Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default(support.microsoft.com) |
Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default(support.microsoft.com) |
And this reflects on other tech giants. They understand that they're in an era of near-zero regulation and can get away with seemingly anything.
For example, when you 'accidentally' click the help question mark instead of the exit cross, it will open Microsoft Edge with a search on Bing for "help with paint in windows".
I use Outlook for work only, and I segregate my browsing so that work browsing is done in Edge and personal is not. I could do (and have done) Chrome or Firefox profiles, but moving completely to Edge hasn't been terrible. (Hello vertical tab bar on my widescreen laptop).
I agree the pattern is bad if someone is using Outlook for their personal email, but I suspect the Venn diagram of people who use Outlook for personal email and people who install a different browser is probably small.
As always this should be an option!
On my Linux desktop and laptops I have my default browser set to firefox --profilemanager %u so that every link I click in Slack, Teams, Thunderbird etc I can select the correct profile to open it in.
The Windows Start menu is already so broken though.
Wow.
I was making fun of all the idiots that always comment "loving the new microsoft" when in fact, as you say, nothing is new, and they are as shit as ever.
And it's always a 100% complete lie, and abusing their monopoly position.
Ready for a 15 minute long process that will restore itself in the future, not to mention trusting some random website for a guide.
Edge makes a lot more sense as a smarter 365 client than it does as a browser, but it's not a bad browser either.
We're looking at building a monster Davinci Resolve workstation and we might use Linux. He certainly wants to.
But between our mobile devices (all iOS etc) and laptops -- we'd have a very mixed and heterogenous environment. I'm tired of maintaining all the different incompatibilities. I'm inclined to go all Apple, just to keep things clean.
But the Distrowatch situation showed me how much Linux missed its "year of the desktop" window, so many years ago, and how having optimal hardware experiences across form-factors doesn't include Linux as a default, or obvious, or user-friendly option.. the way it does for servers and cloud ops.
That said, be responsible where you put your money. My wife no longer uses iOS. I no longer use iOS or Android. Raspberry is a media server for TV.
God I hope we get another anti competitive lawsuit over shit like this in my lifetime.
There may be many who does not care but growing number of people on the grid - who they ask advice from - will spread the dirtball reputation of Microsoft, reaching a lot of people, fortunately.
This type of thing doesn't come for free, IMO. There's a cost to this, even if they don't pay it in the short term.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Resource_Protection, previously Windows File Protection, introduced in Windows 2000.
A few days ago on fresh windows install I couldnt watch netflix on ff/edge, but on chrome it worked. Player error.
I guess it was related to some missing drivers?
The links don't "open in Edge". That would suggest they launch the Edge app (instead of the default browser) and open the link in that. Instead the links open in a pane in Outlook that embeds Edge (presumably with the same settings and session context as the actual app). This also only affects the desktop Outlook app, not the far more modern and less clunky web version. I genuinely wonder how many HN users commenting on this story actually use desktop Outlook app or know someone who does and doesn't also use Edge (or their IT department's mandated out-of-date copy of Firefox ESR).
Now, bear in mind I'm saying this from a position that is in favor of splitting up Microsoft (and Google and maybe Apple). The feature is certainly useful if viewed in isolation, but it is in effect anti-competitive behavior because even if they wanted, they couldn't provide generic integration of your browser of choice the same way and the new behavior is opt-out rather than opt-in. It's bad, but let's not pretend it's worse and more deceitful than it truly is, just because you already don't like Microsoft (and presumably don't use their products).
This is probably a genuine usability improvement. It's also anti-competitive. Both of these things can be true at the same time.
There are not many alternatives, are there?
Lol. Euphemism for "we want to take away all choice from the user".
fucking lmao, linux since years ago don't care
For those who were too young at the time, Microsoft lost the first instance of that trial and eventually reached a settlement.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....
> To provide a unique experience — at Microsoft, we strive to create the best customer experience across our products.
... they straight up admit using windows dominance to push other products.
That should fix it, right?
I use it for quite a long time now and it works with the search bar in the startmenu.
How painful is the Steam on Linux/Proton experience on average?
Its way better than 2,3 years ago and at this time is was already useable. Give it a try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Also definitely not in the best interest of users, which isn't the Satya Nadella way of operating, at least not as demonstrated in the developer tools side of the business.
Oh yes, good tsar, bad boyars.
Whenever Microsoft does something good, like open-sourcing some dev tool, it's because of Nadella. But he isn't responsible for the state of Windows. If only someone told him about the forced telemetry, forced updates, forced Microsoft account login, pushing Edge down users' throats, and so on... I'm sure he would fix all those problems, but sadly, he doesn't know. And it's just a coincidence that all this stuff intensified when he became the CEO.
I even saw a comment on HN saying that it's "Ballmer loyalists" who are truly at fault for the current state of Windows.
"Ultimately though, if this experience isn't right for you, you can turn off this feature the first time it launches in Microsoft Edge, and then in Outlook settings at any time after that."
Then what it the point of having system-wide settings in the first place?
Nobody wants Edge. Not now. Not ever.
Here's a graphic showing for the many uses for Edge.
This is as bad as Facebooks legendary QP abuse in metrics season that everyone used to win their PSC because we are talking about 300$ product here, Win11 PRO that is as crammed with adware - tiktok, instagram, office, onedrive, blah blah blah as in the worst days of steve balmer now.
I haven't touched Windows in a decade and don't miss a single thing. Every computer literate user should make the switch.
Years ago, I developed the muscle memory of copying links from outlook and pasting them into a browser rather than clicking on them directly. This was to avoid various "helpful" things Microsoft insists of doing. Now, that habit will pay off in spades.
The nice thing about the web versions of office is that they're powerless on the local machine.
(and forwarding was disabled 'for security reasons' -- that may very well be a company decision, not a MS one)
I think apps should work in the general way an OS is designed. This change may lead to the same mobile app horrors where every app is also a browser that breaks common user flows.
some things I've noticed: Mobil Safari seems to be using the search bar to hijack my google search (Particularly for locations which open in apple maps)
Although I'm mostly linux these days I went to install an alternative browser on a windows machine (using edge to download). I mentioned this in another post, but edge seems to watch for "chrome" or "firefox" downloads and politely reminds you that 'Edge is a great browser with added "trust of microsoft"' (A company who happen to be watching when you download a web browser).
https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22813733/microsoft-window...
Linux seems like an OS that is way more respectful.
Battery throtteling on the iPhone 6s; The sandboxing / sideloading discussion; The no-iCloud experience; The way that regular bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work even better; How unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click.
Safari suggestions are also a great example: So far, I like them in iOS 17, since they can also provide direct links to useful sites such as Wikipedia. But don't doubt for a second, that taking traffic away from Google was the primary goal here.
Microsoft isn't so smart. Most users, including non-technical, can see through their attempts.
"iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones" -- an actual quote from the SVP of Software Engineering in charge of iOS, revealed in Epic Games v Apple court discovery
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.36...
Of course, if you really cared about green bubbles, you'd switch to Android because there you can adjust outgoing message color to your heart's liking :-)
What do you mean by this? I have an iPhone but don't have airpods, just "regular" BT headphones. Under windows, they're hit or miss (sometimes they don't reconnect), but they work pretty well under iOS and mac os. They work best under linux (!), especially since it's the only one to support LDAC (though I understand some non-sony android phones may support this now).
So, if somehow apple came out with a way of making BT headphones work even better (what do they do better?), I don't see why you'd hold that against them. Should they not innovate just so that the competition doesn't get upset?
I argue that they are blatantly anti-consumer, but have created a brand identity association that causes people to pretend (and argue) they are not. Try using an ipad without handing over your credit card details. Even google is better in this area.
This is one of the ways I can tell what preconceived opinion someone has. The only problem with the battery throttling was PR. The engineering solution was correct and objectively better than not throttling. Should they have told users their battery was failing? Sure. But keeping the phone from crashing was better than letting it.
