For Windows Insiders in the Skip Ahead ring, we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge, which provides the best, most secure and consistent experience on Windows 10 and across your devices. With built-in features for reading, note-taking, Cortana integration, and easy access to services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Microsoft Edge enables you to be more productive, organized and creative without sacrificing your battery life or security.
I’m one of those weird people who actually really like the default Windows 10 Mail application, but if this absolutely desperate, user-hostile move – which ignores any default browser setting – makes it into any definitive Windows 10 release, I won’t be able to use it anymore.
As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community.
Oh you’ll get something to look forward to alright.
Windows 10 doesn’t run on my Mac or my Android phone. Where’s the consistency again?
They’re talking about Edge, which does run on Android.
There’s also an Edge app for iOS, although no idea how much is actually Edge code and how much is just a GUI wrapper around the iOS HTML/JS engines.
Unless Apple let Microsoft slide on their guidelines (doubtful), it would be a wrapper around iOS built-in Webkit engine, probably adding an Edge-like interface and Microsoft bookmark and tab sync and other things like that.
In both cases (Android, iOS) Edge is running webkit/blink. On iOS it has to use the Apple supplied version of webkit for obvious reasons, but it’s also using a version on Android too. I’m not sure if it’s wrapping the Chrome/WebView version on Android or whatever, because I haven’t cared enough to look closely.
So far, I haven’t even considered using Edge, because I still haven’t forgiven Microsoft for IE6. (Since, AFAIK, they’ve never formally apologized for foisting that abomination onto the general public, and trying to break the web with it.) This is certainly not going to help matters any.
Edited 2018-03-17 03:14 UTC
You seem to have a very warped memory of the past.
IE6 was the best browser when it was released.
Netscape commited suizide with a series of garbage-releases and opera (besides not being free) had trouble rendering sites.
But to be honest: the HTML-spec itselfe was pure garbage back then.
The only thing you can blame MS for is the half a decade of stagnation after IE6es release.
smashIt,
WorknMan is spot on. IE6 was considered atrocious by an overwhelming majority of developers at the time who hated all it’s numerous buggy & non-standard quirks. It was only because of the MS monopoly that IE achieved an easy market majority; it would not have been a significant player in the market by it’s own merits.
In summer 2001, when it was released, which alternative are you suggesting was better?
Netscape 4.78?
Netscape 6?
Opera?
(Chrome, Safari, Firefox et al would not exist for years.)
malxau,
By that point IE already had 85-90% of the market and much of the damage to the browser market was already done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
I was a netscape user myself. The thing is as a web developer during that period it become much less viable to base one’s website development on anything other than IE regardless of how flawed it was. In those days marketshare became so skewed that it trumped merit. Consequently a large number of websites were built around IE6’s rendering quirks and actually became broken in other browsers.
Opera did it’s best to mimic IE’s quirks and javascript model, but the results were less than satisfactory as I recall.
Maybe you haven’t been to any websites that fail to load because you’re not on chrome. Comedy central didn’t load on Firefox or edge. So I stopped watching them, let’s face it. Chrome is now worse than IE, you go fix someone’s computer. Then you realize that notifications from just about every website are enabled, adware extensions, dns hijacking extension, buying assistant extension, and even better.Open source chromium browser loaded with all that crappie from scratch.
missingxtension,
Well, it pales in comparison to the situation in the early 2000s, but like you I occasionally find websites that won’t work correctly in my browser.
I actually had this issue with an SSL certificate vendor. Rather than switch my browser, I switched vendors and they lost business. This is a good property of healthy competitive markets with lots of choice. It’s when choices become limited and coerced that market balance breaks down.
Meh, at least Chrome runs on multiple platforms, including mobile devices.
In 2001 I was using Konqueror ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqueror ). Do you know WebKit?
Yeah, also a Konq user back then. It was great for what it worked with, but for everything else, IE and/or netscape was required.
