Were they ever different tho? I know a lot of people believed the 'MS loves open source' and similar stuff but it always felt like bait to me. They still tried to force trough their shitty open document format, still regularly pull layers of small anticompetitive stuff. Small changes that aren't outrageous enough on their own to cause a reaction or throw out the trust they try to create but enough for me to be consistently reminded that generally their incentives and goals run counter to what I'd prefer.
They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in. Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees, becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that hosts a lot of open projects.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...
According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace open source now" argument:
* their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous attempt to discredit their competition that took over a decade
* the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu and other spyware with settings that reset after random upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS
* if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its boot menu.
Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the changes are just superficial.
*
Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?
> Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems.
You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to install Windows?
In UEFI? If I have the OSes on separate physical disks I'm planning to use the bios to select what boots.
But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated bootloader).
If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big" updates.
Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux
As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues. If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing it.
The last 30 years of MS shows that they are not interested in the non-hostile approach
Few things:
- Microsoft Java Virtual Machine scandal
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_Foundation_Classes
The equivalent for this on iOS or Android would be allowing opening links in a different browser and web view engine.
The equivalent Microsoft apps on mobile OSs aren't degraded - they aren't even allowed to exist in the first place.
Microsoft is bringing the desktop experience in line with mobile here. Doesn't make it less terrible but contrasting Apple and Google as better actors in this sense is an odd take.
Apple doesn't allow other browser engines but it's on them.
None of these bug tech corps are in the right here, but MS is being more anti-competitive than most.
So the correct iOS parallel is not Apple’s refusal to allow non-WebKit engines. But Apple’s hypothetical refusal to allow links to be opened in WebKit-flavored Firefox. Which, for the record, it does let you do.
To be precise: No, they don't. Their engines are based on the same codebase, but they still are running their own installed engines.
In contrast, Apple doesn't just refuse to allow non-WebKit engines. It requires everyone to use the pre-installed, Apple-provided engine. You can't use your own build of WebKit.
If I hadn't been paying attention, I would have thought that they were forcing me to install Edge too.
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening with GP’s experience with Teams, but just pointing out that when thinking about MS app behavior on any platform, it’s a variable that can be present in the corporate context which many “users” remain blissfully unaware of, or see it manifest as these weird rules and behaviors and not acting like other apps. But there can be an entirely different set of user stories at play beneath the surface.
In Android, all my links open in Firefox. I don't see any issue there. Might serve as an inspiration to Microsoft ;)
I've not seen anything opening in Chrome for years, if ever.
Except for the things that you just said open in the chrome webview, right?
It is also per-app choice. If an app decides doing something in a particular way, it is not the system's fault -- some reddit readers do the same, for some reason. For now, apps do have preferences to open in browser instead, and that option respects the default one.
One aggresive move that Google or Apple could do is to really help companies in the migration to their technology beyond saying RTFM and use our support. For example, augmenting these locked companies with Google staff. You cannot expect a big corporation to move all the gears alone to change their technology.
It is not the technology, it is the business execution.
“ A key factor in the decision was cost. Under the new Google license model, an equivalent amount of Google cloud storage would cost more than seven times what it will cost the university on the Microsoft platform.”
https://vtx.vt.edu/articles/2023/04/google-changes-announcem...
This is just the result of normalizing monopolistic practices in the mobile world over 15 years. You can thank Apple and Google for that. If you want something different, call your representatives and ask them to let the hammer fall on all 3.
My Android phone came with Chrome which I can't uninstall, just disable. Chrome is just there on millions of mobile devices, it was already on millions of PCs and has been for years, so people are used to that, the synergies between devices and services makes it easy to stay and hard to leave.
Microsoft problem now is that for 15+ years people have been told and essentially trained to install a new browser if they want a good internet experience on Windows. And that is Microsoft's fault for shipping a shitty browser with their OS for multiple decades. That's why they had to drop the "Internet Explorer" branding. It became synonymous with "browser you can't use if you want to use any modern website" during the late 00s/early 2010s.
Obviously, Edge uses Chromium now but that is a relatively recent develop (and a technical detail that the average user isn't even going to know). So it's not enough to undo 20 years of "the browser that comes with Windows is crap" inertia right away.
That's not been true for a while. IT preinstall Chrome in most companies nowadays, and obviously it's already on the phones and tablet you buy for the home.
Yes, MS dropped the ball after killing Netscape and being humbled by antitrust laws. But the current situation is as much a product of Google's "growth hacks" and mobile monopoly.
Most tablets sold are iPads. They don't have Chrome pre-installed. In North America, most phones are iPhones that don't have Chrome pre-installed. Most personal laptops are either Windows machines or Macs which don't have Chrome installed. Its pretty disingenuous to pretend as if Chrome market share comes from devices with Chrome preinstalled. People go out of their way to install Chrome.
Some freeware also contained an (enabled by default!) option to install Chrome and make it the default browser. CCleaner was guilty of it if I recall correctly.
I never understood why Microsoft thought cloning chrome was a good thing for adoption. Edge is just chrome now but with some annoying bloat like the coupon pop-ups and pay later scams.
Taking an existing engine and building a malicious frontend to harass your customers with popups, ads, and scams has way better returns in comparison.
Has nothing to do with why people don't use Edge (they still didn't use Edge when it was using a custom engine; same for IE before it).
