Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?
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@HardwareGeek said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Nothing I've had since then comes close, even my current dinky four-cylinder Toyota Taco.
What do you expect? You're driving a car made out of a corn tortilla.
What would you use? Flour? You'd need at least some corn for the frame, for rigidity.
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@HardwareGeek said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Nothing I've had since then comes close, even my current dinky four-cylinder Toyota Taco.
What do you expect? You're driving a car made out of a corn tortilla.
I'd expect half-assed tech from today to be marginally better than the half-assed tech from two decades ago.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@HardwareGeek said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Tsaukpaetra said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Nothing I've had since then comes close, even my current dinky four-cylinder Toyota Taco.
What do you expect? You're driving a car made out of a corn tortilla.
I'd expect half-assed tech from today to be marginally better than the half-assed tech from two decades ago.
With advances in engineering come advances in cost engineering.
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@Gribnit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
You'd need at least some corn for the frame, for rigidity.
Someone should tell Toyota. Maybe they can use some on the Tacoma.
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@TimeBandit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
My RX-8 does 18mpg when I drive smoothly.
Wankel
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@Applied-Mediocrity Hey now, no need for name-calling!
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@TimeBandit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
My RX-8 does 18mpg when I drive smoothly.
Wankel.
Huh, I knew about the design but I thought it was just theoretical; I didn't realise it was actually used in real vehicles.
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@Carnage After taking these shots, while walking back to my office, I started thinking. "Why am I photographing my car for a random stranger on the internet?" I'm suddenly more and more glad I've always steered clear of Facebook et.al..
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@PleegWat said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@TimeBandit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
My RX-8 does 18mpg when I drive smoothly.
Wankel.
Huh, I knew about the design but I thought it was just theoretical; I didn't realise it was actually used in real vehicles.
Was used unfortunately, shame as they were apparently great for performance. Very common in small military generating sets though.
If you liked the Wankel then this thing is even weirder:
For my part I think the Deltic was the best bonkers engine, it had a lovely note too:
18 Cylinders, 36 pistons
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@acrow said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Ten bucks on "adding their own neo-ActiveX". Maybe something Java-ish this time.
Five bucks on baking in a version of Flash Player that is several versions out of date.If the Flash Player one is a hit, then 20 more bucks say that it can't be disabled.
I'll happily take your money. When will you give it too me?
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@bjolling said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@acrow said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Ten bucks on "adding their own neo-ActiveX". Maybe something Java-ish this time.
Five bucks on baking in a version of Flash Player that is several versions out of date.If the Flash Player one is a hit, then 20 more bucks say that it can't be disabled.
I'll happily take your money. When will you give it too me?
I guess distribution to he winner(s) happens when the product in question is in general use and the behavior has been sufficiently documented either way, to satisfy the judges.
Assuming that @El_Heffe arranged for a bookie by then, like he was supposed to.
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@PleegWat said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Huh, I knew about the design but I thought it was just theoretical; I didn't realise it was actually used in real vehicles.
Mazda's first rotary powered car came out in 1967
Also the first Japanese car to win the 24h of Le Mans
And it's coming back as a range extender
Also, all Mazda RX models are rotary powered. RX means "Rotary Experience"
Now if only Mazda could build something based on the RX-vision prototype
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/mazda-rx-vision-concept-debuts-in-tokyo-news
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@TimeBandit I hate region blocked content. It's such a stupid, pointless thing to do
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@PleegWat said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Applied-Mediocrity said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@TimeBandit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
My RX-8 does 18mpg when I drive smoothly.
Wankel.
Huh, I knew about the design but I thought it was just theoretical; I didn't realise it was actually used in real vehicles.
Been used on Motorbikes as well
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@sweaty_gammon said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
I love it.
Yeah, me too. I have a friend that has one with the 20B-REW (3 rotors).
An amazing luxury car
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@TimeBandit I really like the kinda mean / squat and boxy look of those late 80s / early 90s Japanese performance cars.
I have never driven one. The only car I have driven that is somewhat similar is the Nissan 370Z (my friend was kind enough to let me take it for a spin around the block).