> unauthorized Apps on MacOS must be opened with a right-click
I've never had to do that.
No I don’t want to install your shit browser on my phone Google. Kindly frick off.
and lack of user profiles on ipads so they cannot be easily shared among family.
> the no-iCloud experience
What?
> The way regular Bluetooth headsets work fine, but AirPods work better.
I… I don’t see how this is apple’s fault. Bluetooth, as a standard, is obviously limiting. Apple, making both headphones and the devices that play audio, had an opportunity to offer a better product to their customers if you use other apple devices. That’s fine, and I would argue, eminently reasonable. I just don’t get what you’re driving at here, would love to hear more.
The reason I like apple is that, in vague general terms, their interests as a company often align with my interests as a consumer.
Yes, you can argue that apple has made changes in safari detrimental to google for business reasons. But shit, I’m happy about that. The less data my phone silently sends off to google, the better.
Maybe I’ve just fallen for their ploy, but I do actually really like the apple products I own (and I often try the non-apple alternatives because I love tech). No company is perfect, and I know they aren’t my friend or don’t care about me. But until I feel apples interests diverge from my own significantly, I’ll find alternatives.
bluetooth headphones work to the best of their ability on Apple devices. Apple invented a better technology for their own headphones to improve problems inherent with bluetooth. I’m struggling to understand how improving upon a flawed technology is anti-consumer? Apple devices still support bluetooth, and Apple headphones work with non-Apple devices over bluetooth.
In the terminal it has a nice "search with Google" option and I can not figure out how to get MacOS to stop opening Safari with that.
Every time I use Apple products I get frustrated at how it blocks me from doing what I want to do.
I think this is one thing a ton of people don't realize. Apple doesn't want to sell you individual devices. They want you to sell an entire electronic ecosystem that serves all of your technology needs and seamlessly integrates all of it for you.
It's why they put effort into things like handoff, copy & paste on iPhone/mac, AirDrop, iCloud photo sharing, et al. Sure there's a profit motive in having you use all their stuff, but they really do make a genuine effort to make things work together better than disparate devices, companies or manufacturers do.
I still have to use a private channel in Signal to share things like pics or links from iOS/OSX/Windows because there just isn't a good cross-ecosystem app that I've found. Discord and slack sort of work, but they're not E2E encrypted like Signal is.
Now you get the benefit of Windows power management (and that beautiful laptop battery life) but a web browser Microsoft isn't going to mess with.
This sounds hilarious were it not the way I actually work.
PS: I'll also mention that VSCode from Windows to WSL2 + Debian is a mind-blowingly wonderful thing, I don't know how it works but it's near magical as a dev environment when you need a full Linux but like having battery life.
Is that sarcasm? I never had good battery life on a laptop running Windows. Linux has always been superior to me in that regard (maybe if nvidia optimus is at play?).
What kind of system are you running?
On my thinkpad, arch install squeezes 9 hours after 7 years of use.
On a dell XPS I'd get about 13 hours with the gpu disabled and display set to 1440p instead of 4k. Sure you might say "but I need my GPU and 4k 15'' display" to which I reply eh maybe but I don't.
I got fed up with trying to run Fusion360 on Linux, no longer had a Mac, and reignited my long disused Windows installation recently. Updated and restarted. Looked around for WSL, nothing. Searched online, loads of blog spam of mixed helpfulness, no way of telling (for me, new to it) if they were v1 or v2, no basic information like they're talking about Ubuntu but is that a requirement? What changes if I want x? Looked in the app store, ..stuff yes, including 'Arch WSL' for example, but is this right? It seems to work, but really, I'm supposed to install something third-party?
I assumed it was just something that was there built-in by default, but apparently not? Probably is if I first go start run regedit and set Computer Computer Windows HKLM Software Windows Windows Linux Software WSL enable to '2', right? Easy.
I wish they would label that section of the results (would have given a hint to what it was). The google search results are labeled and appear below those unlabeled suggestions.
It feels a little sneaky to me (like having to go to settings to turn off the a"subscribe to apple music" in the music app..)
> If you stick with safari it will load the site in an internal safari webview, requiring a second tap on the bottom to launch in the real safari
???
Many applications do this, including those from Apple itself. I don't see the refusal here.
"Ultimately though, if this experience isn't right for you, you can turn off this feature the first time it launches in Microsoft Edge, and then in Outlook settings at any time after that."
Yes, you're missing the fact that the user ALREADY set the default browser to something other than Edge, and Outhouse is now going to ignore your declared preference "for your convenience".
You usually download a browser just once, so turning if off isn't the issue. I suspect some of less technically inclined might abide by it and not download the new broswer.
It almost seems like trial run for stopping the download. I can imagine "clippy" popping up an saying "I see your trying to download a browser, I'm sorry, I can't allow that"
To be fair, you trust Microsoft to be your OS. Installing another browser means that there are now two parties that could be malicious or hacked (distribute a compromised update) rather than one.
FWIW, I run Firefox on Debian Linux and an open source browser on Android as well (so no Safari hijacking going on either), but I can see valid logic in their statement ...even if they might not themselves have considered whether this is true before using it as marketing
Exactly. If you don't trust Microsoft with your confidential data, and to supply you the best browser, then why are you using their OS?
Anecdata, I know, but I've never experienced this across any iOS versions.
Though given how shitty Apple's own software has become, I wouldn't be surprised if it's an integration gone awry.
Unless you are referring to the search field on google.com, it is not hijacking’s your google searches. It is suggesting actions based on your input to the url bar.
I was introduced to the following concept[1] some time back, and I can't help but think it gives a very reasonable explanation as to why everything is a subscription these days.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
to help you stay engaged in conversations as you browse the web.
I wonder if the people who write this sort of BS-filled prose really believe in what they're writing. To be completely honest, the style almost sounds like LLM output.
Then an update replaced my work.
It wasnt some 'uninstall program', but a multi-step process that involved registry editing.
I don't feel like I have control over Windows.
Not everyone can just jump to Linux when they work in a company.
However I still have Teams. And Teams occasionally opens up a webpage for oidc authentication. Unlike Slack this isn't my default browser (firefox), it's some embedded browser in teams, which has no access to my password store. It's terrible, but it's microsoft, what do you expect?
https://www.geoffchappell.com/notes/windows/archive/aard/ind...
> The code in question has become known widely as the AARD code, named after initials that are found within.
From your link, for those not in the know
They weren't logged-out, they just didn't notice that the link was opened in the wrong browser. Doesn't help that most browsers kind of all look the same.
However, we are power users and the big masses won't care about an ever increasing misalignment between the users' needs and Microsoft's. We cannot vote with our wallets, e.g. by using Linux instead. It won't matter.
What we could maybe do is contribute to projects like ReactOS[0] and make it easier for the layperson to migrate to it if modern Windows finally annoys them. Just food for thought.
Now, if only I could convince my dad, he might allow me trying to put it on my mom's computer as well... he insists on buying Microsoft Office for everyone under his roof so that I don't have an excuse to install LibreOffice
Sometimes it seems like old-ish white men is why we can't have nice things (I'm gonna be one of those :/)
I'm sorry, I LOVE building products and I LOVE design... but these fields have become grift central. No disrespect to folks in these fields, but remember how you came into this field talking about usability, cooperation, beautiful typography, color theory?
Bring those back.
Why not? You can absolutely call people out for using Nuremberg defense. Just because someone ordered you to intentionally mistreat people doesn't mean that you did not intentionally mistreat people.
But VSCode is okay, for now!
How about you don't decide that for everyone, Microsoft?
<rant>
This is the same BS that pushes 'conditional acces' based on what browser you happen to be using, or their idea of SSO where your console login also dictates all other logins... and it happens that you must use Edge. Turns out people don't give a shit if they have to pick an account more than once. That used to be a big point of friction on LanMan networks and when there was no Kerberos, but the same principles simply do not transfer to the web.
