Insider build of Windows 10 warns users not install Firefox and Chrome

Since I use a rather low spec laptop for my desktop, I play games on a PS3.

Edge is brilliant.

Best damn Firefox download tool I’ve ever used. 10/10. Would use, once, to download Firefox, again.

(Bonus: Also works on Chrome and Opera! Multi-functional, too! Well done, Microsoft.)

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Because Google limits their nag to a website people visit, not an entire operating system mandatorily bundled on computers? Visiting google.com is optional, while at a retail/aupply chain level Windows is not.

There is not two equally valid/evil sides on this issue

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I’m not 100% sure but i don’t think you can get rid of it, IE is baked into the OS and what you’re uninstalling is just the latest version so you’ll be left with whichever IE was originally bundled with the version of windows you’re using. Certainly for windows 7 uninstalling IE 11 will leave you with IE 9 with no way to unpick that from windows innards. I think what you’re doing there is disabling it rather than uninstalling completely. I think the question remains then is, can it still be exploited by viruses and malware.

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I believe Microsoft ripped out all of the OS-level plumbing in Windows 10 that relied on IE and replaced it with new plumbing that uses Edge, so IE is now just a standard application on that OS. Earlier versions of Windows still rely on IE for their HTML engine, so it’s still a permanent fixture there.

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Some of the people I work with aren’t even clear on what a browser is. IMO, any time any user goes to install one of the popular browsers they should get hit with this warning instead:

“Are you sure you know what a browser is? Do you even know what it does? Do have any idea what HTML is? If you answered no to any of these questions, you should seriously consider installing Links. Because, fuck this bullshit, it’s time to rewind the clock a bit and learn some stuff.”

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I’ll take your word for it because i have very little interaction with windows 10, thankfully. The person i replied to is clearly talking about 10 of course, which i now realised.

I feel that none of this would be an issue if an entire industry of tech idiots people hadn’t made browsers into the clunky swiss army knives of the internet.

I do not. Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (and even Opera) are ubiquitous enough that I see no need need to mess with Edge.

Call me old-fashioned; but I’d say that there’s a rather glaring bright line between a website proprietor being a dick about your user agent and an operating system, that thing we purchase specifically to mediate between our device driverd and our applications, having special passive-aggressibe heuristics for specific applications based on vendor financial interest.

Microsoft’s “we are a cool app company with apps and consumer experiences” kick has been really, really, sordid.

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Safari is waaaay better than Edge - it’s not even close.

That is Firefox behaviour, there is a setting in FF (settings/general/tab queue) to disable it.

I tried Edge, and it was horrible–it opened windows to sites I didn’t want to visit, loaded me down with advertising, and dumped malware on my system. It took me a day to repair my system.

I wonder what their metric is for claiming it’s safer?

Edit: oh found the explanation:

At least they didn’t just pull that claim out of their ass.

That article is over a year and a half old. Being a FF fan, I wonder if FF has caught up to Edge and Chrome wrt security, etc, in 2017, as they predict at the end of the article.

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Oh, forgot to check the date.

I use FF myself anyway. And I think it does sandboxing like the others now (which is why I think so many extensions broke with that major upgrade they did a few months ago)

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What really pisses me off about WIN 10 and Edge is that by default, somehow Microsoft thinks my PDF’s should open with Edge. I would think Adobe, with its rabid licensing tactics would have something to say about that, and this case. I would agree with Adobe.

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What’s delightful about Edge’s enthusiasm for exercising its fairly limited PDF skills is that something, have yet to nail down what exactly, causes it to periodically reclaim the PDF handling throne.

Doesn’t matter if the user has manually specified a different handler; or if you’ve used the entertainingly cumbersome officially documented method; nothing dampens Edge’s enthusiasm forever.

Don’t all the browsers do this? I’m not saying that all the browsers’ PDF rendering abilities suck, but it always seems to be the default. Here’s a link I found via DDG (DuckDuckGo) which explains how to change the default PDF handler in Chrome and FF.

There were a lot of hits before this that discussed how to do it in Win10, but that’s left up to you, dear reader.

Edge doesn’t have a truckload of insecure radioactiveX api.

So much business software relies heavily on having direct access to the OS api via the browser.

It’s like a cash register who’s drawer is their bank vault. And they keep leaving it open.

Windows has 82% of desktops. Google has 65% of search. Sure, you can use Bing. Then again, you can use iOS.

Also, maybe I’m a bit out of touch because I don’t buy ready-made computers that often, but at least where I live (Poland) it seems very easy to buy a computer without Windows, you just have to ask.