And it's only the techy minority that even knows Edge is built on top of Chromium.
It’s all about Electron. There may be a Microsoft contingent that thinks it’s the future or maybe they are just hedging, but for now it’s important for stuff like Teams.
Of course, that's UI design, they are worse for privacy than Chrome, and the UI advantages begin to slip by the aggressive introduction of all the bloatware in the world. The browser's never quite been free of dark patterns either (new tab page's search field as one of the more glaring examples).
>It's more memory efficient in general
>It supports the Edge Webview2 framework that MSoffice apps use further cutting memory use
>It supports MDAG https://learn.mecrosoft.com/en-us/windows/security/threat-pr...
To me Edge is so competitive that I was surprised to see Microsoft getting back up to their old playbook when much of what makes edge profitable for them will be disabled on a corporate network anyways.
Google started breaking pages as soon as it detected it was running on Edge and not Chrome. Simply changing the user-agent string magically repaired the pages. So MS gave up and forked Chrome.
Another one is a lot of websites would only test on Chrome. So if Chrome implemented a standard in a slightly different way than the spec, it would break on all other browsers.
That's the correct thing to do and it's what real software engineers will do. But from the horrors I've seen in offshored websites, that's science-fiction to some coders. They will assume whatever version of Chrome they are running is the only one in existence and will use user-agent string once someone tells them their site is broken in Safari.
Chrome didn't even really catch on until 1-2 years after release when they finally added extensions and themes around 2010.
People liked Chrome because it really was a quantum leap over Firefox, which itself was a quantum leap over IE at the time. When Chrome was released and Google explained their tech decisions, it was a sea change. Everything they said in their illustrated comic about Chrome[1] made perfect sense and accurately predicted where web apps were moving to.
Google saw where the ball was going and designed Chrome accordingly. Isolated tab processes, seamless auto-updates, and a prioritization on JS performance were great bets that were copied by everyone else.
But to be honest, it's mostly the other way around: people live on phones, and when they have to interact with desktops, they pick the browser that integrates with their phones in the most seamless way. Which means, inevitably, the browser picked by their mobile-OS vendor, since there is little or no choice in that world.
The solution is not to turn into a little enforcer/fanboi for this or that corporation, but to crack open the mobile world (as well as Windows or any future platform) with the force of the State.
New Firefox is too dumb for that – you actually have to open that link in a new tab before you can send it to some other Firefox instance (and then close that useless tab again).
You can also buy an Android phone with Edge pre-installed by default like a Microsoft Surface Duo.
Microsoft has been trying to co-opt Android since Windows Phone failed. And they are able to do so because Android is relatively open (certainly more open than any mainstream consumer operating system has ever been). For instance, Microsoft added support for running Android Apps on Windows 11 and they added the Amazon App store to Windows rather than the Google Play store. Done completely without any involvement from Google. That is unprecedented openness for a mainstream OS. That's not to say that Android is perfect in regards to openness but the iOS/Android walled garden false equivalence that gets pushed around here is baseless.
They won that case on appeal though, and Mozilla wasn't a factor until years after the fact.
The more accurate read of the early-00s browser wars was that MS "won" with IE (95% market share!) and then pretty much lost the stomach (or focus/budget/etc.) to advance the web in any way.
>Monopolistic practices on mobile
Most of my phones have shipped with Samsung Internet.
They could not, because if they did that cartel suits would be opened within hours. Iwould expect both the US and Europe have such suits ready to go just in case, and Microsoft (hypocritically) has amicus briefs on standby.
And how is ms degrading googls products? They don't even have a mandatory app store in windows.
When comparing them all, ms has been the most open one
Same for other products. If OneDrive or MS Teams was all of a sudden really annoying to use on iOS and Android, but Slack and Google Meet would work really reliably and smoothly then I think a lot of people would just starting to use the non Microsoft alternative because nobody likes to deal with annoyances on a daily basis. We have seen this already, when Zoom came about it captured a huge part of the market really rapidly because it did something so much better than Teams did before. It didn't even require a dark pattern, now imagine how many more would have left Teams if dark patterns would have helped on top of that.
I suspect many, many more people globally (and in the US) use a smartphone than use a desktop with MS products on it daily.
I mean, it's Edge that they are work so hard to push. What do they actually gain from doing that? It's stupid all the way down.
I wonder how much money this shameful bottom of the barrel company behaviour makes them.
Are there managers who has their pay tied to some KPI? I have such a hard time believing there is a from above decision to do all these user hostile changes turning their main product into a BS joke.
rampant capitalism, especially in the US of A
the end goal is always to become a monopolist
Microsoft was basically inches away from being broken up in the late '90s due to their anti-competitive practices.
Maybe this time they'll break MS into small pieces. :)
That's my point.
China got their "Antimonopoly law" in 2007.
That might be their problem. They are a great company. Where do they go from there?
Zoom demonstrated really well how quickly companies were to switch their conferencing software if one worked consistently better than another.
I feel like you lost the plot here. Microsoft fiddling with browser settings is nothing compared to something like Apple forcing a walled garden App Store, to create a fully captured market they can brutally take advantage of. Even today, Apple has banned all browser competition on iOS, and only Safari is allowed to run. All competitors must just re-skin Safari to obey the monopolistic demands of Apple. Imagine if Microsoft banned all browsers except Edge! It would be an outrage! But we all accept that Apple does that and has for 10+ years.
Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
But Microsoft, to me, barely has a drop of the anti-competitive evil of its competitors. Apple mints hundreds of billions by banning competitors, locking them out and charging 30% rent on their monopoly. Microsoft... just wants their re-skinned Google Browser to not die.
They tried; with different means, but they expected the same result. That's what the antitrust case was about.
> Perhaps we are all so used to the daily monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior of Apple that we do not care any more.
While I have the same opinion as you wrt Apple behaviour, there is a difference: Apple doesn't have the market position like Microsoft did. You can function perfectly fine in society without any Apple product. That was not the case with Microsoft, they did everything they could so you had to use Microsoft system. Communicating with your bank or with government or public offices? Microsoft products were required. Apple has not such grip on the market and that makes the difference.
One is a healthy market, the other is not.
And Android respects browser choice, iOS will soon be forced to in the EU with the new sideloading mandate.
You're talking about this like Microsoft ever did anything differently than what you wrote? Since when have they focused 100% on just building great products and competing fairly?
Microsoft has a loooong history of the behavior they still have, nothing is new here. Forcing people to use Microsoft EdgeXplorer? They been doing this since the very creation of their own browser.
Don't act all surprised when a company who have been acting one way, continues to act that very way still.
They did a wonderful job with C# and .NET Core.
But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
Ah yes, the ecosystems where features such as hot reloading would only be in paid offers unless the ecosystem didn't start to shout at them when their plans changed from "of course it's free" to "sorry, paid customers only".
> But you need to remember your org charts; the Edge and Windows 11 decision-makers are not the same people with the same incentives.
I couldn't care less about their org charts. That's just a way for employees to feel better about what their colleagues are doing, "but that's not what I do at the company, I'm doing great stuff".
Just like Googlers trying to convince themselves they're doing great stuff for the world because they happen to hack on FOSS stuff while their colleagues spend most of their days optimizing ads and siphoning as much data as they can from their users.
Give me something as sane as .NET ecosystem for C and C++ and I would be willing to pay for that
Does anyone know where the open xlang implementation of MIDL went[3], by the way? (Unlike the original 1990s MIDL, you can't reimplement this one from the language grammar in the docs, because there is no language grammar in the docs.)
[1] https://dusted.codes/can-we-trust-microsoft-with-open-source and links there
Is it? This is the same ecosystem that has .Net, .Net Core, .Net Standard, and .Net Framework as all different (and overlapping? who knows) products?
The Core and Standard things was just there the aid the transition from Framework, which is now complete, any remains will soon be phased out entirely.
OP is giving a different perspective, a more detailed and granular one.
One interest counterpoint would be that the problematic behavior is encouraged by the CEO, then the different units wouldn't matter much (well, unless they have a tendency to go rogue). Anyway, all idle speculation on my part but I welcome the perspective.
What purpose could buying GitHub serve if they don't want GitHub to be a part of Microsoft? They are obviously trying to do everything, via a centralized organization which is Microsoft, so by all measures, they are or want to become, a monolith.
Regardless of what other people in the organization is doing, the organization as a whole is represented by everyone working their, no matter if they work on ads, cloud, FOSS or office products. You cannot work in one area and somehow ignore the work of your colleagues,
Considering all actions taken as part of some overarching plan is probably assuming too much. Some actions probably are towards some larger strategy, but myriad other ones are likely sub-level decisions. Always looking at large corporations such as Microsoft as one entity with a cohesive goal is easy, but it's also simplistic, which doesn't always yield a useful and productive discussion.
It's more like condemning all of the US because it has implemented a national policy that only one state really wanted.
It doesn't matter that only one state wanted it. It's still national policy and thus fair game to criticize the entire nation for.
Do office apps open links in edge? Does VS code?
If they do, then I agree with you. If they don't, then I don't, for what should be obvious reasons.
Just because your particular outcropping isn't coated in digital blood doesn't mean you're not part of the problem.
If a company sent out two crews of people and one crew gave out flowers to strangers and the other crew punched little old lady's faces in, would you still crow about how you're only handing out flowers?
> Something conducive "leads to" a desirable result. A cozy living room may be conducive to relaxed conversation, just as a boardroom may be conducive to more intense discussions. Particular tax policies are often conducive to savings and investment, whereas others are conducive to consumer spending. Notice that conducive is almost always followed by to.
How did I go at least half my life without knowing this.
You mean the products Microsoft created when it became apparent they were losing the lawsuit about their embrace, extend extinguish tactics with J++ and their custom Java implementation. And also had to cough up billions of dollars in a settlement with Sun [1].
[1] https://www.infoworld.com/article/2667124/update--sun--micro...
More then 50% of the VM's in Azure run Linux and not Windows. On AWS and GCP the percentage VM's running non-Windows OS'es is probably even higher. That's a realistic threat to the continued existence of .NET if .NET only runs on Windows.
I don't think that's bias.
It's really nice not having advertisements in my start menu.
Who doesn't like to talk about it? It's so much easier to integrate components on Linux over windows. Why would anyone willingly use windows for data analysis?
The Remote SSH extension has been a game changer for how I do development.
Ironically compared to Windows, MS has been willing to kill backward compatibility more to improve .NET to make it more cross-platform, something that must come from a very different part of the company, probably the one that got the "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS" mandate.
