Setting a default browser could get easier in future Windows 11 versions

But it probably won't stop the OS from reminding you that Edge exists.

See full article...

 

[Chasbo]

Microsoft:

 

[lurknomore]

Can we just get the Win7 UI back ? Port the low-level improvements, but just admit your mistake and go back to 7, or even XP. It was so much nicer than the bland flat windows we have to stare at all day.
Please ?

 

[Coppercloud]

Hey everyone! Alright, after 5 or 10 years of trying really hard we finally achieved critical fuck. That's right, we don't think we could fuck this up any more, so perhaps it's time to start rolling back to a previous slightly-less-fucked version while everyone re-aclimates to just how difficult were making the OS to use. Don't worry, once they've adjusted we'll be able to continue fucking everything up again in a few years, I'm sure.

 

[SubWoofer2]

Great! I can use Outlook Desktop instead of M365 Outlook as a Web Service/OWS/ OWA!

Outlook on the Web does not allow File/Print/Table view to print a list of the contents of a mailbox. Web browser view prints just one page, the page you see on the screen. Doesn't matter if the mailbox has 4,000 items in it, you can't print that as a list, just one screen grab at a time. For 4,000 items. (Mailbox export not permitted and triggers an alarm).

Outlook on the Web does not display "time of email" for any email older than four weeks. Apparently users no longer need to refer to old emails. It's a records management painpoint.

Outlook on the Web has no "automatically spell check before sending". Just aargh.

The issue here is not Microsoft allowing users to associate filetypes to competitors programs (apps). The issue is Microsoft allowing users to associate filetypes to Microsoft's own more usable and functional programs.

I so want to have "Open M365 Outlook" associate to "Open with Outlook for Desktop."

 

[caution live frogs]

It's not exactly acrobat in your browser. It's the sane exact PDF viewer UI only with an acrobat badge in the lower right hand corner.

I imagine it would handle forms ok because acrobat does.

----

WE have come a long way from Vista days when Adobe was trying to go after microsoft for embrace and extend of the PDF format even though microsoft just added PDF support to office and produced bog standard PDFs

MS press release says "powering the Microsoft Edge built-in PDF reader with the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine". Further details on the announcement page says "Natively embedding Acrobat PDF technology in Microsoft Edge." It's not just a simple re-skin with an Adobe logo tacked on. The PDF engine currently in Edge not only refuses to load anything built in LiveCycle, but it also screws up form fields (and in some cases, opening in Edge then saving to desktop actually causes the form to be broken in Acrobat - cannot sign the form, it refuses to save and throws an error.) Using the Adobe engine would fix this.

 

[Calenhad]

Hopefully this will reduce the Edge nagging too. But I am not holding my breath.

A Windows version without Edge would be a pure blessing.

But this is a welcome "feature" roll-back.

 

[aerogems]

Slackware, with a SCSI CD drive.

(Having actually fought my way through such an install ca. 2004 or so, the pain levels feel comparable)

Pbbbt! I downloaded via dialup, a full Slackware distro in floppy images and installed it back around 1995. Back when having to manually enter in modeline values for monitors into your XFree86Config file was more or less standard fair. Around 2004 I had moved away from Linux because it just got to be too much hassle to turn in college assignments using Linux, but at least until around the time XP came out I was running Gentoo. I have to say, the experience with Slackware made it a lot easier to understand what was going on in the instructions to install Gentoo.

Damn kids these days! Probably never even have to see a command line! Who's going to carry on the VIM vs Emacs debate into the next generation? Who will get stupid jokes about /dev/null? Pipes and redirects were already on the way out of common use by the time I got involved in Linux. Stupid brats! Get off my lawn!

 

[Deleted member 826873]

(Filling out forms in any viewer other than Acrobat consistently breaks form field automation, strips out any scripting, flattens the form making entries impossible to batch-export, and so on. I really and truly hate how bad people are at forms.)

People wouldn't use other PDF readers if Acrobat Reader weren't so huge and slow.

