Windows 10 insider build 17744, which will be available in next month to the public as Windows 10 2018 October update has warned a user when he tries to install Firefox browser to open and use Microsoft Edge. We know Windows 10 nudges to use Edge as the default browser, but this is definitely different. A user shared about this on Twitter, here is what the dialog informed the user.
I’m already an Edge user so I won’t be bothered by these dialogs, but it’s really annoying how browser makers – and by browser makers I mean Microsoft and Google – are taking every opportunity to shove annoying “please use Chrome/Edge” dialogs in our faces. It’s user-hostile behaviour, and it feels cheap and scummy.
Been Comfortable.
Have no problem at all with Edge on Secure Mode. But loading the full McCoy brings so much Corporative load -current and legacy- that bad things start to develop quite quickly.
Maybe a more “modular” approach.
Most people ask Chrome, install non-competitive Mozilla, instead.
Edited 2018-09-12 20:23 UTC
Not likely going to alter my use of Firefox at all. I’ll definitely need to nuke the warning if it occurs more than once.
But that is a low move by Microsoft.
Edited 2018-09-12 20:53 UTC
Ya, IE6/7… some sins can never be forgiven. Esp. when moves like this show that Microsoft really hasn’t changed at all.
IE6 was by far better than other browsers (Netscape) at the time it came out. So much better that Microsoft just stopped developing it for 5 years until they were hopelessly surpassed by FireFox and others.
IE7 only was a desperate attempt to catch up by adding tabs but all the way to IE11 Microsoft was just playing catchup with other browsers. They did some interesting things with JavaScript but nothing that ever made them interesting for anything but “this (corporate/ancient) website requires IE”
There is a reason they basically started from scratch with Edge which was a better browser from the start and has developed very well in the last few years
Debatable.
If by best, you mean most ubiquitous, installed by default, most targeted by website owners (CSS warts and all) and hackers alike, then yes, I guess IE6 was far better than the competition.
But Opera and its users might have something to say about that, and I was certainly a relatively happy pre-Firefox Mozilla user at the time.
Simple fact is Microsoft stopped developing it because they relied on its incompatibilities, and subsequent “optimised for IE” lock-in to cement their web browser monopoly. Had they developed a properly standards compliant browser earlier, they would have been as disadvantaged as all the other locked out browsers.
No, that is not a simple fact at all. Microsoft stopped making Internet Explorer a separate program and bound it to the OS instead. So “the next version of IE” was being worked on, but for Vista….which just got delayed and delayed and delayed.
It is perfectly okay to say that Microsoft benefitted from the IE6 dominance, but this wasn’t something that they could have planned or predicted. They made the best browser at the time and others couldn’t follow for a while. That the whole world revolved around IE6 by the time others did catch up and that it took FireFox to get things moving again, WebKit to provide a really great render-engine leading to Chrome (desktop-browsing) and Safari (mobile browsing) to turbocharge the web are all just history.
P.S. If you think there are proper standard compliant browsers you are still mistaken. It took things like AcidTest (http://www.acidtests.org/) and HTML5Test (http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html) to measure progress and we are still not there. XHTML has come and gone and so did the WaSP. Why the W3C never made an open source reference browser/rendering-engine is something that I will never understand (well…money probably)
Edited 2018-09-13 13:16 UTC
They did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)
But HTML 4 and below were technically SGML applications, and SGML is a bugger to write good parsers for.
Thanks for pointing that out. I had never heard of either of these two projects:
1994-1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_(web_browser)
1996-2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaya_(web_editor)
However they don’t seem to be complete by any stretch. Incomplete MathML, no frames, no JavaScript, only partial CSS, etc.
It also seemed to struggle a lot with the “how to handle invalid HTML/XHTML”: https://www.w3.org/Amaya/User/FAQ.html#parsing
ACID tests are just detail. I don’t know how old you are, or how long you’ve been in computing, but I remember the turn of the century, and it was common to have websites render horribly on non-IE browsers, if they rendered at all. I’m not talking about whether the page looks nice with all the CSS whistles, I’m talking basic functionality such as drop menus lining up or being rendered off screen.
Lots of people used MS tools for their website design, which of course knew all the IE incompatibilities to exploit, and used them to great effect, forcing people off third party browsers, because their resulting pages either looked terrible or were totally non-functional. Significant parts of the web were simply off limits to non-IE browsers.
Cold and calculated on MS’s part.
Agreed. IE6 was actually pretty terrible but everyone designed their sites around its quirks so people just thought it was better. It never even supported PNG transparency when all the other browsers did, and CSS was straight up broken on IE6 compared to the standard.
You’re giving MS too much credit/skill at beeing cunning/”evil” …and at the same time you view them as so incompetent; how do you cope with that cognitive dissonance? Anyways, they were not that smart / most competing browsers simply were worse than IE6.
But don’t get me wrong, all were quite horrible back then; both major browsers were quite non-compliant, old Netscape probably more (it had earlier popularity, so the quirks were more accepted …for a time). Also, IE6 brought much needed stabilisation after times of frequent & chaotic non-standard features (largely in Netscape, it was so half-baked that they scrapped the codebase and started fresh…); though then it fell into other extreme, lasting too long…
(past Opera user here)
I don’t see that as a sign of greatness so much as a sign of market dominance.
Personally, I try and stay away from the leading browsers when I can (at home); however, at work I need to use all browsers for testing purposes.