In 2001 I was primarily using Mozilla, although KDE was my preferred desktop back then so I also used Konqueror, and occasionally I used Galeon. The following year I was a very early adopter of Pheonix as I created some of its original artwork.
I loathed IE specific sites for years to come afterwards.
Edge does sound like a decent browser from a specs standpoint, but as a nonWindows user and someone that is adequately pleased with Chrome and Firefox on their phone I have yet to even try it.
Edge is actually decent from a rendering perspective if you can install third party codecs to get it to play back VP8 based webms properly. The problem of course is that it only runs on Windows 10, which is garbage in other ways.
Edited 2018-03-21 22:27 UTC
Developers who were used to ~earlier Netscape …which had plenty of its own quirks. But at some points in time IE had less quirks than Netscape, it was probably better… (which isn’t saying much / both were horrible / but still…)
zima,
Well, IMHO netscape was out innovating IE, the main features it was lacking over IE were active-x com components, but most developers would say good riddance to those.
To be clear, I wouldn’t have wanted a netscape browser monopoly either since ideally a healthy market has no monopolies. However I don’t think anyone can deny that the means through which microsoft took away netscape’s lead was nefarious. I mean going to vendors and contractually prohibiting them from installing netscape, this is the worst kind of antitrust abuse there is. At least the DOJ lawsuits deemed microsoft’s actions illegal.
The thing that concerns me today is that we’re seeing owners being denied the right and ability to install alternatives on many mobile devices. And even in the general purpose PC territory microsoft has been incrementally testing the waters with more owner restrictions over time, antifeatures like preventing owners from changing their default search engines or default launch browser for email links. The purpose: kill competition.
What matters is not which browser one prefers, but that we have a healthy market where we get to choose what we can install and being able to set our defaults on our own computers. Even a good browser, if imposed forcefully, is bad for our freedoms.
Sorry for the long rant, zima
Russia had it at one point in time, with all major browsers having largely the same marketshare ( http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/russian-federati… …just look at that, it’s beautiful), similarly Ukraine ( http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/ukraine/2012 ), Belarus ( http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/belarus/2013 ), or Kazakhstan ( http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/kazakhstan/2011 )
Sadly, they’re all now Chrome-dominated like everywhere else…
I can blame them for:
* activeX controls
* client-side, non-sandboxed “web” applications
* non-standard behavior that was adopted
* Ignoring the basic precepts of HTML / web
* Totally insecure by design
* Websites, written with activeX that wouldn’t work
under Windows Vista or later, requiring us to keep
XP on the desktop well past it’s sell-by date.
If you like IE6, you must be a stockholder in an Anti-virus company.
And of course XmlHttpRequest, which enabled AJAX and modern web applications. Developers hate that.
RobG,
It’s actually an excellent example of IE holding back standards during that time. That is unless you want to make the case that activex should have become a standard for web development, which is perhaps what microsoft wanted, but that is a hard sell given how notorious it is, haha.
Edited 2018-03-20 17:21 UTC
IE6 was not even the best browse _from Microsoft_ when it was released. It was huge, error prone and constantly crashed. I had to roll back to IE5 to get anything done. When you add in all the security issues, which were obscene even for a MS product at the time, IE6 was typically avoided for the first few years it was out.
I ran some speed tests between IE6, Netscape and Opera in 2002. IE6 was about 10x slower than Opera and 5x slower than Netscape on the same hardware.
Personally, I jumped ship from IE5.5 to Opera because I couldn’t get IE6 to run without crashing for any length of time.
I’m not sure Average Joe would even notice, and that’s the majority of Microsoft’s user base outside of corporate customers. “Power Users”, whatever that means, will likely be pissed, but frankly, if their howl didn’t stop Microsoft from shoving always-online-searches through Bing down people’s throats, it will not stop them from forcing Edge down people’s throats.
No, the EU isn’t going to manage to stop it either. They tried with that ballot thing back years ago, and it was largely a failure, it wasn’t even widely enforced.
