Would you use Edge as your default browser on Windows 11 if Microsoft nags you with a 3D banner? Microsoft thinks you would. In a new experiment, which appears to be rolling out to Edge stable on Windows 11, Microsoft has turned on a banner that uses 3D graphics to promote the browser.
First spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft has been testing the new 3D banner for a while now, but it’s now rolling out to more people. If Edge is not your default browser and you open it directly or through files like PDFs, a new banner will remind you to change your default browser settings.
The banner explains that using Edge as your default browser can help protect you from phishing and malware attacks. It asks you to confirm this change by clicking “Set default,” and then you need to confirm again in the Windows settings app.
The pop-up screen will appear after you install the new Windows updates. If you skip the banner, you’ll get another reminder to use Edge when you open the browser.
Only [ Confirm ] and [ Set later ] in the dialog? No way to never set/change/cancel? Rapist mentality?
corporations are people when it comes to “free speech” (read: political bribes) but they aren’t when it comes to accountability. this is what happens when you don’t treat corporations like people and fucking jail them for shit like this.
So you’re saying I can get away with anything as long as I somehow legally declare myself a corporation?
well i can’t give a definitive answer there; I’m just a bird lawyer
In our tests, Windows Latest spotted that Microsoft plans to use ChatGPT to generate website suggestions, which will appear below the search bar.
So needlessly wasting resources to provide something that already exists but you can market as AI?
How many ai “improvements” do you think are based on ideas generated by ai at this point?
The answer is definitely not zero. Which is pretty fuckin weird, the more I think about it.
Unfortunately, there are plenty enough humans to come up with stupid shit like this.
yeah but ai means the same stupid ape can excrete 25 times the stupid shit in the same time period. That’s progress.
Wym 3d banner?
It reaches through your monitor and slaps you.
Switching to Linux is better.
How about using M$ Edge on Linux? /s
Seriously though, one of my friends uses Edge on Windows, Linux, and Android. I still couldn’t wrap my head around his decision.
They should provide a button “Switch to Linux”,that would download a mint iso (or a distro of choice), ask you to plug in a USB stick and input a few config options,reboot and auto install de distro with btrfs over the windows partition.
I would pay to see that featue.
Okay back that up: I just tried my third time in 5 years to run Linux as a daily driver for software dev work and gaming. I’m on an ASUS ROG Zephyrus M16 2022 and I’ve never been able to fully get Linux working. Here’s my takeaways (and I really wanted Linux to work out fwiw):
- No working mic until I added a modprobe and kernel taint to make the built-in mic and speaker work to “function” where the mic is unusable with background noise and the speaker volume control only changes the tweeters, not the subs - so no built-in audio AT ALL
- Nvidia drivers - where to start… I’ve got an eGPU that I use as well and it’s a paperweight due to Linux+Nvidia support
But sure proton is great! /s it’s only viable if the damn hardware works in the first place which Linux simply can’t do yet
No one asked.
You could say “I’m thirsty” and though not explicitly asking a question, someone might still offer you a beverage as a solution, for which you would probably be thankful.
Nobody asked
You must be new here
Nobody asked what you think about it either
This is a forum for general discussion, not a question and answer board.
The only thing that could get me to switch back to windows would be an animatronic Clippy with LLM hallucinations dialed up to 11.
<Obligatory Linux plug>
Obligatory people getting mad at you for people suggesting you stop using software that is openly hostile toward you response.
Obligatory haggeling which is the best distro
Smug reminder that macOS is best OS
Lol. It’s a close second, but at least Apple isn’t blatantly hostile toward users in the same way that Microsoft is.
When did desktop operating systems become a place for live A/B tests of ads?
This is something I expect from a malicious website like Facebook, not the fucking operating system.
Capitalism be like.
Time for another anti-trust lawsuit.
I get that Edge may not be the preferred browser of many, but calling this a “3D banner” seems a bit sensational at best. It’s just clipart of an arrow.
One one hand, this can be pretty annoying.
On the other, when thinking about the lowest common denominator general user that’s been tricked into running some awful PUP-ware browser, I can understand MS’s point.
