The single responsible for this is an executive called Mikhail Parakhin. I was in his org for a while and this kind of shit (ads on windows, forced news pushes, etc) were par for the course in his strategy. He got promoted twice in the last two years due to this crapware actually generating money for the Ads group.
I know everybody is in love with Microsoft these days because of Open AI but the dark side of Microsoft is still there. And Satya is rewarding it.
> I know everybody is in love with Microsoft these days because of Open AI
The cognitive dissonance this provoked in me is astounding. The only people I've seen praising anything AI-related at the same kinds of people who were boosting cryptocurrency and NFTs. Are there really thoughtful, mature people who think that Open AI is in any way positive?
EDIT: The most pro-Microsoft opinions I've seen have mostly been related to VS Code. Personally I don't get it - it's basically functionality-equivalent to IntelliJ, with maybe _slightly_ nicer visuals - but, sure, it works well enough, I guess!
> Are there really thoughtful, mature people who think that Open AI is in any way positive?
Anyone who thinks the AI developments are entirely positive and willfully ignores the downsides [information authenticity, spamming, abuse of copyright by the AI companies, the list goes on] might as well fall into that crypto/NFT cohort for me.
> The most pro-Microsoft opinions I've seen have mostly been related to VS Code.
I think it just stems from the fact that "new" Microsoft releases a lot of code as open source, and isn't out trying to sue everyone who looks at their intellectual property the wrong way.
> Personally I don't get it - it's basically functionality-equivalent to IntelliJ
As a heavy VS Code user, I don't really consider it a replacement for other IDEs. It just so happens that the "heavy" IDEs have always done a pretty poor job serving the frontend/backend Javascript stacks- which are the world VS Code was built for. I think of VS Code as "the IDE for Typescript" the way I think of IntelliJ as "the IDE for Java".
You can certainly adorn VS Code with plugins and write Java in it, and you can certainly install some plugins in IntelliJ to do Javascript in it. But these won't be the ideal experiences.
What is the relationship between (I assume you mean generative) AI, which is the foundation for many useful new technologies, and NFT/crypto, which usually amounts to nothing more than a pyramid scheme style investment opportunity?
Your sentiment toward generative AI ("the foundation for many useful new technologies") is exactly the same that the crypto/NFT bros have towards crypto/NFT. So far generative AI has shown a couple niche use cases and a lot of surface level demos that don't actually work in the real world. Honestly it's hard to tell the current AI hype apart from all the other fads, tho this one at least feels like it will go somewhere
Well, as a developer in a small team it has made my work significantly easier, so personally I am already directly enjoying the benefits. It has supercharged my capacity to pick up new languages and technologies.
Besides that, it will have a huge impact on non-trivial things like the design industry and data interaction. Being able to programmaticly handle abstract decision making is a big one as well.
It frankly baffles me that people can describe the current AI boom as a fad, when a simple extrapolation of the current technologies will show you what an enormous impact it is going to have in the coming years...
> It frankly baffles me that people can describe the current AI boom as a fad, when a simple extrapolation of the current technologies will show you what an enormous impact it is going to have in the coming years...
In fairness, I do see _some_ possible value in AI (though much less than the superfans do) - but you must admit that this exact sentiment was being expressed by cryptobros a couple of years ago.
I was never bullish on Crypto currencies, but GenAI is another story.
It’s worth looking at who the detractors are: People, creatives especially, feel genuinely threatened by generative ML models. The recent writers strike, specifically addressed it. Nobody that I saw felt threatened by crypto currencies in the same way.
Even at the foundational level, crypto currencies/“smart” contracts/NFTs are additive to the economy, they are a new, different and discreet, whereas AI is disruptive/transformative it is a new way of doing something that people already do. I still can’t pay my bills with crypto or even deposit it at traditional financial institutions, but artist are already using genAI as a tool, today.
I hear this argument regularly, which is confusing when IntelliJ is free? It _has_ a paid version, but in the ~7 years that my employer was paying for the Ultimate Edition, I never once used any of them.
