Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Win11 to get people to ditch Chrome
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Win11 to get people to ditch Chrome
Microsoft has paused its latest pop-ups, for now.
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
I think that nagging promotion is counterproductive. Sure, some users switch if nagged hard enough, and this shows in the A/B tests. What is not shown is that those are often less tech-savvy; they'll see that the browser changed, say "my internet is wrong, could you fix it up?" to the local "computer guy", he'll reinstall Chrome, make it default again, and mess with the configs to minimise Edge pop-ups. Because often slightly tech-savvier users have zero trust on Microsoft actually doing things for the sake of the users, if Satan appeared in Earth and told them "hey, I just made Hell Navigator!", they'd consider it over what they see as Internet Exploder 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Instead I think that a better promotion tactic would target tech-savvier users, and let them do the rest through grassroots (or astroturf) promotion. Give Edge some meaningless technical merit over Chrome, and spread the word about it, while paying some journalists and "journalists" to spread news about how awful Chrome, Google, and Alphabet are.
(I'd still not use Edge, not even if I used Windows. But... hey I don't use Chrome either. A plague on both houses.)
Forcing edge down my throat is one of the reasons i left windows for linux…. And i am an edge user. Its one of the first things I installed on linux.
I just happen to use multiple browsers together and edge isn’t the one i want to set as default. Microsoft has some great stuff for nerds but they really have no idea how to connect to us.
To be fair, they kinda already tried this. Early versions of Edge were touted as being Chromium but faster and more efficient. "Technical" people didn't buy it because of their mistrust of Microsoft, and normal users didn't really care about using less RAM.
Now they've added so many "features" even if it is more efficient or whatever it's annoying enough that technical users don't want it, or have to spend so long disabling things like coupon popups and some weird desktop search bar and the sidebar thing - that they just don't want to deal with it and go back to Chrome.
Kind of. They missed one step: raising mistrust on Chrome and Google. (Hell will freeze before they'll be able to raise trust on
Internet ExplorerEdge and Microsoft, so the only way to market themselves as more trustworthy is to make the other side look worse.)And the technical merit should be meaningless; not something measurable as speed. Otherwise Google could simply pour a bit more dev hours into Chrome and say "done, now Chrome is faster", and make MS shoot its own foot.
I use FF as the main on Windows, and the amount of popups I receive about not only the browser — not using OneDrive as well, MS365, etc — makes me want to switch back to a Mac. I do computer repair, and Macs are the worst consistently for it. I have to use OpenCore if I want to run software past an arbitrary ‘limit’ set by Apple because it thinks capable hardware is too old. But apparently having a £150 copy of Win11 pro doesn’t get me no ads and Microsoft continues to think it’s acceptable to annoy a user base into submission.
Maybe you heard this like a hundred times by now, but you can always try linux.
I’m considering it. I run laptops, so there’s some concerns about battery life/Dell XPS drivers that I have to reason out.
Sounds too edgy
I mainly use firefox unless I want x265 decoding + the new nvidia video upscaler then I use edge. Mainly for newish anime releases so they don't look as shit. I don't touch real chrome.
I'm guessing that's for streaming quality? I hadn't thought about browsers for video quality but I do prefer surround sound when possible but I just mostly accept there is minimal surround sound anyways. Mostly use chrome out of habit but never looked into quality difference just assumed they were pretty much the same.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications, in a statement to The Verge.
I wasn’t alone in thinking it was malware, with posts dating back three months showing Reddit users trying to figure out why they were seeing the pop-up.
Microsoft even had to backtrack on plans to force the Chrome default search to Bing for businesses installing its Office apps.
After all, Google runs similar notifications on its webpages to get people to use Chrome or it’s annoying YouTube premium spam.
That could be in the form of the price of a laptop that has a Windows OEM license baked in, or a product key if you built your own PC.
Windows is an important productivity tool for many people, and shouldn’t be treated like a cheap streaming box loaded with ads.
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