People don’t care, they can’t even be bothered to figure out “Internet Explorer” isn’t their operating system, or that “The Internet” isn’t Facebook.
edit ballet >> ballot
Edited 2018-03-17 05:10 UTC
“Average Joe” uses their company webmail exclusively, doesn’t know what Windows Mail is, and doesn’t know/care that they’re giving their employer a way to retroactively delete/change any of their mail.
I agree. It’s a decent app… but this isn’t cool.
At the same time, other mail apps (free) are barely existent on Windows in the first place. Or they’re a bit outdated. Like Thunderbird is particularly oldschool looking (not to mention 32 bit).
Do you often go above 1GB memory usage with Thunderbird?
Fergy,
I have lots of gripes with thunderbird stemming from the serious lack of developer resources and annoying bugs/issues remaining open for over a decade, but 64bit has never been one of them, haha.
There is a bugzilla open for it though:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=634233
I don’t have a computer to try this on, but is the windows 10 linux subsystem be able to run a 64bit version of thunderbird for linux? I don’t know how well it works.
Personally I’d like to see thunderbird get native carddav integration.
I’ve been using a really slick new email client called Mailspring. It’s available on all of the platforms and offers a lot of really nice features, some better than Outlook.
Never heard of it, looked it up, smiled a bit over this, and had to let it go: “Many older clients like Thunderbird provide an “offline mailbox”, allowing you to delete messages from your email provider / IMAP server and continue to view them on your computer. Mailspring does not support this use case“
Mailspring is still missing a spam filter, which is vexing.
It works.
Well, it launches. I didn’t do any testing beyond that, but I’ve used Firefox a fair bit more, and it works pretty well. You just need an Xserver for Windows – I use Xming, but the Cygwin one should work (Xming is based off of the Cygwin xserver, IIRC)
Drumhellar,
I wouldn’t ordinarily want to do that, but it is cool that it works and could be an alternative to the windows client.
In the past I’ve often wanted to do the exact opposite (running all of the windows applications I need for work under linux/wine) but there’ve been too many glitches and consequently I’ve had to accept that windows is unavoidable for some of my work.
WaveBox is pretty cool.
I had a dig through the website and even installed Wavebox and gave it a go, but it looked and felt much like an electron wrapper around a restricted Web browser.
Am I missing the real benefit here, or is it primarily a convenient portal for accessing certain types of site?
[edit: typo]
Edited 2018-03-18 13:34 UTC
This complete lack of decent non-Thunderbird email clients is one of my pet peeves. Thunderbird is OK, and it mostly does what I need, but it feels abandoned… Mozilla’s behaviour towards the project hasn’t helped with that.
The only decent alternatives I’ve found (Mailbird and Mailspring) don’t have spam filters. Mailbird in particular has been ignoring users’ cries for one for years, suggesting you should rely on your ISP’s filters instead. Maybe I’m “special” (and I’ve had the same email address for probably two decades now) but I get an annoying amount of spam despite my mail provider’s excellent filters.
I tried to like the win10 Mail app but it always seems to stop receiving email after a few days. This seems to be a common problem with UWP apps, they just stop doing their thing after a while… I had to revert to the non-UWP version of Wunderlsit because it stops syncing after a while.
So, every year or so I check out the available email clients and try one for a while. Every year I return to Thunderbird. Clearly I should dig into the code and make it better, but who has time to learn such an enormous crufty code base when it isn’t your day job?
Thom Holwerda,
Would you elaborate?
Of course you are right that it is user hostile, but this is what microsoft does. We may not like it, but if microsoft’s history teaches us anything, it’s that manipulation and impeding consumer choice are far more effective ways to dominate the market than competing on the level. They probably figure they’ll take advantage of the extremely pro-corporate environment created by the republican majority. The risks of the current US administration stepping in to defend user rights are minimal. As for the EU, I am not attuned to the mood of EU regulators these days.
