Browser wars again? The latest from Redmond

[rsjsouza]

Wow... They are at it again:
https://m.hexus.net/tech/news/software/122123-microsoft-tests-third-party-browser-warning-windows-10/

[particleman]

Glad I use Linux.

[xrunner]

Well I just encountered it today.

I am helping my neighbor build up a new PC and he just bought W10 home edition from Best Buy - it comes on a USB stick. I installed it today and that warning message does appear. 

[tombi]

A more honest button label for the 'don't ask again' button (honest to the user's intentions) would be 'F*** off and die!!!'

Perhaps I should suggest it as an enhancement request? I think it would enhance the user's experience don't you?

[bitseeker]

Not surprising. It's Microsoft's nature.

See: The Scorpion and the Frog

[james_s]

For all the bashing they get, Microsoft has made some pretty great things. That said, their marketing is amongst the worst I can think of and crap like this shows they have absolutely no tact. Edge could have been good, heck maybe it is by now, I don't know. The reason I don't know is they had one shot at a first impression and they blew it. When Edge shipped it was a half baked piece of crap missing a number of must-have features. Nearly everyone who tried it said something like "wtf is this?!" before using it to download Chrome or whatever.

This sort of nagging just reeks of desperation and will only push people away. It's like one of those clingy people you go on a couple bad dates with and they won't stop calling you.

[Stray Electron]

For all the bashing they get, Microsoft has made some pretty great things.

    HAS is the most important word in that sentence.  The HIGH point of MS software was about DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11 and their SW has gone steadily downhill from there.  Bill Gates needs to close the Redmond headquarters and fire everyone connected with it and start a new company from scratch.

[Ampera]

Microsoft has the crazy habit of trying to market people a product that absolutely nobody wants.

UWP, Edge, Aero, etc.

[Circlotron]

For all the bashing they get, Microsoft has made some pretty great things.

    HAS is the most important word in that sentence.  The HIGH point of MS software was about DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11 and their SW has gone steadily downhill from there.

I thought NT4 wasn’t too bad.

[james_s]

For all the bashing they get, Microsoft has made some pretty great things.

    HAS is the most important word in that sentence.  The HIGH point of MS software was about DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11 and their SW has gone steadily downhill from there.  Bill Gates needs to close the Redmond headquarters and fire everyone connected with it and start a new company from scratch.

Win2k was great, XP was wildly successful, Windows 7 has been one of my favorites. The original Xbox was a huge success, they made some excellent game controllers for the PC, a few very good keyboards and mice, MS Office was excellent up until they switched to that horrid ribbon interface. Lots of other good stuff through the years.

[Zero999]

For all the bashing they get, Microsoft has made some pretty great things.

    HAS is the most important word in that sentence.  The HIGH point of MS software was about DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.11 and their SW has gone steadily downhill from there.

I thought NT4 wasn’t too bad.

Yes, I would say DOS and Windows 3.x/9x was MS's worst software: very buggy, no security and extremely unreliable.

The only good thing about the earlier versions of Windows was they weren't overly reliant on the registry and it was possible to manually change edit most settings by editing win.ini and system.ini in DOS, if something went wrong, but other than that, they were crap.

[bitwelder]

And they are backpedaling already...
https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-ditches-windows-10-warning-about-chrome-and-firefox-following-backlash

[Mr. Scram]

And they are backpedaling already...
https://www.techradar.com/news/microsoft-ditches-windows-10-warning-about-chrome-and-firefox-following-backlash

Unfortunately the rapid update cycle today means manufacturers just throw stuff at the wall and see what isn't greeted by a lot of skepsis. The promise of a rapid development cycle seemed promising, but it seems to have been weaponized against the users.

[helius]

Those devilish Skepsis...

[bitseeker]

Oh, Microsoft. Always entertaining.

[Wilksey]

I personally think Windows ME + Vista and 8 were the worst ones.

I could deal with Dos + Windows 3.x, in fact I think the only issues I had with Windows 3.x was when I wanted to install the Win32 add on.

[djacobow]

Speaking of browser wars, here's a difference between them from a developer's perspective:

I am responsible for a reasonably popular browser extension (users in the thousands, not tens of thousands) that I've had going for a few years now. I originally started on with the extension on Chrome. To publish an extension on Chrome, I had to pay $5 once, I think, and then upload a zip file. Done and done, there it is on the Chrome store.

I also put the extension up for Firefox. Very minimal code changes were required  when Mozilla started supported web extensions, and I think now that's really no code changes at all. I did have to modify the manifest file. Anyway, zip, upload ... wait a few days, then receive rejections for some dumb reason, then rinse repeat a couple of times, and eventually, it's up there. No money was exchanged.

