- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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Does that mean Teams will finally stop opening links in Edge when that’s not my default browser?
Shocking. Never expected this behavior from such a helpful and heart warming company like Micro~.sft /s
a) this is a good thing because users installing extensions and programs that stealthily change defaults is pretty common b) businesses are going to use group policies so it won’t affect them.
I understand that software directly and silently changing the default software can be a security issue. But it’s only because it happens silently. Does Windows allow for showing a system prompt that confirms the change to the user? If not, then that’s just plain ol’ anti-competitive. Especially with how pushy Edge and Bing can be.
I don’t think the goal is to lock you into their browser, since you still can change it through the GUI. It seems to be part of the recent push to block software which changes hidden settings. The end goal being to lock down the OS and prevent users from disabling features MS wants to push onto them.
I did a fresh install on a family member’s PC yesterday. Tried to change the region in the registry so I could uninstall Edge and it wouldn’t let me. I assume this is related.
But I also dual-booted Linux so they could try it at any time 🙃
Man I hate Microsoft pre installing Edge on these laptops to push their browser. Anyways here is your laptop bro, also I pre installed Linux so I can push it to you.
Difference is I don’t profit off of installing Linux. Just encouraging other people to help themselves.
Careful with that. Microsoft loves to periodically push updates that overwrite the boot sector to disable that dual boot configuration.
Been doing it for many years and never had a problem but thanks
Don’t worry, someone will port it to Linux some day.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
they ported ms edge to linux already
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
We know. You keep telling us.
Some people are saying this is good, but Microsoft recently changed my default search engine to bing “In case it was accidentally changed or changed by another program”. I have zero faith they won’t abuse this, they are becoming ever increasingly pushy about using edge and switching to bing.
BS like this has made it impossible to maintain a consistent experience for my parents who aren’t super tech savvy. It’s so frustrating helping them over the phone for hours only to realise that windows just on a whim changed major settings without any user interactions. Changed theirs OS to Debian now. Much better.
Seriously. Windows has become garbage enough that 20 years ago Linux is the better OS. Even though 20 years ago windows (well, let’s say 15) was better than modern Linux is.
It doesn’t seem like your computer, does it? It’s like you’re a user in their enterprise.
Haven’t they recently renamed “My Computer” to “This Computer” on the desktop?
Like the USSR, but somehow shittier, and expensive. And Theres human piss and shit on the streets because we don’t let the poor sleep in abandoned buildings.
“Our Computer”
“The Computer”
“The Nintendo” points at Xbox 360
Set it via group policy (local or domain) and forget about it.
How long til that’s deprecated though?
I would guess probably not soon. Windows still needs to be able to comply with many industries needs for compliance (ITAR, HIPAA, Financial, etc etc.) If they remove the ability to control this, they cut themselves out of their largest profit area (corporate licensing).
I think if they just unilaterally make the move, or charge extra for the feature, no regulator is going to crack down; their market share is too big.
Nah, won’t happen.
Microsoft is generally very reasonable when it comes to GPOs
no regulator is going to crack down; their market share is too big.
The bigger a company’s market share is the more likely regulation is. Hell, the EU has already done this but for internet explorer.
Microsoft won’t depreciate GPOs in many many years, at least.
Has anyone else noticed that MS switched their search engine? I have never heard of that. Sounds like a bug or something.
“Won’t happen. Can’t flood. Hey does anybody else hear water?”
I genuinely can’t tell if this was intentional but its hilarious either way.
What water are you hearing?
Yeah that’s why you can’t give your computer to Fucking m$
I use Kagi, and so far, it seems to casually switch it back with that message about once a month.
Meanwhile, if you use Microsoft Teams & Outlook with the Teams add-on installed … and you are wondering why your email links are suddenly opening in Edge instead of your default browser, disable the Teams add-on in Outlook and rage for a moment at the stupidity.
Teams is forcing Edge browser to open links in new Teams and by extension, in Outlook. Setting the default browser to open links within Outlook settings just leads to un-clickable links. The only way to fix it is to disable the Teams Outlook add-on.
Yes, same old Microsoft. Anyone who thinks they have changed in any way since the days of forcing Internet Explorer as the default are sadly and woefully mistaken.
You can change the default Browser to open links in Teams. I had no problems opening links in Teams or Outlook since I changed it.
I see your TLD is “.de” so maybe there it works, not in America. Home of the “free”.
Changing the setting in Teams and Outlook to Default Browser resulted in links that did not work at all. Removed Teams add-on was the only solution.
At least not in the EU, there Windows should even allow you to uninstall EDGE
Maybe it’s because websites should ask user before enabling cookies?
MS US not only use cookies, it logs even your keystrokes and mouse movements, apart to pass your data to Towerdata and Facebook. Cookies are not the problem if yoy use uBO, Cookie Autodelete ar similar.
Didn’t they already lose a court case about doing that?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - Windows isn’t ready for the desktop. Just use Linux.
I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.
It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.
It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.
Because it doesn’t use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.
Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it’s default desktop environment with Ubuntu.
And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!
That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.
It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.
There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.
And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.
But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.
I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.
But.
Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.
I agree with every single bit of this but felt like I was being attacked the whole time I read it. Maybe it’s PTSD from asking questions in Linux forums as a kid and getting ripped into with long replies. Does anybody else feel that way?
@ajsadauskas @Naich @ardi60 And if you thought that was confusing, the same company also makes a “Windows Subsystem for Linux” but appears to have got the name backwards — it’s not FOR Linux, at all!
