this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
182 points (93.8% liked)
Privacy
31186 readers
571 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly a good change. Defaults should be handled by the OS. If a software wants to be your default, it should ask the OS to present the selection screen and allow the user to choose the option.
Yeah, this is a ragebait headline (and I'll admit that it caught me). This is actually in line with what you see on Android and most Linux distros. It's also likely that Microsoft doesn't want you to easily change from Edge, but still. This is better than allowing an application to silently change which applications open things on your computer.
They could simply present a popup with "Change Default web browser to Chrome? You can change this later in settings."
While there at it they also should remove the "recommended" label and popups, the onedrive ads and Teams integration.
Unless the OS screen adds tons of clicks and popups to click though to change the default. Not to mention its kind of funny how easy it is to switch back to Edge. This is a anti competitive feature pretending to be a security feature.
man i remember doing that once. it basically tells the user: we can force you to waste your time. keep that in mind next time you want to exert free choice. end of story: told my boss i demand using Linux, he said ok. I'm happy now fellow pingus 🐧
As long as that applies to all browsers equally. I don't know the current state of things but if I remember correctly, Firefox already circumvented the earlier default protection method, because Microsoft made it so that their own Edge browser didn't require those extra steps that were forced upon all other browsers.
After reading the article it seems likely this is still the case. They said operating system links still open in edge even when you have another browser configured, so Microsoft is still putting Edge in a privileged position. I guess we just have to wait and see how privileged it ends up being.
Or properly crack down on this like the EU will.
From what I hear Edge is so privileged you can't remove it... well, you kinda just can't remove it.. but even if you can circumvent that the system starts fucking up because it needs it for those OS links.
That will have to change with the DMA becuase otherwise M$ will get ...a really big slap on the wrist or something.
Yeah, and if that was why it was being done, that would be awesome.
It isn't being done because it's a better policy.
True
Kinda crazy that any other method was ever implemented tbh.