 

[LordDaMan]

MS press release says "powering the Microsoft Edge built-in PDF reader with the Adobe Acrobat PDF engine". Further details on the announcement page says "Natively embedding Acrobat PDF technology in Microsoft Edge." It's not just a simple re-skin with an Adobe logo tacked on. The PDF engine currently in Edge not only refuses to load anything built in LiveCycle, but it also screws up form fields (and in some cases, opening in Edge then saving to desktop actually causes the form to be broken in Acrobat - cannot sign the form, it refuses to save and throws an error.) Using the Adobe engine would fix this.

I misspoke there. I meant to say it's the same exact UI there, only with adobe's PDF engine powering it. My bad

I have the flag enabled for the acrobat renderer in the latest edge:

 

[tooki]

File associations is one of the things that, IMHO, Windows continues to do quite poorly compared to macOS. I love that on the Mac, a file has both a filetype association, but also an optional application association, meaning that, for example, there is a default association for PDF files, but nonetheless a specific PDF file can be associated with a specific PDF viewer that isn’t the default. (I am fairly certain that Windows and NTFS actually have the plumbing to support this, but it just doesn’t get used…) This is extraordinarily useful for common file types like images and text files, where you might want this particular C source file to open in Visual Studio Code and another to open in MPLAB X or Xcode. Or for one PNG to open in Photoshop, and another in Preview.

The other way in which macOS handles this way better is how the LaunchServices service dynamically creates the hierarchy of file associations based on what disks/servers are mounted. It knows that the disk you just plugged in contains an app capable of opening a particular filetype and silently merges it into the database of file associations, enabling portable applications to be launched by opening a file. Windows just throws its hands in the air and says “I don’t know, you figure it out.”

 

[jdunn0]

Starting with Windows Vista or 7 (I don't recall which), Microsoft created an Associations system where a program would register what File Extensions / URL Schemes the program could handle and there was a Control Panel UI would show those programs and give you the option of making that program the default for all the extensions it supports or let you pick just the extensions you wanted it to handle.

There was an API call that programs could call to open the Control Panel UI page for their program so the user could quickly set their File Associations.
Microsoft removed this API in Windows 10.

It appears this "Settings deep link URI for applications to take their users directly to the appropriate location in Settings for the user to change their defaults." is just a replacement API to let programs open the Settings Associations UI.

It's insane how long ago Microsoft introduced the Settings App as a replacement for Control Panel with Windows 10 and are still missing a lot of things that Control Panel supported for years, even simple APIs like this.

I can understand the logic of rewriting components to more modern codebases that are easier to maintain, in that sense the change of the Control Panel to Settings App, New Taskbar, New Context Menu, etc. makes some since but with the amount of developers that Microsoft has, one would think they could manage to do that and get far better feature parity before release then they have so far.

 

[wawah]

Firefix pin itself to the taskbar?

 

[pjcamp]

The only vendor that makes "unrequested modifications to a user's choices" on my computer is Microsoft. Several defaults got reset to Microsoft the last time I allowed Windows to update.

 

[pjcamp]

I am so glad I moved off Windows years ago... no longer at Microsoft's non-existent mercy and competence.

If that is what you're trying to avoid, your only real choice is Linux. And while Linux has a lot of attractive features, until you can do most management tasks without dropping to command line it will only be a niche product. Which is not to say that I'm not going that direction once I retire and no long have an employer forcing me to use Microsoft products.

 

[psarhjinian]

If that is what you're trying to avoid, your only real choice is Linux. And while Linux has a lot of attractive features, until you can do most management tasks without dropping to command line it will only be a niche product.

PowerShell says "Hi!"

 

[panton41]

The only vendor that makes "unrequested modifications to a user's choices" on my computer is Microsoft. Several defaults got reset to Microsoft the last time I allowed Windows to update.

That's because Microsoft has technological barriers preventing that.

Back in the bad old days of Windows XP simply going to the wrong website meant you now had a new program installed (thanks ActiveX and ubiquitous Admin account), that's taken over handling common filetypes and also preventing you from changing those associations, removing the program or even turning the system off because it's even hijacked shutting down.

 

[Ten Wind]

their own nag nag nag for edge is so damned annoying

It's better than Google at least, which I'll grant isn't a high bar. I've seen the edge popup maybe twice. Chrome though, every single fucking time I go to a Google web service, and there are a lot of them.

