No particular advice here, I just want to point to the fact that bing allows users to search their organization documents (office 365 files) when using bing [1] when connected with their org account.
This feature is named "Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365". It's not mentionned in the article.
See original ms doc article for details [2].
So it's not just a way to force users to use bing, it's also a way to push this feature in front of them.
> By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search, including being able to access relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar. Microsoft Search is part of Microsoft 365 and is turned on by default for all Microsoft apps that support it.
I personally HATE features like this. I want a web search to return web results and file system search to return files. Novel behavior that mixes in unexpected search results (ie. web results when searching from the Windows 10 start menu) is deleterious and I do my best to train my brain to skip over those unexpected options.
It's more of intranet plus internet search. It may appear like filesystem but that is because it's searching internal services like SharePoint to the company that has chosen this integration.
It's also not mixed in, last I remember using this feature it was displayed in a banner section and made it really obvious these results came from a different sources.
Yup - Microsoft employee here but unaffiliated with that team. I love it, frankly. For large orgs that have thousands of SharePoint sites going back years(1), it's pretty fantastic. What would have been a dozen emails across two days to find some random doc explaining how to do something is now five to ten minutes of poking things into Bing.
1. TAM for this may be on the order of triple digits only for all I know, but if you work in a 50k+ knowledge worker org it's great.
This may be difficult to grasp. But likely where you are seeing this feature is in a corporate setting where you are the "end user", not the paying customer. The corporate entity that is making use of this feature is who you should be protesting the use to, not Microsoft.
Still no reason to force-push this onto users. If you are going to set up and maintain SharePoint servers and what not, you can surely change that browser preference yourselves, no?
We had that back like 10 years ago when google provided a tool (I forgot it's name, Google desktop search?) which scanned and indexed files locally. It was accessible through a shortcut, I laid mine to double-Ctrl and upon invocation it prompted a search bar
It was so great in search quality, number of formats it could index and performance that at one day I index the whole company file share. People showed up next to me and I rediscovered files which would have been lost otherwise.
This tool also integrated after configuration with the browser which issued an invocation to localhost to integrate local search results. As this was widely regarded as a terrible security feature to potentially tell google all about local files, reception of that feature was poor. This feature was the only incentive for google to provide the tool and therefore the tool got quickly axed.
I assumed the reason the tool got axed was because in short order, Microsoft released its own desktop search, and then integrated it into Windows (Vista?); and Apple added Spotlight to OS X. In retrospect it’s a little surprising to me that in just a couple of years, the notion of indexing your entire hard drive went from novel to taken for granted.
I think desktop search existed before Google's. But not a lot of people used it in my experience. I found Google's to be fantastic,a and it was nice it showed results in line with the mostly used search engine. I was surprised when they discontinued it too, and suspect it was some "gentlemen's (anti-consumer) agreement" between companies around turf.
I think Google Desktop even injected results into Google's main page via a "layered service provider" at the TCP level - back before we all used SSL for everything.
I used it to search my Thunderbird messages. It was much faster than Thunderbird's internal search. Luckily Mozilla improved its algorithm and its fast enough now.
Its not desktop it indexes your org files on intranet sites. If you are signed in with you corp account to bing all searches also bring back relevant internal org info.
I think if the installer explains it clesrly and transparently then its fine. It should be entirely opt-in. Matter of fact default search engine should be entirely opt-in on first time use.
Microsoft needs to really do a better job with these sort of decisions to make sure they arent stepping on a landmine.
Searching from the address bar, and changing the user's default search experience aren't the same thing.
If Microsoft was adding Bing as a search provider this wouldn't be nearly as controversial. Instead they're removing the user's preference and replacing it with their own, without consent, during a regular update of an unrelated product.
It is basically adware behaviour. Microsoft's self-rationalisation isn't relevant.
It's worth pointing out that the installer doing this is a business-only installer. So while, yes, it is removing the user's preference, it is also a corporate tool for enforcing corporate policies on corporate machines.
The issue here is that the install is not optional when it should be: admins should have the choice. But IMO it's debatable whether end users (of their corporate machines) should.
I can't speak for anyone else by my Org's recommended browser is Chrome and it comes preinstalled along with a bunch of shitty Extensions you can't remove because Chrome respects GPO.
It's vaguely reminiscent of browsers in the early 2000s, it just needs Gator.
Shit like this literally undoes every bit of goodwill you earn. Much like replacing user's wallpaper for Win7 EOL (why you didn't just put notification text like "Windows $VERSION - End Of Life - Unsupported" in the bottom corner instead is beyond me).
I mean, I WANT to see the new MS, which is really present on the developer tools and azure side of the business. Windows and Office teams seem to be bent on destroying that at every chance... it's time to fire some upper and mid-level managers that have these attitudes and make these decisions.
I'm getting skeptical about the developer tools. The cynic in me says it's just a ploy to gain market share before forcing everything to an online subscription like they're doing with Office.
Things like Visual Studio Online, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, etc. worry me. Once everything's a subscription and you're paying to spin your mouse wheel, you lose the ability to spend time in lieu of spending money.
I think it'll happen slowly, but it'll happen. Eventually they'll have a complete, online only development solution that's charged based on usage. Development on local tools will get de-emphasized so they lag behind and suck by comparison and there will be "donations" of subscriptions to educational institutions to ensure no one ever learns to deal with, or even think of, a local development environment.
I think it's ok to have ongoing costs like IntelliJ's products. I don't like the way they screw you with an outdated perpetual license if you drop your subscription, but it's a hell of a lot better than something like Visual Studio Online which is literally pay per hour.
