I just got this popup while playing New vegas. I don’t even use chrome, i’ve switched to firefox. How can this be allowed? Also, this is Win10
I just got this popup while playing New vegas. I don’t even use chrome, i’ve switched to firefox. How can this be allowed? Also, this is Win10
Maybe I’m missing something, but why would this be illegal?
Anti consumer and anti competitive. Using their position as the OS to bug the living shit out of you to use their services
I’m not so sure how it’s either of those things. I mean yeah, it’s annoying (especially if it’s popping up while you’re playing a game), but I don’t feel like it’s crossing either of these lines. If you click “Don’t switch”, it goes away, and it’s not changing anything without your permission. I’ve never seen it pop up again on my devices. I forget where in the settings it would be, but I seem to recall there being an option to disable suggestions like this, as well (although an argument could be made that this should be opt-in instead of opt-out).
I know this community has a (largely justified) hate-boner for big tech companies, but not every annoyance is a crime. If anything, I’m just glad to see that they’re at least respecting the user’s consent these days; in the before times, Microsoft would just revert all your shit to what they wanted, whether you liked it or not, permission be damned. I lost track of how many WinXP updates would reinstall that Bing Bar (or MSN or whatever they called it back then) without asking me.
Unless there’s another angle that I’m not seeing, I don’t see how this is that much of a problem. If anything, it’s a good advertisement for Linux.
I think this sentiment come from the long history of Microsoft repeatedly breaking and then failing to address antitrust requests. At this point people just assume bas faith.
I remember maybe a decade ago how it seemed a big deal anytime they used their OS monopoly to fuck with 3rd parties alternatives. But yeah, I don’t think every popup and annoyance is a crime. There’s a fine line they walk to still push their first-party garbage.
Using a dominant market position as leverage against competitors, is per definition Anti consumer and anti competitive.
Apart from that, they are basically hijacking a competitors product to show this, which I think if not already illegal, it absolutely should be.
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It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.
E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …
I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.
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Anticompetitive is a matter of antitrust law. Microsoft doesn’t currently have a monopoly on operating systems in the way they did 25 years ago.
Looking online in January they had a 74% share of desktops.
Linux is certainly dominating in the cloud but that doesn’t really make much difference here.
74% market share for desktop OS is actually a lot less than I thought. Guess macOS had a solid comeback
From Wikipedia. Not sure when the numbers are from exactly.
Apple has been slowly growing for years. Google took a little with their Chromebooks but they never really took off. Linux continues to grow steadily but is still pretty rare in desktop environments.
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Yeah if you follow the link to the source freebsd is 0.01%
Linux is 3.1 and unknown is 3.7 so in all likelyhood that’s mostly Linux that they couldn’t identify.
Not sure how the data is collected. Often from useragents on websites I think.
Just way for the year of the Linux desktop baby!Any second now, any second
it’s also notable that Microsoft has no realistic mobile OS of their own, and a huge amount of what used to be done on a desktop OS is now on mobile. Operating an ecommerce site for instance, 65% of the traffic is from mobile phones, even browser vs apps.
According to Rules of the Internet § 12 “if I find something to be annoying, objectionable, or wrong it surely must be illegal.”
MS literally got in trouble for bundling IE with the OS 20 years ago… This is so much worse.
If you cannot understand why people are rightfully upset… LEARN YOUR FUCKING HISTORY.
Things were a little bit different in the late 90s though. Windows had a 97% market share and a massive deal with pretty much every computer maker to only put Windows on their pre-built machines. They had a true monopoly in a way that doesn’t exist today.
They also made IE free and bundled with the OS when every other browser at the time you had to buy. On top of that, they made it so that windows would slow down and malfunction if you uninstalled IE, and made installing any other browser a complicated process.
Today you can freely and easily install pretty much any browser you want. Chrome has the hugely dominant share in the the desktop browser market now, despite Edge being bundled with Windows.
On top of that, Microsoft doesn’t have the massive stranglehold on OS market share that they used to. In the desktop space, MacOS is about 1 in 6 computers with Windows holding 71%, mostly in the enterprise sector.
And this doesn’t even factor in that the majority of web traffic is mobile now, where Windows doesn’t even have a presence anymore.
Basically every point you’re trying to make about how MS was in the 90’s is truer today except for market share.
Why is market share such a critical point when we’re suffering from WORSE problems?
Market share matters because Windows was a functional monopoly back then.
Upset != “Illegal”
They had to separate it you numpty. They literally DID get in trouble because it was illegal. How are you seriously missing this detail?
I’ve been a Linux warrior since '98. I’ve hated MS for decades now.
But not everything they do is illegal.
You’re talking about the past. Notice you’re not explaining how this thing in the present is illegal.
Having some something illegal doesn’t mean everything you do is illegal afterwards.
Because OP is a crybaby.
It’s not, that’s why they’re doing it.