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Windows 10 warns me to use a "Microsoft-verified" app
- Algent 3y agoAlso just noticed this morning by clicking on an url in discord I got a windows popup to choose my browser instead of directly opening Firefox.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoMicrosoft has been pulling this shit for 30 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
- mrich 3y agoWindows 10 warns when launching the Firefox installer, suggests using MS Edge instead.
- roschdal 3y agoMicrosoft is evil. Install Linux.
- rpigab 3y agoI've kept Windows only for gaming and specific software, today most software is multiplatform or has a web version, and Steam uses WINE/Proton which makes probably over 90% of my game library playable, and for the rest there has many alternative ways. It's only been a few weeks, but I don't have Windows installed on any of my PCs now. It's a shame that I still need lots of fiddling to figure out Nvidia drivers and why Wayland is not there yet, so for now I have to use Xorg, but for experienced users, it works really well. I really wish it could be the same for newbies tough.
- anoncow 3y agoEven if it is not legal, it is only a fine. Everything is fine.
- izacus 3y agoHave an upvote for the pun.
- toldyouso2022 3y agoDefamation lawsuit could be more than a fine.
- 1f60c 3y agoWhat about the message is defamatory? I think it's scummy but not illegal.
- toldyouso2022 3y agoThey make it seems like the pc is becoming unprotected if firefox is installed. This is how I interpreted the message.
- ChatGTP 3y agoKind why I don't have any faith at all in the Google anti-trust case. They'll be ordered to pay a fine of 0.5% of their annual revenue or something.
- red_trumpet 3y agoWouldn't they also be ordered to change their behavior?
- mtsr 3y agoAnd the penalty for non-compliance, another 0.5% fine? So long as repercussions aren’t more serious (see EU fines) or more personal (hold C-suite personally responsible for contempt of court or similar), nothing will change.
- varispeed 3y agoThat warning looks like a mob protection racket. Governments really need to get a tight grip on those out of control corporations.
- toldyouso2022 3y agoThey are out of control because they are receiving more and more free freshly printed money from government, since 2008. So they get the advantage of free money and the Cantillon effect. These big corps would not last 10 minutes without government helping them. Not in this form anyway.
- iamsaitam 3y agoAh yes, why make a better product when you can just resolve to dirty tactics.
- gbil 3y agoSeems that this is triggered when you have a specific setting in Installing Apps from Windows Store and that this happens by default is specific Windows 10 versions So doesn't seem widespread to start with - outside of the MS tactics in general which are bull as always. If anyone knows which Win10 version have a restrictive installation method to start with, it will be useful to understand the actual impact
- sabellito 3y agoI wouldn't describe this type of action as "bull as always". I'd use words like anti-consumer, unethical, hopefully illegal, etc.
- 5- 3y ago(2020). https://web.archive.org/web/20201020162028/https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/windows-10-warns-me-use-microsoft-verified-app https://web.archive.org/web/20201020162028/https://support.m... (it would really help if technical content was dated)
- mrich 3y agoThanks for this, I was actually Ctrl+F'ing the page for the year number to no avail. Remembering all the MS antitrust stuff, I thought this Windows popup must be a pretty recent change, can't believe this has been going on for three years already? Where's the investigation? At some point you have to sue for damages when you are the Mozilla foundation.
- Phemist 3y agoMicrosoft uses all dirty tricks in the book to keep their users on the default browser (which is of course MS Edge). Legal..? I'm sure their lawyers think it is? I posted about this before, but MS got fined before by the EU for this kind of OS/Browser bundling in the late 2000s. For a while, we had an option at installation on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 to choose our browser. These were still the days of Internet Explorer, so I don't know how much MS not having a competent browser factored into this decision, but I was really surprised that with a recent fresh install I did, this browser choice prompt was gone. Not to mention all the roadblocks thrown up by MS while trying to install an alternative browser...
- top_sigrid 3y agoMaybe they think it's legal, OR they know its illegal but possible fines don't put them off and are accounted for as cost of doing business.
- Phemist 3y agoIt's interesting, that second option seems too malicious, how would you even coordinate a common understanding of this? Perhaps it's just enough in the grey-zone that it is a "cross that bridge when we come to it" issue and that they don't need to figure out the specifics of any laws/regulation, because if they are on the wrong side of it, in the past it has been proven that these types of regulations are quite toothless. This specific issue on its face seems a security thing, where users are warned against installing software from untrusted (as defined by microsoft) sources. It very handily doubles as a way to scare users into not installing competitors for their own applications (like browsers and office packages), of course.
