Microsoft has been courting much controversy in Windows 11 by making it difficult to set your default browser to anything but Edge.
After much outcry and a seeming change in strategy, Microsoft appears to have come round in the latest Windows 11 Insider Builds, and are now making it relatively easier to set the default browser to your own preference.
This was an untenable situation, and I’m glad for Windows users Microsoft has relented. However, as always, this once again goes to show that with platforms like Windows, you are entirely at the mercy of corporate control and manipulation – down to your individual application choices.
Not a good place to be.
One day kids will look back at this news with amazement, and think: “wow, there was a period you could set your own browser. it should be wild west in those times”.
Hope we don’t end up in that future.
Whoaaa, there was a time you could change the theme of your windows the way you wanted them to be. The scroll bars weren’t even hiding automatically. And there was no hamburger menu to show all the menus and buttons that were available directly before.
Kochise,
Yea, when we keep making applications more and more basic, we typically up with deeper levels of indirection exposing less information & requiring more clicks. It’s one thing on a mobile device where screen real estate is so limited and finger pointing is so blunt that we have no choice about indirection. But on desktop computers I feel WIMP GUIs have been regressing in order to become featureless. I’ve complained about this before, but the lack of window borders sometimes makes it very difficult for me to see where one window ends and another begins.
IMHO hiding context seems obnoxious on desktops that have so many pixels and applications with so much whitespace… maybe what’s old will become new again some day…meh.
Activate “Aero Lite” theme using Winaero Tweaker.
It changes life (on Windows). You can even increase borders’ width.
It’s almost like bringing Windows 7 back to life.
Almost.
Kochise,
Thanks, I’ll try to keep this in mind, although I don’t actively use windows any more outside of irregular projects.
https://winaero.com/enable-the-hidden-aero-lite-theme-in-windows-10/
I do agree with you in several points. But, I also think that not nearly enough apps take the time to be helpful to the user, requiring MORE UI (whether directly in one page or multiple levels) than otherwise is necessary.
For instance, if I’m a trusted app with location access, why force the user to prefill the location details, if it’s fairly clear I want the current location? Or, if I have account data for the user, why make them to populate fields that I can pre-populate? We can call that lazy. We can say it makes users less savvy or more dependent. And, to a degree, I agree with that. Users ought to know what files & folders are. Users should understand basics of device drivers (even if it’s still a somewhat nebulous concept). The paradigms should be required to avoid being dumbed down too far. BUT, I don’t think being helpful, by making smart predictions about what users need & when goes that far*.
* It may be a security and privacy concern & we should address that separately. I just mean as far as I don’t think it goes too far & making users too dumb about what’s really happening.
I say this as someone who’s done MFC dev, web dev, and Android for the last ~15 years. I’ve seen UI’s that abstracted too much & drove me nuts thinking about the users being tortured with too many clicks & not enough info. But, I’ve also seen dialogs in a Windows app with ~50-100 UI elements, very limited structure, terrible error handling, and what amounted to lots of guessing for non-experienced users. It bothered me so much on at least two dialogs, in particular, that I nearly begged to rework the UI. Thankfully, with some approvals, plus QA/SME help, I was allowed to do just that and only show the UI elements that were relevant after a primary field was filled in.
All about balance right?
cacheline,
I am probably misunderstanding you, but I don’t see why you can’t benefit from prepopulated fields in a traditional UI?
I agree. There’s always been bad desktop designs, but I don’t think it’s the traditional WIMP elements that made them bad. That’s more to do with a poor implementation (ie bad layout, planning, and workflow).
There’s also a parallel argument to be made about poorly implemented mobile apps & websites too. There will always be bad apples.
Yeah. For better or worse a lot of modern development has us following mobile guidelines even for desktop applications/websites, which often reduces information density, increases indirection, and sometimes looses features. And that’s my gripe, but it’s easy to see why this is done: replacing desktop versions with mobile versions saves a lot of effort over proper desktop design. It’s also much more trivial to scale up a low density mobile UI to the desktop than to scale down a high density desktop UI to mobile.
I feel your pain. The Office team is particularly weird with the changes they introduce.
A tool named Ubitmenu brings sanity back to Office menus. You can also write a autohotkey script to move the mouse every 3.5 seconds while you’re working in Word, so that the scroll bars won’t hide automatically.
Yeah, these are crude solutions to problems caused by change for the sake of change. But they bring some level of relief anyway.
Yeah, I used to have like 10 different browsers all with their own rendering engines. That was crazy. They all worked pretty decently until javascript was created.
I stopped using Windows weeks ago when Microsoft flexed their muscles and made threats with Windows 11. If somebody says they are going to harm your interests believe them.