I make no apologies for their history, but I like these tools and I like them much better than Java, which also has its place. (This isn't a throwaway comment, notice I said I use Clojure, it's my favorite, which runs on the JVM.)
C# is nice, but the experience in VS Code is sub-par and I think it's the VS (not code) managers that are responsible for that state of being.
This is a joke, right? We never, ever, needed anything other than the Win32 GUI at the core of windows, and it still works to this day. You can write Windows programs without the new stuff, in Lazarus, for example.
C# and .NET were a huge step backwards. VB6 was something easy enough for domain experts to get working, without having to hire a programmer. Delphi for Windows make it very easy for even beginner programmers to ship a clean professional Windows GUI by just building the UI and hooking events to it, with almost zero boilerplate. C/C++/C# reverse that trend and lost us all a decade or more of productivity.
VScode? A rebuild of Atom, "free" with un-disable-able telemetry with the same intention: owning the devs
Buy out of github, owning the devs
Rebuild of ms office for the web: owning users given gsuite was seriously taking over office use
OpenAI: since bing kept being a failure, they invested elsewhere and may have a chance, here again: own the general users and to a degree professionals.
Anything MS did and continues to do is lateral moves to own markets. The pretence of openness or innovation makes it even worse than the corp from its flamboyant 90s days, at least back then nobody was taken for a fool.
- Video games: Activision/Blizzard, ZeniMax, Double Fine Productions, Obsidian Entertainment, inXile Entertainment, Playground Games, Compulsion Games, Undead Labs, Ninja Theory, Mojang
- Developer ecosystems: npm, Dependabot, GitHub, Playfab, Deis, Xamarin, Havok, HockeyApp
And MS practices are not standard business, they certainly understand the rules well, but have have been making illegal moves, it is a fallacy to word it as if illegal moves were part of the capitalism game: Monopolies are to be prevented, that's why anti trust laws were put in place, which MS was already caught breakig.
And Google let them win by coasting on GSuite. I use it for my business, my partner uses Office 365 for hers. In 2023 Office 365 is by far the better choice.
If you don't mind me asking: what is better about o365? I know that Excel is the jewel in the Office crown, but if you aren't leaning on that heavily, what's the big difference to you?
https://support.microsoft.com/office/overview-of-visio-for-t...
And VSCode. One thing all three have in common is that they are all FREE to use--they don't make Microsoft any money directly.
And, for the segment of the developer tools market that wrangles C# code, if VSCode gets too good, it becomes a threat to a cash cow: Visual Studio.
Start here: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276#is...
Given much of the key feature set of visual studio is now in VSCode for free for .Net development, I wonder what future holds for Visual Studio. My assumption is that Microsoft will eventually stop making commercial IDEs and just give the tooling away, as it all helps drive Azure/cloud compute sales.
VSCode runs in a browser and can now be launched straight from a github repo page - I don't think you need a crystal ball to see the way things are going. Imagine onboarding someone with zero dependencies to install on their development machine - just pop a browser and get to work.
> https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2021/08/31/github-...
And typescript!
I guess that's about .. literally.. average.
People who I assume are MS employees keep saying this on HN, and to an end user it's really weird. I don't need to know squat about the internal org structure of some monolith in Redmond, they need to stop screwing around with this anti-consumer behavior and regulators need to slap their hand any time they try and reach for this cookie jar.
"Flight mode" was a lovely curiosity at that time. Example from Encarta 98, but I thought 96 also had it.
Before that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
They simply cannot resist the urge to cheat in this manner.
> "It's an interesting myth, and one I've heard about in general terms, although I've never heard the specific quote before. However, I have no recollection of any instance of its actually happening with 1-2-3 or with any other product I've worked on." And, "My memory of the early days (1984-85) is that we would get early betas of DOS to test with 1-2-3 and any errors that we found were 'bugs' in DOS and fixed by Microsoft."
> Try to imagine a customer with a working copy of 1-2-3 who installed a new version of DOS and 1-2-3 stopped working. Would they blame Lotus or Microsoft? Would their reaction be "1-2-3 sucks" or "DOS sucks"? Would their solution be to get rid of 1-2-3, or stop buying DOS upgrades?
[0] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_done...
Yes. But their definition of those terms are stuck in the 90s
iirc They bought (or rather scammed) Internet Explorer from Spyglass. As they did with many of 'their' products back in the day (Windows NT/SQL server/...). Are MS building products themselves these days?
https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/
The context is explained prior, but the part I'm pointing to is:
> And Microsoft grew impatient, and did not wish to wait for webmasters to learn of IE and begin to send it frames, and so Internet Explorer declared that it was “Mozilla compatible” and began to impersonate Netscape, and called itself Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 2.0; Windows 95), and Internet Explorer received frames, and all of Microsoft was happy, but webmasters were confused.
Ultimately, I think it's still on-topic given that, at any point, any of these browser vendors (admittedly, not limited to Microsoft) could have started to work with webmasters for a standard of "feature claims" instead of "user agent claims". So a user agent can say, "I support frames," and a server can serve frames. Instead, Microsoft decided they'd just lie about it.
To the same point, Google is arguably the reason it persists today given the popularity of Chrome. Just as Microsoft is arguably the reason it started. (I suppose I could have been more careful in the phrasing of my initial comment since "is so useless" could imply both but I don't think it's particularly egregious.)