Based on the willingness to pay astronomical markup on CI minutes, I wouldn't be shocked to see people paying $1000 / year (no joke) to use VSO.
It will happen only if they develop a bulletproof self-hosted environment for corporate clients. Otherwise the enterprise clientele will never trust writing code at an online environment that they don't own.
What's surprised me, coming back (obliged to for work) to MS Windows after 15 years away, is how the WM can't even put windows back where you left them, nor do basics like "always on top" (I swear, even recently, it used to do that; but it's application specific now). And how in generally great tools like OneNote you can't rotate a page printed to it (there's a workaround though, snip the page as an image [it's already an image!] then you're allowed to rotate), nor is there grouping of selections (ink in particular).
Third party tools have fixes for all this, and more.
I surely can't stand Windows for work. Some companies unfortunately force it in the work environment due to IT not willing to handle Linux. Better ones allow using Linux.
Well, when you've got over a hundred people at your company, and 20 of them are developers, and an IT staff (non-development) of 3 people, change doesn't come easy.
Aside: I may be able to switch in a couple months... I'm literally working on isolating a windows tether in the primary app I'm working on into an isolated service. After that, it'll be separated enough that I won't have to support it. We also have some other projects that are k8s/docker/linux as the target, and some of the contractors are using macs. So may be able to make a case for a switch.
edit: My experience (elearning, banking, govt) has been no companies supporting desktop users on linux. Though some VM deskop use for software on non-windows servers.
Change? Introducing a Microsoft ecosystem would be the change. Who worked first at that company: the developers or the sysadmin/sales/customer support/management/cleaning/finance/HR/recruitment/... people? Assuming that a company with 20% of its workforce being developers actually sells a software product or does contractual development, the first few employees were probably all developers working on whatever they pleased. At some point, someone makes the decision to make all developers work on something they don't please when they propose enforcing a monoculture.
Up until about a year and a half ago when the company started working on a couple software solutions the company was print focused for several decades... over I believe about 10 years they got into smaller hardware print/scanning solutions, using 3-4 developers and 1-2 IT staff... They've been using Windows apps, with their core developers C# focused for most of that time... MS was the most natural fit for their environment.
So, the monoculture was there when the new projects started.. the majority of developers and staff are from/in a windows and microsoft centric world view.
Moving stuff away from that has been very hard, and something I've worked hard to make an effort on... I'm not sure where your dogma comes from, but Linux 20 years ago was not what it's been for the last decade even.
> edit: My experience (elearning, banking, govt) has been no companies supporting desktop users on linux.
It could partially be to maintaining a desktop OS. GPO / SCCM helps manage computers with scale. I'm sure there are Linux tools, but suddenly you have 2x more work to secure, patch and keep up with the best practices for your workstations. Moreover GPO and SCCM is IT friendly way of managing computers.
I happen to support a few legacy applications that are tethered to windows server deployments. Not every workplace can just replace working systems with software that tool literally years for many people to write.
Beyond this, I work in a very security conscious environment (election services) and there is security software at several levels that if I'm not running in the office, I wouldn't be able to connect to the network. When you work in an environment that works for various state and county agencies with sensitive data, there are restrictions that come with the job. I've also worked in banking and that has similar or even greater access. I've worked some security tools/software in banking.
I don't do much... I've been using Steam a little more since the switch though... I have nerve damage from about a decade ago, and fast-twitch reflexes aren't what they used to be.
Not games that I enjoy ;-) ... lol. I really like FPS mostly, and these days, I only stand to get my ass handed to me. Most games I liked are similar...
I do more card/board/table games now, and wouldn't mind doing more of that... don't get the same enjoyment online from that though.
The Edge team is trying really hard to create a "we do things right" story around their project. They must be annoyed that a different department squanders the goodwill they're working so hard to create with stuff like this.
If you're a team in a big company and you're trying to optimize for long-term success, you better have the power to stop other teams that try to drive short-term success with campaigns that hurt you.
Google doesn't really have any right to complain as they've had Google Chrome and the Google search bar as drive by installs in third party software installers
Microsoft pulls a consumer-hostile move, and the first thought of a lot of commenters on here (not just you) is, "what is the impact on Google?"
Who cares about the company? Stop messing with my computer behind my back.
200 years from now, someone on Mars will be reading the headline "Google Drones Lethally Injecting iPhone Owners On Sight", and there'll still be people on HN who's first reaction is to wonder whether or not that counts as anti-competitive towards Apple.
This is an enterprise system, though; it won't be running on your computer, but business computers. Still bad, but less bad – arguably on the level of Google pushing its search engine in Chrome and Firefox to begin with.
People are going to get fed up with all these stupid, user-hostile tricks coming from the major tech companies. I'm not just talking about this one incident. There's a bar that's not only lowering, but crashing fast.
Ploys like these tend to be a symptom from companies about to become obsoleted by innovators who actually understand and give a shit about their target audience.
I have been hearing that for a decade. I remember the time when installing anything would change your browser's search engine. Those companies are still alive and going.
What eventually hurt their market space wasn't some trendy hippie customer oriented startup but other "lesser evil" big companies with bigger pockets.
I think people are slowly getting used to all the tricks the major tech companies use and they are going to see this as more and more acceptable and even perfectly normal. And those companies know this. I'm sure they pay very qualified people to tell them how far and how fast they can take it to get what they want without truly alienating the people.
The stuff that many people find perfectly acceptable today would have been absolutely outrageous 10-15 years ago.
