Microsoft now pops up a poll asking why you'd want to use another browser when you download Chrome

I use Firefox because I want you use a web browser whose main focus is browsing the web.

I came to say just this..

Why is the person downloading chrome in the first place. Firefox with ghostery and ublock origin is the way forward

Just use Linux and Firefox. Skip all this bullshit.

Sadly Firefox on iPhone doesn’t translate [human languages]. I don’t want to use Chrome on iPhone and Firefox on PC because synchronising bookmarks and history is too important to give up.

Btw, MS stole it.

https://keivan.io/the-day-appget-died/

On Windows 10 too. I always just download from the website or store but I recently experienced the pretty fun of updating my apps over CLI for some reason

Do you need an MS account?

Which is something you will need to do to not accept their privacy invasive terms and conditions that you have to accept before using the bloated data harvesting browser.

winget install Vivaldi

I can't instantly jump to nefarious purposes. I mean I'm sure there's nefarious purposes baked into it, but it's reasonable that a marketing group knows the common reasons people leave their product. I'm guessing these listed options will actually trigger a popup/page that explains how to correct these exact things, like a FAQ. I'm not trying to be apologetic for MS, it's just that the choice between edge and chrome is how you balance your data... Emissions? Both suck for that reason

I know, I was thinking that about Lemmy too. An issue or not we don't yet know!

I need chrome to download firefox

This is the way, or even better use LibreWolf

Nah. I'd rather download another browser (besides chrome of course)

I used Edge since the beginning, until they decided to fill it with bloat. It's getting worse than Chrome. Now I'm using Firefox that is still a browser instead of an application trying to replace all applications.

This is basically all proprietary software 🙃.

It serves the company first and foremost. The user's needs are an afterthought.

Microsoft is a cloud provider these days, Windows doesn't make enough money, that's why they are desperate to monetise already paying customers.

Azure/entra or whatever the fuck they call it this week is where the real money comes from

I share the same sentiment. The push of having Bing crap all over the place with the inability to make the browser more vanilla is just a turn off for me. As a former and technically current Chrome user, I have found the overall user interface to be pleasant and easy to use. At work, Chrome is the preferred browser so I continue to use it there but for personal use, I moved to Firefox. It’s definitely taken an adjustment to get used to a few small differences but I haven’t hit anything that breaks my experience to need to go back to Chrome yet after a few months on Firefox. The ability to customize Firefox to the level of detail that’s possible is pretty impressive. While I don’t go crazy with customizations because I feel it potentially adds to future tech debt I don’t want to deal with as things change in Firefox, I like having the option.

I wish I could but I couldn't get steam games to work on it.

"I prefer giving my data to Google"

That would be the Cancel button, because anything else would be giving Microsoft free data.

“My reason is not listed”

Even Macs don't do this shit. It's pretty exclusively Microsoft.

To Firefox, sure. But if you're on Windows and your preferred alternative is Chrome you really might as well stay with Edge and benefit from the integration into Microsoft's ecosystem. Either way your data is being harvested.

Adding a negative number is the same as subtracting a positive number.

I learned that in school.

This. Regulators are a joke

Edge can’t be anticompetitive if no one is using it

Imo asking why you leave is fine, many programs and extensions do it. The problem is that you never chose Edge but still have to use it to download another browser!

I'm not trying to defend Google here, but I use Edge every day for work, and it's definitely not as good as Chrome or Firefox. Both Chrome and Edge are based on Chromium, so core functionality is the same, but Edge has no shortage of crappy annoying changes that make it frustrating to use.

Those guys all got Balmered or something because Edge is now Chromium based.

The first sentence is the most fantastical example of circular reasoning I’ve ever seen!

Windows users really do all live in denial.

It is a marketing OS for sure.

15 years ago I used to set up Linux HPC systems and we did a windows one for a testing project. Back then it was sort of a head scratcher, but I could see some use in it. Now? I don’t know about that.

At this point Linux desktops have maintained a more stable UI, quirks and all. The main thing is the freedom of choice. If I want a standard start menu/toolbar interface that just works, KDE. Classic lightweight look and feel? XFCE. Stripped down tiling WM? i3. Then there is also Gnome Shell if you're into that sort of thing ;)

However I know for certain that next year I won't be forced to use a UI that totally scraps functionality I've been used to for 20 years and changes everything for the sake of change.

MS changes things without giving the customer a choice, from the Ribbon interface that started in Office, to the tile based launcher of Windows 8 and now the awful start menu of 11.

I have a windows partition for my tax software and last year I managed to run it under Wine, so haven't booted it in a year. Gaming under Linux is great now thanks to Steam/Proton!

Winget is pretty cool, but I'm not sure how it works exactly. The package sourcing, like anything Microsoft does is a bit sus and I'm worried it's crowdsourced.

It's great for passively checking for new versions of most software you got installed, won't argue with that.

Since I hardly use the ms store, you can get rid of it: winget source delete msstore and then just run winget install chrome or winget install firefox

What the fuck

Microsoft: Should we invest time and energy into allowing a basic feature in the W11 taskbar, like the ability to ungroup items? No, better divert resources into pushing our shitty browser and making polls!

I'm actually alright with this, which seems to be an unpopular opinion. It seems totally sensible for them to ask why you don't want to use Edge and would rather use Chrome.

I wish for Microsoft to mind their business when I download another browser. A web developer or someone excersizing their freedom of choice should not need to deal with petty and sorry looking surveys.

On the other hand, it is fine to ask how the browser experience is like but not this.

If we want to prevent monopolies, we need healthy competition. If Microsoft improves Edge based on this user feedback to create an actually good product, then we all win. It means that if Firefox starts to pull the shit that Google is doing, we have a solid alternative.

