Current-era Microsoft continuing to push the boundaries of consent.
Microsoft Edge is a good browser but for some reason Microsoft keeps trying to shove it down everyone’s throat and make it more difficult to use rivals like Chrome or Firefox. Microsoft has now started notifying IT admins that it will force Outlook and Teams to ignore the default web browser on Windows and open links in Microsoft Edge instead.
Ran into this about two weeks ago. It can be turned off.
Here’s the setting to change. It’s under File -> Options -> Advanced
God I hate Windows and their dance with monopolistic behaviour. They’ll bring out a “feature” that changes how a program works so you have to change it back, in the hopes that most people don’t do it. They keep doing it with browsers because they siphon away enough users each time that it’s worth it for them.
Windows should have a default browser choice in settings, and any program you use should automatically use it no matter what, unless you physically change it yourself. It shouldn’t even be possible for them to do. I really need to learn how to use Linux. I’ve got a spare SSD. Fuck it
Do it brother, try out a “just works” distro like ubuntu or mint. I switched to linux 1,5 years ago, im never looking back again.
It’s not that hard to use and it’s worth the transition. Gaming on Linux is pretty reasonable at this point, most stuff is in the browser or has a Linux app now too.
Linux is not even difficult to use and there is no telemetry slowing down the hardware you paid for and feeding some greedy org with your user data. Ubuntu desktop is perfectly fine as a daily driver as long as you don’t use it for gaming or windows apps through Wine. Thats when it becomes more complicated and error prone.
The day I can play all my games on Linux and know the games i want to play will come to it, I will rejoice. I want so badly not to be stuck on Windows.
This is why, while I’ll probably never get a steam deck myself, I am all for people buying it en masse.
More users will force game publishers to opt for native Linux support, just so they can advertise their products as deck-compatible.
When Windows 10 hits EOL we might actually arrive at the year of Linux. I’ve been daily driving Arch (obligatory, I use arch btw) for the past 7 months and aside from a few hiccups where I tried to tweak absolutely everything and NVIDIA shenanigans, neither of which was the fault of the underlying kernel or OS, it has been dreamy. Never going back.
Ah you must be from the IUseArchLinux.FYI instance. Lol
They have a point. After the Win10 EOL, the only secure option for hardware that doesn’t meet Win11 requirements will be Linux.
Gaming works surprisingly well. The last few years have made it a one-click affair for thousands of games with the efforts of the Proton team.
Even then, with the effort Steam has put in, there is a lot more support for games on Linux, one way or the other, than there was before, and not necessarily as difficult, either. All of my admittedly small collection of frequently played games should work on Linux. I need to refresh my Windows, maybe it’s time to try Linux out for my gaming machine.
wow… this is hot garbage
Good to know, but this is trash. Sucks, because Edge is good now.
That is a terrible dark pattern. “Let me just change the defaults away from the option that literally is the default setting (default browser) to the thing I want users to use instead”.
Straight up maliciously ignoring “default browser”.
Good to see. And if there’s a setting, there’s probably a registry key behind it storing the value…it’s about 30 seconds in group policy to set it back to “Default Browser” for everyone at my company once I know which one it is.
Had to do the same thing to uncheck the “Also set up outlook on mobile device” box when Outlook initially adds the mail account last year…
MS’s main goal nowadays seems to be to find new ways to annoy users by advertising their own crap instead of producing a useful product that gets our of your way and just works.
Ran into this yesterday, when my manager opened a link and had to call me to help because it didnt autofill his passwords.
This “productivity increase” cost my corporation 15 minutes the first time anyone ran into it.
My computer did that for the first time today but it was accompanied by a popup which said something like “do you want me to keep opening links in Edge or use the default (Chrome)?” I clicked Chrome and that was the end of that.
Are the people who are being forced to use Edge the same people who don’t or can’t read popups and who choose the most obvious “get out of the way” button?
I’ve been using edge since the first chromium beta. I’m considering moving to firefox just out of spite.
For me what did my migration was the frequent crashes and the adding of bloat
It’s much better. I don’t miss Chrome at all. Also f Google.
