It’s crazy. I used Edge when it first switched to Chromium because it was a nice, clean Chrome alternative with working sync. Today it’s obvious Microsoft can’t be trusted.
This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.
I just had the Edge Desktop Search Bar show up on my desktop. It just appeared from nowhere. Didn't even know when it was "installed".
MS is getting really pushy. They probably see the GPT stuff as their ticket to beating Google in search so they are pushing it as hard as they can to get as many users as they can.
I just click "turn off". I don't trust LLMs - all their knowledge is learned from the unreliable internet then you add hallucinations on top of that.
My parents used the search to find documents on the local system. Now it defaults to searching the interent. Event more insane is now the 'close' button location has a button that opens your search in the Edge browser, where my parents still try searching for local documents. Getting lost ... so many levels deep.
I got a laptop in from a user the other day, that shocked the hell out of me, that floating search bar thing. MS is downright creepy the way they slip things in.
With remote work it always fascinates me to see how many people leave the weather (& news) bar displayed next to the tray on the taskbar, this is something that came with a Windows 10 update. People really don't change defaults...
I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust
They make it very difficult to uninstall that crap. I set up a new windows 11 machine the other day. And then did the obligatory removal of the weather/news, cortana, and 15 other pieces of crap I don’t need or want. While I was doing that it was downloading updates and once the updates were installed, the weather/news thing was back.
The stories on there are so bad. Like, borderline conspiracy thinking / conservative media gossip rag stuff. I can’t believe Microsoft puts their company name behind the content that shows up. (Though I’m in Australia. Maybe the people in charge of that content have no idea how bad it is here).
Defaults are incredibly powerful. For us on here, we expect to have control and to be able to manipulate these things. For most people a computer is just an appliance like a washing machine. Accept it as it comes!
While I appreciate the ability to configure software, I also believe that software that requires too much configuration is poorly suited for my needs and will replace it with something better suited to my needs. There is an incredible number of options out there. We do not have to put up with the nonsense that overbearing businesses subject us to.
> There is an incredible number of options out there. We do not have to put up with the nonsense that overbearing businesses subject us to.
How true that is depends on the type of software. Web browsers, for instance, don't have an incredible number of meaningfully different options. I can no longer find one that sufficiently meets my needs at all.
Just have to right click the task bar and change the news settings to 'reduce updates' & turn off open on hover.
Turning on 'reduce updates' just has the taskbar display the weather and not change to some random stock ticker of a company you don't care about or whatever other item of interest they feel like showing.
I saw that pop up on one of my parent's computers. The hardware is old enough that it didn't want to install Windows 11, but Microsoft still managed to push that shit. Within an hour I wiped the drive of Windows.
Similar happened to my parents years ago. Windows 7, working perfectly. My mum kept seeing a popup asking "do you want to upgrade to Windows 10?" and every time (for months) clicked close.
Then, they changed the button layout and put a "install" button where the close button was, and she installed it without realising. Some bits of hardware weren't supported in Windows 10 and I had to go around and mess around with drivers, which I failed at.
So, she's been on Fedora since. Considering all she did on Windows was light browsing in Firefox and many hours of Pysol, she barely even noticed the switch.
Grammatically, the location of the apostrophe makes parent singular. However, it seems weird if I think of it that way, likely because pronunciation as a whole is the same regardless of parent being singular or plural. Computers is plural regardless. This really doesn't effect me ib any way, but somehow seeing someone else want to know makes me want to know.
The only real alternative option with most hardware is linux. And when the use case is browsing the internet and you are there to help them unstuck a broken update, things should be fine.
Just happened to me this week, same thing. Out of nowhere. It also auto-signed me into Edge, when I never did it before in my life. It really is getting ridiculous now.
You weren't around when they were threatening linux with patents and forcing OEMs to not deliver PCs without a Microsoft operating system preinstalled then?
I use Microsoft products for business (though I'm trying to phase them out). I don't care that much about their competitive practices (from a business perspective) and there's even the upside of a pretty uniform productivity software/ file format ecosystem that makes communication easier.