 

[karlhendrikse]

If they're not going to fix it by putting it back to how it was in Windows XP, where there was a big list of file extensions and you could pick a program to use for each one, then color me uninterested.

Like, what is a "browser"? What business has Windows with considering whether a given application is a "browser"? I have no mental model for how it actually works now. It's mess.

 

[jdale]

Jokes on you, Adobe merged Acrobat into Edge

Mixed feelings. Maybe it will fix Edge's horrible handling of bookmarks. Why does that pane auto-hide? I want it open all the time (in fact I want it to open automatically and stay open).

On the other hand, in-app purchases are not a plus. And Acrobat Reader crashes constantly. So I expect to continue doing most of my PDF reading in Firefox.

 

[aggri1]

File associations is one of the things that, IMHO, Windows continues to do quite poorly compared to macOS. <snip>

Having Type & Creator codes (hi ResEdit!) makes using a part of the filename metadata field to store the type and creator seem totally stupid. But I don't know whether Mac OS X respects Type/Creator codes - does it, or does it have a different system? It dumped a few really nice Mac OS features. Grrr.

Likewise not being able to rename (or move) an open file. Why not, Windows? Surely you're not using the file path as the thing by which you're referencing this collection of bits I'm re-arranging...

 

[Kressilac]

Perhaps the one bit of industry cooperation that we can all agree on is that when you set a default browser, all of the other browsers should shut up. Chrome and Firefox are just as bad as Edge at nagging you to switch. I made up my fucking mind, leave me alone. I'll come to you if I want to change browsers.

 

[Kanten]

My favorite moment was the one time Windows tried to talk me out of setting Outlook instead of Mail on a company system.

 

[prh99]

I thought they made it hard on purpose to keep from switching away from Edge etc. Bad enough it's spyware. Also thanks to Steam's compatibility layer the games I care about work on Linux, so Linux Mint will be my PC's next OS when 10 looses support. Been using for a few years on my laptop.

 

[RhoSpider]

I’ve been using Edge unironically since early 2022. To be honest, I quite like it.

 

[Kage_]

I don't get it, "Open With" is actually one of the few right click menu items that MS didn't hide behind a second click on Win 11 (probably the most irritating UI "improvement" IMHO). It works just like it did on Win 10, there is an option to "always use this application to open this file type" which sets the default app

While there are several things I like about Win 11, the right click context menu is very annoying. What is the point of burying settings behind settings?

 

[JamesKnma]

I never, ever, want to use Edge for pdf viewing. Acrobat Reader is already not great - I can't imagine using it in Edge.

 

[moosemaimer]

Jokes on you, Adobe merged Acrobat into Edge

Funny you say that, I just had to install the stand-alone Acrobat Reader on someone's machine here, because nothing else, not Edge, not Firefox, not PowerPDF, could open a document they received properly. If it wasn't missing entirely, it was halfway off the page.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

AND DAMMIT, bring back the ONE list of "background apps" that you can toggle on/off, instead of the monstrosity the app setup is now, where you have to go into each app to change that setting.

Also - stop changing my start menu's setup every damned update. And it's not even right after the update. It's like 2 days later, BAM - completely different start menu.

I literally just flipped every last "background app" off with a single switch and haven't noticed a single negative result of it. When I want to run any of those apps, I just run them. This also changed in Windows 11? Well nuts to that... Of course, there's a lot more to optimizing a Windows machine than just what's in the app list, sadly. That's where autoruns comes in handy.

 

[fafalone]

What's this article talking about... there's no official pinning API; are they going to add prompts to the undocumented one? No... that would impact their own abusive pinning; so non-MS apps will get a new pinning API with a prompt, while Microsoft plays games to block 3rd party apps from having the features of their own apps? ... from Raymond Chen's blog:

Some debugging of the tertiary installer revealed that it was trying to pin itself to the taskbar automatically on install. This is one of those things that installers love to do, probably second only to silently taking over popular file extensions. This particularly program’s approach was to find the vtable for the internal interface that Explorer uses to pin items to the taskbar, and then call the fifth function in the vtable.