Firefox is great! I have never been to a website where it doesn’t work, and the future of the internet relies on people ditching chrome based browsers (don’t kid yourself, chromium = supporting chrome and monopolistic companies)
Sadly haven’t had the same experience. There are some websites that are broken and Canvas particularly didn’t play videos well on Firefox. Also, it has been really laggy for me lately and watching videos has been laggy. There are also no tab sorting options. I love Firefox and still use it, but it’s not all great.
For me the worst part is sites with crappy JavaScript not working in it. It’s like they didn’t even test it in Firefox. Our time tracking and accrual systems at work and my bank system don’t operate particularly well in Firefox. Whenever people do refreshes on websites it’s kind of hit or miss whether they actually work out of the box.
I’ve converted over to mainly running Brave because It’s more aggressive about blocking tracking while still remaining almost completely chrome compatible.
I generally still keep a Firefox browser window open but it’s mainly to play YouTube videos.
When Microsoft offered GPT to edge users I flipped over and started using that for a while. I loaded it down with all my normal Chrome plugins. For me it’s faster unless ram heavy than Firefox, Chrome, or Brave, I just don’t trust openly giving all of my browsing data to Microsoft.
For me the worst part is sites with crappy JavaScript not working in it. It’s like they didn’t even test it in Firefox.
A major issue now is that some sites actually unknowingly rely on bugs in Chrome, so they don’t work properly in other browsers that don’t have the same bugs. Mozilla do ship some workarounds with Firefox (where it detects sites that rely on bugs and patches them to work properly) but obviously they can’t test everything.
I love Firefox, but had to go to Edge due to tab groupings. How Firefox doesn’t have this yet boggles my mind. The day I see they have groups, I’ll be all over it again.
On the Mozilla feature request page, it is the highest voted post and is currently being “investigated” by the team. But it’s been like that for a while, so I stopped holding my breath. It will come one day (hopefully) considering how much demand there is for it.
What so you mean by “tab sorting options”?
Chromium has tab groups where you can easily add or remove tabs from a group. It makes it easy to drag it out to a different window, bring it into an existing window, and the groups are collapsible.
I usually have a lot of forums open, work tabs, and just other stuff. Right now, my solution is dealing with it/creating separate windows, but it gets messy really fast when you have 4-6 different windows. It becomes a game of which one has the tab I’m looking for.
I use an add-on called tab groups for organizing tabs.
I’ve tried them all, but I really prefer how Chromium handles it.
I’m personally a Firefox user since it has developed to be so much better imo. However I do have to give credit to Microsoft for having imo a better browser than Chrome despite the fact they are both Chromium based.
In the beginning it was a lot better, because ot was basically just Chromium reskinned to look nicer. Now it’s much much worse than chrome. It’s filled to the brim with popups you can’t click away, tracking software, generally slower than firefox in my experienc, and is just all around ugly with microsoft icons everywhere.
I was it-supporter, so I had to click it all away every time I had set up a pc, so I’ve experienced it a lot.
If it’s not your work PC then I can’t understand why you keep letting them rape your privacy, personal choices,
OP was pretty clear that this was the opposite of their choice
It’s fucking annoying, admittedly edge is good on its own merits, but you know what pushes me to not want to ever use your product? Anti-consumer practices.
I have been very happy in using FF for my main browsing. It has adblock, NoScript and SponsorBlock. Since I use NoScript I jump on Edge when I want to use a trusted website for payments but I really want to use it less when it does this shit.
I can’t wait for the excuse “OoOooh wooooops, that’s a bug! Sowwy EU we did not mean to do anti consumer pwactices” as a way to dodge blame
you can use a secondary firefox profile. starting firefox with the
--no-remote -pswitches allows to load it alongside the main profile (-p loads the profile manager and --no-remote suppresses the “open new window in existing profile” behaviorUsing Firefox is the only real way to circumvent much of the bloat of the modern web. UBlock only works 100% functionally on Firefox, Chromium-based browsers just don’t give add-ons the functionality that they need to block 100% of nasties. Until that changes (which it likely won’t) I see no reason to switch off Firefox.
brave also works very well for this. Just don’t use any of the other chromium based browsers and you’re fine.