Ever since Google did that experiment where Bing added fake search results when you used IE to click a fake search result on Google. I know Microsoft tracks everything, and I’m pretty sure Google does the same thing (but I don’t have first hand knowledge.)
To be fair, Microsoft is just as much a dick to Chrome/FireFox as they are to IE on Windows 10, always recommending Edge. Just try changing the default Web Browser from Edge to Internet Explorer (Settings->Apps->Default Apps)
This is indeed an absolute atrocity by Microsoft. The browser ballot screen was a step too far in the other direction, but analyzing installers from competing products and interfering during these installations should be an absolute no-go!
Can you imagine the installation of Open Office getting blocked because Microsoft recommends O365? Or a Java IDE because Microsoft recommends Visual Studio? or Notepad++ because….Notepad????
I mean, I guess this is a kind of revenge on Google for their in-your-face Chrome ads on the Google search page. But that doesn’t make it any less slimy.
Sidenote rant: If MS wants people to finally move on from IE11 to Edge, which would be in their own as well as all web developers’ interests, they need to finally stop shipping IE11 with Windows 10 by default. IE11 is the bane of every web developer’s existence and needs to be stamped out ASAP.
Edited 2018-09-12 21:17 UTC
I suspect they’re waiting until the day after Win7 EOL to do that, just to make sure there’s no random backlash of people saying “screw Win10 I’m not moving.”
They wont do that, because of the LTS (and server) versions of Windows – no Edge there.
They’re using Metro stack to segment the market, and Edge is part of the metro world, so it’s a sacrifice to that segmentation.
Of course, this just hurts Microsoft’s desire to see Edge everywhere.
From what I understand btw, the edge core components dont *have* to be UWP/Metro, just the UI is currently. Shame politics and “strategy” mean we can’t have a win32 variant of Edge
Chrome ads in Google are the worst. Dear Google, I asked for Firefox not because I don’t know Chrome exists, but because I want to use Video DownloadHelper to download YouTube videos and YouTube downloader extensions are banned in the Chrome store, thank you.
This as has been said, a low move by MS.
I am so glad that my last Windows system was ‘rm -fr’d almost two years ago and I don’t have to fight their stupidity on a daily basis any longer.
The person who was responsible for this needs to be shown the exit pronto.
MS does seem to be lacking in direction these days. The same goes for Apple as well IMHO.
Does anyone know? Has he ever mentioned it?
Everone is an Edge user ….. It is by far the best way to download Chrome
/s
But yes, Thom literally writes that he is already an Edge user and I remember him saying that several times before. That doesn’t have to mean that he exclusively uses Edge though!
Actually written on Edge which I rely on for work and mobile, but Chrome is my personal browser with my private bookmarks/passwords.
I love the reading mode on Edge and the font-rendering in general and it also seems fast, reliable and resource-efficient. The developer toolbar and youtube experience are far better in Chrome though.
I think the original question was asked ironically, because Thom mentions he is an Edge user in every vaguely related news item he posts.
As for the post: it would be fine if they only did it for IE. Discouraging people to use a competing product in this way is very low.
Does that make him an Edge Lord?
> But yes, Thom literally writes that he is already an Edge user and I remember him saying that several times before.
I know, I was being sarcastic. In every discussion relating to browsers Thom makes a point of injecting his use of Edge as an editorial comment.
The side effect of this behaviour that makes my jaw drop the most is when using Windows Server, in IE, on a Microsoft website, you get big “USE EDGE!” banners.
You can’t run edge on Windows server (without hacks anyway). Microsoft have your client string. They should be able to have a line in their CMS that says “Oh, this user looks like they’re on a platform that can’t physically run Edge and paid a LOT of money to us too, lets not post stupid banners!”
Anyway, pet peeve of the day.
Yeah, even better is that based on what’s been said, this popup which says ‘You already have Edge installed.’ will happen on server versions too.
Seriously? Jeez – that qualifies as a full on bug.
I’m starting to get the feeling MS wants Server only ever running in Azure these days.
Microsoft? Scummy?
Nooooo. I just can’t believe it!
[/sarcasm]
Edge may be better than IE, but that doesn’t say much. I use it to download chrome, and then use chrome to download brave.
I had a lot more to say, but didn’t want to trail off on a windows 10 rant about how its pretty but pretty miserable in the end. yw lol
Edge is suprisingly decent at rendering webpages. It’s in fact better than chrome in some respects.
Honestly the lack of VP8 support for WebMs (no, Microsoft, VP9 only does not count as “supporting WebM”) is the only technical barrier I have to using Edge on Win10. My other reasons for not using Edge boil down to “don’t reward bad behavior.”
I can understand why a lot of people wants to stay with Windows 7 and they were forced to extend the support until 2023.
The Verge is reporting that Microsoft has said this will NOT appear in the big October update
If we give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that, then one must ask why the “feature” is there at all. Perhaps other posters are correct and they’re waiting for paid Windows 7 updates before they shove this newest monstrosity down our collective throats.
Hi,
If we’re giving them the benefit of doubt, then…
Windows insider builds are intended for beta testers and not normal users; so maybe Microsoft just wants these beta testers to actually test the software that they’re supposed to be testing (instead of ignoring Microsoft’s browser and testing third party apps).
– Brendan
Edited 2018-09-14 03:52 UTC
How are you able to use Edge as your main browser? It’s awful. It doesn’t work with anything. Are you a masochist?