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Comment by oaiey | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who sees the technical aspect here: They literally write in this article that this is about embedding web pages next to the chat/email/whatever. That means in-memory over contracted hosting api etc. When I would own, e.g. MS Teams or Outlook, the hell I would love to have a dependency on the internal Firefox hosting API which can break any other day (just a example ... firefox is cool) or introducing unwanted side behavior.

Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage. Same also goes for App Store deploy to desktop: a stable html/css/js SDK is needed there as well.

I would absolutely hate Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, but this thing, IMHO, it is not. There are better example (e.g. what they do with VS Code or the .NET Debugger/HotReload) then this concrete case.

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The behaviour the user wants is to open a link. The idea of displaying the email again beside the webpage is valuable, but to the user their preferred browser is more valuable. Realistically, they already have their browser open, if they do anything other than read and close the web page their browsing is now split across two browsers without rhyme or reason. Say they switch to Excel and need to switch back to the webpage to double check something, it'll immediately be "oh, this one page is open in Edge, not Chrome where I first looked".

How about only enabling this functionality when Edge is the user's default browser? We somehow managed without it for several decades.

Force-opening another browser despite user-configured defaults is utterly disrespectful to the user. You're trying to frame it as something helpful but it's not helpful in any way whatsoever. It interferes with the user getting their job done using a tool you made.

I hate this pattern, even if it's not monopolistic. If I want to open a link, I want it to go to my browser, not some embedded pane. It completely breaks my workflow. I can't bookmark, use password managers, any of my extensions.

> Looking at the bigger M365 vision of embedding snippets of documents/chats/stuff-from-the-graph into every other asset. Having there a free-variable like a third party browser will make this a horrible thing to manage.

Once again, MS with the browser balkanization. MS is on all the consortia, they can push for browser standards too.

It won't go to an embedded pane. What they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.

> The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all

Maybe, but if I have the Outlook app, a browser, and a windowing desktop environment, it seems a little superfluous.

Yes. As a counterpoint, people are also absurdly tech illiterate.

Aren't you sort of saying that it's okay because they have a vision where you use their products for everything? Hard to tickle that out from antitrust, no?

The worst thing about the integration is that their safelink checker thing is slow as hell.

This is the correct take that should be at the top. They aren't opening the links in Edge, they are opening the links in an embedded window implemented using Edge.

It's not an embedded window.

As far as I can tell, what they're doing is this: Edge recently released a sidebar, one app in the sidebar is Outlook. The idea is that if you click on a link in Outlook, the link opens in the full Edge browser, opens the Outlook sidebar and opens the email the link was from so you have context. It's not a bad feature at all, the problem is the dark pattern forcing it.

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