Committing corporate espionage, which is what their software does now, on the other hand, makes me not want to use them at all. I have agreements with customers about protecting their data, how can I use software that steals everything I put into it and sends it to MS? This is a much bigger deal. (Although I agree you could argue their earlier anticompetitive practices gave them the monopoly that allows them to run their current criminal spying empire unchecked)
> See that’s on-brand with the cutthroat ruthless billG company
Tangential, but this made me reflect on how "good"/"nice" Ballmer, and Ballmer-era MS, was in a very relative sense. This is slightly startling considering how my mental image of either Ballmer or MS is not great. But now looking back it does feel like relentless anti-competitiveness lessened a bit during that era, and lot of good stuff happened then. Windows 7 probably will go down in history as the pinnacle of traditional desktop Windows, MS giving up on IE gave room for Firefox and (unfortunately also) Chrome, lot of previously proprietary stuff got documented and published (SMB and Office formats comes to mind), and there were some nice product developments.
In contrast Gates era Microsoft was very much characterized by strong-arm tactics and throwing their weight around. And now Nadella era feels very aggressive again, pushing the company forwards no matter what; in some ways maybe less vindictive and direct than Gates, but still definitely not nice.
Ballmer was as bad as Gates (and seemed completely unhinged at times to boot), Nadella only looks good next to Ballmer but has done plenty of stuff that should have never ever happened.
All of them were present at MS when they pulled their 'millions of lines of code' bullshit in an attempt to kill Linux and harm FOSS.
As a long-time Linux user, the Nadella era looks far better. Back in the earlier eras, MS was my clear and present enemy: they did a lot of stuff to me, personally, to make my life hard because I didn't want to use their software, and tried to force me to be their customer with various tactics.
These days, that's all gone. I don't feel any pressure to use Windows, and I don't see MS doing various legal shenanigans to try to destroy Linux. I'm able to do what I want and not worry about MS much at all. It's very different from the earlier eras that way.
Instead, the difference these days seems to be that MS is the enemy of its own customers (or should I say "users"?). If you use Windows, MS will make your life hard with all this built-in malware and advertising. But if you're like me and you simply don't use Windows, you never see this stuff, except when people complain about it on forums like this, or if you have the misfortune of having to deal with a relative's PC.
Personally, I like this new era much better. I'm able to easily opt out of MS's shenanigans by simply installing Linux. When other people gripe and complain about that stuff, it falls on deaf ears here. ("but but but... I need to play $game on my PC!!!") I feel the same way as when sports fans complain about how much they're getting raped by the media companies so they can follow their favorite team.
I see the Nadella era rather as the triumph of PM culture, adapted/stolen from the seemingly more competitive Google and Facebook. It's all about demonstrating increased "engagement" and the ubiquitous A/B testing because new product deltas get you promoted. It's never about maintaining 'old' stuff or providing real value - only gimmicks to catch the eye of your half-wit leadership.
If you're referring to Program Management and not Project Management...
Microsoft actually created the "PM" role and popularized it.
"The PM role is unique to Microsoft and was actually created in response to developing software that is more usable and at the same time pushes the state of the art of technology. So when we talk about PM at Microsoft, we're talking from a perspective of creating and evolving the role over the lifetime of the PC industry."
"Program managers got started at Microsoft while developing Excel for the Macintosh. [...] a new role was created in Program Management with the explicit goal of partnering with development and working through the entire product cycle as the advocate for end-users and customers."
Lot of people like to troll Ballmer for his "Developers! Developers! Developers!" act, but then again you can't really get any better than being developer centric and by consequence enthusiast, power users, and professional centric.
By contrast, Gates was "Embrace! Extend! Extinguish!" and Nadella is "Data! Data! Data!"
Also, Microsoft nowadays is very much in the business of mass surveillance. This "feature" prepares the ground for a future with client-side scanning and upload filters running all your "local" data and "private" communications through [PhotoDNA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA) and other spyware.
I wouldn't actually mind going back to DOS, like FreeDOS. Or even Windows 2000, with some updates for SSE, AVX, and other instructions. Operating systems have been getting in the way of the software that runs on top of them for over twenty years now and it's annoyingly become the norm.
Not only PC's. They tried to eliminate as many Android OEM's as possible by threating and launching patent litigation against them unless they paid up. The amount they demanded from each device was so ridiculous that you would have thought it was a payment to license the Android OS itself. Thugs will always be thugs.
>The disclosure by MOFCOM on April 8, 2014 is a direct result of Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s mobile handset unit as that deal required approval by the Anti-Monopoly Bureau of MOFCOM. The disclosed lists were part of the antitrust review.
>Of the two lists of Microsoft patents disclosed by MOFCOM2, one was a list of 310 patents which included 73 "standard-essential” patents (SEPs) for smartphones; 127 patents which are “implemented in Android”; and 110 “nonstandard-essential” patents and applications (non-SEPs). This list is referred to as Annex “B” by Microsoft.3 The second list is identical to the non-SEP set minus one issued patent, U.S. Patent No.7,111,039. This list is referred to as Annex “A”.