- jeffparsons 3y agoJust look at Uber, for example. The opportunity cost of obeying the law in the various markets they entered would have far exceeded the cost of penalties they received in practice. So what did they do? They just flat out ignored the law globally, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them. Unless part of the calculus involves executives behind bars, I don't know what else we should expect from corporate behaviour; they're just following their incentives.
- cklaus 3y agoMicrosoft faced and lost case on browser wars in the beginning . https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-proposed-findings-fact-0 https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-proposed-findings...
- dvh 3y agoIn 2023 there is only 1 legitimate use of MS Windows - your customer wants your software or website tested on windows. That's it.
- disintegore 3y agoMore or less. It has precisely zero selling points other than "this software vendor I rely on doesn't support anything else".
- asdefghyk 3y agoSearching words Microsoft Dirty Tricks on Google finds .....MORE
- defrost 3y agoThe very latest MS Windows 10 update (last weeks) is down right deceptive in its Edge pimping. After reboot I had a notification message "Make your Computer Faster". I wouldn't touch one of them with a 40 foot pole on the open web but this was an official MS message in notifications so I figured it was worth a look as it might be some general advice about official new MS tools for tweaking, booting faster, cleaning dead files, newest iteration of the usual stuff. It immediately launched into an MS Edge installation that had to be killed via process explorer. no dialog about "do you want to?" etc. MS really has gone beyond the pale here.
- delfinom 3y agoYea it's strange how some MBA marketing executive shitfuck seems to have taken control of Microsoft on this aspect.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoIf I could have total control of the OS I would undo all of that bullshit. An OS shouldnt feel like it was made by Google full of ads nobody wants or is asking for. Also the insane telemetry considering telemetry left Microsoft with Windows 8 one of the more hated versions after Windows Millenium Me which was a buggy piece of trash.
- wkat4242 3y agoMicrosoft has always been full of marketing shitfucks. Like when they rebranded Lync to Skype just because and dumped a whole communication campaign on their paying customers just for one marketing goon's KPI. But they get away with it. Nobody buys Microsoft because they're good. It's because they have so many fingers in the pie that you can't do without them. They know it and make their products just good enough to not be dropped in favour of something much better.
- worewood 3y ago"No one ever gets fired for buying Microsoft."
- courseofaction 3y agoTwo weeks ago M$ bricked my father’s laptop with an update. Reinstalled, bricked it again. Went Mac, not going back.
- alpaca128 3y agoHappened to me years ago with a Windows 10 update which made it crash all the time on my desktop. Reinstall didn't help because the installation image of course already included the update so it was broken from the start. I don't use Windows anymore either, its stability was the one feature that had kept me from switching away for years.
- kosma 3y agoI've had Windows updates brick the motherboard by installing a faulty BIOS update. Multiple times.
- bonton89 3y agoWindows also loves installing garbage drivers by default. I remember it was obsessed with installing an AMD GPU driver update )that only ever showed a black screen on boot) since it was newer than the working version I was using. I disabled the driver updates (this option in buried in a sub-dialog of a classic control panel option at the time) but since it had previously sniffed out that the driver existed it obsessively continued to download and install it in the background, re-bricking the install. None of the guides on clearing the download cache seemed to be able to convince it to give up, I eventually just reinstalled the OS without and internet connection and disabled the option before running updates.
- lloyds_barclays 3y agoI thought it was enforcing code signature verification, but no, it's promoting Microsoft Edge.
- addicted 3y agoAll of this started immediately after the U.S./EU’s limitations on MS from their antitrust case ended. The US /EU protected the world from 20 or so years of this BS. I suspect Google, Firefox, Chrome, Social Media, maybe even Apple’s resurgence, etc as we know it would not have happened if it wasn’t for the them preventing MS from abusing their monopoly in the most blatant manner.
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- mrweasel 3y agoI still fail to understand Microsofts obsession with getting people to use Edge. Apples developers and ships Safari, but if you don't use it who cares, you're still on a mac running macOS (iPhone is a slightly different story). Shipping a good and fast browser with Windows is perfectly fine, many will use it, some won't. Why do Microsoft care? The users are still running Windows. If anything this seems to undermine the value Microsoft place on Windows as a platform. Why not focus on making Windows better and if users want to use Windows to run Firefox or Chrome that's their choice. I really don't see what value pushing Edge has to Microsoft. Are they just pining for the good old days of IE dominance? They dropped their own browser engine, so they obviously don't want to spend that much money on browser development, so why spend any at all?
