I like that they do that for Windows for ARM too (admittedly niche) but can't be bothered to produce a native ARM Windows port of Chrome (you can get Chromium though) so the experience is just absolutely dreadful.

Its so weird that one company isnt mentioned, but will straight up not allow you to run any programs they want.

These have dark patterns, but freedom still. (Not M$ anymore, they restore defaults with each update)

Which company? You can run an unsigned .app on Mac with a ctrl+click, and there's also a system flag to change the block to a click-through popup. Apple is generally good at providing hidden flags to permanently turn off nanny mode, with a few exceptions (the context menu translation feature will happily tell you that a language isn't supported instead of letting you use Google Translate).

I believe he was referencing iOS were it is not possible to use a third party browser engine. Just safari in different dresses.

I think maybe they are referring to iOS, where you can't install any software not on the app store, and all non-safari browsers are required to use webviews instead of their own engine.

You're all over this thread being deliberately obtuse. Of course iOS is bad, that's not the point.

We're discussing desktop operating systems, Windows is the only one that deliberately messes with the default browser.

I'd say it's far better because messing at the OS level is straight out evil.

On Firefox I can stand the suggestion to use Chrome when I use google, I can even block it with uBlock, but haven't really bothered to.

Now, when they keep tweaking my OS settings, and use every upgrade as the excuse to reset my browser settings over and over, then I get mad. When I get ads on my start menu too. That's why I don't use windows anymore.

I agree in general but Google has done things like let YouTube be slow in non-Chrome browsers or “accidentally” break GCP logins or Meet for months at a time.

TBF internal sites break on firefox for months too. People foocus on Chrome outside too, I think it's just that the mindset of coding against the standards and tracking all the version rollout for multiple engines is gone now that many "browsers" are just chorme reskins.

This doesn't make much sense to me

> I can even block it with uBlock

You can also block such things in your OS. It requires more expertise to modify machine code rather than obfuscated HTML, but in the end, it's cosmetically altering software to make it look the way you want it to.

Equal levels of 'evil' either way, to me

If they had gone out of their way to add DRM specifically to the pop-up (detecting div deletion for the web version, for example), that would be more evil, but such things aren't being done for showing browser advertisements (might come as a side effect for Windows licensing, but one who chooses to employ licensed software naturally invites that)

Have you tried downloading Chrome from Edge?

The both the browser and OS actively advise against it.

Google has an old crusade against Microsoft browsers. It doesn't do the same with the other ones.

What doesn't negate anything you said, it's just a detail worth adding.

I discovered a fun one yesterday; downloaded google drive for desktop, wasn't able to sign in, got an "unknown error". Search for it, try all the solutions, delete gdrive cache, reinstall, reboot, etc. Started to think it might be registry related (I had done a bunch of weird stuff to the storage recently), then it ocurred to me to try the login flow through chrome instead of firefox.

It worked first try.

I don't think they explicitly broke it in ff, just that they don't test on anything that isn't chrome, which results in these nice side effects.

> Visit google.com with Edge (on desktop) and you immediately get a popup on the top right "Google recommends using Chrome. Built for Windows. Easily search on Google with the fast, secure browser".

You make it out as if this is only done by Google. The same company that tries everything it can to make you use Edge on Windows also tries to make you switch to Edge on their site. Google is perfectly entitled to do what they want on their site, Microsoft however takes it to a whole new level - which is par for the course with Microsoft.

"Experience AI-powered browsing with the new Bing built-in. Get comprehensive answers and summarized information side-by-side in Microsoft Edge"