Just like Teams and all their other packaged nonsense (Intune): they are creating a fake ecosystem where usage isn't based on requirements or best tool for the job, but on 'what else happens to come with the package', making the UX worse for everyone. Entry-level admins and middlemen don't actually need (or want) to know how any of it works, delegate responsibility and defects to the vendor (Microsoft) and then essentially stall all local wants and needs because they cannot actually fulfil anything themselves.
Please understand that I understand the reasons behind Wayland, that the Wayland Devs are also behind X, and that X is an awful mess. I know and I believe, but Wayland is still the worst solution for the problem X created, in my humble view.
Please also accept that this is not a criticism of the awesomeness of Wayland/X devs. They are awesome. But they also were tired of X, and the result is, Wayland is undercomplex by at least a gut-factor of 10. And anything accessiibility-related is part of that.
Just like what happened before Firefox saved us from the Internet Explorer 6 monoculture.
Whether you talk about Microsoft-the-firm or Microsoft-the-shareholders when asking about "what's in it for them": that's the same thing because it's a for-profit business, so that's an irrelevant thing to post as well.
I’ll need to reconsider Chrome or Firefox, which is a shame since I really liked some Edge’s features.
Why should microsoft respect anyone if they don't have the self respect to use literally any other OS? They keep getting away with this shit, because people keep letting them.
If you choose to use Windows then I have no pity for you.
Skype similarly gets worse and worse each update. They removed the ability to have multiple windows, they made links open in some kind of in-Skype browser I can’t find a setting a to turn off, they added a weather widget which is dumb.
Thankfully the weather widget exists, though, because their new in app browser doesn’t have any way to close the in app “window” it opens - no x, nowhere to click to close it. The only way I’ve found to close it is to click the weather widget which loads into the same space and that has an x to close it. I bet they’re getting tons of positive numbers about weather widget use from users just looking to close the shitty in app browser. I don’t know if it even counts as a dark pattern - I can’t tell if the Skype designers are this incompetent or actually hate the few users left still on that shitty platform. Maybe they’re purposely trying to get Microsoft to shut it down by making it worse every update?
Every second I use skype I want to get away from it, I just have to convince a handful of people to move as well, or I guess let them know they won’t be able to reach me through there and give up talking to them.
I noticed the outlook link handling thing on my personal machine and figured out how to turn it off but damn that was annoying. I’m not going to be annoyed into using edge - I won’t be tricked into it either. Every time this happens my willingness to go along with this gets smaller and smaller. I have a bunch of paid Microsoft licenses - windows, office365, etc. Once gaming off windows matures a little more I think its time to move away from this abusive shit.
“ Ultimately though, if this experience isn't right for you, you can turn off this feature the first time it launches in Microsoft Edge, and then in Outlook settings at any time after that. ”
Having said that, Microsoft seem to be entering another phase of baiting antitrust regulators.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next person, but AFAICT this is about opening the link inside Outlook, in a sidepane:
> ... browser links from the Outlook app will open in Microsoft Edge by default, right alongside the email they’re from in the Microsoft Edge sidebar pane.
Also the title has been editorialized here, the original title describes what is actually happening:
> Outlook emails open next to web links in Microsoft Edge
You can also turn it off:
> Ultimately though, if this experience isn't right for you, you can turn off this feature the first time it launches in Microsoft Edge, and then in Outlook settings at any time after that.
Note on (a): some will argue a difference between Google advertising Chrome on Google’s property (something they could do when bootstrapping Chrome) and advertising Chrome on other people’s property (something they could not do). But here, Windows and Edge are Microsoft’s property, like it or not.
This isn't about advertising, it's about not following system defaults.
On my iphone the GMail app seems to frequently "forget" that Safari exists and I'm prompted to install Chrome when I tap a link.
https://i.redd.it/tg2yj98o5ao51.jpg (Obtenir means Get/Install).
Side A is fighting side B, and therefore has to take these measures that harm bystander C. Nope, their fight, their problem, don't mess with my computer. I can happily say MS is wrong and Google is wrong
We need a comeback of antitrust enforcement with teeth to get both Microsoft and Google to do honest competition, instead of backhanded methods.
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.
These have dark patterns, but freedom still. (Not M$ anymore, they restore defaults with each update)
The both the browser and OS actively advise against it.
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"
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.
What doesn't negate anything you said, it's just a detail worth adding.
How about enforcing direct control about Microsoft business? Not just another “low” fine in the ten to twenty billion range. Just stopping Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Enforcing AT&T to not enter any new business worked well. In consequence we got UNIX, C, open-source and documentation and finally the TCP/IP-stack of BSD, GNU and Linux. This had a positive effect for the complete computing industry and society. Reagan relaxed all rules, allowed AT&T to split up - the results were bad. No IT company had to fear any regulation afterwards, either politics didn’t want regulate or didn’t understand computing at all.
We don’t need this companies with too much power using incompatibility, vendor lock-in and storing away our data (the newest approach).
Chances for regulation Europe seem a little better? Less lobbyists and less tax money involved and people don’t believe in capitalism. Too late (10xtimes) and too little but at least they react.
Microsoft already lost this case twenty years ago? Repeat offenders do not get the mercy of the courts.
About the Windows gaming machine, you can surely build one just for gaming; just never put any personal data on it, never use it for surfing or doing anything that is not gaming, never give it any unfiltered access to your LAN, assume it contains malicious software then put it on dedicated Ethernet port on the firewall, setting up rules that allow only very restricted storage sharing so that it can't read or write anywhere but directories set up to contain exclusively what one would want to be readable/writeable by that machine.
Yes, it's a nightmare, but I don't see alternatives, save for giving Windows the middle finger for good also wrt gaming, which might end up easier than expected given the recent development with Proton and DXVK.
The one thing you will need to do occasionally is experiment with different Wine distributions. This means you will need to right click on your game and select the distribution from a drop-down box. Exhausting, I know.
None of the games I've played recently even are on Steam, so no, your answer is misleading at best.
And no, I've not tried it recently on my main machine but I've tried it often enough that my summary is still: Feel free to try it, but many (or most) of us still have to stick with Windows even if we don't like it.
And yes there are also ways to stop data collection if you're concerned about giving that to them.
Bill Gates said so himself in 2007: "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not,"[1]
I'm not pretending that the intervening 16 years hasn't changed things; I am happily gaming exclusively on Linux after all, something most people didn't truly expect back then. But that statement remains true regardless.
[1]https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007...
What makes you think the crack you apply to your official ISO isn't compromising your OS?
> even if it were questionable on the security front it's not like you're doing anything that really needs that sort of security
If you're going to install steam on your PC, then you'd be giving an attacker access to your steam account and if you ever install or use a platform that doesn't already have your credit card info stored then the attacker gets your credit card data.
> And yes there are also ways to stop data collection if you're concerned about giving that to them.
This isn't true. There is no way to stop windows from collecting data. No version of windows is capable of disabling all data collection, and there's no setting you can configure that can't be undone by MS at any time, and without any notice at all to you.
At best, you can install a copy of windows on a machine that is left offline 100% of the time, but i think most gamers would find that unacceptable since even if you don't care about MMOs or multiplayer, steam is still pretty popular.
I don't object to the idea of pirating software you don't like, don't want, but feel "forced" to use, but the idea that there are no real risks to your security or your privacy by doing it is just plain wrong.
Just use linux. It can play plenty of games.
Alternatively, a Windows box locked down to LTSC.
Shouldn't it all, good or bad, be attributed to Satya Nadella at this point?
Or does the great CEO lack agency?
Even weirder, for some reason people have no issues blaming Google's sorry state directly on Sundar Pichai.
shrug
Enjoy!