There's nothing hippie about capitalizing on the opportunity created when a market leader alienates its customers by letting its products rot with pain points.
In some ways Google is just as sinister as Microsoft ever was. It's not any sort of intentional master plan, it's simply what happens when you lose sight of the user. Some of the crap being pulled by today's incumbents... They might as well put a little imp in the box that beats you with a whip to drive the behavior they want from you.
All of them began as tiny startups with a couple of smart people and disruptive tech... take a long enough view and I'm still optimistic the cycle will continue.
Yes! I believe "the people", in this case the users who are getting abused/exploited/disrespected, need to be more attentive and vocal about borderline illegal behavior of corporations, tech companies included.
It's shame how Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al have behaved in recent years, patronizing and manipulating users on a mass scale with a brazenness and near impunity. (OK, Microsoft deserves some love with VS Code, TypeScript, and other open source goodness, but..)
I'm with your optimistic comment that the pendulum is swinging back. These companies have lost sight of users, what "customer care" means, and they're leaving an increasing gap in the market for more humane service and technology.
> about to become obsoleted by innovators who actually understand and give a shit about their target audience.
A caring innovator is very easily crushed by a platform monopolist. And building your own platform and securing mass adoption is incredibly hard. Microsoft didn't manage it in phones.
A caring innovator is very easily crushed by a platform monopolist.
That's been a common suggestion in tech for years, but I'm not sure it stands up to scrutiny.
Right now, we do most of our graphics work with "young upstarts" like the Affinity suite, because Adobe went all user-hostile and subscription-based. Previously we'd been Creative Suite users.
Every service used to collect payments by every business I have is from the newer generation, not the big banks or PayPals of the world.
We didn't move to Windows 10 but instead we've been experimenting with various other desktop platforms and other devices according to our needs. Previously we were mostly using Windows 7 PCs.
We don't do a lot of "traditional" office document preparation ourselves any more, and the various OSS packages are fine for the occasional spreadsheet or whatever. But among our professional network, there is a lot of use of online collaboration and documentation tools now, and I can hardly think of anyone we work with regularly who is still using MS Office as their main tool for this kind of work.
Basically, at this point, we typically keep a single machine around with a genuine copy of whatever big name software we used to use, for guaranteed compatibility and/or testing purposes, but the 800lb gorillas of the software world have mostly been eliminated from our day-to-day workflows now. Smaller, more flexible businesses like ours certainly are moving away from the traditional monopolies, even if the huge enterprise deployments are slower to do so.
There are no people in this world through the eyes of these companies. They only see "consumers". Walking money-bags. And they'll do whatever they need to to shake as much out of them as they can. Nowhere is there a guarantee that what's best for the user is what generates the most money. It's a system failure.
I just switched to libre despite having 2 different office licenses, because I got way too annoyed with an issue. Basically, at first my excel died in a way that actually set back saves on some of my files. I was surprised this is even possible. Nothing worked to solve the problem except a reinstall, but you can't just reinstall Excel, you need to reinstall the whole package.
I did that, but now there is no simple way anymore to have compartmentalized logins with different licenses on the same system. At least I didn't find one. I'm used to setup directories, servers etc. but this kind of bullshit is extremely off-putting to me.
I think people are missing a key point here . This is included with the pro plus installer which is exclusively a business product. My company installs a bunch of tracking and other crap software on my windows machine in the name of data privacy, security and other bullshit. All it does is makes my i7 laptop with 16 gigs of ram behave like a slow crappy laptop.
So if you have an issue with this complain to your work organization because somebody higher up made a decision to go with Pro plus .
Have you ever tried to 'bing' a python error you've ran into?
This is specifically bad because it's a business product meaning that trying to get work done will only get harder.
I use Bing regularly, I made it my default search engine just for kicks about 2 months ago just to see how terrible it was and for the most part I can't even tell the difference. Sometimes I can't find what I want and then I search Google and it can't find it either. I can think of exactly two times in the last two months when Google found something Bing couldn't. One was when I searched for Hearthstone cardback browser and Bing couldn't find the link to it, but Google did, but it was like halfway down the page. I actually prefer not giving Google any more info about me and still getting decent search results.
Honestly the worst part about Bing is coworkers seeing I use it. It's kind of embarrasing, but it's stupid that it is because it's actually a good search engine.
> the worst part about Bing is coworkers seeing I use it.
I use Bing Images (because I don't like DuckDuckGo's image search) and link people there sometimes, and I used to have a Bing-branded wallpaper just to call attention to that there is a choice. Didn't even work, nobody around me finds that weird, many already use DDG or chose to remain with Google.
Bing seems to have switched away from branding a Bing logo onto their wallpapers, though, so that's no longer a thing.
I moved back to linux (fedora) a while ago, what a relief and what a joy it is compared to Windows.
I use Firefox with duckduckgo search engine, no pages full of ad results like with google nowadays. I cannot think of 1 single reason to install Windows 10 and use Chrome browser, you just bite yourself with that choice.
The primary reason I boot into Windows is to play videogames, especially VR, which just isn't stable on Linux yet. But that's not a bad compromise either; my Windows boot is for companies that are happy to sneak rootkits onto the OS to detect cheaters, and honestly I'm totally okay declaring my Windows partition unsafe, and booting back to a sane OS to do real work.
It's really a shame, because the core OS underneath Windows 10 is fairly solid. It's specifically the user interface and Microsoft's behavior around telemetry and advertising their own products at the expense of the end user that turns me off Windows as a platform. Like, I feel like if they focused on making Windows a solid and boring OS that was so stable and reliable that no other choice made sense, their overall brand image would improve so much. Experiment elsewhere, the OS is not the place to tarnish your users' good will.
