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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

To be explicitly clear: Microsoft is spending the time to build basic features like "links clicked actually open in your default browser" and still blocking access to these features in most of the world. That's not an antipattern, that's simply evil.

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It's the kind of childish, petty response that you'd expect from a 4 year old: "You can make me do it but you can't make me like it!"

Now they need to maintain all these "if isInEEA()" equivalent complexity all over their systems just so they can comply with the law as narrowly as possible.

It feels almost like these companies with their obnoxious cookie banners: "Let's make these things as terrible as possible so we can show everyone (including our users) how grumpy and mad the law makes us feel!"

Desperate to circumvent the California/Brussels effect.

Well, it’s a company in advanced capitalism, it’s gonna chase that profit all the way to the border of legality (and beyond if it’s worth it). There’s no pretending not to be an asshole.

I’m fine with this and hope that this being the case catches up to the broader public because it will further the realization that companies must be adequately regulated.

It really shows that they don't see their users as customers to serve, but as resources to exploit.

In this case you can't even use the "it's free so you're the product" excuse, because people are literally paying hundreds of dollars for this crapware.

That's a rather melodramatic interpretation.

Have you opened a lot of .mht or .shtml files lately? What about ftp:// links? (Most browsers have removed FTP support and if HN is to be believed, FTP users should be beaten and locked in a cell with the uneducated, mouth breathing http:// users).

And in doing so, not cared enough to immediately go into control panel and change the file association manually, as you could for the last 30 years; rather, insisting you need an Easy Button (tm) to do this in one click?

This impacts like 0.001% of users.

They were referring to some apps ignoring your default browser preference and opening Microsoft Edge whenever you click any link in the app. That's not a niche case, it's an everyday interaction.

Literally nothing stops any app from hard coding launching msedge.exe or chrome.exe

But why ignore the user preference?

So Bing has non-zero MAU due to people accidentally clicking links on the Windows lockscreen to "learn more about this picture"

This is about integrated Windows functions from Microsoft that force the use of Edge. That constitutes anticompetitive behavior by Microsoft, besides ignoring configured user preferences.

The law does now. There’s a default setting for a reason.

Are you sure they were ignoring defaults and not just using edge deeplinks. It's not much different than apps like slack who always use a packaged in chromium instead of your default browser's web engine.

Opening Edge instead of whatever is set to default impacts way more than 0.001% of users. I think you are the one being melodramatic here.

The start menu opens Bing in Edge. Pressing Win+F1 opens Bing in Edge.

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