Companies using dark patterns and other abusive tactics to make money. Water is also wet.
Remember when they got sued and lost because they were doing shit like this with Internet Exploder?
Oh the time they were legally declared a monopoly before absolutely nothing at all happened to them? Yeah, yeah. Vaguely.
That stupid judge had to shoot off his mouth while off the bench at some party or something, and it got the whole ruling thrown out, since it gave the impression of bias.
MS should’ve been busted into a few separate companies back then.
It wasn’t totally nothing… There was a standing injunction that was left over that prevented them from bundling certain services with Windows for 10 years, so until after Windows 7 came out. That’s why Windows 8 specifically was the one that got inundated with the need for a Windows account and all this other bullshit. They were actually ready to start tracking activations and having logins go through an online account with Windows XP, back then they were called .NET Passports.
During this time they also purchased several million dollars worth of non-voting shares in Apple to gain favor in the courts, believing at the time that if Apple went under they would have even less of an argument against a breakup. The purchase agreement came with some interesting caveats like Apple needing to make Internet Explorer the default browser in macOS for some specified time (this ended with the introduction of Safari IIRC), and Microsoft committing to make Office for macOS for the foreseeable future. The main result though was that it kept Apple out of bankruptcy right before they hit the market with their redesigned iMac G3 (the colorful one) and then the iPod a few years later and allowed Apple to move forward with its purchase of Next which brought Jobs back to the company.
True, but those were relatively minor or accidental consequences. Microsoft’s monopoly held back wave after wave of innovation and virtually guaranteed an industry dominated by the “few” tech giants we now have.
They should have been smashed into tiny pieces and barred from working with each other. But, money. Or the failure of capitalism. Or the ignorance of the legislative and judiciary. Or all of the above.
Anyway, I left them over a decade ago and its been fantastic.
At work no matter how many times I set the default browser to something else it will always open Edge when I click on a link through any other program. Error messages, emails, and a host many Windows files will always open in Edge even after I’ve changed it and it’s infuriating.
Oh, no, you have to go into Teams and Outlook and any other Microsoft product and go into their settings pages and under the Advanced section, find the however many sections that they have set up and convert them from force redirecting to Edge to choose instead to go to your default browser.
And also, you have to tell it to open Excel spreadsheets in Excel and Word documents in Word instead of having them open in Edge or your default browser for some fucking reason.
The new research consisted of the researchers turning on Windows 11 and looking at it.
All they gotta do is bribe the Pedo-in-Chief and it won’t matter what shady practices they have.
Surprised they haven’t bribed the orange cancer to stamp out any Linux use by federal workers…
They’ve already been doing it for decades tho
Last time I was using Windows; the weather widget you can put on the taskbar was locked to Edge. If you changed your default browser, it’d still open Edge when clicked on. If you went to the effort of removing Edge from the system, the widget still displays the current weather, but when clicked on, it’d just do nothing at all.
Much happier with Debian.
