I just got this popup while playing New vegas. I don’t even use chrome, i’ve switched to firefox. How can this be allowed? Also, this is Win10
If governments actually gave a fuck about antitrust anymore, it would be. 20-ish years ago, they dragged Microsoft to court over simply bundling IE with Windows. It didn’t even constantly nag you to set as default; just the fact that it was bundled at all was enough to make it into the sights of regulators.
Dumb question but how would you get your browser of choice if they didn’t include one from the jump?
At the time, you’d get a disk from a store or order it from a magazine or whatever. I don’t really know what the solution would be now since those aren’t things though. I guess get one from a friend or another device?
If they didn’t bundle safari on a mac or firefox on linux, there are terminal commands to install firefox and chrome on both.
There is a command for windows via their built in package manager apparently, but I can’t confirm that.
Microsoft clearly uses dark patterns and FUD to lure you into using Bing.
As long as they’re using legal loopholes (or downright do not care because they have enough money to pay any fines) you cannot do anything against it except not using their OS.
I stopped using outlook entirely for this behaviour. Outlook would embed a bing search in your long press menu on android.
What kind of long press menu? I have it installed but don’t have any such menu.
Oh God, that was so annoying! Once I realized which app had added that, I uninstalled it with alacrity. I have to use Outlook for my job, but that doesn’t mean I’ll use the mobile version ever again. And the web-based one actually works fine on mobile devices.
It’s getting REALLY difficult to tell normal operation and viruses apart.
I think you’re confusing virus and malware. Windows is malware by definition. I think according to gnu philosophy any proprietary software is malware because features are designed to make profits and not to service the end user.
Because in all practical senses, windows is a virus.
Viruses at their core are programs which do things against your will on your own machine. Which is bad.
However, that is exactly what windows does. But like the boiling frog, people for some reason are okay with more bullshit from Microsoft and less control of their own devices with every passing update and year.
Complaining on reddit social media does nothing. Switching to Linux gives you back control and will be better for everyone in the long run.
Maybe I’m missing something, but why would this be illegal?
Anti consumer and anti competitive. Using their position as the OS to bug the living shit out of you to use their services
Anti consumer and anti competitive.
I’m not so sure how it’s either of those things. I mean yeah, it’s annoying (especially if it’s popping up while you’re playing a game), but I don’t feel like it’s crossing either of these lines. If you click “Don’t switch”, it goes away, and it’s not changing anything without your permission. I’ve never seen it pop up again on my devices. I forget where in the settings it would be, but I seem to recall there being an option to disable suggestions like this, as well (although an argument could be made that this should be opt-in instead of opt-out).
I know this community has a (largely justified) hate-boner for big tech companies, but not every annoyance is a crime. If anything, I’m just glad to see that they’re at least respecting the user’s consent these days; in the before times, Microsoft would just revert all your shit to what they wanted, whether you liked it or not, permission be damned. I lost track of how many WinXP updates would reinstall that Bing Bar (or MSN or whatever they called it back then) without asking me.
Unless there’s another angle that I’m not seeing, I don’t see how this is that much of a problem. If anything, it’s a good advertisement for Linux, though.
I’m not even remotely a legal expert and I don’t know what type of popup that is but I think the anti-competitive piece is “could Google use the same technique to push the user to switch to google search on Edge or not?”.
If this was an ad from a web page OP had opened or from the game and if clicking “Yes” only directed the user to a site with instructions on how to switch default search engine on Chrome, then yes, obnoxious but probably fair. Google could strike a deal with the game developers to push their search engine to Edge users or buy an ad. Someone writing a new browser or search engine will probably have considerably less money than Google but could reasonably do something similar to try and gain market share.
On the other hand, if that popup comes from Windows itself and especially if clicking “Yes” directly changes Chrome’s settings, then this is Microsoft using their ubiquitous (on desktops) OS to nudge more users to switch a competitor’s browser to their own search engine. Google, or even less a new competitor. would probably not have the same type of OS-level access to switch the settings of a different browser.
Using a dominant market position as leverage against competitors, is per definition Anti consumer and anti competitive.
Apart from that, they are basically hijacking a competitors product to show this, which I think if not already illegal, it absolutely should be.
I think this sentiment come from the long history of Microsoft repeatedly breaking and then failing to address antitrust requests. At this point people just assume bas faith.
I remember maybe a decade ago how it seemed a big deal anytime they used their OS monopoly to fuck with 3rd parties alternatives. But yeah, I don’t think every popup and annoyance is a crime. There’s a fine line they walk to still push their first-party garbage.
It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.
E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …
I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.
Anticompetitive is a matter of antitrust law. Microsoft doesn’t currently have a monopoly on operating systems in the way they did 25 years ago.
Looking online in January they had a 74% share of desktops.
Linux is certainly dominating in the cloud but that doesn’t really make much difference here.
According to Rules of the Internet § 12 “if I find something to be annoying, objectionable, or wrong it surely must be illegal.”
MS literally got in trouble for bundling IE with the OS 20 years ago… This is so much worse.
If you cannot understand why people are rightfully upset… LEARN YOUR FUCKING HISTORY.
Those days are long gone. Else we’d see Apple and Google getting in trouble for bundling their own apps for everything on their devices.
Things were a little bit different in the late 90s though. Windows had a 97% market share and a massive deal with pretty much every computer maker to only put Windows on their pre-built machines. They had a true monopoly in a way that doesn’t exist today.
They also made IE free and bundled with the OS when every other browser at the time you had to buy. On top of that, they made it so that windows would slow down and malfunction if you uninstalled IE, and made installing any other browser a complicated process.
Today you can freely and easily install pretty much any browser you want. Chrome has the hugely dominant share in the the desktop browser market now, despite Edge being bundled with Windows.
On top of that, Microsoft doesn’t have the massive stranglehold on OS market share that they used to. In the desktop space, MacOS is about 1 in 6 computers with Windows holding 71%, mostly in the enterprise sector.
And this doesn’t even factor in that the majority of web traffic is mobile now, where Windows doesn’t even have a presence anymore.
It is illegal - they’ve already been taken to court and lost over similar practices 20 years ago.
It’s just not enforced anymore - and that’s why they’re doing it.
One of the many reasons why I will never return to Windows.
I still have to use 10 for work, but on the plus side it’s a 5 day per week reminder of just how terrible it is.
In the same boat. and recently of all the issues that could pop up, Teams has decided to become a buggy mess. Their own software on their own OS just stops working after just one year of using the machine.
Not to speak of all the other slowdowns and child-diseases that the thing has developed.
Meanwhile my desktop install of Linux is nearing its 10th birthday, has all sorts of legacy configs that I never bothered to clean up, has moved drives 3 times and to a different filesystem+partitioning scheme, changed bootloader… Yet still is way less of a pain than Windows at work.
I still have to use 10 for work, but on the plus side it’s a 5 day per week reminder of just how terrible it is.
What do you use the rest of the time that you prefer? Serious question, because I’ve been looking at Windows alternatives for a while and I like to hear what’s working better for others.
Everything with a GUI runs POP_OS, because I like how much control I have over app windows via the keyboard. When I’m hyperfocused I like not having to take my hands off the keyboard. It has really good tiling too, but I think vanilla Gnome has mostly caught up in that department.