This infuriates me insanely. By what right does Microsoft think it is ok to manipulate a third party software by injecting their own code?! This is outright malicious. Malware.
I hope the EU fines them and forces Microsoft to stop such actions (as they forced them to stop bundling IE with Windows a couple of years ago).
It's time these big corporations get broken up. It really is. Stop f*cking with my hardware and the web.
By what right does google set the search engine to begin with? They use their browser's popularity for a competitive advantage and that's legal.
Now, your comment is popular because of the hype train but nobody complains when a linux distro has a non-google default search for chrome or firefox. Microsoft(or any OS maker) has a competitive advantage also by dominating the desktop OS market like Chrome dominates the browser market,the installer gets to configure the browser.
Anyone has the right to bundle 3rd party software and make n installer that configures the software a certain way,even if the config gives them a competitive advantage.
I don't disagree with your comment about corps getting broken up but I disagree with this being your reason. Think of it the other way "It is now illegal to make installers that change default settings of the publisher" that would sound as more of a reason to get worked up over to me.
> By what right does google set the search engine to begin with? They use their browser's popularity for a competitive advantage and that's legal.
I'd say it's customer expectation. The slogan in the Chrome website is: Now more simple, secure, and faster than ever - with help from Google built‑in [0]
So, if I install Chrome I expect Google search to be built-in, and I am okay with that because it was clearly stated on the product page.
Now, when I install Office, which is not a browser to begin with, I don't expect it to change my default search provider.
Exactly. The browser provides a URL bar that is coupled to a search engine. It makes sense for the browser to provide you with a default option for that search engine. A web browser is something that needs to be on every computer; so it makes sense that the OS installs a default web browser.
What doesn't make sense is that some software (office) tampers with your preferences for a (mostly) unrelated piece of software (chrome). That is not office's responsibility.
Do you know how many years and millions of dollars the US government spent prosecuting Microsoft for their belief that " web browser is something that needs to be on every computer"?
That’s, to my knowledge, a pretty big misrepresentation of the case, that from my understanding has quite a few facets.
> Microsoft would terminate Compaq's licence if it removed IE and substituted Netscape, or even if it put the Netscape icon alongside the Explorer one.
Okay, and how do we compare that to the legal trouble microsoft had with setting IE as the default browser. As a customer of course I expect IE to be built in to windows. Yet that wasn't ok.
> but nobody complains when a linux distro has a non-google default search for chrome or firefox.
Nobody complains when a Linux distro bundles a browser with a default search engine set. People would 100% complain if the next Ubuntu update changed the default search engine on an already installed browser from a 3rd-party source. That would not be OK.
You're looking at this from a pure business perspective and skipping over the more basic problems, which are:
- Software in general shouldn't change/reset user preferences without permission.
- Software updates should be consistent and predictable. Updating one program should not change settings in an unrelated program. Updates should not conditionally decide whether or not to install unrelated programs based on non-transparent reasoning.[0]
- Browser extensions should not sneakily change the mechanisms for how preferences are set.[1] Sneakily forcing the user to know that they need to update the extension settings instead of their browser settings is a user-hostile UX antipattern.
It's not about Microsoft or Google's rights, it's about the users' rights, and about building a sensible UX that works for real users. As a user, I believe strongly that my word processor should not be messing with my browser settings. I would feel the exact same way if a Linux install of LibreOffice changed my default search in Chrome to DuckDuckGo.
[0]: > New installations of Office 365 ProPlus and updated installs will include the extension, as long as the default search engine in Chrome is not set to Bing.
[1]: > Office users will also be able to disable Bing as the default search engine through the extension’s settings.
The difference here is that Microsoft is bypassing existing user consent mechanisms of their own making, and repeatedly disrespecting user choice.
If as a user, you change back to DuckDuckGo, your next Office patch cycle will “re-Bing” you in a month.
Google Chrome does not do that. If you express your intent to use another search provider, it sticks. Likewise, there is a clear and reliable way to make that choice via policy. This Bing thing has a convoluted and unreliable workaround.
It’s in Microsoft’s documentation as of right now. You don’t really know until they do it, as Microsoft doesn’t necessarily do what they document.
> Version 2002 is the first version of Office 365 ProPlus that will install this extension. Version 2002 is expected to be released in Monthly Channel in early March 2020 and will be available in Monthly Channel (Targeted) shortly before then. After that, the extension will then be included in releases of Semi-Annual (Targeted) and Semi-Annual Channel.
It’s part of the as built configuration of the browser. Just like how Bing is the default for Edge, or Google for Safari.
It’s a design choice that has become a de facto standard, as nobody wants to wade through an onboarding questionnaire for your browser.
This is different, it’s modifying an as-configured configuration and linking it to the update process. It’s bad, as we should be able to trust update processes to be as minimally disruptive as possible.
I dont mind this feature in Firefox and Chrome, as it only happens once, and only out of the box.
Microsoft has a notorious penchant for disrespecting user preferences in favour of market share. They were known for steamrolling IE as the default after every patch of windows, so im anticipating the "bing" default to get applied every time a windows patch is rolled out as well.
Users will probably (rightly) see this behavior as an error and go back to using Chrome. Heck, it was part of a litany of chicanery that spurred the exodus from IE.
To tack on, they also have a very annoying penchant for changing my boot order on major updates. I dual boot Windows and Linux and default to Linux. Every major update, it defaults to Windows first.