Tried to do the same for Safari. Apple wanted $99 for a developer account. This is a free extension, so easy pass. Not gonna bother. Also, Safari sucks.

This week I got it in my head that since MS was serious about Edge and Edge is supposedly not terrible, I should try it. So, first, to get the extension running on Edge, I have to install and run a piece of software from MS called the Microsoft Edge Extension Toolkit. It runs on your extension and then munges it in certain ways to make it run on Edge, adds a few files and changes the manifest. After that and some tweaking, I can load it as an unpacked extension on Edge and try it out. It mostly works, so great, I'll just upload this to the MS store, right?

Wrong. First, create a developer account. $19. Then create an "app." Plan on this taking an hour to set all the fields and go through all the forms. Then You need to upload an appx package. What's an appx package? Oh, it's a magically signed doohickey from MS. Here's the short process:

1. install node
2. install a node package called manifold js
3. run manifold to make a special xml manifest from the extension's json manifest
4. edit that manifest with some magic keys from the dev account you just created
5. create some resized icons, because MS doesn't have resize technology
6. run the manifold tool to create the package
7. you want to run that package locally to test it? Then
8. Creat a local self-signed certificate
9. convince your computer to trust it
10. sign your package with that cert
11. Oh, you need a tool called signtool that comes with Microsoft SDK
12. Install Microsoft SDK
13. try again to sign package
14. install package to you can test

OK, looks good, so let's upload that to the MS dev account and see what happens...

Reject because I don't have permissions to do an Edge extension. Please fill out this separate Edge extension permission form...

Well, that's where I am now. Waiting for who-knows-what from MS to do something so they can host my extension.

And people wonder... where are all the Edge extensions?!?!

[Marco]

UWP

The sandbox is nice, it's a shame they are coy about sideloading because they try to use UWP to push the app store. App Installer should be a standard part of Windows 10 (program to sideload UWP, showing the required permissions etc) .

[james_s]

It's important to look at past products through the lens of the era in which they were made. DOS lacked security, so what? PCs were standalone in those days, there was no internet, LANs were a rare luxury in high end corporate environments. Win9x was a massive step into the future at the time, yes it had warts but finally Windows was more than a shell on top of DOS. Yes it still lacked much in the way of security but so did the competition, Mac System 7 and Amiga Workbench.

Win98 was pretty solid IMO, I used it for years and it was very dependable for what it was. NT4 was a step in the right direction but it was pretty rough around the edges and not well suited as a consumer OS. Win2k was another huge leap, offering the stability and security of NT with a much more polished interface and for the first time games started to be supported under the "heavy duty" corporate OS. XP further refined this, once you ignore then inexplicable "Fisher Price" default color scheme (ick!) which everyone I knew changed immediately, it was a very solid OS.

Vista, that one gets a bad rap that is IMHO not really deserved. The issue with Vista is that when it came out, it required far more memory than was commonplace at the time, and it really needed a GPU to handle the slick user interface. Performance on contemporary machines sucked, people balked at the idea of needing a whopping 4GB of RAM for decent performance. Fast forward a few years when hardware caught up and Vista is really not too bad. RAM became cheap, 4GB cost peanuts, 8GB was cheap, even 16GB is affordable and even low end systems have powerful GPUs by comparison. I know people who still use it, after a few service packs it was rock solid. Windows 7 was a refinement of Vista, offering improved performance and a few other fixes, it could almost be considered the final Vista service pack. Win7 is to this day my favorite MS operating system.

Win8 is the one that made everyone go "WTF is this??!", the out of box experience is beyond horrid, and their token gesture later adding a "fake" start button that just brings up the start screen showed just how completely tone deaf they were. Everyone wanted a proper start menu and that stupid button they added was a condescending slap in the face. Installing Classic Shell or similar 3rd party products makes Win8 quite usable, although the flat UI still looks like crap in my opinion.

Win10 I would almost consider to be a service pack for Win8. The out of box experience is much better although the barebones start menu still pales in comparison to the fully featured and highly customizable menu in XP through Win7. Once again Classic Shell comes to the rescue, but Win10 is seriously marred by other flaws like the forced updates and baked in telemetry that make it arguably worse than Win8 once you start fixing it with 3rd party addons. 