At the time Microsoft was strong-arming every Android OEM into paying royalty payments or else. Samsung paid more than a billion dollars to Microsoft in royalty payments for those questionable patents. I'd call that a chokehold.
Where were you when it's 'free' OS' was 'phoning home' or during it's behemoth days in the 90s-2000s when it forced the most pro-business Government (US) to essentially break it up when it was using it's monoploitic practices too far for even them?
I have to use Teams and just logically assume all of what was said or talked about exists on some server somewhere for the employer, LEO or intelengence agencies to retrieve; if Snowden has taught us anything is that M$ is the darling child of the Intelligence agencies in the US for a reason.
Using M$ outside of a (forced) work environment is literately like asking to be tracked, monitored of your own accord. Nothing they do should be presumed to be secure until proven a length to be otherwise. It's very likely why it's so bloated and runs terribly, they are optimizing no for UX but for it's real business model: spying.
Sadly, and with only a slight tinge of despondence: I've given up on preaching about FOSS to the masses, but with stuff like this it's like asking why people sign up for death cults, it alwasy ends in: Humans just being Humans.
Please don’t give up praying about FOSS to the masses. It was a post like this that convinced me to try Linux Arch. I will never look back.
I didn’t boot into my Windows drive for more than a month now. I just keep a bare installation for online games that don’t run on Linux. For now.
It’s unfortunate, but there’s not really a FOSS alternative for a general purpose personal-use OS that comes close to Windows.
It completely owns that market. There’s macOS and iOS I guess, but they’re not generally available to install on third party equipment.
Linux, sadly, is just not at all a consumer OS and never became one. The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years).
You are aware that users are not privileged by default in Linux? While historically in Windows...at least until UAC and Windows 2008...
Not sure what the example proves. The simple fact you can compile your kernel, have a strong model with Linux SE, it's just another ballpark.
Besides the fundamental aspect that Microsoft are telemetry kleptomaniacs, one OS assumes the user machine does not belong to the user, and Microsoft knows better.
Linux assumes it's your machine and nobody else.
You can have your own hardened and lighter Linux kernel, with less surface exposure, while with Windows you start with whatever version version of Cortana Microsoft would like to push that week on it's users...Plus all the other unnecessary components that create an almost infinite opportunity of attack vectors.
Naturally for Linux, the open source code, makes for a more transparent process, even if I don't subscribe to the idea that more eyes on the code, correlates directly to higher safety.
The fact that deb extension is associated with an application (I don’t know what Eddie is) does not make deb executable. It’s like Winzip opening a zip archive on double click in Windows: yes, the file is opened, but no untrusted code has been run (assuming, Winzip is installed already and is considered trusted).
Linux is more secure because it has a much smaller attach surface. Even from the kernel interaction perspective, the number of syscalls in Linux is much smaller than in Windows, they are in a way more primitive and easier to audit. But the biggest distinguisher is lack of DCE (or MS) RPC - in Windows it’s ubiquitous, available both locally and sometimes over the network with various ways to access it (named pipes over SMB, DCE over TCP/IP, even over NetBEUI, over HTTP in some cases) which makes it hard to secure (Windows firewall is very complex as a result). Finally, Windows Carrie’s enormous amount of legacy and Microsoft is not interested in fixing it (they would rather push you to “cloud”).
Combination of code complexity and large attack surface makes Windows less secure that competition (although Pottering seems to be working on fixing it).
Self extracting archives don't require scripts or other functionality to work. They have a decompressor built-in. This is why they're _self_-extracting and not just archives.
None of the above can be enforced at a distribution level, and where these features are opt-in they’re significantly underdeveloped relative to Windows/macOS/ChromeOS as no-one is using them in significant numbers.
I’m not even sure you could find any amount of FOSS advocates to even get on board with notarization let alone get it implemented.
You could maybe enforce protected folders at the distribution level but I don’t know if anyone could really trust a feature like that if it wasn’t implemented in the kernel directly.
I've been railing about all the spying Microsoft Teams is doing across corporate networks for the last year or so, to nothing but shrugs, 'I'm sure Microsoft isn't using our business data' or similar responses. People never learn.
We use Teams at work. We also use almost everything else Microsoft sells, which is probably the only reason we use Teams.
I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.
Never mind teams, imagine what kind of data Office gives them. Every email, every word doc, and every excel document created by nearly every company on the globe is theirs to pick through! It must provide insane levels of insight into what most companies (even those that compete with MS) are doing.