Lock them down in your software once, shame on Microsoft, lock them down in your software twice (or more!) shame on the retarded user base.
We know M$ want to trick us into being locked into whatever they want us to use. They have often done it in the past and even recently they tricked people into upgrading to Windows 10 using bait & switch. M$ does not care about it’s user and they show that again and again.
It is not difficult to install a proper OS and they are freely available. If you are still using M$ for your personal stuff then you have yourself to blame for everything user unfriendly that M$ continues to do.
Dr. Cyber,
It’s no secret here on osnews that I’ve been vocal against the small yet continuous barrage of attacks against owner control by major corporations over the years. Personally I’ve avoided windows 10 as it’s been relatively easy and inconsequential in terms of my work, but I concede that I honestly don’t know what I am going to do once windows 7 extended support ends.
It’s easy to say “use linux”, and of course I do, but I’m not in a financial position of being able to turn down windows clients. While linux dominates in the server realm, windows businesses typically have a lot more money in my experience, hence the dilemma.
Life is full of compromising. There is no way around it. I was mainly talking about people who keep putting up with Windows for no good reason.
Of the people I know who were faced with that dilemma, they’ve all pretty much just accepted the fact there is no real choice – it’s either accept Windows 10 or lose the business. Surprisingly fewer of them have accepted it with their noses plugged than the ones who just accepted it with a `*shrug* it is what it is`.
I guess that shouldn’t be surprising though since the latter describes most Windows users in general, including myself after a lot of grumbling, bitching, and complaining. I haven’t been beaten into total submission, there are still things I despise and remain vocal about. But, it is a relief not to be fighting against the decision anymore.
ilovebeer,
Yep I agree, most people I know are that way too. If you bring it up, they might agree that it sucks for microsoft to ban end users from doing as we please, but they simply don’t see it as their problem and haven’t given much if any thought to the consequences of monopoly control.
Edited 2018-03-20 06:44 UTC
^ lmao. I’ve heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Now I see it.
How the hell did you jump from Mail to that?!
I don’t like these practices either, but geez. America has always been market based. The government rarely jumps in things. It’s a Republic, based on states and markets. Not central government controls, except in extreme cases. Been this way since the beginning. Didn’t just happen because of the last year. You can hate it (I don’t necessarily blame you! I hate practices in the food industry especially), but it’s nothing new.
Eh, don’t mind me. I think I’ll just go back to lurk mode.
Edited 2018-03-17 06:05 UTC
It’s not about Trump. It’s about Republicans vs. Democrats.
Trump, Bush, or earlier, Republicans are much more brazen about favouring corporate interests.
Bullshit. Large corporations fund both US political parties to purchase influence, and are granted political favors for such support shortly after the election. It would be a bad investment for corporate America not to do so.
Anyone thinking that one party is more or less friendly to the American public at large is deluding themselves.
It seems like there is no common sense on many of Microsoft’s decisions these days. 20 years ago they could pull this crap. Today, people will just use a different mail app, or move to a different OS completely. Mac market share hit 10% of desktop/laptop computers recently. That’s double what it was ten years ago. Linux usage has more than doubled in the same time frame, although it was only at 0.8% back then.
Seeprime,
You are right, 20 years ago they were stronger and their actions were more abusive, but they still have a lot of monopoly power and it has a negative effect on competition when they intentionally disregard & veto a user’s preference for alternatives.
Edited 2018-03-17 09:35 UTC
Do you honestly see people dumping Windows simply because the default Microsoft mail app opens links in Edge? Changing mail client, sure, but dumping Windows altogether? I wouldn’t hold my breath.
ilovebeer,
You are right, that’s exactly it! And microsoft knows it too! Regardless of how coercive their policies are, they know that most users will ultimately succumb to it and continue to be windows users out of necessity.
You might be right but IMHO, it is part of a trend by MS to lock you into their mindset ever tighter and tighter. That will make getting out from it harder as every day goes by.