[rsjsouza]

james_s, I think you summarize quite well the evolution of Microsoft's OS world. A few additional remarks:
- MS-DOS 4.00 was absolute crap. Many people were conned into buying it and got burned. 4.01 was better.
- MS-DOS 5.x was good but was way behind the DR-DOS 5.0 released earlier.
- Windows 95 was terrible when compared to the contemporary OS/2 3.x. However, the lack of applications threw OS/2 into oblivion.
- Windows 98, then NT4 were quite good for their time.
- Windows 2000 was really great with a very solid integration of DirectX and the safety of NTFS and user accounts, although boot time sucked terribly (solved when XP was out).
- Vista also got a terrible rap with User Access Control which was a problem caused mostly by the applications, used to trash the registry and critical areas of the disk without any regard. At work, many people that complained about this at the time didn't make the connection that Ubuntu did the same when asking for the admin password for certain tasks. Windows 7 toned down UAC a bit, which got a better reception especially because the applications started to behave better.
- Similar impressions about Windows 8 and 10: it is a 1:1 parallel with Vista/7.
- As for other packages, the only one I use thoroughly is Microsoft Office. Although I dislike Ribbon due to the lack of visibility over the available options, I am getting used to it (although I still prefer the menus). IMHO the best applications of this package are Outlook (when used with exchange server) and Word. Powerpoint is still plagued by the formatting issues when a presentation is copied to other machines and Excel still has ludicrous size limitations and the idiotic single screen view for all your spreadsheets.

[james_s]

Ah yes, OS/2, I knew I was forgetting a significant competitor. I rank it somewhat alongside BeOS, very innovative products but as Edison recognized that a lightbulb was a useless curiosity without all the infrastructure, Microsoft recognized the enormous value of backward compatibility with existing software. The finest operating system in the world is useless if it can't run the software you need.

UAC was indeed horrible, but if you turned it off like pretty much everyone did then it was no longer an issue. While a good idea in principal, it nags so much that it becomes like the boy who cried wolf. People form a habit of just blindly clicking to dismiss it.

I loathe the ribbon, and it has spread like cancer into parts of Windows too. I've been forced to use it for more than a decade now and it still takes me twice as long to find anything as with a proper hierarchical menu. The thing that really frustrates me is that they could have so easily retained the traditional menu and offered the ribbon as an option for those who prefer it. I'm sure there are people for whom it truly works better but I am not one of those people, my brain is wired for hierarchical menus.

I also agree that the single window view on Excell is ludicrous, although at least in the 2003 version you can open up multiple copies of it and have each in its own window.

[EEVblog]

Yes, I would say DOS and Windows 3.x/9x was MS's worst software: very buggy, no security and extremely unreliable.

What planet is that?
DOS and Windows 3.11 were stupidly reliable. Production systems based on them would stay operating until the power supply failed.

[Monkeh]

Yes, I would say DOS and Windows 3.x/9x was MS's worst software: very buggy, no security and extremely unreliable.

What planet is that?
DOS and Windows 3.11 were stupidly reliable. Production systems based on them would stay operating until the power supply failed.

That we consider that special today is a sad state of affairs indeed.

[Berni]

Yep back then DOS if it could run for 20 hours it could also run for 20 years provided the PC hardware didn't die before that.

These days Windows is so complicated and messes about with the state of the system over so many abstraction layers that at some point one of the layers is bound to do something stupid and cause a problem that gets fixed by simply rebooting.

The best OS that Microsoft made is Win 2000. Okay yeah it did boot slowly but once it was running boy did it run well, even on old crappy PCs.

Windows 10 i have been using at work for a few years now(Only reason is that they ran out of Win 7 licenses but had a pile of Win 8 ones so i upgraded the license to Win 10 for obvious reasons). The whole thing still looks like its a work in progress, there are still new and totally incomplete menus all over while some settings are flat out gone forcing you to registry hack. Some of these missing settings involving windows update can result in loss of work as the PC will forcefully terminate programs to go a update and reboot on its own. Said windows update will sometimes mess with stuff and break things or even trigger bugs in windows itself. There are some new little issues and glitches, compatibility problems etc. One of the rare good things about Win 10 is that it gets some new tools like the ability to view and edit 3D models as easily as it if was a jpeg in MS paint.

So far Win 10 is banned from being installed on anything in my home until all of this is fixed. Im perfectly happy with everything running on Win 7.

[james_s]

Yeah with Win10 it hardly matters how stable it is because the stupid update will end up rebooting it far more often than any recent OS would crash. I had a Win10 laptop at my last job and cursed it almost daily, the place I'm at now issued me a MacBook and while it has taken some getting used to, I have to say I'm impressed. It wakes from sleep almost instantly and I haven't rebooted it in a month.