I wonder since the initial "free" W10 upgrade, where the hell are the regulators? The browser selection window happen these years ago and seems they call job well done both for themselves and MS.
We have standards wars, a stale browser that just woke-up and became a bit less stale (but no promises for the future), anticompetitive practices all around. We are right inside a browser war.
Edge is pretty OK, good even compared to Firefox's speed issues and Chrome being Chrome.
I use different browsers for different things: let me fucking chose which browser to use.
I am currently wondering how easy it would be to build a "shim browser" that you can set as default but does not actually open the page, it only list the urls apps tried to open and lets you copy them to whichever browser you prefer.
Properly implemented such prompts would be great though. Someone else in the thread mentioned how location search results on mobile Safari always launch Apple Maps - it would be great to have the option to choose from whatever I have installed.
Hamburger > Settings > Default Apps (in "General" at the bottom)
- Chrome
- Google (?)
- Safari
- Default browser app
I don't know what "google" is, but I don't even have chrome installed. If I click it, it sends me to the app store.
It's a bare-minimum version of chromium that comes with Android. It's not chrome either.
FirefoxPWA gets it right and opens in the default browser (but it is a bit janky for other reasons).
My friends would be like "do you want to play games?" and I'd be like "yeah hang on while I make some boot media so I can recover afterwards."
If Windows is removing another OS's entries from the boot list (displayed when you run 'efibootmgr -v' in Linux) then that's 100% deliberate anticompetitive behaviour from Microsoft; this list is where the entires like Windows, Fedora, and so on appear in the list of boot entries your firmware shows you.
I worked around this by installing Ubuntu on a second SSD, then I can use my bios menu to change the boot device.
Today I can't get rid of ads/news/cortana/edge.
* O&O ShutUp10++ – Free antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11 | https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
* StevenBlack/hosts: Consolidating and extending hosts files from several well-curated sources. Optionally pick extensions for porn, social media, and other categories. | https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
And this is similar. There is no non-malicious use case for this setting that I can see.
On iOS, it's mandatory, because Apple says so.
Users don't pay attention to this stuff. And then when you have to go back and switch it to the correct behavior of using the default browser, they've buried the option in Outlook (Options > Advanced > Link Handling).
What kind of post-Orwellian shitfuckery is this? It really grinds my gears when a prompt puts words in your mouth (e.g. "Yes, please" or "No thanks, maybe later") but this reaches a new level by trying to reframe something as simple as wilfully ignoring a stated preference. It sounds like a modern car ad in that it's all about catering to you the "main character" writing your own story and presenting themselves as the facilitators of your perfect customised destiny.
But they're just trying to change your browser and hope you have enough to worry about that you won't notice and their metric will tick up.
On the "FedEx Accused of Largest Odometer Rollback Fraud" post, llimos says "When did we move to a "do whatever you think you can get away with" model of society?" [0].
Like light_hue_1 says in response, "Because the cost of fraud is far too low and it's now factored into business plans." That seems to be exactly what is happening here too. It's honestly disheartening.
If we want to live in a society that's not supported by tech that's weaponized against its users, we need to find better ways to fight back than smugly switching to Linux.
Walking away while they prey on our friends is insufficient. Whatever it is, it has to be costly. Bonus points if it's legal.
Edge has another funny behavior where if you go to a Chrome extension page, it says you can install the extension. However, Chrome puts a web-page warning over the install button to block it and try to get you to install Chrome again.
It's clear companies value being your default browser.
I would recommend Fedora if you want the bleeding edge or Debian if you want a super stable system (Or NixOS stable, but NixOS is kind of hard to get started using).
The ads for Ubuntu Pro every time I open a terminal or update my computer aren't very welcoming either. If Ubuntu had a browser of their own, it would be as worse as Windows.
Tried again maybe 4 (?) years ago and have stuck with it - everything is pretty smooth for my purposes now. I do run into some random issues sometimes - like display drivers randomly resetting. That seems to be the biggest one.
Turns out I now have a related problem in Windows, with the integrated GPU spinning at full throttle despite not doing anything important.
I've somewhat improved battery life(and CPU temperature) by setting the system to prefer the discrete GPU, which is a ridiculous solution to a problem which I shouldn't have had in the first place.
At this point I think I can live with selecting one of the GPUs and sticking to it for a given session, like I did in Linux on my previous machine. Even if I have to restart the system each time.
My USB wireless mouse randomly disconnects on Linux. Unplugging and replugging fixes it.
My sound is flaky on windows + Microsoft dark patterns.
Maybe I'll find a hardware solution to the mouse thing.
It is a difference for Google to advertise their browser on their properties (eg Youtube) versus Apple hijacking the search bar of some other browser, and in general not allowing third parties to provide full browsers in the Apple App Store (and not just a shim which mandatorily has to use Safari behind the curtains)
A difference that's moot because it never happened.
https://9to5mac.com/2023/01/16/apple-tv-iphone-required/
Or sherlocking stuff without acknowledging anyone, e.g. game porting toolkit.
I do like OneNote and use the ‘Send to OneNote’ for meeting notes all the time.
IT policy also doesn’t let us have anything other than Windows. I could skirt it for the day to day stuff, but I wouldn’t want to maintain my setup in multiple places anyway
I get away with just my phone and an iPad for everything else.
Gmail still nags me about not using Chrome.
I don't see the issue here.
I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people.
It seems (?) to be a bug but it makes me wonder how widespread the bug is, how often it's triggered. But that is very not cool. Thanks for the screenshot.
You still had some amount of control on 95. MS had the power to take your control away at any point, but they didn't at that time.
People should really try putting themselves into the place of those they are speaking to before making broad statements, and temper those statements with the realization that different people have different experiences and expectations.
However, I do feel your pain, I don't understand why other motherboard manufacturers don't save your existing BIOS settings. Asus and MSI, I'm looking at you all... why can't you just ask me instead of undoing my work?
These things have become so yawn to me these days.
You can see and configure all available services by going to the app menu in the menu bar and selecting Services -> Services Settings
1. https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/use-services-in-app...
And really Apple should have made a generic service using the default browser, rather than this being a Safari provided thing. I guess the OP's "edge of anti-consumer" theory has some merit.
Using OKD (OpenShift Kubernetes Distribution) because I just dealt with this morning:
https://github.com/okd-project/okd/releases - download the MacOS installer and unzip it.
Then try to run it from the command line. Be told that it "cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified". This is NOT the "is an app downloaded from the Internet, do you wish to run it?" dialog.
Go to Finder, and double click it. Get the same message.
You have to go to Finder, then right click the app, specifically hit Open (which will open a terminal that will immediately exit), and only now can you run this app in your original terminal.
Again, thanks for the link. That's probably the only time I'll run into that, it clearly isn't my usual use case, but I'm glad you could back up the assertion with something I could see for myself.
I do agree that it should be clearer how you can run the executable if you really do trust it.
Yes, you get the “developer cannot be verified” error if the code isn’t signed. Which is perfectly fine, I don’t see how this is anti-consumer.
It’s $99 for a code signing cert (per developer account) on macOS/iOS, which I believe is less than what they cost on Windows.
Also, an individual Microsoft Store cert is $19 (one-time, not per year), and a company account is $99.
> 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)
We're discussing desktop operating systems, Windows is the only one that deliberately messes with the default browser.
Red Hat is working on getting it integrated, and Valve have it in their display manager.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HDR_monitor_support
But for general users, out of the box, no.
I guess the crack being FOSS with readable source code helps. It's a 9000 line cmd file with insane Windows-y things everywhere that make it hard to read, but being open at all and with that many users gives me quite a bit of confidence in it.
If NixOS didn't exist, I'd use Fedora as the RPM repositories aren't hot garbage like the AUR.
In this case Windows is the only sane choice (at least based on my experience from 2 years ago).