Then why send a UA string at all? Save the bytes on the wire.
Oh and music. I use an alternative to Apple music because I choose to. That doesn’t stop Apple music from being the auto play choice even when I don’t use Apple Music.
If Apple’s products are so much better they should allow choice and bot be threatened by it.
Two examples: In "Find My" their is a "navigate" button for your various things, this will always use Apple Maps instead of giving you the choice. Same with the tapping the "address" field in your contacts list.
And if you don't have Apple Maps installed, does it give you any options? No, instead it'll ask you if you want to install Apple Maps...
Meaning that it wouldn’t be much of an issue to open an audio file with anything that isn’t Apple Music, but FindMy would need to support a myriad of map app formats to work as intended.
Out of curiosity, I opened the Google app in iOS, searched for a place, and tapped on the result to open a map. Even with the default app set to Apple Maps, it goes straight to Google Maps.
I haven’t been able to find the correct MIME type or URL protocol for a generic geo call, either, which makes me suspect that there is more to it than it seems.
Regardless, it seems strange that other applications can show you a list of navigation apps when clicking on an address while Apple cannot. You're saying it's too technically difficult for Apple to achieve what others can?
Somehow, by some magic, Telegram asks you if you want to open the navigation to an address in Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze (for me, possibly different for others). I'm not sure I'm buying it's too difficult for Apple to do the same, if they wanted to.
Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
That's quite a statement, given that Internet Explorer didn't support WebGL, nor rich HTML5 video reproduction, until 2014 [0]. They are needed for the full versions of Google Maps and YouTube, respectively.
Microsoft did create a YouTube app, but it filtered out video ads, which didn't sit quite well with Google [1]
It looks to me that the pain was self inflicted.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/windows-phone-8-1-fe...
[1] http://allaboutwindowsphone.com/features/item/24422_Thestate...
No, there weren't. PWAs did not even exist at the time. User experience was severely degraded when browsing Google properties with Windows Phone IE.
Google also barred Microsoft from releasing a native YouTube app for Windows Phone, insisting that it must be done with HTML5 instead, even though Google's own YouTube apps for Android and iOS were native.
> Microsoft didn’t do the same with theirs. Outlook didn’t get an Android version until late 2015, Edge took a few years to arrive, and Bing Maps never made it.
Bing Maps works fine on Android as a PWA. It does not get degraded if I use Chrome. So yeah, Microsoft didn't do the same with theirs.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2474516/why-is-google-...
> Windows Phone's Achilles Heel is its app gap -- it has far fewer apps than Android and iOS
This was more of an issue than one specific app, especially one that like YT that can be consumed via web browser
I’m just speaking based on intuition and what I remember happening, I might be wrong
Sorry, but Google really isn't a saint regarding degraded experience. The shenanigans around UX for example using Google services in Firefox have a long, well documented tradition. They just aren't as overt and clumsy with it as MS.
Works without any issues and it's a much nicer product experience.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...
Afair there's also one for YouTube.
I just recently started using a modified version of the "h265ify" add-on that just advertises support of a few extra codecs (HEVC and surprisingly MPEG-2) to websites. With both Edge and Chrome, I do that because I know the formats work but the API doesn't indicate they do.
Android not exactly making it easy to change the default browser for average users either tbh
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/1118/
but on desktop legislation shut this down, or at least tried, and it wasn't a problem for years
honestly we need a proper "fair platform" legislation, world wide
and focus more on power abuse and free market damaging power dynamics instead of obsessing over the "mono" in monopoly (because with today markets you can have more power then a classical single market monopoly while not being a monopol or even duopoly in any of the many markets you cover, power you can even more efficiently abuse then a monopoly when adding new market to your portfolio...)
the “Android makes you tap something to change your default browser!” was some FUD that either Brave/DDG stopped spreading because it was generating backlash.
Much like the “you have to confirm you enable sideloading!” alert in Android, it’s not clear what people want otherwise, a confirmation isn’t the same thing as making it difficult.
I wish these things would pass simply because it makes it harder to have the real conversations needed to get things back on track
The problem with sideloading on Android is that it won't accept upgrades for your applications. You will have to get them from the installer app. And then it will confirm before downloading each app. And then it will confirm before installing each app. And then it will confirm again because, well, I have no idea.
One confirmation isn't the same as making it difficult. Piles and piles of them is.
Apple was in deep troubles when IE was all the rage, you needed IE to access your bank's site, your company's intranet, so many site that were strictly IE only. Microsoft gifting them an implementation of IE was a mild grace, but still wasn't enough. Not having a browser compatible with 99% of the web was an issue pushing people away from Macs.
They learned their lesson, and used their advantage in the mobile market to make sure no other browser ever puts them in a similar position.
Google has a slightly different issue, in that for instance a strongly privacy focus/ad blocking browser taking the android world by storm is nothing good for them.
Apple doesn't trust third party developers when it comes to running code that Apple has not vetted in advance.
Visiting any Google property would result in nagging to download chrome. Firefox and (classic) Edge would just break for no reasons on Google pages (changing the user-agent fixed the issue).
I disagree here. Despite me using firefox on my android device and it being set to my default browser, many apps will still open in chrome (usually google apps - maps, gmail, etc) despite me explicitly asking it _not_ to do that. It's also not clear that it's using chrome, as it's the "generic" browser modal. The way that google services are bundled together on android and have limited interop (Samsung and Google Pay regularly fight with each other on my device for "who is the default payment method", and google is _not_ happy to not be my default).