> is more resource efficient believe it or not
Sure, anecdotally this does seem to be true (by the fact that I can have VS Code and Factorio open at the same time :P ).
But the way you hear VS Code fans rave about it, you'd think there are oodles of extra functionality, not just "it's a little more efficient, but not so as you'd notice during the work day".
Not cheaper. IntelliJ truly pays itself over a very brief period of time.
Let's say a license is worth about k hours of development time per year. Over the course of 1 year, IntelliJ will save you much more than k hours of development time.
On the other hand, you have VS Code, which needs over k hours to configure in order to get a fraction of what you can achieve with IntelliJ. You paid the same money in a different way and obtained less benefits.
It takes 2mins, once, to install the required extension for your language and then you get to have remote dev and multi lang dev capabilities that you can't get on jetbrains no matter what. It also improves much faster than any jetbrains ide did in my experience. Just the terminal is so much better now on vscode, and hasn't changed at all on jetbrains (and it's not because it is already perfect either.)
I'm sure it's better for java though, haven't tried that.
I can press on a single button and get access to tons of remote servers without needing to use gateway. Also, the UI is much better than gateway, since it's not "included" whenever you ssh or open a websocket connection. Gateway works fine, but it's much heavier, clunkier and IME less reliable.
In contrast, almost all extensions work just fine in VScode remote, and you can sync your settings across all machines that you have without doing anything.
It's not really something jetbrains can do about it, but there's also the fact that vscode is almost a standard for one click remote dev so Gcloud, AWS and Azure integrate with it super well. I can access any machine on a single click, and open test envs too while having my settings synced on the browser too. Gateway being proprietary probably makes such integration impossible
Maybe I'm being naïve here, but - why would you need your IDE to have access to remote servers? From a quick look at the landing pages for Gateway it looks like this is basically setting up an ssh connection to a remote server so that you can run your IDE locally but edit files on another server - why would that be advantageous? The only thing I can think of would be if your development machine isn't powerful enough to run your tests or a development version of your code, but I can't imagine that's particularly common?
Jetbrains IDEs (and I assume others) index the code to make search operations faster. That's one example of a heavy operation where you'd rather have the meat of the IDE close to the code, than close to the user. Simplifies setting up your debugger if the IDE and the debugger are both on localhost. I've worked for one org that insisted the code stay entirely inside AWS GovCloud at all times.
Like you I'm not actually convinced it's a useful feature generally (otherwise we'd still all be using X11), but those are some justifications.
> I've worked for one org that insisted the code stay entirely inside AWS GovCloud at all times.
Ah, this was the bit that I was missing. Thanks! That's.....certainly a constraint within which this feature could be useful. Seems extraordinarily niche, though!?
It was (niche). And to add insult to injury, there was a jump box.
Like I said, I don't like the approach, it's way too "thin client" for me, but it seems to be part and parcel of our "towers of abstraction" approach to software development. I guess the next logical step is to abstract away the physical location of the code.
The only thing I can think of would be if your development machine isn't powerful enough to run your tests
A lot of people have Mac/Arm dev machines, but deploy to Linux/x86 machines. Developing and testing on the hardware/OS you are targeting lets you avoid nasty surprises down the line.
In the period between working on Bing and his new venture, he spent 5 years as the CTO at the Russian search engine "Yandex," stepping in for the late co-founder Ilya Segalovich who passed away because of cancer. There are many anecdotes circulating about Parakhin at Yandex. One of them goes like this: on his first day of work, he was asked to choose a handle for his corporate email. He was surprised that such a choice was available, as he was used to Microsoft, where addresses were assigned based on names and surnames. He asked if he could seriously pick any handle. Upon receiving a positive response, he didn't believe it and asked if he could use the address imperator@yandex-team.ru, which means "emperor" in transliterated Russian. There's actually proof of this: https://github.com/yandex/fastops/blob/master/AUTHORS
I never trusted Microsoft once in my life, and I'm older than them, but I can't deny that they made many smart moves in the last years: proof is that they got a lot of good feelings among developers. They are starting to look bad again. I can't say that I'm happy about that but at least it confirms the soundness of my position.