Teams takes all that data, plus all the conversations about it, including audio, IMs, web browsing, etc and creates reports tying it all together. Teams is the 'one ring to rule them all' that allows it to all be coordinated in context. It takes all of data that Microsoft can gather from other apps and weaponizes it into a competitive advantage against its own customers.
For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.
21 years ago: "It is difficult enough already to engage Gabriel in a discussion of security or Digital Rights Management, and spelling Microsoft M-dollar sign is probably the best way I can think of to get your mail deleted. He might even have a rule that does it now, I haven't asked. When Ross Anderson penned his now famous Palladium FAQ, which reads somewhere between a toaster manual and grim speculative fiction, you will note that he never deploys the dollar sign, because he would like to be taken seriously."
People can come up with whatever reasons to ignore others that they want. That doesn't make those reasons reasonable, it just makes those people ignorant.
I can switch OS, Office is almost obsolete with google + free stuff, their browser/software is terrible and never used, Github(yikes, well, git works..), LinkedIn(and nothing of value was lost).
So we really are at the whim of M$ when it comes to Github and Minecraft. Scary. But hey, I used to be obsessed with Nintendo games, and now people have Zelda clones so I don't need to pay games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
I use LibreOffice. I'm the only person I know who does, but it works great. People are incensed when I send them ods files. "You expect me to install a program on my computer to view this file?" "No, you can use any spreadsheet program." "I don't want to do that. Why don't you just use Google sheets?"
Exactly. Nintendo spent many years developing a sequel to Breath of the Wild, when they certainly could've gone for a cheap cash grab, and instead released an extremely high quality followup to a beloved game.
Not only that, but they delayed release for a year to fix bugs and polish TotK [1]. They deliberately missed the holiday '22 window for this! No one else seems to care about their games as much as Nintendo in terms of product quality.
The use of "just" here is classic underestimation of complexity or investment required. Technologists everywhere face this negative language from customers and other laypeople, and I expect many readers understand from first hand experience how insulting it feels. Please don't "share" that negativity with other creative arts.
ToTK makes BotW look like like an early developer build. While the base of the map is the same, they expanded it WAY beyond anything reasonable for an expansion pack. They have an below ground map that is the same size as the rest of hyrule and it is basically done just as a bonus to the rest of the title.
The depths is just inverted version of the same overworld height map, copy-pasted enemies and reused items from BOTW. It's simply yet another collectahon with bunch of puzzle shrines with physics sandbox. Not zelda game in my book. At least it did not copy paste the same boss with different skin 3 times this time however.
Minetest is surprisingly good it's a minecraft clone but also a sort of game engine like roblox but FOSS. It even has lots of mods, gamemodes, texturepacks, and servers to try out
It would be wise of them not to go against those that know how to build alternatives. Never under estimate the stubbornness of a programmer wronged.
Look at Richard Stallman, disliked proprietary software so much he spent his life fighting it even building large parts of an OS! Messing with Github would be like creating 100,000 Stallmans - and I don't think anyone wants that. ;)
GitHub as a tool is easily replaceable. GitHub as a platform where you can easily interact with countless projects is not. MS would have to really fuck up to negate the network effects.
It's a lot like the 2D titles, with elements added from the 3D ones, like the targeting system, stamina meter, and controls for raising the shield (not a thing in many 2D Zeldas). Plus, of course, it also introduces its own elements and gameplay elements from other series.
More seriously, Tunic also draws upon newer Zelda titles as well as games outside the series. In addition, many 2D Zelda games have come out since the time of the SNES, not even counting re-releases like the recent remake of Link's Awakening.
Tunic doesn't just evoke Zelda aesthetically as a substitute for developing its own aesthetic! It's a loving homage to a series that absolutely materially inspired the core gameplay, too.
The cynic in me wants to argue that all post-SNES 2D Zelda games are in fact remakes of LttP :) I mean that as a good thing.
I haven't had a chance to really play Tunic yet, but I just get the feeling that calling it a Zelda clone is unfairly reductive to both. If Tunic and Okami are both Zelda clones, but not clones of each other, something needs reevaulation.
https://veloren.net - not exactly a clone but it's pretty awesome (and free software)
"Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust. It is inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft."
"Veloren is fully open-source, licensed under GPL 3. It uses original graphics, musics and other assets created by its community. Being contributor-driven, its development community and user community is one and the same: developers, players, artists and musicians come together to develop the game. "
But the lack of PvP or other strong competitive elements makes it still fun to play free as long as you're in it for the game & story and not for the collecting and minimaxing.