- harrylepotter 3y agoBecause the browser is the gateway to things like search. And thats the gateway to a lot of things.
- devnullbrain 3y agoMillions of developer hours and hundreds of millions of dollars spent developing hugely complex software just so that the omnibox's default target is bing.com instead of google.com A strange species.
- consp 3y ago> Why do Microsoft care? Since the spyware and add presenting malware in Windows is apparently insufficient they also want to get your data via bing and web browser usage and present you adds in those regions as well.
- mrweasel 3y agoI get that ads represent a pretty good chunk of money for Microsoft, but not it terms of percentages. I really do question the long term viability in creating shittier versions of you core products in order to boost one of the smallest parts of you business. Of course that might be why Microsoft have billions of dollars and I don't.
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- lhoff 3y agoI would assume malice but Outlook informed me today that it deactivated the "Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office" because it caused Outlook to open items slowly. So if halon's razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") is anything to go by it might be not on purpose, but who knows.
- thrownawaysz 3y agoDaily HN rage bait. Sometimes this site is barely any different than reddit or Twitter
- nickstinemates 3y agoThankfully, PCI Passthrough in QEMU/Proxmox is good enough to run games in a Windows sandbox. I spent the last 1.5 years making Windows a good development environment (supported by a home lab/san that is pure linux,) but I am increasingly frustrated at the user hostility from Microsoft. I have so many layers of outgoing connection filtering, custom windows rules to disable telemetry, etc, but still cannot get away from the dark patterns that is the modern day Windows experience. So, Linux it is.
- neurostimulant 3y agoProton is good enough these days so there is little reason to use gpu passthrough in a windows vm. The kind of games that don't work on proton are typically online games where the anticheats don't work on linux, and those anticheats typically strict enough to disallow use inside a windows vm anyway. There are exceptions though. For example, I can't seem to run single player campaign of Halo: The Master Chief Collection without crashing after a few minutes on proton despite its gold status in protondb. If I really want to run that game, I guess gpu passthrough is the way to go.
- bonton89 3y agoI have a GPU passthrough setup but I hardly used it as I was able to run most of my games in with proton anyway. When I start the VM up it spends so long installing updates I couldn't really use it. I did eventually rig it to download updates and shut itself down in the middle of the night. This involved installing a third party power shell package because somehow Windows has no way to trigger running all updates from the command line by default. Mind blowing considering how obsessed they are with updates. But based on my experience with my work machine, the whole OS does seem to have it as a design goal that the user be forced to watch the PC reboot and install updates while they sit around twiddling their thumbs. Why else would "Install updates and shutdown" actually shutdown and then start installing updates when you startup again? Maybe they're planning to place ads on the update screen so they wan the user to be there to look at them.
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- danpalmer 3y agoI'm generally in favour of OSes encouraging signed executables from known developers with basic oversight by default. Apple do this, I can and do bypass it, but many don't need to. It's not a huge burden for the sort of software most people tend to run. But that's not what this is. By saying "oh by the way go and get our browser instead" it's clear that Microsoft aren't just checking known signing keys, they are directly targeting Firefox and using that knowledge to present high-intent users with an alternative. It betrays their real intentions, and that's something lawyers love.
- vesinisa 3y agoHow in the unholy mother's pillow is this legal?? Didn't MS get pretty heavily sanctioned both in the EU and the US for using its operating system to push for its browser? The US case was only settled when the government threatened to dissolve Microsoft Corp and break it into commercially independent parts (like Standard Oil was dissolved in 1911). And the EU case resulted in Microsoft having to add for European Windows users a post-install dialog where they could directly choose to install any browser of their liking. It seems like they are at it again. Really hope the DOJ is not gonna settle this time around (repeat offender and all) and actually see it through that Edge, Bing and Windows are actually spun off to independent subsidiaries that can not collude to illegally manipulate the consumers.
- rvba 3y agoIt is sad that the solution to the nagscreen, is to completely break the thermometer (disable this screen for real unsafe applications).