The application compatibility issue was that we changed the signature of the fifth function in the vtable, so they were calling the function with the old signature, and the implementation was therefore misinterpreting the parameters, and as a bonus insult, it also corrupted the stack because the number of parameters also changed.


The solution was to restore the function to its original signature and have it just return without doing anything, decorated with comments to ensure that the method stays at the same slot in the vtable for eternity. Meanwhile, the new functionality was moved to a different location. (I’m not telling where.)

It's a shame comments close so damn quickly on that site, because good god is that just begging for someone to tell. The old one he's talking about is IPinnedList::Modify (Vista) and IPinnedList2::Modify (Win7-early Win10), the 5th vtable entry counting IUnknown's 3.
In Windows 10 1809, it got another new GUID... and somebody misread whatever comment got left... because the old one, now called LegacyModify, sits at the 5th vtable entry not counting IUnknown, but it's indeed been patched to do nothing. The new Modify that works is vtable entry 17 (absolute), and it takes an additional argument, the caller, which must be set to PLMC_EXPLORER (0x04). These are all undocumented COM interfaces obtainable by creating the also-undocumented TaskbandPin object. There's a similar one for the Start Menu, although the StartMenuPin object is documented with the IStartMenuPinnedList interface, which lets you unpin only. But it also implements the undocumented IStartMenuPin interface, which has a method to pin.

Microsoft also trashed all the documented APIs for setting file associations; it was rather ridiculous even running as admin wasn't good enough, even forcing a prompt wasn't good enough, which made little sense because anyone malicious would just use undocumented methods. Good to know Windows 11 broke it even more and now they're touting slightly unfucking it (just a little) as a "feature". At this rate maybe by Windows 14 we'll get back to having all the features we've lost since 7.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

Can we just get the Win7 UI back ? Port the low-level improvements, but just admit your mistake and go back to 7, or even XP. It was so much nicer than the bland flat windows we have to stare at all day.
Please ?

I love bland rectangles, and I actually actively despise the "curved corner" look of their current UI. I'm not going to cut myself on virtual corners, I promise you MS. Now give me back the full screen real estate.

 

[Apotheoun]

OH THANK GOD

No, REALLY. As an administrator who develops and deploys Adobe forms for our program, you have NO FLIPPING IDEA how many times I have had to talk people through the incredibly difficult task of opening a PDF in Acrobat.

"No, you opened it in Edge. No, your PDF viewer is not outdated, that's what you see when a form like that is opened in Edge. No, there is nothing wrong with the form, you just need to open it in Adobe. Nope, you downloaded the form, but you double-clicked it and it opened up in Edge again. You can't fill the form out and sign it in Edge, you need to do it in Adobe."

It absolutely sucks and some people just do not understand how they can possibly have two programs that can open a PDF. The old Adobe plug-in for IE trained a generation of office drones that opening it in browser meant it was open in Adobe, and talking them through the differences is like talking your grandmother through a bare-metal Linux install over the phone.

(Filling out forms in any viewer other than Acrobat consistently breaks form field automation, strips out any scripting, flattens the form making entries impossible to batch-export, and so on. I really and truly hate how bad people are at forms.)

Remember in Windows 8, how you literally could not print PDF's in the default PDF app? It just wasn't a supported feature.

That's around the time I started working in End User Support for a large company. For some strange reason, it's also about the time I lost hope in humanity. Weird.

 

[pedro-pierre]

I know I'm and "edge case" having used Edge since it switched to Chromium
I just want to point out that Google is also quite obnoxious with its notifications every time I access Google Maps or Gmail on Edge, asking me if I want to use Chrome instead.

 

[scottwsx96]

PowerShell says "Hi!"

I'm pretty sure @pjcamp isn't saying that you can't do a lot of things via commandline in Windows; instead, they are saying that there are many things in Linux that cannot be done via the UI.

 

[scottwsx96]

I know I'm and "edge case" having used Edge since it switched to Chromium
I just want to point out that Google is also quite obnoxious with its notifications every time I access Google Maps or Gmail on Edge, asking me if I want to use Chrome instead.

Agreed. I also appear to be in the minority and actually like Edge at work vs. Chrome. I'm under no illusions about what Edge is or what it represents for Microsoft; however, Google is doing essentially the same exact things with Chrome.