Firefox did the same recently with eg Pocket, if you'd removed it from your toolbar they added it back (and they made the plugin unremovable). Very similar behaviour IMO.
Of course this is also true. Chrome should be forced to offer a selection of search engines when it first runs. This is something for example Android is now forced to do (in the EU).
I tremendously disagree with software being allowed to modify other software installed by me. A proper app sandbox model would never ever allow this. This is one of the things I really love about iOS, no app from wherever it came from can ever modify other software on the system without my permission. (iOS is not perfect either, this is just one area where I would wish desktop OSes would catch up with.)
It would be my personal nightmare if desktop OS' adapt this practice, although I fear at least Windows will do so in incremental steps. I think this will be the end of its dominance on desktops, but I have no doubts management at MS will try. So this would be a good and a bad thing.
And do you honestly believe a sandbox would have stopped MS changing the page?
That iOS isn't perfect is an understatement in my opinion. It has a nice UI, it usually works and my pads lie in my cabinet since I cannot do anything remotely interesting and productive with it.
I got my iOS devices for free and it still somehow feels like I got cheated on. Like these devices belong to Apple, not to me.
> And do you honestly believe a sandbox would have stopped MS changing the page?
Depends on the sandbox. A real sandbox? Yes, it should stop Microsoft from changing the page. A sandbox built by Microsoft, that they're willing to circumvent for their own advantage? No; I expect that it won't stop Microsoft. To me, that makes their sandbox less trustworthy rather than making their browser more trustworthy.
So, even with my permission, a program shouldn't be allowed to manipulate other programs? So debuggers that modify a program's memory should be disallowed? security products shouldn't scan for insecure/bad settings/bugs and fix them? Adblockers shouldn't mess with ads in a different application?
I can tell you, the last thing I want is android/ios like app sandboxing if that means I can't interfere with what apps are doing/configuring. I prefer to have control or finao say about inter-app interaction since it is my device
>By what right does google set the search engine to begin with?
Your argument makes no sense, Chrome can set it's own default configuration and I think it asks if you want to make it the default browser. I think it is correct to call the practice of changing user or other apps configuration without asking for user permission. A prompt with a nice text and a catchy image that explains why the user should accept the change would be enough for me.
Now if you think this is fine then you would also think that would be fine that Google will do the same and change the search engine back to Google in all browser, change the windows search to Google search , maybe change the settings so your word,pdf and other files open in Chrome.
> Anyone has the right to bundle 3rd party software and make n installer that configures their software a certain way,even if the config gives them a competitive advantage.
That should read their software. MS is free to set the default search in edge when I am installing edge. If I install something unrelated like office and it goes and touches my chrome config that is something else entirely. Don't touch other people's stuff without asking first.
So you're conflating legality with good practice I think. In general I agree touching other publishers software is a bad idea but far from illegal. MS is not forcing people to use their installer, they're not blocking you from using the default chrome installer. You picked their platform's installer so they configure it for their platform ,that's it. They have every right to do that just like for example a privacy friendly website (or distro) can provide a package/installer with defaults that are privacy friendly for example. You're trying to infringe upon packaging rights, I hope some foss package maintainers chime in on this. Would suck if it was illegal to change upstream's defaults.
I did not mention either legality or good practice.
> MS is not forcing people to use their installer, they're not blocking you from using the default chrome installer.
That sentence makes no sense to me. The chrome installer is completely unrelated to this and MS is not shipping anything resembling a chrome installer. They are shipping their office installer (which you are kinda forced to use to install office), which unexpectedly(!) tampers with your chrome install.
> They have every right to do that just like for example a privacy friendly website (or distro) can provide a package/installer with defaults that are privacy friendly for example.
Everything you are saying makes sense if you are talking about controlling the defaults of the software maintained/installed by the package. That's not what is happening here.
Sure, if you suddenly overwrite the default version of python you break lots of stuff.
Adding onto PATH at the end in contrast does not break anything and is totally fine. See the difference? Similarly for bundling your own libc vs replacing the system one.
Again, simple kindergarten manners: If you think there is any reason people might object to what you want to be doing with/to their stuff, ask first and be prepared to hear "no".
What I was saying is that the whole point of an installation is to modify the user's system. It is pretty unlikely that legally it would be possible to have such fine grained differentiation between replacing and appending. And I'd prefer voting with my wallet than to forcing tech companies to involve legal in the development process.
> the whole point of an installation is to modify the user's system
Well, the point is to make an application available to the user; the changes are required by how the OS is designed. It's an accident of history that things like PATH in Windows are world-writable. Things like Metro apps have far less ability to modify the wider system.
The tech company response to this kind of application infighting is likely to be more sandboxing and lockdowns. Everything will move in the direction of an iOS like model where the platform owner can just veto apps and ban developers, as that's the only way to deal with "abuse".
> Everything will move in the direction of an iOS like model where the platform owner can just veto apps and ban developers, as that's the only way to deal with "abuse".
Unless the adults aka the state steps in and orders them to do their jobs instead of bullying each others and the users they are supposed to serve.
Of course, the only reason the mafia is involved in the first place is because sex work is illegal in most jurisdictions. So the analogy is worse than a mere leaky abstraction. You're advocating a cure that's worse than the disease, in both cases.
And I think there is a big difference between "system" and "applications".
It is not like this is hypothetical magic or unexplored, see any sandboxing ever or Android and iOS, where an app can't even access another app's files without specifically asking for permission.
> What I was saying is that the whole point of an installation is to modify the user's system.
Chrome is not part of the OS.