After a lot of reading random docs, I got to a point where I could stop the GPU from eating the battery doing nothing, but I could only disable/enable it by logging out then in. It was either no GPU at all or a GPU drawing maximum power, no in-between.
Maybe Nvidia's latest code releases will help with that?
The problem is the games coming in the next years started development five years ago.
My point is broader than browsers: if an app wants to redirect me to another app I want a modal where I can select an alternative app and cancel the "redirect".
I'm not okay being prompted to install an additional app when I already have one that can handle the link. This is advertisement spam and it's disingenuous to claim Google does that to give you choice.
> In 2020, Bill Gates left the board of directors of Microsoft, the tech giant he cofounded in 1975. But he still spends about 10% of his time at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, meeting with product teams, he says.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/02/06/bill-gate... (article is from early February of this year)
Still, agreed, that doesn't really make him responsible for MS's current decisions.
Gates owns 100x more shares than Nadella - about 1% of all shares - and thus has 100x the responsibility.
They are both guilty of greed and disrespecting their customers through their actions, or their willful or negligent ignorance and inaction.
I don't know how they can live with this, they are already rich, why not try to be better even if you earn less money in the short term?
Disrespecting your customers will get you nowhere in the long term.
Shareholder returns.
It has nothing to do with CEOs "already being rich", their job is literally to run the company properly so that the shareholders make more money.
Like it or not, that's how it is. Now, if this "crap" actually hurts the brand and the bottom line, they shouldn't implement it. If they are seeing more profits, and not many complaints, it's likely it will stay.
Moral faiure does not come into play.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
(arguably)
Also worth noting is that the color only applies to sent messages. When you receive a message, it's just gray in either case. It makes a certain amount of sense to let the user know which transport their outbound message went on since it will affect your expectations.
I worry this a subjective matter, i.e. if the colours were reversed some people would make exactly the same complaint.
The actual argument really should focus on whether phone providers should use some interoperable standard more capable than SMS. If they can't come to consensus then the telecommunications regulators should involve themselves and force one.
generally I try to avoid SMS since the photo quality is bad, there’s no delivery guarantee, and it doesn’t work over wifi.
In general, Apple has lowered contrast throughout the UI over the years. There's an accessibility setting for high contrast if you need it.
Yes, one could argue that the default should provide high contrast for everyone, but once this setting is enabled, it effectively becomes just that going forward for those that need it.
All games I want to play these days work under Linux without effort. Older titles work even better where under Windows you could run into compatibility issues not so under Linux because of the great effort put on backward compatibility by Wine.
Also, a bit susprising and unfortunate, the Windows version of a game that has native Linux support often runs better.
I run Manjaro Linux and have an Nvidia GPU for if it matters. My Steam games I run with Steam and for the games I bought on GOG I use Lutris.
I would really suggest people to check out how far it has come.
Only problem with Linux gaming is that you don't get stuff like fan, voltage, frequency control for newer AMD hardware. This hasn't been an issue for me until I got a 6800XT. I thought about RMA until I remembered their Adrenaline software exists. I wish I could save my settings to the card's BIOS.
I no longer use this machine for anything but gaming. Going back to windows sucks
They are not necessarily applicable to everyone, but most of the time they are accurate. Makes it easy to see whether setting it all up under Linux is worth it for your library.
It’s really mind blowing that winapi is the binary cross-OS API of choice.
Mine's a 4th gen X1 carbon with an ancient Antergos install from 2016 that I converted to normal arch after they closed the project. i3wm, probably some thinkpad specific tweaks from the arch wiki but the machine is so damn stable I rarely think about it.
Definitely not physically possible in my bag. I've chalked it up to the fact that linux desktop environments are just a total hodgepodge of weird components with unclear responsibility boundaries that couldn't possibly handle all the edge cases properly when you stick them all together. This leads to stuff like the fact that if I suspend my laptop with an external monitor connected, but then un-suspend it without that external monitor connected, I'm often presented with a lock screen that I can't actually interact with, forcing me to either seek out a monitor or switch over to text console to log in and kill my session.
I have a normal ubuntu install, I use the i3wm to reduce general load. Resolution set to 1440p with xrandr, no scale adjustments. GPU disabled, totally on intel graphics.
My xps is about 4.5 years old right now, I have replaced the battery when it started to swell slightly, the replacement was salvaged from another and even worse, so after a year I put the original battery back in.
I honestly think the biggest thing is a tiling wm. Any time I go from full gnome to i3wm, my battery life gets an instant 3 hour bonus.
Big ole note, because of the age and battery degradation, i can squeeze about 6-7 hours out of with if I limit myself to a single firefox window and text editors. When it was brand new, 13 hours of normal use was totally doable.
Neither being nice nor mean will persuade people working at Microsoft to be different. Being better and letting them know might though.
Don't touch the registry.
I really can't fathom how any technically-minded professional gets anything done with Windows - nevermind SEs - it just feels constantly in the way. And I'm not a die-hard Linux (nor Apple) fanatic, I grew up with Windows, it got me into 'computers'. It just seems like an uncontrollable (as in literally, operator not in control) mess compared even to macOS to me now.
(I also really wanted to like it coming back to it - I thought with WSL surely that was going to take the Unixy strength of macOS and far supersede it as a when-I-can't-use-Linux device. But so far, egh, nevermind that I think the hardware's great, I think I'd pay the Apple tax just for the OS.)
Maybe I'll try again to upgrade if the integrated graphics support it.
Don’t want to support WSL - due Microsoft being Microsoft, mediocrity and smoke and mirrors to leech on your telemetry. Am waiting anxiously for the moment to cut off the final ties with Microsoft OS.
Airpods automatically try to pair with a nearby iphone when opened, if one of your own devices isn't around. All of this is through a pretty fancy UI, just for Airpods and Beats
So if Apple figured a way of bypassing this limitation, it's really not clear to me why that should be considered "bad", even if it's clearly better than what the competition does. It's on the bluetooth standard to do better.
Or is your point that apple should have standardized the protocol they use to make this happen?
But with Bluetooth I believe Apple is right to forge its own path. The standard is convoluted, built on old methods, still cannot pair two buds in a sane manner, and can’t provide enough bandwidth for Apple’s uncompressed format.
I expect Airpods to leave Bluetooth behind sooner rather than later.
AirPods are always accesible via the AirPlay-menu, which is prominently featured in many media apps.
Again: still fine, but just bad enough to partly influence my next buying decision.
Either way, the user experience is still better than on Windows. Whenever I start up my PC it steals my headphones, even if I’m currently listening on another device (or worse, making a phone call). I’ve searched online and it seems there is no way to switch this off. The only solution seems to be to manually unpair or disable Bluetooth after using it.
But once they're paired, they connect automatically to my iphone, and I can select them easily from a list when e.g making a phone call, though they're usually selected automatically when connected.
Some headphones support connecting two devices simultaneously, which is great... unless you have 3 devices :)
Anyways, if I was Apple, I would have added paired headphones to the speaker menu.
Apple has a “select audio out” menu thats on a lot of music and video apps. It shows “Apple airplay enabled” devices and makes switching easy. If it’s just Bluetooth it’s harder (you have to go into setting…)
https://www.soundguys.com/how-does-apple-h1-chip-work-21049/
That only works if you use two Apple devices together. You don't get those functions with other Bluetooth on a Mac, or using Airpods with an Android. It doesn't really make that big of a difference IMO but it's there.
Enforce the kernel team must be separate from the application layer - let other people build operating system UIs on top of the kernel.
For the operating system team to be separated from the product teams.
Even go further and unbundle the product teams - make office separate from bing which is separate from edge, etc.
Just make sure you also do it to Apple, Google, etc.
This is what the US almost did in the 90s.
A mere split up will lead to “baby bells” and the bigger one will just buy others - and centralize again.
PS: We should remember that Microsoft was able to destroy Nokia with an installed CEO (Stephen Elop) of their own. Killed the already shipping Linux smartphone. Installed Windows Mobile and Nokia was finally dead. Nokia itself did mistakes before but from outside this was questionable?