Google have been pushing manifest v3 despite massive objections, introducing undocumented "fair usage" limits [0], require third party cookies to use some of their services to download files (gmail, gdrive). Google are drowning in dark patterns.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35329135/item?id=353291...)
And they aren't the only ones engaged in exploiting these kind of walled garden incentive mechanism.
I mentioned before, it feels like we're being herded to Mastodon with the Twitter drama. This feels like being herded to a different OS. Perhaps ome new brilliant one. But how we get there, the journey, matters.
Of course, that's crazy talk, Microsoft would never do that. Why would they chase away customers. So I'll just end that silly argument before it inches into a snowball dragging me towards a troll state.
But it doesn't feel good. It turns my love of programming into something else.
And I see that happening with other things I love too.
But it's important recognizing the mechanisms and patterns. And recognizing that managing it differently may lead to different outcomes afterwards.
They did decades ago in the last century. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Microsoft does not care if they piss off most of these people because they not the ones signing the contracts and the lock-in is SO BAD that even if they piss off the right people, making any change is way more trouble than they are willing to deal with.
There is an entire side of the tech industry with admins who only want to learn powershell and still think you can’t “lock down” Linux and mac machines.
How? I mean, how does a degraded experience on android cause people to abandon windows desktops?
I just don't see the connection here: if Google, tomorrow, outright rejected any MSFT software on android phones, how does it hurt windows desktop deployment numbers? Maybe if everyone switched to Mac, but that would kill of android too...
This is what a working monopoly looks like. We've seen before this exactly how much crap users would put up with on the desktop, and still they didn't abandon windows.
There is nothing the mobile market can do that they haven't already tried to take windows market share.
In fact, there is nothing that the mobile world can do to Windows users that is worse than what Microsoft did to them, and yet those users are still chugging along happily paying for Windows every year.
I have an iPhone (forced upon me by work) and it's ridiculous how many links still try to open in safari or Apple maps. I've tried to configure it for years and I've literally uninstalled Apple maps, but half the time iPhone keeps wanting me to reinstall it when I click a link or address. And a lot of url links open in safari instead of chrome or Firefox.
Same with many other things - I can install whatever browser I want as long as it's a skin on their browser.
I can install any keyboard I want as long as it's just a skin on their keyboard.
I can install any app I want as long as it comes from Apple store.
Etc etc etc.
Yep, I vehemently disagree with your premise :). I think MS is looking at Apple's walled garden and saying "what if we could get away with some of that?"
(not disagreeing that dark patterns are despicable! My wife knows the scream that comes from my home office when I try to get iPhone or windows to do something I want! I just disagree that mobile os world is some paragon of user centric benevolence :)
A link to what domain?
For clicking addresses, I kind of get it: the author of the text didn't link it at all, so the OS (or whatever) gets to decide how to enhance the presentation which can include promoting a specific app. Not great, but fine.
For clicking links, it should definitely just use the browser unless an installed app's manifest has the domain registered.
And for what it's worth, open a directions link from Google some time - for me, it opens Google Maps, which I do have installed, but don't prefer using. I choose Apple Maps because I'd rather have Watch notifications while I drive, but Google doesn't offer me that choice.
Off topic, but you're not actually looking at your watch while you drive right?
How do I get Siri to navigate using Google Maps? How do I replace Siri with a different voice assistant?
You can't for either of those questions.
Nevermind that changing the browser doesn't actually change jack because Apple doesn't allow competition in the browser engine space.
All in all, it is just hard for me to take seriously an opinion saying that Apple allows for unrestrained competition on its devices and Microsoft is the big bad in this space. Historically, maybe true - but not even close to true now imo.
However, clicking an address in a message and being told to install Apple Maps is super aggravating and I'm not sure if there's a way around that...
Yeah, and its easy to open the link from Outlook and Teams in Chrome - just copy the link & paste into the chrome URL bar.
> You can actually ask Siri to navigate with Google Maps by appending "using Google Maps" to a request. So for example, "navigate home using Google Maps".
It reads differently now.
To be fair though, I did find it on my wife's iPhone, though under Chrome (she does not have it under Safari (or General either, where I would've expected it)). Still don't have it anywhere on my iPhone. I'll try to see if that's because she's ahead of me on OS updates or some other reason.
Thx!
As an iOS app dev with a hobby project iOS keyboard, this is false. Third party iOS keyboards have just as much control over the keyboard UI and how each key interacts with text as a full fledged app does. In fact there is no way to “skin” the standard keyboard, but I wish there were because building a decent touch keyboard is actually quite difficult and that’d reduce the workload quite a lot.
To wit, some of the features that same-named apps/keyboards give me on android but not on iPhone include "hold key for alternative character" or button to "force" numpad. As well all keyboards I've tried have same layout and sizing as the original one.
I assumed it was imposed on them in some way I guess?
For instance the app Fantastical comes with a "keyboard" that inputs dates that are open on your calendar[0] and there exist a few rather nonstandard keyboards like Typewise[1].
Absence of features common on Android boards I would guess comes down to those patterns not being familiar to (and thus, not desired by) iOS users or in some cases software patents (there have been a few cases of keyboard devs receiving cease and desist notices from patent holders for using some UI pattern).