“Suddenly”? This has been happening for a long time. If you click on outbound links from built-in Windows apps, they used to always open in Edge unless you used a tool named EdgeDeflector to redirect them to your preferred browser. In 2021, they killed EdgeDeflector by making it impossible to redirect links with the
microsoft-edge://protocol baked in, even if you go deep into the registry settings to change this. They will eventually do this to Outlook and Teams too and get away with it, just like they got away with restricting EdgeDeflector.Yes suddenly. This basically started happening at work within the last week for no apparent reason.
There is a new tool that stops this:
https://github.com/rcmaehl/MSEdgeRedirect
But, yeah, this shouldn’t need to exist
It really shouldn’t. Someone should give that dev a break
Oh hey, it’s the dev! Thanks for making that, it’s incredibly helpful!
You’re welcome!
I’ll keep using Firefox until I’m dead or it’s dead!
i’ll stop using internet if firefox dies.
The internet needs an independent browser like Firefox.
The big issue with Firefox is that most of Mozilla’s funding still comes from Google, via an agreement that makes Google the default search engine in Firefox. Google essentially have the power to shut down Mozilla if they want to.
I wouldn’t mind if they started a subscription model that makes them enough to keep the thing running and be completely independent from Google.
Totally agreed. I would definitely pay to use FF, even a hateful subscription, if the alternative was to shut down. I think enough people are of the same opinion that its not going to be funding that kills it, but a buyout and kill off
What keeps me from moving to Firefox is the Translation option. Edge and Chrome are so good at quickly making the page available to read in my language. Firefox is not so good at this and requires adding which don’t seem to deliver the same functionality. At least from what I have found. So if someone has tips there, please share.
Thanks _
There’s a setting for this in Outlook now, basically a toggle to choose either edge or the system default.
Not nice to have an extra setting for it but at least it can be turned off
What’s even the point of having a system default if apps are just going to ignore it?
So where’s the group policy to turn this shit off?
Maybe some people will just give up on outlook finally and use a good email client or the webapp, neither of which will do this shit.
Good email client
Go on…
Emclient works better with Microsoft 365 than outlook does.
Search actually works and you can edit server rules for starters.
Emclient works better with Microsoft 365 than outlook does, while also working great with Gmail and others which outlook doesn’t.
Search actually works and you can edit server rules for starters.
It’s also technically cheaper though most paying users get outlook with their office subscription.
Thunderbird is a pretty decent client, and OSS to boot!
I still use Thunderbird for my personal email because honestly it’s the best email client I’ve used, and I tried all the popular ones (including Outlook, eM Client, Mailbird, Postbox, Windows 10 Mail, and others). In particular, I have filter rules (Sieve) that filter emails into folders, and many of the clients don’t handle folders well.
On Android, I haven’t found any email clients anywhere near as good as FairEmail. It’s free and open-source, and has every feature you’d need. It directly connects to your provider’s IMAP server so messages don’t have to be relayed via a third-party or Google’s servers.
It happened to me last week and it pissed me off. If i wanted to use Edge I would, Microsoft needs to cut the pushy shit out.
Step 1: Stop using Outlook…
I’ll just tell my IT department to stop using Outlook. I’m sure they’ll get right on that ;)
Move to Ubuntu, you are not obligated to use Microsoft.
Not necessarily, I’m using Pop!OS but my workplace AzureAD SSO mandates Edge on Linux so you’re not safe.
Not going to happen in any business environment
Not with that attitude ;)
Ubuntu is a choice in business nowadays, alongside Windows and OS X. But it’s a choice usually only offered to programmers or the IT department.
Yeah, I had a user who was in Sales. Issued a new PC to her after 8 years. She didn’t even know how to organize her bookmark bar in Chrome. I don’t think Linux would even be able to come out of my mouth in terms of “Things our users might be able to use”
Sad, but true.
