This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1264137/microsoft-blocks-browser-choice-for-1-4-billion-windows-10-11-users-page-84-study-finds
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Lobsters
Full Report(PDF).
Note: The number in the headline is the total number of Windows 10 and Windows 11 users mentioned in page 84 notes in the report.
i just start with the basic rule of: whatever they want or suggest or default to, the opposite is probably what should be configured or answered instead.
I work with a lot of fresh-out-of-box windows PCs. When I don't immediately wipe them completely for a Debian install, the first thing I do in Windows is fire up Edge, download and install chrome and set it as default browser, then delete all Edge shortcuts.
Several iterations of Windows stubbornly re-install the Edge shortcuts, luckily Google can quickly help you make the deletions stick longer. Of course, if they don't want to respect our choices of how we want our desktop configured, we also have a choice of desktops and OSs.
Why not winget install Google.Chrome? That way you don't even need to open Edge
Too nerdy, doesn't send the same message as "ordinary people hate Edge THIS MUCH!"
why not firefox though?
Edge is just a better, way more feature rich but still leaner, more W3C compliant version of chrome though.
Left out that oulook has two settings for opening links now... Edge, and Default Browser, and Edge is selected by default, even if you have chosen a different browser as your default.
Teams too.
New Outlook also really wants you to send files through onedrive. When dragging a file in you get two big fields to drop it into, one for actual attachment, the other for a onedrive link. After you go for the former, it has the gall to add another small banner with "upload to onedrive".
Fffffuck off
Updates for Windows now off the table for most users.
Microsoft still in race to end their company. Sony still slightly ahead of them in terms of reputation loss.
Both companies want to turn you into a renter of their software.
These harmful patterns exist all throughout the operating system. They're so incredibly frustrating and obviously anti-user, and it is these intentional design decisions that have pushed me away from windows on all of my devices
Windows 10 and 11 webapps like Wikipedia are also designed to use the pre-installed copy of Edge and stop working if Edge is manually uninstalled.
Welcome back to the year 2000…
It's undeniable that Microsoft makes this difficult, but Google Chrome has found its way onto nearly 75% of all desktops while Edge only enjoys around a 10% share.
I assume Apple does the same with Safari and Google with Chrome on ChromeOS.
youtube, google, gmail. all better platform to market from than your desktop os. plus google spent a ton of money on mainstream ads, and had the perfect place on those aforementioned platforms to peddle their own and at no cost to them. and google is far from innocent here.. they've bullshitted their way to the top of the browser game and pull similar stunts as microsoft does.
To be sure, Google's market penetration across the web is a huge driver of encouraging people to switch browsers. It costs nothing to advertise on their own website! I just find it interesting that so many people on Windows actually do. If I was forced to choose between Edge and Chrome, I'd probably skip the hassle of installing an extra browser.