Indeed, the AT&T case at the US is the textbook example, it's worth looking at it.
EU cannot tell Microsoft in general what to do.
iMessage is apparently a differentiator for them.
It’s not like Apple is stopping you from running it. 1 quick google search and there you go. It’s a good design, in my opinion.
That doesn't sound like good design to me.
This application lets you adjust everything and the settings are saved on reboot
It is not about "performing slowly" but about getting your app rejected from the App store because it violates an Apple policy of scripting languages/interpreters not being allowed. And also another one that forbids you from competing/replacing the Apple applications, i.e. Safari. So if you want to display a web page you have to use webview (i.e. Safari behind the scenes).
You can’t do this with a regular Bluetooth audio device that doesn’t have the W2 chip, because according to the Bluetooth spec, you can only be paired to one device at a time; there is no separate concept of “known” devices; devices that auto-connect stay auto-connected on sleep+wake; and devices that connect (therefore devices that auto-connect) must stop announcing themselves as available over BT discovery. (BT is essentially a protocol state machine — a device can be either idle, in pairing mode, searching for its paired device to auto-reconnect, or connected, and none of these states can overlap.)
These are all limitations of the audio device, not of the host OS. Limitations required for Bluetooth conformance! Apple can only work around these limitations by having the device and host both run a completely separate, second discovery protocol over completely separate hardware, that just forces the BT hardware into certain states as a result of its own negotiation. They can’t magically make audio devices that don’t have a W2 chip do this out-of-BT-band negotiation.
Of course, that limits system integration, but you can still register it as a default browser.
I prefer as few outside opinions on what I run as possible, so I only leave Chrome and VSCode in Windows and everything else is in Linux.
I had run Linux for years, but whilst I still have Linux on desktop machines I leave Windows on my laptop as it truly gives me 8-9h battery life and Linux only gives me a matter of a few hours tops.
Why is that in any way exonerating? Most people do most of their actual computing on their phones now, it is not an irrelevant toy platform. We should be more, not less, hard on Apple than Microsoft for pulling this shit on their mobile platform.
Its a psychology trick that took decades of marketing to pull off, but they are deeply entrenched as someone's identity. These users have a religious devotion and will defend them, because an attack on Apple is an attack on them and their group.
If you don't care about a corporate in-group, you are most likely wanting a quality computing platform. Which is why people are so hard on Google an Microsoft when they restrict computing.
Since you're projecting onto people, I'll provide a counter point in that I dislike Android enough, the hardware is often of poor quality, support for updates don't last very long, OEMs install unremovable software (unless you root).
All in all, an awful ecosystem, in my personal experience.
I don't think I ever used iMessage or Facetime in my life and I've been using iPhones for 15 years. Most people I know that have an iPhone also don't care, in the 3 countries I lived in. We use WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram.
I don't buy Apple for fashion reasons, some mythical "in group" or any of the reasons you say.
I was just talking to my 80 year old mom yesterday and she was telling me how much she loves being part of the “in group”
This reads like the whining of a 14-year-old standing in a dark corner during the school dance. Translation:
"Look at me! I'm different! I'm so very counter-culture. People like Apple products, so I'm going to pretend it's a problem with the people and not other products. That way I can cosplay like I'm better/smarter/cooler than all those 'lemmings.' Now I'm going to smoke cigarettes, wear jeans, pop a leather jacket because nobody's been doing that since the 1940's. I'm special!"
I think you're reading into the parent too much. They were simply stating a fact.
on a new install of MacOS, when you have installed Chrome and explicitly set it as the default browser, MacOS will still ask you, albeit once, whether you really want to open that resource in Chrome, or Safari. And Chrome isn't the default option.
You mean not installing it by default? This does make sense for me personally I never had good experience with flatpacks or snapped desktop apps. Snap CLI tools worked great for me on server.
If you use the "Snap Store", you're imprisoned in a walled garden and subject to arbitrary decisions by Canonical, Inc.[1] They also take a cut if you charge for an app.
There is a hugely substantive difference between this feature being on by default and say, making a ”reject tracking” button in 2 point grey font. Dark patterns are primarily things that if presented equally would result in a different decision which often go directly against the users self interest.
I don’t see that here.
Not a dark pattern.
But when this happens 6 times in a row..
Linux has never been this, and likely never will be. On any hardware supported fully by both, Windows will always have better battery life. Back when I was a thinkpad user, i'd literally live in a vmware workstation linux VM on windows, and THIS had better battery life than linux natively on the same thinkpad.
With white foreground text, this gives a contrast ratio of 2.15:1 for SMS and 3.79:1 for iMessage. WCAG 2.x AA level compliances requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and at least 3:1 for large text.
https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum...
| iOS 5-6 | iOS 7+ |
---------+-------------+--------+
SMS | 11.3 - 13.4 | 2.2 |
iMessage | 11.8 - 14.1 | 3.8 |To my eyes, the green/blue doesn't make much difference in terms of legibility. I obviously find the reduced contrast throughout iOS annoying and keep increase contrast turned on.
Whereas for black on green it's 9.72:1 : https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=000000&...
Anyway I was right, it was FUD, you were referring about not beeing installed by default. Can you maybe do a self-diagnostic and find out why you spread FUD? Would it be nice if I would do the same about Flatpack or your distro? (Do not respond, just analyze this and maybe realize you can be better)
Oh, HP recommends Windows 11 (tm) (r) (c). Both worked 100% from day 1 on Linux. But both laptops had issues during the first year under windows (no webcam on the amd, boken external screen output on the intel), so maybe they don't qualify as "supported by both".
I have a pair of ASUS VivoBooks that BSOD on Windows every third or so boot with the NVMe they shipped with. That is the supported, manufacturer shipped OS.
On any Linux distro I've installed they run without issues. They also pass any diagnostic I have tried.
Battery life wise, some laptops I have get better battery life on a Windows install, and some get better battery life on a Linux install. Very hit and miss here.
I suspect part of it is due to some incompatibility with the nouveau graphics driver, but it's not been a big enough problem that I had to solve it yet.
Chromebook and Android works very well. They use Linux kernel.
From the Thinkpads I have seen and used (last one in 2023) I haven't yet seen one that is "fully supported" out of the box on Linux and all of them required some degree of tinkering.
By the way Arch wiki has a nice overview on configuring power saving properly, in case you ever need it in the future: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management
Yes, that is my limited experience with Thinkpad as well.
This don't ship with Linux and are not Linux Hardware. They're Windows hardware.
It feels like over the past 10y Linux only went from 2h to 3h of battery life. While MacBook went from 3h to 13h.
I hate to say it, but, for me, it is the price to pay to not have to deal with Windows anymore. I'm on Ubuntu right now, but have tried with other distros in the past. YMMV.
https://twitter.com/AsahiLinux/status/1500039345142923269?la...
This hardware does not exist, or at least it's exceedingly rare. something most folks miss is that the OS supports the hardware (though for Windows it's more the drivers than the OS, but I digress), but equally (and perhaps moreso) the hardware supports the OS.
Modern hardware is full of code (almost always proprietary), in ACPI, in EFI, in the EC, in all the devices. You cannot (without significant engineering effort) make the hardware support both OSes equally.
People generally want their gadgets to be as lightweight as possible, cheap as possible, last as long as possible, and be reliable. There's tradeoffs in balancing those. eg: overbuilding the battery to make the device run longer in the face of degradation adds weight, size, and cost. Somebody has to make a call on where the balance should be.
What nobody really talks about in the context of device longevity is wear levels in the onboard flash. A battery replacement or three doesn't extend that clock. It's pretty good but it doesn't last forever. This is more of an issue on devices with smaller amounts of flash storage with a lot more storage churn.