This banner is the same tactic used by malware. It targets the average Joe that just accepts anything thrown in their face. It’s the same with the cookie popup we see in the EU. People just click accept to get it out their way so they can view the content they came to see.
“Hey you, yes exactly you. Do you wanna accept all cookies or just part of them?”
Fucking bullshit what if I don’t want any of them. I’m glad extensions partially fix this
I remember when someone posted a joke Slashdot with a fake screenshot of Windows advising a user to switch away from Firefox and back to IE.
Everyone lost their minds on what was an obvious joke. An unthinkable thing for Microsoft to do.
Yet here we are…
Was that long ago?
Yes, it was a while ago. Hence Slashdot and Internet Explorer.
I mean, he was still reading Slashdot, so I guess “yes”
Removed
and you open it directly or through files like PDFs
As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
I have Win11 in a VM so I can make certain company documents play nice for the Windows users at work, and find it genuinely entertaining how fucky MS have made it. I found the other day that if you link to a document in Excel, but put the link in wrong, it’ll open Edge to warn you about it. Until that point I hadn’t opened Edge at all in that VM. I installed Firefox from an .exe I downloaded in macOS then immediately set it as default.
It’s always nice to shut that VM down and go back to using an OS that doesn’t nag me all the fucking time.
PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.
An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.
That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.
It’s not that far-fetched, PDFs in my opinion are closer to vector graphics than to document formats like odt and docx. They have no understanding of format if not using advanced features, like a table in a PDF is just spaced text with lines between them, and text is just independently placed letters. In fact the space symbol doesn’t exist in most PDFs, it’s just that two letters were spaced further apart. So they basically are multiple canvases that are being painted on with letters, lines, fill areas and even bitmap graphics.
Modern PDF actually does further in the direction of a document format by providing the content in a structured way, mostly for accessibility, but also for making the format suitable for automatic processing the contained data.
I don’t know what to tell you, Preview is an image viewer that is the default way to view PDFs on a Mac, and does so in a way that I’ve not seen bettered. It opens them without any formatting errors, allows for text selection and copying, and allows for rotation and cropping, as well as combining multiple documents and splitting them up. You just drag pages out and into the Finder to create a new document, or drag a second document into the thumbnail bar to combine.
The rotation ability is the reason I started using my old Mac mini at work. The crappy Dell PCs we’re normally given only have the free version of Acrobat installed, and I got sick of being sent landscape scanned document PDFs in portrait, so used my own MacBook to rotate them.
I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
Can that image viewer extract text so that a user could easily copy/paste it? I think if whatever pdf I was opening didn’t allow me to do that I would be really frustrated.
I can only speak for Preview, but yeah, of course. It’s really useful.
Plus, pdf.js & co. have a couple XSS holes per month. Local pdf viewers don’t have XSS holes.
Btw, why is pdfjs.enableScripting = true by default?
As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
I don’t see the difference here. Opening PDFs in an image viewer is wild too to me and I’ve used both Mac and Windows. For the shit that people give Edge, it’s a pretty nice pdf viewer and of all the browsers, it’s the most fully featured one that I know of.
And is it that strange that it opens a link in a browser? That is the default application for handling URLs after all.
It’s not that it opens the link in a browser, it’s that it opens the link in a browser that isn’t the default, and that I’d never used.
macOS has its problems, sure, but I can’t think of a single time when it’s ignored my preference for software.
I’d like to add to this by saying that on my Windows 11 work laptop, I have Firefox set as the default. If I open a link from Outlook or Teams, it will open in Edge. So you’re not wrong, and it’s quite infuriating
Microsoft could care less about your PCs resources when you’re idk, playing some 4k or even 8k video games. What a joke, but for real, if any of you use WIndows at home and don’t want to jump straight to Linux. You can (temporally jump over to Chromebooks, which will mostly work out of the box, and has support for Linux apps.
Chromebook’s I would argue are perfect for getting users use to Linux apps without having to worry about losing any familiarity they might have with Something like WIndows or Mac.
