dnebdal
What do you purists use to talk to all the random people around you? Do you reply "I'm sorry, it's too insecure for me to answer that, you'll have to install Signal first" messages when more distant colleagues ask you if you're at your desk right now? Do you teach your grandmother to use WhatsApp so her birthday greetings won't be intercepted by the NSA?
(Admittedly, the email situation at work being utter trash may be coloring my opinion here.)
It would take a very weird bug to make the "select program for protocol" dialog ignore all entries except all versions of Edge; an even weirder coincidence to also ignore the relevant registry setting in favor of Edge when clicking links, and yet more so when when it only affects that protocol but not the other weird ms-specific ones.
Combined with how there was just a small burst of publicity over Firefox and Brave now also support capturing microsoft-edge: links, it feels like the "random bug" explanation is not the more likely one.
However, Excel remains a nice tool for "I'll just look at this CSV with the final results from this analysis, sort it by correlation, and see if any of the usual suspects are up top". And if the next step is "yeah, that looks fine - I'll just copy the top 100 genes into this convenient GUI pathway analysis tool", you're suddenly exposed to whatever Excel did to your data.
And as for "why not libreoffice", most researchers I personally run into are strong molecular biologists who've learned a subset of R for their uses; they're not really likely to go out and find libreoffice on their own. Besides, the writing process for papers includes sending drafts and spreadsheets to doctors and pathologists and editors, who are probably on hospital computers with a short whitelist of programs ... and I don't really want to debug subtle compatibility issues in the sort of garbage fire those documents can turn into.
Oh well, I'll probably have to get an ubiqity or something.