aggressively pushed their browser for years. Even with their pitiable language "are you sure you don't want to try our new browser?". It's not just people misunderstanding, Microsoft actively did this throughout W10's lifetime

Seems like either way, microsoft just can't catch a break.

Every job I had where we used Windows 10 we had no issues and when there were issues, it was always caused by faulty hardware, crappy corporate bloatware or some misbehaving or poorly configured third party app.

I know it's fashionable on HN to hate microsoft and windows because of the "muh embrace, extend, extinguish and candy crush" meme, but objectively they make a solid OS for consumers (optimus graphics switching works flawlessly on our laptops) and developers (WSL) considering the vast hardware combinations it has to run on.

I prefer the old system where individual apps begged users to use it as the default app for this or that filetype, and shut up if the user said no. If an app kept bothering the user to change (hello, every browser ever), that was the app's fault, not the platform's. Meanwhile, Windows dutifully kept sending the user to the default app.

Now that Windows has taken up the task of bothering the user, the responsibility for this annoying behavior is on Microsoft. They can and should be blamed for it.

I too find the new system annoying, but its better than go hunting thru file formats looking for what had been changed silently.

It would have been marvelous if Microsoft stopped right there. Instead, they chose to annoy users with an unskippable dialog box whenever a new app is installed that claims to know how to handle a PDF, JPG, or whatever. Fuck it, every app and their dog knows how to handle PDFs these days. I'm just waiting for the day when Windows suggests Slack as the default music player.

A shortcut to Edge also magically appeared on the desktop

Explain like I'm five how a firefox update would set the default browser to EDGE ;]

It didn't. The person who posted this didn't read the screen, and fundamentally misunderstood it. The title of the post is wrong.

You'll notice that the dialog is asking "How do you want to open .pdf files from now on?" Because Firefox can now be set as a default PDF reader, Windows has a new PDF reader option, so it asks the next time the user tries to open a PDF. (And this has nothing to do with being the default web browser or not.)

Next, the user also incorrectly assumed this had set the default to Edge. This is again, because they didn't read. Microsoft has broken out the "Featured in Windows 10" option from the "Other options". But it's asking, it hasn't made a change yet.

Note that if you install any web browser, Windows will do this.

I guess the main difference between this Edge install and any other browser is that only Edge gets an automatic placement in the bottom taskbar, next to the start button. No other browser I installed have ended up there automatically.

But many complaints about Windows are trumped up a bit by misunderstanding what actually happened.