{time for my crystal ball}
Then when they have you by the short and curlies they will move to a subscription basis. Fail to pay and you are reverted to ‘S’ mode and no more patches.
I got out of the MS enclave at home almost 10 years ago and have never regretted it once. Moves like this actually tell me that the decision I made in 2008 was the right one.
They want to promote Edge among the users that have already bought into the Windows 10 ecosystem by voluntarily using MS apps. They can’t say they just wanna push it to users for a pre-decided period of time, so they call it ‘testing’ and can later conclude that it didn’t work so we’ll go back. They never even thought this could become permanent, no. Thsi way they also probably avoid monopoly abuse complaints.
Edited 2018-03-17 09:05 UTC
Every time I update my macbook air, links are opening in safari instead of my default browser.
Integration is on same level as Edge in W10?
Idk. I do know, I never have these problems with Linuxmint.
Not to mention Safari or Edge are not installed.
Both my 2012 15in MacBook Pro and 2015 15in MBP(both currently on MacOs 10.13.3) has Firefox (ESR) set as the default browser and it stays that way through updates. I’ve not seen the behaviour you are seeing.
Seconded. My Macs have never changed the default browser on me once I’ve set it. Other settings have been messed with such as Gatekeeper (arrrgh), but that’s a separate topic.
Microsoft has always made decisions for users or ignored user preferences. Integration of IE into Windows shell (95/98/Me), product activation (XP), forced updates (Win10), the collection of personal information (Win10) and now it is forcing users to use Edge when clicking on links in Windows Mail. Why is this move so appalling when users have put up with this sort of controlling nonsense for years? What Microsoft (and Apple too) seem to not realize is that when people pay for a computer they should be able to use it as they see fit, not how Microsoft or Apple sees fit. If users dislike this change then either use a different email app or ditch Windows for *NIX/Linux. On Linux, every choice down to every detail belongs to the user.
Since you don’t use edge, then you complain. But youre not forced to use edge in the current build of creators update. If you used edge, you would realize that half of the stupid ads and dialog crazy websites don’t really affect edge. Also the fact that edge does 1080p in Netflix, that it has origin adblocker, that it only lags in Google sites, that chrome in incognito saves addresses entered into navigation bar, or that edge supports java snippets. You would realize that edge is actually a better user friendly browser. I have voice, drive, remote desktop, photos, Gmail and way too dependent on Google. But by far, edge gives me a better experience in Google docs. I am trying to ween myself from, but it’s going to take time….
I am not going to check everything here, but
* “Chrome in incognito saves addresses entered into navigation bar” is false.
Test:
1. start entering some address in Chrome in regular mode that you have not visited and see that it doesn’t autocomplete but don’t finish entering that address.
2. Now really enter that address in incognito.
3. Now start entering that address in regular mode and see that it still doesn’t autocomplete.
* “Edge supports Java snippets”
Edge doesn’t even support installing the Java plugin. Maybe you meant JavaScript snippets but those are supported on Chrome as well https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/snippets
Edge is a good browser. Chrome is still a better browser. But none of that matters. There is a setting in Windows (and in Internet Options) that determines which program you associate with certain tasks/extensions/protocols. Programs should respect that setting
Slightly off topic but I’ve yet to meet a non-geek who doesn’t refer to Edge as Internet Explorer, and would rather use Chrome instead (simply for Google).
Someone recently contacted me worried their Win 10 PC had been infected with malware because “Internet Explorer was returning unexpected search results”. Transpired that Edge had reset to use Bing.
Most geeks these days are avoiding google and are moving on to less Privacy invading things like brave browser and ddg for search
They’re also moving unto the Slimjet browser.
Personally I have been using DDG for a while but recently I found yacy which seems nice too. The idea of decentralized search is appealing to me.
Doubtful that “most” – brave browser or ddg don’t register in web stats…
Ever since a small accident involving a visiting relative and a computer virus, I have changed the settings in my installation of thunderbird to not do anything at all when left-clicking a link.