Lin…ux?
Okay so KDE was okay 5-10 years ago. Ultimately crawled back to Windoze. What’s in vogue in 2024?
- Budgie for minimalist KDE-like experience
- Cinnamon for good old Windows 7 vibes
- XFCE for going all XP
- KDE itself is really good nowadays, and probably the most popular option
There is plenty of choices, those are just some of the major ones.
I’m a big fan of Pop OS personally.
KDE 6 just dropped. Cinnamon is up there as well. And if you think iOS is too cluttered and functional, give Gnome a try.
Can’t endorse Gnome enough. I feel like something about it is anti ADHD for me. It optimizes screen size usage. And, the division of tasks into workspaces is glorious. It honestly bothers me a little that it helps me be productive despite myself.
I am glad someone likes it.
It frustrates me to no end.
Okay, you sold it to me (given for free) Should try to approach Gnome again. Currently a KDE user.
The extension ecosystem is absolutely amazing. I really love it!
If you want to keep your computer, yeah.
Might be rough, but, like… Windows7 isnt supported anymore.
Yep, I just switched yesterday.
Literally switched two days ago. Trying mint for now
Haha, me too. I tried opensuse first but switched to mint.
Manjaro is amazing, but might have a little steep learning curve should you use it for something very advanced. Also, no .deb’s and .rpm’s for you, but AUR is arguably even more based (don’t rely on it too much though, troubleshooting issues with AUR-sourced apps is an advanced task indeed!)
Other than that, an insanely snappy (thanks, Arch!), beautiful (thank you, presets for various DEs!), almost bleeding-edge and very novice-friendly distribution.
Mint gang rise up!
Switched just a couple of months ago.
I switched to mint in November, almost everything just works (I mainly use my desktop for gaming). And everything that doesn’t, works after visiting the mint forum or is just a minor inconvenience.
I dunno; ive had trouble trying to internally rewhatsit outgoing broadcast UDP packets to multicast UDP (or even TCP and then back on the other side) packets for use with some 25 year old windows software. So clearly Linux sucks.
PopOS uses the same core stuff as mint and is good at graphics drivers, does em automatically.
Linux Linux?
(only tangentially related) what does ‘driver’ mean in windows lingo? I thought it was hardware-related stuff but I’m probably wrong.
Just a low-level filter that inspects and vetos things (think anti virus)
It’s pretty much a program running in OS kernel space to handle specific function calls which need low level system access. Most hardware needs custom drivers to work because they need to interact with those low level OS components, so that’s why they’re mostly associated with hardware.
A lot of antiviruses use custom drivers to intercept and inspect program behavior to look for viruses, etc
To anyone saying “just use GPOs”, here’s a quote from the SetUserFTA page:
Microsoft offers a solution with GPO, but it is Computer-based and not User-based – and rather complicated. this means, you can not associate your Users on the same Server/Client with different file types. for example:
you have a PDF viewer and a PDF editing software on your XenApp server. Now you want that a certain group opens their PDF’s in the editor and the others only in the viewer (for licensing reasons for example). this is NOT possible anymore and Microsoft states “it is by design” and “this is a security measure”.
Said solution:
- Set up a reference computer
- Install applications
- Go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Default Programs and configure default apps associations.
- Export/import the custom default app association with dism.exe
[…]
As some recommended applications can manage more extensions with each new Windows 10 version available, it’s a good practice to refresh your XML. For example, in Windows 10 1703, Microsoft Edge registers the epub extension. If you’re using an XML file from Windows 10 1607, epub is missing. As a result, you will get an app reset notification for epub.
[…]
Configure a policy for your domain-joined computer: file association will be configured at each logon. User will be able to change file association, but at the next logon file association will be configured using XML file. This policy works only for domain-joined computer.
This is just about the most convoluted, annoying way they could come up with for doing this, doesn’t help people whose machines aren’t part of AD and isn’t scriptable. If they were mainly concerned about security they’d have an option for not allowing the user to change these preferences even temporarily on domain-joined machines.
Presumably one can still set default in settings. I’m not giving up Firefox yet.
Yes, the article clearly indicates MS stated purpose here was to ensure that an end user is presented with the default selection options and their choice is respected, regardless of administrator actions outside the user interacting with the settings panel. MS is not trying to force everyone to use Edge.
But why? Is administrators forcing their company’s laptop to use certain browser actually a significant problem before?
Its more a issue in China where every browser (read malware) would make itself the default and it’s a pain to change it back.
It’s not that’s it’s a problem per se, it’s that MS thinks it might leave them liable to punitive action under the DMA. While i’m not convinced whether MS is being honest or if it’s a bit of malicious compliance/dark pattern stuff, I fully believe that there’s some spite layered in there from the 90s regardless.
Still doable for corporate-managed devices through GPOs, MS Intune, MECM, etc
They aren’t talking about system administrators. They are talking about 3rd party software presenting a privilege escalation prompt (administrator access) and changing your default browser without you knowing about it
They say that, but I’ll believe it when I see the implementation.
Nowhere in the article does MS say that. It’s presented as an argument, while MS said “no comment”.
Nowhere does MS claim that.
“Kolbicz believes this change may be to comply with Europe’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)” (emphasis mine).
“BleepingComputer contacted Microsoft about the lockdown of these Registry keys in March, but they said they had nothing to share at this time.”