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoLatest "Windows Update" added an Edge icon back to my app bar. They actually had the reasonable behaviour for the search box, "do you want to keep it"; but the Edge icon gets stuffed without any option. I looked, again, at how to remove Edge ... I don't have the will power for their shenanigans, they won that one. Over the last few years MS have actually done quite a few things that would have changed my opinion of them. But they always back it to with a reminder they're still awful. Prior to this was the convoluted process to buy Minecraft, my third time buying it, but first time buying a game from Microsoft. Jeez-louise, I needed three accounts: the child who is getting it, an adult to authorise the child to get it, and an Amazon account (somehow!?) to buy it ... having bought it, it was not simple to install it. They can't sell software, they have to control you, it's like signing up for an abusive relationship.
- delfinom 3y ago>I looked, again, at how to remove Edge ... I don't have the will power for their shenanigans, they won that one. You can't because Edge is also the WebView component on Windows. The IE component is still there in its old broken, insecure glory and they have been replacing it with the Edge based WebView over time.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoWhat do I need the webview for that I can't use a web browser for? Windows Store? (which I'd also happily remove, I don't use it nor want to).
- snoman 3y agoAnything having to do with parental controls or kids accounts on windows is just the worst. It’s not just Microsoft but they clearly give no shits about supporting those scenarios. It’s a box to check for them that something resembling parental controls exists. I’ve given up trying. Apple actually does a serviceable job there, so that’s where I’ll stay until they’re older.
- grishka 3y ago> I looked, again, at how to remove Edge ... I don't have the will power for their shenanigans, they won that one. Reboot into "recovery mode" and use the command prompt from there to delete the Edge folder. Alternatively, boot into another OS that can mount NTFS read-write and do the same from it. You can use this "I wasn't asking" method to remove any — and I mean any — component of Windows you don't like. But of course make sure you understand what exactly you're deleting to avoid breaking your Windows installation. Move files instead of deleting them if you aren't 100% sure. I did this to Windows Update on my VM.
- jussij 3y agoThese days, Windows Defender has a habit of declaring almost any executable a virus. I can compile a simple 'hello world' C++ code using the Microsoft C++ compiler and the resulting executable is immediately quarantined by Windows Defender as a virus. These numerous false positives begs the question, why is Windows Defender so bad at identifying a virus? Windows Defender appears to be so bad at identifying a virus threat it seems almost worthless? With so many false positives, what happened to Windows Defender to make it so bad at detecting an actual virus?
- nercury 3y agoThey are simplifying the heuristics: if it's not on MS store, then it's a virus.
- uwagar 3y agothe day they didnt let me have a say on when i update my OS, it was my last day on their platform. hello linux.
- hermitcrab 3y agoI have 'Settings>Apps & features> Choose where to get apps' set to 'anywhere' in Windows 10. What is the default setting? Has it changed?
- bonton89 3y agoThere doesn't seem to be an option for "Anywhere but Windows Store".
- martin-adams 3y agoInteresting that they say that users should select to install applications from "Anywhere", but don't tell the user to revert the changes afterwords, or explain what the implications of this change are.
- stainablesteel 3y agoif you renamed windows to PredatoryOS people would think its fine because satire is acceptable
- dartharva 3y agoIt's hilarious because had Microsoft not pushed Edge so insanely hard, very likely more people would have used it just out of convenience. Once you disable the annoying parts it's not a bad browser at all, in fact it leaves both Chrome and Firefox in dust in terms of resource efficiency and speed on Windows.
- theknocker 3y ago[dead]
- 93po 3y agoI did a fresh install of Windows for a friend and I spent literally 30 minutes trying to figure out how to download Chrome. Edge refused to download it because it was dangerous, and I could not figure out for the life of me which setting to turn off to allow it. I googled it and found some suggestions, but everything I tried didn't seem to work. It was ultimately many settings changes (not sure which it was that helped) and restarting twice that allowed it. I will never use Windows again on any computer I own. Even if I want to do desktop PC gaming again, it won't be on Windows.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoSad sigh at the line "Run the Firefox Installer again. Your Windows may now allow it to install Firefox. " at the end.
- ClickedUp 3y agoTime for another 'United States v. Microsoft Corp.' antitrust law case perhaps?
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- fennecfoxy 3y agoAnd Apple has their own Apple Approved app store? Hell they even force all browsers to use webkit. I remember they were considering dropping that requirement, but have they?