[0]: https://flexibits.com/img/help/fantastical-ios/en/f3-opening... [1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/typewise-custom-keyboard/id147...
https://www.exideas.com/ME/index.php
Somewhat different from the original keyboard layout.
(The paucity of alternatives is probably down to patents and licensing.)
The idea is that because keyboards can connect to the internet (with user permission), there's potential for data theft. It may also be possible to exfiltrate data from a keyboard extension by saving the data to an app container shared by the host app, which the host app can then send out with its network access.
Devs who don't know how or care to properly accommodate the variable height of third-party keyboards may use the app-wide opt-out to eliminate bugs relating to that, though I haven't personally encountered this.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiapplicatio... [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uitextinputt...
Now it seems that the keyboards randomly hang / crash and don't come up when requested on the first try.
Apple goes out of their way to screw with third party competitors.
Walled garden is marketing speak. You should not use it.
>Closed ecosystem
>Restricted platform
>Proprietary systems
>Walled Prison/Jail(this has negative bias, but may fit depending on the context)
>Curated platform
I'm sure you can get objective phrases from chatgpt too.
MS looks at it and thinks their frat party mansion (3 bedroom duplex) can do the same.
Apple gets away with it because that what their target audience want. MS target audience doesn't want it. If I wanted a walled garden - I would use Apple, they clearly know how to maintain it.
All Smartphones on this planet use the same USB-C charging port except iPhones. And as far as I remember, the European Union requires the manufacturers by law to use USB-C, because before the law every phone came with a different power adapter.
Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
No, I am not a big fan of that Microsoft move, because I think they should respect the users browser choice. But I am even less a fan of Apple doing things nobody else is allowed (for good reason).
The law you're talking about here specified that the charger itself must have a standard USB-C port. Apple gets away with it because 1. they don't even bundle a charger anymore, and 2. they ship a cable that allows the phone to be connected to a USB-C charger (Lightning to USB-C cable).
The new law that takes effect some time in 2024 for smartphones (amongst other devices) stipulates that the port on the smart device must be USB-C. Under this new law, essentially if a device is large enough then the port must be USB-C.
> Next example, OS and browsers: Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
Another new EU law (the Digital Markets Act) takes aim at this specific issue actually.
I get where you're coming from, and yeah sure one could argue that giants like Apple, Google, Microsoft should do better, but in the end they are corporations who will do what is best for their shareholders, as such I am not in the least surprised over actions they take like the ones discussed in your comment and the article that started this discussion.
I think it's great that governmental regulation is finally coming to set the game rules for things like how general purpose operating systems must allow device owners the ability to install their own software (including real actual browsers with their own engines and everything), how communication apps must support cross-network communication upon request, and to standardise how we charge our smart devices.
For me it shows what kind of a company Apple is. Even companies like Sony (who install rootkits on your devices without your consent), comply with the spirit of the charging adapter law. But Apple tries to find a loophole, just to push their own agenda, at whatever cost for society.
But as you said, the other large corporations probably do it in some way too.
I swing both ways honestly, I love many engineering aspects of the Lightning port, and at the same time I recognise that having only USB-C to care about would obviously simplify my life a bit, even if I think for the purpose of a mobile phone it is an inferior port.
I realistically don't care what port is on my phone, but my wife's phone has USB-C and I have 9000 and 1 usbc cables at home.
> Every Operating System has to offer the user the choice of which browser they want to use. Except for Apple, they offer a choice of which UI you want to use, but on iOS the browser engine is always Safari (which kills competition hard on iOS devices).
This is due to security imposed on App Store apps: can't do JIT, and you can't have a reasonable JavaScript engine today without it. Frankly, I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses as long as everything synced.
I have plenty of annoyances with Apple, but what people usually bring up are from people just looking for reasons to hate on Apple for no reason.
> I'm not concerned with what engine browser uses
Just to give one example from the top of my head: For years (5+), Apple did not implement a proper Push-API for Safari. All other major browsers had it, but because on iOS all browsers are just Safari, there was no way to have it on iOS, which is a pretty big market share. Push-API sound like some marketing stuff, but in reality it is pretty fundamental to a lot of use-cases like multi-user synchronization, chats, etc. So you might think that you don't care about the rendering engine, but in reality Apple can abuse the browser situation to control the whole JS ecosystem.
So I don't hate Apple for no reason. Instead, I hate them for very specific reasons. They also do good stuff (primarily for their users/customers), but for me the bad far outweighs the good, because it affects everybody who has contact with their customers and not just the people who decided they want to have an Apple device.
Apple is the most user-hostile company I have ever seen from a individual freedom centric standpoint, but they are good at hiding it. They think everyone outside of the organization should follow their line of thinking. Apple wants to be the gatekeeper of everything and that doesn't work in a free society. Deep down, I think people want to be free of external influence. Microsoft only cares about maximizing profits and doing whatever it takes to get there. I guess there is no difference between the two except that apple tries to justify there behavior behind a superiority complex.
The bug report ones is especially annoying as those emails are often pre-populated with a bunch of data that isn't so easy to just copy into a new email in a different mail client, like support attachments, etc.
On your phone, the walled garden approach is fine. On a desktop machine in which you control, it is not.
And then there's no need to comment on the Apple portion in your comment, considering the critique is that Microsoft isn't playing nice because they try to default to Edge.