FWIW, I'm a Firefox user on my personal laptop.

 

[scottwsx96]

My favorite moment was the one time Windows tried to talk me out of setting Outlook instead of Mail on a company system.

Besides the obvious point of your statement, it's also funny because Windows Mail is bad. Very, very, very bad.

 

[phoenix_rizzen]

Great! I can use Outlook Desktop instead of M365 Outlook as a Web Service/OWS/ OWA!

Outlook on the Web does not allow File/Print/Table view to print a list of the contents of a mailbox. Web browser view prints just one page, the page you see on the screen. Doesn't matter if the mailbox has 4,000 items in it, you can't print that as a list, just one screen grab at a time. For 4,000 items. (Mailbox export not permitted and triggers an alarm).

Outlook on the Web does not display "time of email" for any email older than four weeks. Apparently users no longer need to refer to old emails. It's a records management painpoint.

Outlook on the Web has no "automatically spell check before sending". Just aargh.

You can enable inline spell check, grammar check, and a bunch of other MS Editor features in the online version of Outlook. And you can enable a delay of up to 10 seconds between pressing "Send" and the message actually being sent. Combined, you get most of the benefit of "run through a spell check before sending".

Doesn't help with the other 999 cuts that you have to endure while using Outlook, though. God, that's a horrible piece of software, whether it's standalone, online, on a phone, anywhere.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Starting with Windows Vista or 7 (I don't recall which), Microsoft created an Associations system where a program would register what File Extensions / URL Schemes the program could handle […]

As far as I remember, the registry allowed this at least since XP, and it still works.
The problem here is Microsoft apps stealing associations without asking, or asking sneaky questions each and every time their apps are updated.

I would really appreciate the third choice here when Microsoft stuff asks permission to steal associations:

Do you want Edge to be your default browser?

• Yes
• No
• WTF, I said NO last time and you keep f* asking. It is NO FOREVER. NO. Capeesh?

Option 3 nicely sets a flag in the registry to remember my choice, so next time I won’t be asked again.

 

[Dark Jaguar]

As far as I remember, the registry allowed this at least since XP, and it still works.
The problem here is Microsoft apps stealing associations without asking, or asking sneaky questions each and every time their apps are updated.

I would really appreciate the third choice here when Microsoft stuff asks permission to steal associations:

Do you want Edge to be your default browser?

• Yes
• No
• WTF, I said NO last time and you keep f* asking. It is NO FOREVER. NO. Capeesh?

Option 3 nicely sets a flag in the registry to remember my choice, so next time I won’t be asked again.

It's not even the question that gets me, it's when the OS just sets it to that automatically without even bothering to ask after a certain amount of time, or resets, have passed.

 

[scottwsx96]

It's not even the question that gets me, it's when the OS just sets it to that automatically without even bothering to ask after a certain amount of time, or resets, have passed.

Is this something that happens? I haven't tried Win 11 yet, but on my Win 10 PC I set Firefox to the default browser long ago and it's stayed that way through multiple feature upgrades and the initial Edge installation.

 

[SubWoofer2]

You can enable inline spell check, grammar check, and a bunch of other MS Editor features in the online version of Outlook. And you can enable a delay of up to 10 seconds between pressing "Send" and the message actually being sent. Combined, you get most of the benefit of "run through a spell check before sending".

Doesn't help with the other 999 cuts that you have to endure while using Outlook, though. God, that's a horrible piece of software, whether it's standalone, online, on a phone, anywhere.

Yes, I'm running with those all already but still miss the "spell check on send" function. Gods do I miss it. There's a lag in inline spell check, sometimes of minutes before the wiggly underline "hoi! over here! Check this" appears. The process of alerting the writer should be automatic.

About 1 in 5 of my emails benefit from the 10-second lag function when sending.

Tables. I so much want to print tables. Am currently verifying invoices against timesheet data by checking if any emails were sent after employees logged out, so I need to see what time the emails were sent, each day for the past year. If only a "time sent" column was visible. This auditor is embarassed about charging the client for the time-waster of opening individual emails to verify time sent.