> It is pretty unlikely that legally it would be possible to have such fine grained differentiation between replacing and appending.
It's not only possible but easy to differentiate between installing software which includes registering it in the appropriate places and changing user settings for anticompetitive reasons. Unlike some corporations' customer support departments, the court system is not only staffed by actual humans with brains, they're even allowed to use them.
> And I'd prefer voting with my wallet than to forcing tech companies to involve legal in the development process.
I prefer solutions that have a chance of working, but to each their own.
> Legally irrelevant. If that was relevant, Microsoft wouldn't be attacked for bundling IE.
I would argue that this shows that it is legally relevant. Because it is possible to say that IE is not part of the OS but an application, we can talk about “bundling” products together at all. If IE and Windows were one indecomposable unit, I don’t think the EU would have had a case.
United States v. Microsoft Corporation, 253 F.3d 34 (D.C. Cir. 2001),[1] was a noted American antitrust law case in which the U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the PC market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.
Mate, you are hilarious! From the Wikipedia article you cited:
“ The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system.”
So yeah, follow your own advise. Because if you would, you'd find gems like this in the actual court case I cited:
"After trial, the court found Microsoft had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems (“OSs”) and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for internet browsers, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer (“IE”) browser."
> I advise you to take a civics course. This is literally not true.
It would be easier if you explained to me how this possibly can be not true.
> In short: GDPR failed to correct the incentives and lead just to more boilerplate disclaimers. Some of GDPR is good, but this part definitely isn't.
The incentives people think the GDPR sets are obviously broken but what about the ones it actually does set as written? The law is fine, the enforcement is disappointing so far.
> Yeah... That's the definition of a niche product. Because, it's targeted at niche audience.
If Office is targeted at a niche audience then everything is a niche audience.
Yes, absolutely. Such things should require explicit consent from the user and be implemented in such a way that the application can't even tell if permission was granted or not. For a long time now applications have proven that they cannot be trusted to act in the user's best interest. If we care at all about personal computing, then applications should be isolated and sandboxed by default with any connection to the rest of the system under the explicit control of the user.
I'm sure someone will say you should only install applications you trust, but where does that trust come from? How can I judge the trustworthiness of an application if I can't use it first? Must I trust some third party like a community of repo maintainers --not to mention corporate run repos-- and pretend that they all must have my best interest at heart and never make mistakes? Am I required to believe in the fantasy that once trustworthy software will always be so?
The established norm is for the browser to ship a default and allow users to change it.
The difference here is that Microsoft is overriding the user choice without consent initially AND doing it again every time to patch Office 365, which your license agreement requires you to do every 90-120 days.
As with several recent Microsoft behaviors with Windows and Office, it is fundamentally disrespectful of the customer. As someone who has run a big End User Computing organization, having Uncle Microsoft modifying other vendors software undermines my ability to do my job and hold those vendors accountable for their product.
It’s a shame because Office 365 is an incredibly positive thing. But with about a decade in, you have the next generation of managers in the company aspiring to make the 2020s equivalent of the 2000s triple play cable bundle. Unfortunately cable company aspirations nurture cable company customer focus.
> By what right does google set the search engine to begin with? They use their browser's popularity for a competitive advantage and that's legal.
Yeah, but the solution to that is regulation and not an arms race! Google should (and does) allow the user/installer/organization to change the search engine, precisely to allow for competition in the industry.
Browser vendors need to respect that choice. It would be equally bad for Google to be surreptitiously change the Chrome (or Edge) search engine to Google from Bing! It's just bad. Respect user preferences, period.
True, but we forget how also Chrome attempts to set itself automatically as standard browser in Linux _WITHOUT_ asking. That is also a malicious behavior, isn't?
Not trying to change the conversation, but also Chrome has malicious behavior without consent.
IMHO, browsers from Big Corps shouldn't be trusted at all.
If someone likes to use Chrome, should try to go for Chromium or a de-Googled version of it.
About Microsoft, don't use Office then, move to something else, the world has plenty of alternatives (LibreOffice or SoftOffice are really good ones)
For what it is worth, it seems like even Microsoft can’t make Chromium work without phoning “home” to Google. The new edge preview (at least for me, not sure if A/B testing) still talks back to the mothership at 1e100...
The market leader sets the terms. Behaving maliciously didn't hurt Chrome - consumers obviously don't care. So you fight fire with fire. Otherwise you're at a disadvantage.
It doesn't sound like mister_hn is excusing Microsoft's behaviour. It's just that, if people think Google is the "victim" here, they are completely wrong. They both have little regard for a user's preference.
People think the end users are the victim here. This equally applies if my default search engine is something else. Bing is still going to override it.
It doesn't sound like he is trying to justify it. He's suggesting that the popular alternative is just as bad. In no way does that make Microsoft's action any better.
Exactly. Imagine if Google changed your windows installation to point shortcut to win word to point to a new chrome window in kiosk mode that opens docs.new...
Chrome literally did something like this. When the user searched the web from the Windows search box, it used to open their default browser to bing.com. Chrome started to inspect the url and redirect to Google.com. So Microsoft changed it to open Edge to block this bs.
To me this was always why Google's position was weak and why they absolutely needed Android -- Apple and Microsoft could kill Google as a default move for users. Users only have so much energy to micro-manage the parameters of their devices and they depend on sensible defaults.
Or you can create and enforce laws that apply when they abuse their monopolies. Breaking up a company because it's above an arbitrary size threshold is a dangerous precedent, and most likely it won't even address the problem at hand.