Unfortunately, this privacy invasive feature goes against this concept because it already made the browser worse. Also, Edge is chromium based. Mozilla, Apple's Safari, and Chromium are the only true browser choices. Edge may bring some UX features, but they are data harvesting focused and not the core browser mechanisms. Microsoft is taking the work Google, and the chromium community puts into the code base and then running their own data harvesting UX on top. It is not a "alternative" browser choice, ever.

With Microsoft's track record, this survey is not to improve the browser but to harvest more data to pinpoint your identity and behavior to sell to advertisers and data analysts. So the "manner" Microsoft does this is more of a reason for not wanting to have this.

I think it's a conflict of interest to leverage their position as an OS provider to do this. If they want feedback they can pay a market research firm like a normal company. God knows they have the money.

My problem with all of it is, they've built that shit into the browser. That means baked into the browser, it is watching what I'm doing and doing things on its own based on what I do.

It leaves the door open for them to bother me/phone home anytime I do something that isn't in their interests. Are they going to add in similar things for me looking for windows, office, GitHub, or Xbox alternatives?

I feel like a lot of users won't use edge because of spite. It's intrusive and manipulative stuff like this which has angered a lot of people. Admittedly, this is one of the more harmless reactions.

Edge: "Nobody likes me. :( "

Microsoft: "Don't worry. We will make them like you. >:] "

It’s none of Microsoft’s business if I’m using their web browser or not. They shouldn’t be blocking my use of another product just because I don’t like theirs.

The competition between Chrome and Edge is very shallow, they're two slightly altered and heavily branded reskins of chromium, the real competition would be Firefox and it's forks (mullvad, waterfox, librewolf) (and maybe webkit aka safari) Vs chromium but there's no big corporation behind those (except safari, but it has many of the problems that big corpo chromium browsers have) , so they're struggling a lot.

Microsoft is synonymous with "healthy competition!" /s

Edge collects your "ctrl-f" in-page searches. Fuck that with a cactus.

I'm about to jump ship to Linux. I have been a Windows user since it first came out. I was DOS savvy before that, but Microsoft has just been getting worse and worse. They have never made a web browser that is worth a teaspoon of salt being high on the list of reasons they suck. Buuuuut, it's what all the software runs on. Now, though, they have gotten to be such bullies about forced updates and more that I am done. I'm not gonna lie, it's a little intimidating to have to start all over again, especially since Linux expects you to be very hands on with everything and I have let a looooot of my savvy slip by the wayside, but I feel like I've been forced at this point.

Well, in the case of Linux, also free. Many years ago I built an HTPC to run a media center at home and I got it all done and I realized that I didn't actually HAVE install media (or a spare license) for windows and it kinda irritated me that a legitimate license was going to cost me like $100 for a computer that wouldn't ever do anything but stream media from my own server. I had heard of linux before and I really wanted to make sure that my hardware worked without having to figure out how to actually buy windows and wound up installing ubuntu to test it out. I was surprised to discover that once installed it wasn't really all that different from Windows and decided then and there that this would be perfectly adequate for my HTPC and wound up using linux on various machines ever since. (I always have an old thinkpad running some flavor of linux for most of my general computing).

Like a lot of folks, I think the only thing I use windows for is working remotely and gaming (although, that is less and less the case since I got a steam deck and linux support for gaming has gotten SO much better over the last ten years).

Been Linux full time since February. 100% because of the bullshit MS is pulling. Hard pass.

On a side note, Linux is fantastic now, all my games work, it doesn't everything I need/want it to do with ease.

I virtual machine Linux these days. There is just too much effort in getting everything moved over from streaming video to games. No I don't want to see a tutorial.

Linux for regular stuff, Microsoft for entertainment. Except porn. I still need Linux for porn because I am not insane

They can both suck an egg.

Self-censorship is the best censorship

"have to follow the standard for HTML"

Websites have historically been so godawful about complying with web standards that browsers had no choice but to support grossly non-standard code. Which then became standard. Now the vast majority of the web only works because of browser implementation details. So it's Chromium and Gecko and nothing else ever again.

I recommend Ungoogled Chromium if you have to pick a Chromium derivative. It's a solid browser with the spyware removed, rather than taped over and exchanged with Microsoft's own.

Might I add, they keep adding so much useless junk to their browser hopping that any of it will stick, and it's just bloat and more bloat.

Edge is going full IE6. The Greeks were right, time is a fucking circle, not a line.

But Microsoft don't want you to block ads either, so they'd never do that anyway.

I switched to chrome just to try it out years ago, and then I probably would have switched to edge when it replaced explorer just to try that out, but Microsoft just got so pushy trying to convince me to use it and forcing it as default and little notifications about how it's the best that I just refuse to use it out of spite now.

You would rather be edging over chroming.

I think the number one answer is just that for so long people have heard not to use MS's browser and most people have no clue one way or the other so they just follow the herd. (Not insulting them, there is no possible way for anyone to be intimately informed about every single topic and so for things you don't care one way or the other, might as well follow word of mouth)

You can’t blame them for wanting to know.

I think that the problem here is that Edge inject the poll in a web page, served from a site that is not from Microsoft, not that they asked it.

I would maybe understand that they asked when installing Chrome, or if was from a page from Microsoft. What's next ? Ask because I use bank A instead of bank B ?

picking between a turd sandwich and a giant douche, what a decision to make. Firefox all the way, nothing stinky happening in that direction, no need to just pick between the two because it will always be NEITHER

You know it.

The entire world runs on Microsoft products. They're a very highly trusted company.

In this instance, Microsoft has tried everything but pay people to use Edge, but IE burned enough bridges that they're struggling to regain market share. This flies in the face of how much trust consumers generally put in Microsoft products, and thus makes sense to ask.