Microsoft to Force Web Links Shared in Teams to Open with Microsoft Edge

It's like the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft 22 years ago. They are still trying to push their browser.

If you didn't like it, you shouldn't have let your laptop walk around dressed so provocatively

The thing is, it's actually decent. I don't know why they have to keep doing this. I used Edge as the main browser on my Surface Go to get a bit more battery life, and it's fine as my second browser; feels like someone is desperately trying to meet their KPIs to keep on pulling shit like this. Parts of the browser are getting worse too, that sidebar is a complete mess at default.

It's way better than Chrome for a Chromium browser.

Ironically, the popularity of macOS, mobile platforms, and the fact that Chrome is now the #1 browser means there's a much weaker case for there being a monopoly now.

"Got screwed" is an over-exaggeration. They lost. Eventually. Only after having crushed Netscape's hopes and dreams. And the settlement was pitiful.

IE was still king after the antitrust lawsuit. It took decades to de-throne it.

Which country are we talking?

I'm with you. I'm so completely and utterly over working in IT. The industry used to be full of companies founded by people who loved tech, and were staffed by kids who grew up on Lego and Logo. Today these same businesses are owned by investors who don't know the first thing about technology, and staffed by grown up kids who were told by their guidance counselor that IT was a high paying field. Nobody knows their ass from a hole in the ground anymore, and getting anyone remotely competent on the phone is like pulling teeth. If I could bail on this industry tomorrow and build picnic tables I'd never look back.

Same. Streaming services reinvented cable. The open web is increasingly hidden behind paywalls. Instead of having the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips, you have 5 billion tiny creators begging you to sign up for their goat-fat candle-making course on udacity. You can't look in any direction without advertisers stabbing you in the eyes and claiming that it's their god-given right to scream their snake-oil sales pitch directly into your brain; and if you install an ad blocker you're the one stealing food out of content creators mouths, not the ~5 people who control 50 % of the total wealth of humanity...

I’m out of software the first chance I get. I hate it. Tech is no longer fun and inventive, it’s exploitative and designed to milk the most money out of every user.

I don’t even particularly care about the capitalist part. I just find that the new things are no longer fun, but terrifying and causing anxiety about the future. I used to love keeping up with the newest stuff, but I already feel like a Luddite after the last few years

I joined an IT career out of excitement for technology and gaming, but most that I see about both those industries makes me lose hope for the future.

I did. I switched to social work and am starting my 2nd year in grad school. It's not just you, my dude.

I've feel a deep resentment when asked to work on anything Windows related!

Don't quit IT. Combine your abilities with other IT people and make new things that create competition.

This feels like a serious abuse of market position. This should definitely result in legal action

There's a setting in outlook options, but it's buried pretty deep.

Open Links with under advanced something

I'm in tech support, I've had several users hit by this in office programs as opening links via plugins to sites they need to be logged into would suddenly open a different browser which they weren't logged into. None of them realized what was going on. That alone should cause for a lawsuit, since they're changing defaults for reasons entirely unrelated to eg. preventing security risks.

Everyone hates this new feature at work. Now we have to close the extra side-chat bar in edge every time we click a link in Teams. This kind of feature will drive people to share links using any other program.

I swear... MS program managers are some kind of alien that don't understand user experience at all

This can be set in Apps Admin Center by your Org Admins.

Well yeah they've had 20 years to pad courts with corporate-sympathetic judges and neuter any other forms of government oversight. Course it'll work out this time.

Back then the anti-trust laws were actually somewhat enforced. Nowadays, not so much.

They won't. Those lawsuits took years, and MS have been practicing the same shady business model for years since. It only got worse. Probably since the EU (and other governing bodies) are busy fighting Google, Apple and Facebook.

Teams on Linux is already broken af, we won't even notice we can't open links

Lucky for you, teams will install edge for you on Linux!

What if I tell you, that Teams has edge integrated, since it is basically a browser with custom UI

You can find it on flathub :)

They lost something similar. But the US is different now. We don't hold companies accountable anymore. Look at the food industry, look at Facebook, Google, etc.

Didn't Microsoft lose a large anti trust court case about this shit for internet explorer?

Yes and no.

MS made Internet explorer uninstallable and made it even if you could install Netscape you couldn't set it as the default app. Forcing teams to open internet explorer edge is more in line with iPhones and Android. Both phone OSs will let you install different browsers, but opening links from most 1st party apps opens safari or chrome with no real way to change it. It's one of the worst things about phones and now MS is trying to move Windows that direction.

It's going to get worse. Once corporations start to adopt edge MS will move to make browser office the only office. Clicking a .doc in edge will redirect to browser word 365. Saving already defaults to the cloud, soon we'll have "virtual downloads" that save your download to your cloud and you can only meaningfully interact with it via edge.