The irony here is that Google mostly got its market share by paying companies like Adobe to pack the Google Toolbar in their installers which would hijack IE's default search and change it to Google. (Chrome later came out of a fear Microsoft might block the Google Toolbar in IE.)
Don't get me wrong, it's trashy behavior. But it's hardly a new one.
MS is implementing this in one of their ‘business tools’, and leveraging their position as an enterprise software provider to raise the status of some of their products that aren’t classic Office.
Personally, I think the change will be positive here only because it might help introduce some people to a web that is not google.com. So many people cannot conceive of a web search or address that isn’t done through google.com that I’m continually surprised by it.
This will be a test for enterprise IT admins: can they control this change’s level of disruption for their users, will they communicate it to their users, and will they stick with Microsoft?
Chrome often installs itself maliciously, so perhaps turnabout is fair play. Google has done pay-for-install with Adobe Flash updates, Java updates, 'Free' Windows antivirus vendors, etc, and all used dark patterns to trick users into installing Chrome and setting it as the default.
Microsoft introduced a feature in Internet Explorer 11 to specifically combat this type of abusive action, that is the interference of browser settings by third parties, via extensions. It's a shame to see them on the other side of their users' interests.
I thought Chrome had similar protections (both in terms of policy and technical enforcement) - while of course the browser can't protect itself against software running with root privileges, it can ensure that any attempt to pull this off requires tampering that would clearly be considered malicious by most, and I thought that Chrome was doing just that.
People here are justifying Microsoft stance of modifying default browser in third party browser, What if they get away with this and what we could see is that, after every windows update Microsoft would change default search engine in Windows to bing.
It's opt-out. Here's the email they sent out to admins recently:
You must exclude the extension before you install or update to a version of Office 365 ProPlus that installs the extension for Microsoft Search in Bing. Implementing the exclusion after the extension has been installed will not remove the extension.
• For new installations of Office 365 ProPlus, the Office Deployment Tool may be the best method, as outlined in this support document
• For existing installations of Office 365 ProPlus, modifying the Group Policy may be best. Enable the policy setting Don't install extension for Microsoft Search in Bing, which makes Bing the default the search engine.
• If you use Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (current branch), from the Features section, set Microsoft Search as default to the Off position.
• If you use Microsoft Intune to deploy Office 365 ProPlus, clear the check box Microsoft Search as default on the Configure App Suite pane.
I haven’t followed closely, but Chrome took many steps over the years to make sure software installers couldn’t sneakily install extensions. How is this possible?
This seems a method for enterprise administrators that centrally manage Chrome installation. That page doesn't seem to show a way for third-party software providers to bundle extensions into installers.
Since Office is a first-class Microsoft component in Windows Update, I'd assume they can use the Windows Updates mechanism to set any group policy or registry settings they need to manage Chrome.
Considering MS Office has overwhelming market share in the office suite space for businesses, this will surely attract attention from the regulators, no?
Hopefully the regulators will whallop them with a big clue-by-4. They've already gotten in trouble for trying to leverage their position before (tying IE to Windows). They're now a repeat offender.
And just try to save your Excel spreadsheet to Google Drive without having to click all over the place. And autosave only works when your stuff is saved to their infrastructure? Childish, destructive behavior.
HN may not be the target audience for this feature, but I've absolutely proposed writing a browser extension to synthesize confidential search results with public search results before, because it's a need that remains unmet to this day. If Bing is integrating their confidential cloud with logged-in search, that is a game-changer. I hope everyone gets past the visceral reaction against it and starts building browser extensions that compete. It is possible to do this without depending on a single search engine to perform synthesis for you. Metacrawler can live again.
Please do correct me if I’m missing something, but this seems like a lot of uproar over not much... the article states that this only applies to enterprise, who would most certainly have IT admins, and those IT admins are able to block the extension through Group Policy. They’ve also been given one month prior notice about the change. This also only applies accounts which are owned and operated by IT, making it IT’s decision what happens on them, not the actual users.
Disclaimer: I work at msft, nothing related and no knowledge of this besides the article. Opinions are my own.
A bit underhanded, given the text from the bulletin.
"Once this feature has rolled out, your end users can change their search engine preferences only via the toggle in the extension; they cannot modify the default search engine in browser preferences."
I was an IT admin for a company of 100 people. If you mess with employee's browsers or browser layouts or search functionality, you are going to get a LOT of angry users. Furthermore, Microsoft is forcing companies who do not want this functionality to take evasive action to prevent this from happening. It's not the fact that this functionality is useful or the fact that this functionality isn't evil thats making people angry. Its the fact that they are forcing changes on people that people may not want or need. That is user hostile behavior.
If you use your work Office 365 licenses on your personal machine (as is heavily encouraged in Education since you get 5 BYOD devices), this will automatically install when your machine is updated to 2002, and IT can't do anything about it since they don't manage your personal laptop.
It's not just Enterprise. Plenty of small businesses use Office 365 as well. They don't all have on-site IT staff, and they often don't have competent IT consultants who keep an eye on this stuff.
well the default office365 installer, is bad anway. without https://config.office.com/ it already installs a lot of unnecessary crap. sadly in config.office.com they made the choice to opt-out the feature (it's a checkbox: https://imgur.com/a/O43EI2M sorry for german language)
Google is doing everything it can to tighten its stranglehold on the entire WWW, if another behemoth like Microsoft wants to put up a fight, I say have at it!
I certainly am not shedding any tears for Google, who relentlessly funnels people into their tools, automatically logs them in in chrome, pushes their products into schools to get young people into their data-vacuum as soon as possible. Not to mention shady practices like AMP trying to force developers to use their own version of HTML & serve their content on google.com, "or else say goodbye to your search ranking."