Similar feelings. I'm old(?) enough to have wrangled with NT4 in a professional setting, I remember the Halloween documents, the malicious treatment of Java, I even lead the charge on samba deployments.
I don't even own any windows device, but I think csharp might be my current favorite balance of pragmatism and design. I have quite a few rather important things running on dotnet core. I appreciate their un-google hammering persistence on things and the willingness to iterate until they get it right.
If they're actually smart, they would've tried to cash in on the recent youtube adblocking issues, and invest in making edge able to block youtube ads properly.
If they did, i bet their usage statistics would grow in some substantial amount. Obviously, this could open a can of worms, since they'd then be open to being sued by google...
With how they slipped back into making it more difficult to exorcise Edge from being opened for various links and file types... I think "FTC fine" might just be a line item on the business expenses....
They need to look good in order to sell you ads and sell you software, so in my opinion, Microsoft is bound to be good (in order to go bad)
this means there's no point in evangelizing for big companies like microsoft, because it's just the cycle. (And also, no need to be embarrassed, because that's the cycle too!)
It's like feeling bad that you got hungry, so you ate, and then you feel sorry that you ate, so you got hungry again, it's a cycle, companies need to look good in order to get customers, then they will exploit the customers they got by looking good, and then look bad cause the goal is to exploit the customers, and the cycle starts again.
And one thing that won’t harmonize with my world view is that this executive is actually a very capable engineer, extremely smart, but instead of using that knowledge for good (as I believe all true engineers would), no, “let’s push adware onto Windows unchecked”. Frustrating.
he isn't smart for successfully delivering what his boss wants receiving his desired promotion and fortune? you might want to reassess your definitions.
lol if you think Ballmer wouldn’t be eating up your data right now as well.
Also, arguably, the biggest part of MS’s success under Nadella has been the massively improved dev experience, with the open sourcing of C#/.Net, Powershell, the promotion of Thpescript and VS Code, to name a few larger Dev focused efforts.
The MS dev story under Ballmer was dire. Despite C# being a tremendous language and .Net being an excellent framework, Windows’s supremacy under Ballmer’s MS meant it was never allowed to go beyond Windows, and IIS, which meant both the language and framework fared extremely poorly largely due to the underlying Windows Server and IIS dependencies.
While I hate all the telemetry and behind the scenes crap going on in Windows (that can't be disabled), you are still free to use whatever browser you prefer. It's a minor annoyance, and happens just once.
Again, not defending this practice, but this browser thing is superficial.
My problem with this browser thing is that it's part of a more insidious campaign to normalize this sort of dark pattern + intrusive nudging. If users don't speak app soon Windows will turn into an ad-infested user abusefest. And if it makes to Windows, and survives, pretty much everybody else will follow.
Because you keep interfering with my work with your never ending notifications starting with the last opened tabs, to the incessant "use Bing it's great" - which I can only mute for a week at a time.
WTF already; used to love Edge until all this started.
In my case I switched to Firefox. It's working really, really well!
This is it for me too. It feels like it's jamming something new in my face every single day. I want a web browser, not an endless stream of crap I'm not interested in.
There was a point in time where I didn't bother installing another browser on Windows computers. That's far in the past now.
It's like when you're cornered and asked for specific reasons you want out of a bad relationship. It's so they can tell you why your reasons aren't correct.
"You are failing to comply with my repeated insistence that you love me"
It's really pretty telling that they leave out the most obvious, and, I'm guessing, common answer: "I'm content with my current browser want to stay with the thing I'm used to."
What's so pitiful is they aren't asking because they want a vibrant, diverse browsing ecosystem. They're asking because they're on the outside looking in to a platform-defining position of market dominance.