We need more legislation and regulations allowing software choice for all platforms. We've never been allowed to own software, now we can't even buy a perpetual license. Soon we won't be allowed to have a copy of software saved on our devices, and files made by that software won't be allowed on our computers either.

Did you try to use the Progressive Web App (PWA) version of Teams instead? It is not perfect either, but I find it more useful that way than running it somewhere in a browser's tab.

Even if they used Firefox or any other browser as a base I wouldn't use it, it started as a decent browser but they just had to stuff it with cruft, they even took things they were offering as an extension and baked it in instead of letting people choose what they want to install on their PC.

of course they had to go with chromium and just become another dicksucker.

Interesting take to put Google higher on the list of fuckery corps than Microsoft, but what goes around comes around in different ways. I'd make a guess it's more likely they're just doing what they do, going full embrace and extend on chromium to dilute Chrome's dominance. Unfortunately they determined that means going full Internet Explorer with their integration into the OS (which they get to play technicality over with antitrust concerns since their 'apps' are what default it rather than an underlying OS 'default' that this effectively deprecates).

Cheers.

Just as soon as Linux sales people wine and dine the CTO better than the Microsoft ones. Usually it's not IT people. If it was up to IT in my experience, Jan from Accounting would be using a tiling VM on Linux.

I get to use a Mac for work. But they still require me to use Chrome, so...

In my case won't matter company has deplyed Edge on all company Mac's for better integration apparently. (͡•_ ͡• )

Just consider that by using Ubuntu inside Windows, they're trying to make you not install Linux on hardware itself.

Embrace, extend. What's the next one? Oh yeah, extinguish.

You're going to want to remove other parts of Windows as well, such as Windows Explorer, the Win32 runtime, the kernel, etc.

(In other words, install Linux.)

Edge is so invasive now that people have developed tools to remove it, for example https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil. And you still have to run them after any update that ends up reinstalling Edge! It's like removing malware, but it's even worse because this gets reinstalled by updates from the same legitimate authority that provides your security updates. This recently got me so mad that I decided to quit the games that don't run on Linux and replace Windows with Linux on my gaming PC.

It's a shame I can't avoid Microsoft at work as well.

Removing internet explorer caused a whole lot of issues back in the days. I'd wager some programs would still depend on Edge nowadays and ignore your default browser.

Be glad you didn't use Skyoe for business. One of the shiitest experiences of my career. Comparitively teams is a godsend.

Every iteration of Microsoft IM clients has gotten so close to being usable to have some executive mess it up with bloat and then abandon it for something new that is missing even basic features and start the cycle all over again.

Whats your favorite alternative?

Even more, Debian support powerpc and others architectures, can you imagine apple and Microsoft to always support x86, as Microsoft dropped x86_32 and apple dropped powerpc and now x86

It's probably not the same people. Microsoft is a big company

Because that was just to weaken the arguments of SWE asking their company to allow Linux laptops.

As a wise man once said: Developers! Developers! Developers!

Microsoft will appeal to developers, because those are techy enough to realistically leave their platform and because developers supply the value to their platform. Normal users can be milked, though.

This is basically what all those reddit clients did on phones, now coming for us to enjoy on desktop.

Is there something similar for Apple and Google products? I'd also like to set another default browser on iOS and Google apps also force-open their links in Chrome.

I do prefer Edge at my work and same feature but for Outlook feels very weird and unintuitive and I can not see any use for having Outlook on the browser sidebar when I open link from desktop Outlook. Disabled that feature after it started to annoy me too much.

Used LTSC, eventually ended on linux, its quite usable now :)

...what

Don't worry, it already installed it when you started Teams. That's why it takes five minutes to start up.

Like you have a choice in 98% of workplaces.

Sounds like Microsoft Defender/other AV sandbox running it to check for malware, Ive seen it happen in the wild in a similar fashion. A client was running software with phone home licensing and the vendor auto disabled the license after AV sandbox runs touched their license server from the sandbox IPs. I think Quark also had that issue for another ckient, but that was almost a decade ago.

Trust me I'm not willingly using teams.

With every update Edge gets more and more useless features to sell their own services. Edge is an advertising platform for MS more than anything else.

Firefox on the other hand.. I just install and be done with it.

1. Microsoft isn't a good steward with my data.
2. Microsoft has historically been really bad for locking in a subscriber base by adding proprietary features.
3. Ignoring the choice for opening web pages in a default browser is the skeeziest of skeezy.

Teams should open links in the default browser, that's why windows give you the option to set one. If that's Edge for you, great. But others shouldn't have to suffer under MS' shitty decision making process.

It seems so :)

I think Edge isnt all that bad. But for most its just this whole idea of beeing forced to use it, i think :)