> Zelda clones so I don’t need to play games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
hospitalJail is saying there are similar games out there, and that they don't need to play games from Nintendo that are unfairly rated well just because they're from Nintendo, despite a former obsession with Nintendo.
>I’m unsure of anyone producing games of a quality and polish level that rivals Nintendo, but that’s subjective too.
like sub 20 FPS, empty worlds, 5 enemies with different skins(okay, factually there were 11 enemies, meanwhile MM had over 70 enemies), same story as the last 30 years, annoying combat mechanics, grindy crafting(food) mechanics.
But IGN said it was the greatest game of all time 10/10 and never mentioned a single issue. That is what happens when we grade on the Nintendo curve.
But I think all these different divisions just act radically different within microsoft. What is absolutely certain is that the Windows team cannot be trusted, as they have shown repeatedly.
GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I'm sure one day it'll happen; statistically it's more likely than not. But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly?
More like 40 years now! I have said ti for a very long time, Microsoft didn't innovate in technology, it innovated in sleazy business practices disguised as technology.
It is difficult to find some of the more awful practices nowadays but I was always amazed at just how far they would go, and a little impressed by the thinking, to undermine all opposition.
Microsoft is like an Alpaca, if they start getting friendly towards you, it means they are about to attack!
Above the privacy concerns that MS captures your data that they can have their hands on quick and loose and the way they please their terrible record of ruining long living basic functions is a second reson not to go for laptops with Windows, not trusting it for reliabile functionality and handling any private data of mine. Having a completely isolated separate computer for company data on Windows that belongs to the company - they seem to feel easy about handing over all confidential data to them to store and manage, so I do not need to worry there.
Lol, explain this to the average European/global business.
They pay for "the service" to upload their trade secrets and literally everything to Microsft / the USA. OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, etc etc.
And then boast about their high level of "security". The naivity is unbelievable.
Install Office, use an App that tracks bandwidth use, uploads and downloads, PER app, and be amazed with how many MB/s of data Office sends to Microsoft.
Yeah, I switched to the web version of outlook when I noticed (via little snitch) that the desktop app was sending 100's of MB upstream. No idea why it'd need to send much of anything in that direction.
I think I was mainly upset that it was using a bunch of upstream bandwidth (if I remember right, it kept going while idle), possibly also didn't like the disk space that it was using for caching. Nothing important. Arguably a web application is more secure, since it can't read my disk, but that wasn't my concern.
At this point, I prefer the UI of the web app (I tried switching back), and since it is a PWA, it behaves like a normal application.
Firefox is my favorite browser. Not because I like it more than other browsers. But I think it is very important that there is not just a single browser engine on the market. Chromium has too much market share. And although it is open source google dictated what features get in. We shouldn’t trust one company with that much power.
I've been using FF more lately because it has a functioning ad block. Mobile web has become borderline unusable with the amount of ads that get shoved in your face. It's not enough to take up 90% of the screen, it has to pop up autoplay videos with audio over that last 10%.
Preach. Using my iPhone, I clicked on an HN link to Tom’s Hardware earlier today. Readable text occupied less than 1/4 of the screen. Everything else was taken by various banners, modals, etc. I tried to scroll down a little. It jumped back to the top of the page every time I tried, then started reloading itself. So, in sum, I read one(ish?) paragraph of a post before giving up.
I don't have problems scrolling in Firefox mobile that I've noticed, and I don't run flagship phones (I'm running a few years old Galaxy A51). I do run uBlock on Firefox Mobile though, which I'm sure helps immensely, so maybe that's the main difference.
I have a late model samsung and browsing a news site like NYTimes works better with Vivaldi than with FF. FF seems to stutter if I scroll quickly, as if getting "snagged". Maybe Vivaldi is preloading resource vs. FF trying to load stuff realtime while scrolling? I'm taking a wild guess.
I was also an edge user until a few month ago. I have Lenovo X1 Yoga that has had severe overheating problems since I bought it a year ago. Lenovo has been very helpful but unable to resolve the issue. They have changed the mainboard twice.
Then I switch to brave instead of edge and now I don't have overheating issue anymore. When I start edge it won't take many minutes before the laptop gets burning hot.
I guess the bloat has exceeded what the highest spec'd, top of the line, Lenovo laptop can handle.
Rather naive to ignore Embrace/Extend/Extinguish, the dark patterns used to push Win10, the online account hassles, the practically buying-up of OpenAI...
This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.