This roughly translates to "we know damn well why you're downloading Chrome, and we'd really rather Google or Apple be left wondering why you're downloading Edge, but we have no idea how to get there"
I am not by any means a browser loyalist. Firefox is my daily driver, I regularly use Safari on my Mac (not to mention phone), and at work I normally use Chrome for certain tasks. I would guess that I use all three at least a little bit on most days. And I like to try out alternative browsers too.
In fact, just about the only browser I don't like to use is Edge. I used to use it quite a bit, too. But I stopped using it a while back, precisely because of shit like this.
"Have you heard about Bing, which let's you harness the power of AI to... Click [here] to visit Bing. Otherwise click [here] to find out more about Bing's powerful AI features."
> "I can't access my Google documents"
"Have you tried Microsoft 365 that harnesses powerful AI to increase your productivity?..."
> "I don't have my favorites or passwords here"
"Did you know about Microsoft... powerful AI... something something AI..."
Harnessing the power of AI with Windows copilot is amazing. None of the example tasks it ships with work. They just scrape the docs and give you a summary how to turn on dark mode for example. I suspect its because copilot isn't even supposed to be available in Germany, but MS forgot to geofence it.
To not have "without damaging the brand" as a contingency on that goal seems shortsighted but I wouldn't be surprised if the goals omit that judging from watching the way MS operates over the decades.
“Without damaging the brand” in the sight of whom? Your average person isn’t going to care about any of this, and tactics like these are making number go up, which is all these executives and shareholders care about.
Out of curiosity I went to open Edge and try to trigger the poll, instead I found the most shocking avenue of product placement I've ever seen. [1]
Yep, Microsoft pushed an update that adds a (completely useless) launch app button to Windows Search results, and that button is being used to promote Edge.
If you're picking Chrime over Edge for -trust- reasons, then I'm not sure what to say.
Both Microsoft and Google are both trust-worthy (I trust them not to phone home with my bank login details) and untrust-worthy (I expect them to gather as much information about me as possible) to equal degrees.
Both want to show me ads. Both want to track my behaviour. It's trivial to point to either and show multiple examples of egregious behaviour.
So yeah, if you're choosing Google over Microsoft for -trust- reasons then I have a page of ads for you.
The real reason I'm installing Chrome is simply because I use Chrome. It's a browser. My life is too short to waste time deciding which browser to use. They're all good enough. Of course I could switch to Edge. I just couldn't be bothered to.
Note that the question from MS is about "trying another browser" rather than "trying Chrome".
The article itself is about the poll happening when a user tries to download Chrome, but the poll wording and behaviour seem like it may also be happening for other browsers too.
Well said, I’ll add that I use chrome because the UI loads snappily on every PC I’ve ran it on. High end to trash boxes. I have never seen edge run smoothly on a consistent basis. In fact I could say the same for most modern win apps.
If you don't believe they're trustworthy, then why are you trusting them with your valuable data by using their OS?
I don't think they're trustworthy either: why would I trust a company that forces ads on me right in the OS, tries to force their crappy browser on me, and many more awful things? So, I don't use their OS. It's pretty simple. If you continue to use them despite supposedly not trusting them and being offended by their user-hostile treatment, then you're just rewarding their behavior.
> If you don't believe they're trustworthy, then why are you trusting them with your valuable data by using their OS?
The very, very common reason for this is that it's an employer provided laptop.
So the employee has no (reasonable) choice in the matter.
---
That also often (but not always) comes with a locked down admin capability. So installing a different browser may not even be possible after the download. But that's a different issue. ;)
>The very, very common reason for this is that it's an employer provided laptop.
>So the employee has no (reasonable) choice in the matter.
In this case, the point is moot: the employee should not be trusting his/her data to Microsoft, not because of MS itself, but because the computer isn't theirs. Even if the computer were running an OS they trusted, they shouldn't be putting their private data on there, because it's not their computer. Clearly, the employer trusts MS, because they selected them as their OS vendor, so the employee's opinion doesn't matter. If the employer's data gets stolen or whatever, that's the employer's problem, not the employee's.