Which isn't to say that things like the 30% app store cut is entirely defensible, though you can certainly make some halfway plausible claims in that direction (based mostly on how retail works, especially at the time iPhones were invented). Or sideloading. There are legitimate gripes. But a lot of crap spewed regularly on HN turns out to be exactly that, crap.
But for some reason Apple's fans are way more insistent in defending everything and sticking to the PR department's arguments. No criticism is allowed to stand.
Those devices really should have been recalled or offered a generous trade-in value to account for the fundamental design flaw
The throttling feature still exists in iOS. All that’s changed is that you will be made aware that it’s happening and you can switch it off if you prefer a brownout when your battery is degraded.
Other manufacturers are happy to let your handset reboot, it could lead to another sale for them. Some would call that planned obsolescence.
yawn Why my 8 years old Moto XT910 eat the battery like cookies but did not reboot? It's battery wasnot only old, but swollen a bit, it's USB port was damaged so sometimes the charge didn't actually happened... but it still could survive a couple of hours with enabled radio and GPS, serving a navigation app with 3G updates? And didn't reboot?
Android does the exact same thing now, but I don't see people boycotting Google over it.
The problem was that Apple didn't communicate this to the user. People didn't know why their phone was slow.
Apple just has a history of prioritizing design asthenic and they're willing to push the limits on thermal regulation.
Apple just pushed design to far and underestimated the cooling/heat dissipation required
I'd much rather have a slow phone than a phone that doesn't work at all (or worse, bursts into flames in my pocket)
Which is why Bill Gates personally intervened, when Munich switched to Linux a couple of years ago.
Regarding Munich: Three competing IT-Departments! Repeat, three. An own special distribution. They didn’t migrated all applications (either do it or not) and a lot of stuff was always done on Windows. Finally Microsoft moved a headquarter to Munich and solved it with “tax money”.
Rumors say that the reverse migration to Microsoft itself was also “bumpy”. Let me guess, three IT-Departments?
The former major of Munich also gave an interesting interview about the “experience”.
And after some (hard) years of actual competition benefits of compatibility will lead to lower prices and more choices.
I am not sure whether to be against this feature because I cannot get it working... Is it an US only feature or some magic combination of other settings is required?
Note that I have been using Linux for 20y. And I fully accept the short battery life in exchange of the tooling and freedom I get with Linux.
HN isn't perfect, but it's so much better than a lot of other online discussion forums these days.
Original: https://ronstauffer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/taking-a-pic...
Current: https://support.apple.com/library/content/dam/edam/applecare...
But let's run with that for a moment, and assume many people do in fact find that more difficult to read. I still have trouble calling that particularly hostile given that it's sent messages, received ones are the same color no matter what.
I'm more open to the green vs blue argument than the old-green vs new-green one. Apple definitely wants you to know you're using iMessage. It just happens to be useful for me as a customer, too -- I'm glad it's prominent when I send a text message instead of an iMessage. It aligns my expectations for what features will work in the conversation.
For small developers there's checker tools and simulators, but Apple is huge and has a responsibility to get this right.
Most accessibility problems aren't things that those without some sort of sensory disability (beyond mild long-sightedness) can detect easily - at least, without using tools to do so.
Surely though there is some sort of "accessible" mode you can put it into that does improve the contrast?
Macs ship with SIP enabled and it's easy to disable, I don't know what the (comparable) issue is there?
Again, not that I'm at all an Apple/Mac fanboy, I've had one personal Apple device (2013 Air) and a couple of work MBPs since. If anything macOS could be credited with moving me to Linux. Before it I only really knew Windows, but now I'd say 'Linux is what you make of it, macOS is just about manageable, and Windows is what it is'.
I generally use a Mac too, connected to Linux systems, but from the last time I disabled Secure Boot on a PC, the process was press F2 for Setup, go to the System tab in the BIOS, and uncheck Secure Boot, Save.
It's not particularly harder than a Mac: Restart in Recovery Mode, Launch a terminal, `csrutil disable`, Reboot.
> though for requiring it I suppose
Just like Mac "requires" it? I guess I just don't see how this is a "Windows sucks compared to Mac, let alone Linux" thing.
A non-technical user could disable SIP, though they'd never need to; good luck to them upgrading to Windows 11.
Newly requiring it on upgrade when it's hard to do and hardware may be incompatible anyway isn't great IMO. It's not really protecting anyone from anything, because it just leaves them unprotected in exactly the same way on the older OS. As long as they don't brick it trying.
Smartphones with active cooling? You must live in world that's very different from the one I live in.
Also, as mentioned in other replies, your whole point about "overheating and rebooting" is a straw man. Throttling was introduced to address battery aging. Again, a problem that affects every device with rechargeable batteries.
> Apple just has a history of prioritizing design asthenic and they're willing to push the limits on thermal regulation.
Except they do have thermal controls...
In fact, it is much better than what iOS6 had.
My local dollar store has a couple of prepaid android 5.5" phones. Not much size diff from my iphone 12 mini.
Point still taken though - 'regular' sized phones from 6 years ago are mostly gone from the mainstream market. I really hope there's another mini or a bumped up iphone se. I would like them to keep the physical home button with touch id as well. Or maybe a touch id sensor someplace else...?
I also dislike many things apple does but all too often, their hardware quality is good and lasts a long time. I'm still using a 2014 macbook. it is on its last legs but eight years out of a piece of tech is borderline amazing.
I think that is pretty normal. I'm still using my 2014 $700 Asus 'gaming laptop' for CAD, emulators, gaming, etc.... Only reason I even upgraded was so I could have 6gb VRAM for various AI purposes.
Time for my kid to use it for a few years... Then I'll turn it into a server.
Probably because it's a simple, slow dual core Cortex A9 with low enough power draw that it doesn't stress the battery enough to matter.
Or you drunk your Koolaid and ignored "GPU, WiFi, GPS" parts.
When batterygate happened my wife’s phone was throttled but mine wasn’t. She didn’t care and never got the battery replaced but she definitely would have upgraded sooner if it was rebooting.
Are you saying that Apple use different battery technology to everyone else? Or what is your point?
It was a rhetorical question, yet a Jobs' fanboi couldn't resist, see the neighbouring comment.
> each system is different
Except in that part it's pretty much the same. Or your battery, even discharged, can keep up with a full load from a CPU, GPU, WiFi and GPS modules eating amps, or it couldn't even when it's fresh.
If at 3V your battery couldn't power the system then you shouldn't show 3V as 30%, you should show it as 0% and adjust %/V curve accordingly.
It's simple, it's about momentary load in amps, but "only some iPhone 6S models manufactured in September and October 2015 had suffered from a battery manufacturing defect" yet millions of iPhones were slowed down ~~totally not beacuse Apple needed to sell the next iPhone~~.
And as an anecdote - even after the years of abuse, the last time I used my XT910 it was literally showing 10% when I enabled the radio so I could receive a SMS from my bank on it. I really expected it to just shutdown (because enabling radio means data too, so all that bullshit rushed to update their things and using data => more power draw) and for me to be stranded in a remote city without money. But not only it did survive that, it kept chugging for another 4 hours, with radio disabled, ofc. *shrug_emoji*
> Or what is your point?
What people would eagerly drink any Koolaid what would make them feel entitled or standing out. Which most Apple fanbois vehemently deny.
NB: there are people who just use iPhones/Macs/whatever and don't engage in defending 'their favourite brand', of course they aren't fanbois.
> yet millions of iPhones were slowed
Citation needed. Only handsets with degraded batteries were slowed, and only after the first brownout. Replacing the battery brought it back to full speed. This is the main point people don’t understand. Every phone got the software update. The feature still exists today. But not all phones were slowed. My iPhone 11 will slow if the battery degrades.
If they wanted to sell you a new phone, was that the best way to do it? Couldn’t they… have just done nothing instead? Like the other manufacturers? Instead of prolonging the life of resetting handsets?
