this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Dude, nothing is more suspicious than when a developer of a supposedly free app nags you to use their app. Why do they even want you to use Edge so badly? You're never going to pay any money for it, this screams "give us your data, we want to sell it".
I know, I was thinking that about Lemmy too. An issue or not we don't yet know!
The neat part about the fediverse is that no matter how badly behaved a dev may be, there'll be enough people to fix their behaviour and work around it. Look at mastodon, gorgon made a few questionable choices but glitch and all the other forks work around it and enough community servers exist that you could block mastodon.social and never miss a thing.
Just like with Lemmy there's already kbin and countless other alternatives that all integrate with each other and enough community servers.
But with browsers that's stopped being a thing a long time ago as the modern web is far too complex for small groups of indie devs to make their own browsers.
I can't instantly jump to nefarious purposes. I mean I'm sure there's nefarious purposes baked into it, but it's reasonable that a marketing group knows the common reasons people leave their product. I'm guessing these listed options will actually trigger a popup/page that explains how to correct these exact things, like a FAQ. I'm not trying to be apologetic for MS, it's just that the choice between edge and chrome is how you balance your data... Emissions? Both suck for that reason
It might be reasonable, but the question still stands: why does Microsoft put so much effort into trying to convince people to use Edge? The purpose of Edge is to have a preinstalled browser so that you can start working right away and don't need to rely on 3rd party software to do basic tasks. Great, I get that. Every OS has their own preinstalled browser. But what I don't get is, why do they actively try to stop you from using a different browser? Why do they put in so much effort to stop you from installing Chrome? Why do they not put in the same effort when you try to install Notepad++ or Paint.Net? What's so special about a browser, compared to other standard software? I can think of anti-consumer reasons, like harvesting and selling your data. And yes, Chrome isn't any better in that regard, but at least you make the choice yourself.
The answer is very simply advertising and affiliate revenue. If you use Chrome instead of Edge, Google gets the money from their ad engine, and Microsoft gets nothing unless you actively use Bing.
Microsoft Rewards gets you used to using Bing, which can then serve you ads on your searches instead of Google, earning money for Microsoft while giving you tiny fractions of a cent in points as a gamification strategy.
Edge has shopping features that work just like Rakuten or Capital One Shopping, where if you "earn" cash back, Microsoft gets a cut of the sale.
Honestly, it doesn't bother me much. Edge has some pretty great features added in and it actually actively saves me some money and cuts me in where Google wouldn't. Plus, it somehow is less of a memory hog and feels snappier than Chrome.
It's a great browser and is a huge upgrade from Chrome from a performance perspective if you don't value their extra features and just turn them off. Not sure how Google took Chromium and made it run like shit wit Chrome when I feel like there isn't much extra underneath the hood.