I mean... yes. But that happened in the late 90s. Hasn't changed since then.
What are you talking about? The only browser on iOS is safari, the only app store is the Apple app store. They prevent you from collecting any sort of payment without passing through their 30% fee "because we can". How is that any better?
I think this is already happening. Google pushes non-stop for you to use the Gmail app, then once you do all the links prompt you to open Google Maps, and all the rest. It's annoying and there's no way to change it.
I think Microsoft is just taking a step out of Google's playbook here. Doing exactly what Google does on mobile, but doing that same shitty behavior on desktops. "If you made the choice to use a Microsoft app, you're making the choice to be in the Microsoft ecosystem."
I hate it, it's trash, all the rest... but it feels like -- shocking -- Microsoft is just copying something they saw someone else doing.
I have been investing in MSFT under the assumption that they have completely abandoned these markets. What mobile market does Microsoft require when they have an increasing number of SMBs locked entirely into their death star?
> given up on making products which people enjoy to use
Building new apps in with .NET/Azure/GitHub is a dream. The laser focus of the tech community on principled Windows OS issues and other product concerns is completely missing the overarching universe that is being forged by Microsoft.
Azure in 2023 is like Disneyland for a SMB CTO/CIO. If you go all-in you can actually enjoy your weekends and auditors can't really figure out how to ruin your free time as much as they used to be able to. Sure, there are specific technological or economic things that might be better on-prem (or in a different cloud), but overall I have never seen something this unified, stable, confidence-inspiring, etc.
I believe that the first cloud which can be largely delegated out to non-wizards is going to be the one that wipes the floor with the others. I suspect Microsoft is already hard at work integrating the LLM features they acquired into their Azure administration use cases. Simply having a bot integrated into the portal that can provide suggested configurations in a few hotspots (e.g. make a VM like XYZ but with ABC changes) would be incredible.
I mean, they actually do though. Apple and Google both do similar things, they just get less media coverage because they are seen as normal to the mobile ecosystem, while this seems abnormal because it's in a desktop environment. That's no excuse for Microsoft, I wish they'd stop doing some of this garbage, but to act like Apple and Google have clean hands is laughable.
This sort of thing happens regularly on Android though it's perhaps more subtle. I don't know how many times I've had to set the default browser, photo viewer, pdf viewer, etc only to be prompted to choose how to open a file and Google's App is first in the list.
They also implement features in their Apps to avoid your defaults: https://i.imgur.com/9nzpTPG.png
Certain features like STT for the entire operating system require Google Assistant. And image search or real-time translation require the Google Search App to be installed. So you have to choose between being harassed by Assistant and Search prompts at ever turn, or disabling core OS features.
Microsoft does not care about anything more than the bottom line. As long as they can increase revenues and market penetration, they will do it. They've been playing this game since IE.
I would love to hear other folks opinions as I'm sure I see only a tiny sliver of what's going on :)
They were always that, thru entirety of their history they have used anticompetitive practices on any chance they could.
Microsoft just really abused it bundling in IE and was penalized hard for it.
These other players have learned to push the limits of anti-competitive behavior while maintaining a plausible defense against government action.
Until very recently you couldn't even change the default browser on iOS, I think the idea Apple are playing "fairier" than Microsoft is a lot more nuanced than you make it seem with this statement.
Even after adding ability to change default browser to iOS, there's still the limitation that only the webkit rendering engine provided by Apple can be used - Firefox and Chrome on iOS are wrappers around the OS level Webkit implementation - the rendering engine is still Safari/webkit - they aren't using their own rendering engines as they do on all other OSes.
There's also the agreement between Apple and Google for default search on iOS too, which absolutely costs Bing marketshare.
> https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/01/web-developers-challenge-appl...
What even is Microsoft?
Microsoft's software isn't even trying to be "good". That hasn't been the goal for a while. Instead, Microsoft's goal has been to cement its monopoly, particularly with Windows, Office, and Xbox.
Sure, they tried to break into the mobile sector, but they seem to have generally accepted that failure. Every other move has been to keep everyone using the same old tech it had in 2002.
Dark patterns are all about keeping users in the room. Microsoft has been a "great company" since 1993. As long as it can keep that status, it doesn't need "good".
One nice thing about the last decade or so is that other company has had to rein in its historical behavior, and also care about PR a bit.
We'll see how that plays out, given the increasing power that might come with the intimate relationship with OpenAI, and the frenzy of market interest around what's shipping there.
This thing of forcing Edge for opening links, it's clearly an idea successfully forced by a small group of bullies upon other employees, and they probably get a reward from the increased Edge traffic/usage.
Ultimately, there is only one person responsible for this toxic culture and it's the CEO.
Change that from a question to a statement and it becomes one of the better single sentence summaries of the windows 11 design methodology.
Apple and Google own the entire mobile OS market. They could literally destroy Microsoft if they started to hugely degrade the experience of Microsoft products on iOS and Android with dark patterns a la Microsoft. But they don't. So far they were competing by making their own products better. Microsoft needs to think hard how hostile they want to be to its competitors and users, because two people can play this game. I don't get Microsoft, have they no pride or desire to become a great company? Have they just become content to be an old corporate software house who only manages to keep users through dark patterns and anti-competitive behaviour because they have given up on making products which people enjoy to use?