Granted this happened because glue in the battery was compromised by excess heat because Steve Jobs preferred heat over the sound of a fan, but the machine never rebooted or shut down due to heat or decreased max voltage.
That is just the bare minimum. Its 2023, every phone is like this.
Anyway, any teenager can tell you what its like to have the wrong kind of bubbles. They are extremely susceptible to in-group bias. Heck I wore Abercrombie and American Eagle, it wasn't because the clothes fit.
I even had a single buddy, age 30, recently get peer pressured into getting an iphone because his sister said "I don't date green bubbles". He took it to heart.
At some point, its denialism to think in-group bias doesnt exist. Not that someone exploited can easily admit to it, its far too difficult to imagine your brain being incorrect about something. Much easier to say things like "they are reliable and consistent" than to accept that marketers have exploited us.
Shallow people are shallow, and it’s hardly like Apple made them that way. People do the same thing about cars, shoes, clothing, alcohol, zip codes, etc. The only upside is that it lets you very quickly identify and avoid them.
In the messaging case, it’s important to remember that Google is currently funding a huge lobbying campaign trying to get governments to restore the market position they gave up a decade ago. SMS messages have been green on iOS since the first iPhone – and shortly after the App Store launched most people were using Google Chat since everyone using Gmail was on it and it even federated with other XMPP services. Google spent the next decade pushing users away with a bunch of poorly conceived and executed attempts to lock users into their proprietary system. Only after those failed did they start picking up RCS, but most of their catch up with iMessage work has been proprietary extensions which help sell carriers on Google’s Jibe cloud service.
I like the idea of open protocols but Google is acting out of self interest and I have no doubt that they’d try to lock things up in a heartbeat if they think they could get away with it.
Let them park for their own PR, and we can talk about more open alternatives.
Oh yeah its not a Apple thing, its a human thing.
Apple takes advantage of that weakness in humans and reinforces it with their marketing. I personally don't have the ethics to take advantage of people who are class insecure, but Apple stepped up in the tech space.
Anyway, the original point was that Apple gives less freedom and its fine because they sell a social club, not necessarily the ability to compute. If they aren't selling a social club, they are doing a poor job at letting people compute.
RCS is controlled by Google just like iMessage.
All the people she didn't date thank her.
I don't really care particularly about the icloud/imessage ecosystem but all close people around me have iphones (the network effect was not the primary reason for the switch).
This is such a funny take I see so often parroted by the self proclaimed ‘out-crowd’. Your need to feel different and therefore superior clouds your judgment. Likes this post.
Yeah, there isn't anything going on beside out-group cope. Really glad most plans have unlimited text these days. Having spam texts where the person I'm communicating with just parrots what I'd just typed with the words "Liked this" would have driven me insane back in the days when you only got a thousand texts for the month.
I think you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who wants an unreliable and inconsistent laptop
All you have to do is search HN for "linux laptop", look:
"newer laptops still have their fair share of issues. When I bought my thinkpad A485 kernels wouldn't boot without additional parameters, the graphics would freeze at times and cause a hardlock, sleep and hibernation have been fixed and broken again intermittently over several kernel versions, the wifi card's AP mode started causing segfaults in kernel 5.2 due to the driver's rewrite but has since been fixed, the fnlock key LED didn't update properly, which I spent a while debugging and submitted a kernel patch for, and while over the years the fingerprint scanner has been implemented, it's a pain to install and support for fingerprint scanning in linux is still in a very sorry state. Oh and bluetooth still can't connect more than one device at a time" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32964872
Reply: "With Wayland, Gnome and KDE have no way to adjust the scroll speed on a laptop trackpad. Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. In 2022."
"I have a slimbook pro (the model before the silver keyboard) and sadly I am very unhappy with it, I got a fairly maxed out version and it's fans are always on full blast and I have found no way to keep the power management under control except throttling the CPU - so it is constantly overheated, suspend is not working properly and the chassis is not strong enough so the fans stall unless you have it on a flat surface. [...] Still I will keep buying these things.. eventually someone will figure out how to make reliable laptops that align with the ethos of free software. I've researched system76, puri.sm and also lately the way too expensive MNT reform, but really the only laptop people seem to be happy with is thinkpad x220 / x230 which came out 12 years ago.... This makes me sad. I would pay a lot for a super sturdy laptop which works (and aligns with the free software ethos)." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23925729
NB that they say what they want is 'super sturdy which works' but their actual behaviour, and the market signal they send, is they pay a lot for an unreliable and inconsistent piece of junk, knowing and expecting it will be that way, and that they will keep doing so indefinitely as long as companies keep making them, and as soon as companies make a good thing they will stop buying. Hmm.
Increased heat when operating near the current limit is a symptom, not a cause. Adding a fan or a chonky heatsink to your iPhone wouldn't magically raise this limit.
A two year old lithium battery under normal use will hardly degrade at all. Any design that pushed the limits so far that a degredation of a few percent over promised and under delivered. In Apples case it could be remedied with a software update, but that doesn't mean the device held up to the original performance claims over a standard life cycle of device use.
The hardware and software were shipped with performance optimized to the initial voltage curves of the battery. Once that voltage curve decreases slightly the device will either reboot when the processor attempts to run at a higher clock speed than the battery voltage can support, or the battery can technically keep up though begin to overheat as the operating voltage is a higher draw than the battery can safely handle.
Dont get me wrong I'm not aware of any concerns over the phone actuary catching fire like that one generation of Samsung years ago, but the degraded battery would either lead to reboots or excess heat.
Yes, that’s the claim but it’s glaring how it’s an emotional position presented as a given but completely unsupported by any evidence and bears a striking resemblance to a competitor’s PR campaign. If this was true, it’d be easy to point to things like ads or marketing material disparaging SMS users – not to mention some effort to extend this outside of the United States where apps like WhatsApp are far more popular.
> If they aren't selling a social club, they are doing a poor job at letting people compute.
Here’s the thing: most people don’t buy phones (or computers) to “compute”. If you look at an Apple ad, it’s full of people doing things like creating photos or videos, sharing moments with their friends, traveling, etc. – that’s what they’re selling and the repeat purchase rate suggests most people feel like they are getting what they were promised.
I get it may help you feel more confident about your Android preferences to concoct these weird theories about iOS buyers being brainwashed or part of some weird social club but you might want to consider why you need to justify your preference this way. Most iOS users are buying something which they find useful and you’d be far more successful in your advocacy if you focused on what tangible benefits normal people are missing out on. What you’re doing sounds insecure, not persuasive.
Popular doesnt mean 'in-group'.
>I get it may help you feel more confident about your Android preferences to concoct these weird theories about iOS buyers being brainwashed
No, we learned this during my MBA. Apple is basically 50% of your marketing classes. I'm not sure you want to call academics incorrect here. They were spot on, they knew you'd come to apologize. Your identity is wrapped in Apple. An attack on Apple, is an attack on you.
Meanwhile I hate google and microsoft. I'm agonistic and trying to find anything better. Heck, I even think Linux isnt great for consumers given all the USB issues I've had.
Do Apple fans complain about butterfly keyboards, international high stakes security breaches, and holding your phone wrong? Or do they rush to Apple's defense. Weird you don't see people doing that in Google and Microsoft threads.
Google doesnt control RCS. Its a general format. Apple could implement RCS. At most, they are a loud voice. Any phone can adopt it.
This is completely different from a closed imessage that cannot be adopted by others. Not to mention, imessage has been pretty anti-consumer with all their security problems, inability to accept high quality video, etc... None of this is good for the consumer.
What is good for the consumer is that the color of the bubble are different, this is important for status seeking individuals who want to be part of the in-group.
Back to the parent comments, RCS is better if you want a computing device. iMessage is the best if you want to buy your way into an in-group.
Oof gross. Do you have any further reading? I couldn't find anything on it.