Not everyone buys into Microsoft’s mantra. I’ve read plenty of comments by IT professionals on other websites which called them out. A few decent videos call the out on Youtube too. I cannot comment on other countries media but UK media is by and large a complacent pigsty, “light touch” regulation is the dogmatic lazy and gutless norm, and a reckless and insane government is in power. I cannot imagine a lot of pushback happening off the UK.
The fact Microsoft even tried it on should set off alarm bells.
Also what bunch of idiots bought the F-35 fighter jet with baked in telemetry and without a copy of the sourcecode?
@HollyB
I don’t get the continual rallying against telemetry, it seems quite contradictory to be demanding better product development and performance, and then also demand the developer stops collecting telemetry. It seems to me to be a bit of a silly position to take!
Collecting telemetry is a basic part of any development cycle, whether it’s analysing software or hardware use, reliability or faults.
Telemetry can leak private data. There’s enough inadvertant side-channel attacks against systems these days without actively and deliberately contributing to that with phone-home telemetry.
There’s usually very little visibility into what telemetry is actually being sent and to where, too, nor much control over what happens to it once it goes out. It’s often not clear how secure it is in transit or storage, either.
The telemetry being gathered is also largely being considered the “property” of the developer, with users providing free testing for the developers with (in the case of proprietary, paid software) usually little to no return – in fact with paid software, users are effectively paying to be testers.
There’s a lot about automated, opaque telemetry that causes concern to users (both private and business).
cpcf,
I know nothing about the F-35 HollyB mentions, but for consumer systems I am in agreement with The1stImmortal. Telemetry isn’t always nefarious, but even so it should always be opt-in. So for example, I’m ok with prompting users to submit crash reports, or even periodic telemetry provided that users explicitly agreed to it (and not obscure legalize hidden in the ToS). Otherwise data should not be collected automatically from user systems.
Additionally, whenever telemetry is collected, the user should be able to find out exactly what is being collected. All too often it’s a black box, which is completely unacceptable IMHO.
An example of responsible telemetry is debian’s popcon.
https://popcon.debian.org/
@Alfman
My problem is that when the data collection is made somehow overt, the answers are not always pure, the data is contaminated by the knowledge it will be collected. Often innocently, but not always subconsciously, sometimes when it is collected overtly it can also be deliberately corrupted, like the anti-vax movement continually quoting VAERS after rallying to destroy the VAERS true worth!
The best data is collected in the blind, preferably double blind!
Alfman,
Double blind tests are obviously useful for some things, but when it comes to our privacy on our own hardware, I strongly believe that we should have a right to know what’s being collected. Besides, there’s no need for corporate secrecy or deception for the purposes of bug and feature tracking. It’d be one thing to monitor users who don’t mind being monitored, but companies should respect the wishes of those who do not want to be monitored and I think it sets a bad precedent when they act without consent. I guess we may end up disagreeing.
Gee. Thank you Microsoft.
Just upgraded my 5 year old, no tpm, no secure boot, no supported cpu computer to windows 11.
And you know what?? Totally un-necessary! There is literally no reason to upgrade
@joe
I’ve looked at a Win 10 vs Win 11 comparison, and in the absence of a requirement to make use of a tablet mode, I have to agree with you.
I find it very unlikely that I’ll have a need to upgrade any of my systems or hardware to Win 11 in the near future.
To be honest, outside of the argument of “unsupported OS”, i see no real reason to upgrade from 7. I don’t even browse the web on my Win7, it’s purely used to gaming, so i have practically no vector for viruses to exploit. As long as everything i want to play runs on it, i’ll stick to 7 until i replace the machine.
How kind of them to make a thing easier that they previously made harder.
I bailed on Windows when they said my laptop passed all windows 11 tests except being too old, Such an arbitrary reason to devalue a laptop that easily exceeded all other hardware requirements. This latest story just reinforces that I made the correct choice.
I have since bought a new laptop and the first thing I did was put Linux on. I spent enough time without Windows on my old machine that I no longer miss or need it.
I find Nvidia to be a more palatable option than if it were Qualcomm buying ARM, but yes, there are better companies than Nvidia, as well. I’d really rather ARM go back to being an independent company, though.
Sarreq Teryx,
I think a lot of people are going to idealistically agree with you, however that’s not the way our world works. Independent companies with great value tend to be snached up by much bigger companies. Today’s giants have unprecedented levels of wealth and will readily spend a bit of money for valuable companies like ARM. Unless governments intervene and deny the sale to larger entities, I don’t see independence in ARM’s future.
Microsoft’s change of heart is why I’m converting all my Linux servers to Windows /s