MSFT is definitely "picking on someone their own size" and certainly not doing anything more underhanded than what google routinely engages in, so I don't see the issue.
One doing it is bad so 2 doing it is great? Competition is usually good but I don't think this kind of competition is actually helping get rid any of those problems just changing who's name might be on the particular problem today. No amount of giant tech companies shuffling is going to result in the return of an even playground for all in those areas.
I agree that nobody needs to shed tears for Google. However, what's more concerning here is that it's the users who would face the brunt of this decision.
While this is bad, Google got Chrome installed on many computers using equally bad practices (Chrome defaults to Google search), which might be worst because they got executable files installed.
The article does not mention whether or not Firefox will also be affected. Does anyone know if Office365 ProPlus already does this or are they just ignoring Firefox?
Why people are complaining about that? If you don't want it just change your search engine to whatever you want. That just take a minute.
PS: Just for experimenting I switched to Edge (new) & Bing to see what's different. And I really liked Edge, it's faster than chrome and has some privacy controls like cross domain cookie handling. Tried firefox before edge. But did not liked it, because It's ui is crap also some functionalities may not work because devs are optimizing the websites mostly for chrome.
But Bing as a search engine is not powerful like google because of lack of data.
I think a large number of people can't tell a browser and the search engine apart anymore. They are so entangled, internet to people means something that when they click on it, it shows the iconic Google search page. Wonder how that happened. I heard that Google is introducing Chromebooks to school kids. By the time these kids graduate, they'll be confused by any computer that is not a Chromebook.
I think if the OS, browser and the search engine belongs to the same company, its perfectly fine to set it as the default. As long as on first launch they give a clear option to choose something else.
I don't know why people here are surprised about this. Companies like Microsoft are not interested in acting in the interest of users and their privacy, but they do whatever they please with their products; thus you don't own them. If there are laws to prevent this, they'll find other ways in bending them to continue to do nasty things.
With that, personally I don't trust any company with a closed source OS these days and will treat all closed source programs as malware.
That's stinky but doesn't really hurt. Once I was given a new Windows 10 PC at the office, I've tried Edge (the classic, non-Blink version) and sicked to it because it's A LOT faster than Firefox. I haven't bothered to change the default search engine and the results Bing gives are Ok.
I guess this may depend on the subjects you search information on and the country/language. I used DuckDuckGo and StartPage before that and was satisfied too. On a rare occasions when these wouldn't give me what I need I just go to Google manually.
Additionally, it looks like this is a product intended for enterprise deployments, where the admins would probably already be comfortable with managing group policies. This is basically how software ends up on your computer in big companies.
Because otherwise you could be like Deloitte and have some jaggoff management consultant leak all your clients' private email addresses because they didn't follow internal technology policy and used Google Docs to stow it all.
It's all the more infuriating when you consider how Windows 10 throws a hissy fit if you should dare to change your default browser from Edge to something else.
i hate to say this, but at this point it really doesn't matter which search engine i use as they all have ads as 90% of the results above the fold :( it saddens me that this is what has become of the search market :(
and let me just get this out of the way now by saying, no, i will not use duckduckgo as my search engine cause it has given me nothing but _the_ most irrelevant search results i have ever seen.
Google did the same for years with any kind of installer, I remember installing CCleaner and finding Chrome on my computer for no reason. They put chrome everywhere using super shady techniques.
A lot of a weird arguments here. You are OK with Google being the default and not Bing? Sounds silly to me.
Have you heard of "other browsers" on iOS and how Apple forces them to use Safari specs?
This is more of you folks having an issue with Microsoft itself, not what they have done. Because your favorite company is doing it already and you just choose to look away.
I don't mind what the default is when I install a browser since I know to change it, but I have issues with any piece of software altering the settings of another unrelated piece of software that I've already configured.
How many users are going to get "stuck" because of the text below, from the MS bulletin?
"Once this feature has rolled out, your end users can change their search engine preferences only via the toggle in the extension; they cannot modify the default search engine in browser preferences."
This is good news, given the circumstances. Google doesn't show a welcome screen in Chrome to select your default search engine, and this action somewhat helps with mitigating that imbalance.
Considering Chrome's market share, it's only a matter of time until Google will be required to show a search engine choice screen in the browser, they were already ordered by the EU to do it for the default Android browser and search engine.
I don't know how forcing people to use another search engine is better is good news. It's not like Microsoft is giving a set of options here.
The way microsoft is trying to force its products through its other products (like edge and bing in windows 10) is sad and really annoying.
Microsoft is doing the same as Google, they set a default search engine that can be changed, instead of offering an active choice before setting a default.
Both companies behave inappropriately, but then again, actions like these are needed to highlight how choices are made for us, and to shake us out of complatence.
Actually Microsoft are installing a chrome plugin that forces the search engine to Bing so users can’t change the default back until they remove the plugin
how is forcing Bing on customers is good news? Microsoft, Internet Explorer creator, is a trillion dollar company, not a startup looking to disturb the market in face of tech giants.
If I offered a desktop software to browse my library of cat pictures and automatically changed all default search engines to my online cat search service, would that be good news as well?
So it's not just a way to force users to use bing, it's also a way to push this feature in front of them.
> By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search, including being able to access relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar. Microsoft Search is part of Microsoft 365 and is turned on by default for all Microsoft apps that support it.
[1] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/find-what-you-need-...
[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/microsoft-sear...