Use an ad-filled browser controlled by a megacorp, with an engine built by another megacorp?
Hmmm, I dunno
Even better. After you’ve explicitly triggered the default change MS is like “have you tried the all new megacorp spyware? It’s not actually new, but identical to the spyware we already installed and absolutely nothing has changed in the last 10 seconds since you made the decision, but we figured we’d throw another churn barrier at you because fuck you; we own your OS. You’re our product now bitch, and that’s all you’ll ever be”
Don’t forget the OS built by a megacorp snorkeling up all your data anyways
…that they ask you to actually pay for the privilege. Because remember, windows isn’t actually free (and you pay for it if you buy a pre-built).
I feel it’s important to point out that you can simply not activate Windows and use it indefinitely
Does make you wonder though where Microsoft is getting that money from
Well, on the other hand, said megacorp finances the only other engine (Gecko, Blink being a fork of Apples Webkit), so they don’t have to bother with monopoly restrictions.
Current web is broken.
I realize this, but technically Mozilla is still an independent entity. They also fight some Google attempts at Web DRM, so it’s still healthy competition
and web standards! chrome doesn’t care much about web standards. they regularly add new nonstandard proprieties that eventually wins because of their market-size.
Edge started itself on boot after a recent Windows update. It even had a little pop-up about how “helpful” it was to have it start right when my computer turns on so I can “get to browsing” faster. It’s never been set as my default. Uhg.
Make sure you go into the settings and turn everything off. It’ll run in the background and do God knows what even though you’ve turned off startup.
If you sped through edge’s first launch wizard recently it’s now scraping your browsing data from other browsers.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
Run this after every update, specifically the tweak that uninstalls Edge. Makes things a lot easier. It also gives you the option to delay feature updates by two years and only install security updates on time.
Well, I switched to Edge for work with the latest Chrome update (since internal apps were Chromium only), and was pleasantly surprised. It actually let me turn off almost all the junk, and is responsive in a way I haven’t seen in a Chromium browser in years.
Safari and Firefox for personal use though, and nothing compelling to make me change that.
The performance is pretty on-par with other major browsers now, but it is the obscene amount of popups built into the browser that irritates me.
Once you set it up it’s fine, but on first opening you have to click through a bunch of menus (no, I don’t want to share data, no I don’t want to sync my account, and so on). In other browsers it’s a small popup in the corner which you can ignore, and just google what you wanted to google. In edge they’re fullscreen and you have to click no on each one.
Probably a rather unique problem because I regularly set up new machines, most people just go through it once and never see it again.
Same I’m a developer who uses edge as my daily driver and once setup right I love it
There’s the shopping popup that tries to find better deals or vouchers for products you’re looking at. It’s easy to turn off though.
Searching the settings for “notification” does show others - a feature called Discover and sidebar apps seem to be able to send notifications but I’ve never seen either.
Maybe look at BromiteCromite? Open Source Chromium browser where you don’t need to disable anything
Bromite has not been updated since January.
One of the old Bromite contributors forked it: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Same, I’m only allowed to use either Chrome or Edge on my work laptop, so I chose Edge.
Librewolf on my personal laptop and Firefox on mobile tho.
Don’t worry Gill it will set itself back as default next Tuesday
I’ve never had that happen. Either the US version of Windows is fucked, or people are bullshitting hard.
I’m in the US and have never ran into half of the stuff people say MS forces on them on a daily basis.
I think this has a lot to do with what license you bought. My old Win8 Pro key install has never had ads and shit pop back up or re-enable candy crush or whatever. One of our shitty laptops at work with a win10 home license I absolutely dread updating because there is some new bullshit nearly every time.
I’m still on 10, but half the shit I see people complain about with Windows I’ve never experienced personally. Maybe I’m just lucky? Maybe I just read? I don’t know, but I’m not having the same experience as a lot of people on here.
In general any bad thing about windows that it manages to fixes still gets commented about online for several years after the fact. For example: BSODs stopped being a regular thing in windows user’s life very long ago, but it took another 10 years after that for people to stop making BSOD jokes online.
From time to time when you update windows it’ll show you a welcoming setup again similar to the first time you logged in. In that process it will try to convince you to setup some Microsoft stuff on your pc, including changing default apps, but it shouldn’t do it on its own.
But sometimes it does. It happened once for me this year.
There was a while there where it would default to Edge for PDFs and as a web browser after a update. Quite annoying for a factory full of PCs that I wanted to use Chrome and Adobe Reader instead.
I tried Edge for a bit but stuck with chrome. Recently I’ve gone back to Firefox but I’ve not had one of those major updates yet that even tries to get me to log into Microsoft as a log in so it will be interesting when that happens again if Edge shows up as the default.
What does “built for Windows 10” even mean? It’s just a browser. It’s even cross platform.
Almost everything that runs on Windows was built for Windows. So it’s a true statement, but pointless. That’s like BF Goodrich advertising their tires as “built for cars”.
You’re right, clicked it away so many times over the years and never stopped to think what a silly statement that was. I feel like it was for a time when 10 was a new shiny ‘mysterious’ thing, that it might convince people into thinking it needed something special, but has just aged like milk.
Their other apps use it or part of it in the background.
Kind of like old Windows apps always used Explorer when they needed a browser
I wouldn’t be surprised if the start menu was using Edge for their search/ads