If you simply don't like the computing environment your employer provides you, find another employer, or just put up with it like you put up with other annoyances that come with employment. Every job is a compromise.
How many realistic options are there for a browser if I don't use it for stuff that has an app? Servo seemed to work fine the few places I went, but the UI isn't there yet. Lynx either has some tricks I neglected to read about, or is unusable even on stuff that works fine in reader mode as a plain document. Firefox and chrome have some spinoffs that may get rid of telemetry, maybe that is a decent option, but I'd worry about bug fixes. Thoughts anyone?
I just use Firefox and maintain a single policies.json [1] to disable features I don't like (Pocket, telemetry, etc) across all of the computers that I use. Mozilla has pretty good documentation [2] available, mostly aimed at Enterprise admins, but it works for me.
Also ninite.com - you do have to open Edge, but you get a custom installer for a whole host of programs and it won't get flagged by Edge as a competing browser download.
Not that MS is the poster child for chivalrous competition…but this level of desoerationjust signifies how important the battle for the branded browser is.
The google maps web page is checking which browser you are using.
The ms edge browser is watching what you are doing when you are using the web. Someone had to add code that said “if trying to download chrome send this system popup. “ which startled me when I saw it.
That and my one windows machine seems to open edge when waking from sleep (maybe rebooting?)
They get pushy about Chrome on iOS if you're using any of their other apps iOS too, with a browser menu that opens when you click a link.
This made sense back before iOS let you change the default browser, but it's been several years since then. Google apps should really just obey the system default and open the link I tapped without nagging me.
I feel like I'm in the minority- but I actually kind of like Edge. I understand that it's probably not the best in terms of privacy, but I rarely search for things I shouldn't. The integration with AI (Copilot) is quite nice and have changed how I search now. I also use it for generating ideas and leads on open-ended questions, too... which has helped a lot in my creative endeavors. I know this sounds like a pro-Microsoft comment and post, but I just want to get on my computer - do a few things and get some stuff done. I don't live my entire life on my PC anymore.
When Google advertised their browser every time you visited google.com with a non-Google browser, nobody lost their mind. Nobody (yes, I know some people complain) complains when Apple forces Safari on every iOS user (Even if you used a non-Apple browser, it's still Safari under the hood).
But when Microsoft does it, people would have you believe the sky is falling.
I liked Edge originally too - it seemed cleaner than chrome and had some cool features like vertical tabs and the Dev tools that were better than Chrome's. I made it my daily driver.
Then they adding a shopping helper; then more ads to the new start-page; then a notification about Microsoft rewards; then popups about how "Bing is better" or that "Bing AI" was there to help - don't forget the "Open links in Edge on Mobile" popup; then they added a side toolbar with a giant B[ing] button that wasn't removable unless you toggled a group policy (now there's an option for it). The damn button was the last straw for me because of the amount of work I needed to do to just disable it.
> I just want to get on my computer - do a few things and get some stuff done
Yeah, so do I and Edge kept getting in the way to keep telling me about all the new things that Microsoft things I should use.
Chrome isn't great - the privacy sandbox/built-in interests stuff is disgusting - but Chrome wasn't as "in your face" so I could just start it and go. Brave avoided the the privacy sandbox and now Firefox works for me everywhere.
Because every update of the browser something changes. Like an extra bar here, collections there. Just keep the browser an application to browse the web. If I want split screen I'll open 2 windows. If I want to take a screenshot I'll use the OS' feature.
Why are they even paying developers to duplicate these Windows features?
Pretty simple. I gave Edge a few weeks. Switched back to Chrome for one reason: ads. Edge is a spammy browser with spammy defaults. It’s a Trojan horse to sell you MS services, instead of being the best possible web browser.
And if you think browser innovation is dead… check out Arc
A correct answer everyone should cite is not wanting to trust using an app made by the company that puts ads (and excessive telemetry) into the operating system. Or more generally treating the user as not the customer.
I know everybody is in love with Microsoft these days because of Open AI but the dark side of Microsoft is still there. And Satya is rewarding it.