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@sweaty_gammon My dream car:
Last generation of Mazda RX-7.
Or the first generation (was my first car)
That's a blast to drive.
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@TimeBandit I just got a crappy old diesel. Though I was driving my boss the other day and he was getting a bit scared because I tend to slow down as little as possible as I know it takes ages for my car to get back upto speed. He has an Audi TT (not idea if that is good or not, but it does look like it should be fast).
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@Cursorkeys said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
For my part I think the Deltic was the best bonkers engine
ISTR that one worked about as well as all other opposed-piston engines, like the tank engines used in the Chieftain and T-64 MBTs — that is to say, high maintenance and replaced by something else entirely in whatever vehicle followed it.
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@Cursorkeys was that noise... normal operation? I thought I was going to get to see this engine explode.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Audi TT
Eh. It's not slow, but I'd argue it's more of a look than an actual sports car. The ones around here have about 200hp.
You can get around that in a stock Skoda Fabia vrs. (And probably whatever the Corolla is now called)
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@swayde said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
You can get around that in a stock Skoda Fabia vrs when it's not broken down
FTFY
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@swayde I'd rather have the TT. The newer ones look better than their equivalent Fabia. Although I did like how the original Fabia vRS was diesel-engined only.
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@TimeBandit I haven't owned one, so I'm clueless about reliably. They're not for sale where I live, cause car prices here are insane.
£30k
2007 tt costs 250.000 DKK
$38k USD
*Cries in Danish*
A new one costs more than twice that...
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@swayde said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
I haven't owned one, so I'm clueless about reliably
The Germans are in charge, modern Skodas are pretty reliable.
@swayde said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
£30k
$38k USD
Cries in DanishShiiiiiiiiiit. That'd be like £4k here.
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Veering somewhat back on-topic, Chris Beard is not amused.
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@Gribnit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Cursorkeys was that noise... normal operation? I thought I was going to get to see this engine explode.
Yep, that lovely continuous howl is how they're supposed to sound. Very unique.
I've got a normal diesel having a bad day if you like seeing heavy machinery commit seppuku:
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@Gribnit said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@Cursorkeys was that noise... normal operation? I thought I was going to get to see this engine explode.
Yeah, if it was a diesel I thought it was in runaway mode. But since the smoke wasn't black I didn't think so.
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@kazitor said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Veering somewhat back on-topic, Chris Beard is not amused.
YMBNH. At least we're still talking about engines, sort of.
On topic, Mozilla can go and screw themselves with their WebExtensions baton. Oh wait, it doesn't have an API for that! Anyway, they're right about IE6 days returning, but I'm really tired of their underdog holy savior of open webs whining. Guess who was the first in the line who steadily pissed away their market share by trying to be Chrome in everything but actually being Chrome?
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@kazitor said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Veering somewhat back on-topic, Chris Beard is not amused.
Dear Chris,
We're not amused with the way Mozilla has spent the past several years destroying everything that made Firefox popular in the first place, and driving your market share into nearly irrelevant single digits.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Mozilla can go and screw themselves with their WebExtensions baton.
Yeah, I hated the chromification of firefox, too. But even after the addon debacle, the “quantum” line is actually pretty good (once I found the settings to un-fuck the UI)
And it’s the only remaining competitor to Google’s monopoly.
Using Chrome??
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@ChaosTheEternal said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Some people think, and I tend to agree, that Microsoft's "hardware acceleration fast-path" was a hack that relied on very specific HTML layout of the YouTube site. When Google added an empty hidden div (something that should have absolutely no effect on a standards compliant layout engine or the video hardware acceleration) it broke something that was more of a benchmark cheat than an actual feature.
Whether Google did this intentionally or accidentally, Microsoft fell into a trap that it set for itself. Microsoft guy says, "we couldn't keep up" but then says that the issue is fixed in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.
That's because Microsoft put itself in a position of only being able to update Edge twice a year when the new updates are released.
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@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@ChaosTheEternal said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Some people think, and I tend to agree, that Microsoft's "hardware acceleration fast-path" was a hack that relied on very specific HTML layout of the YouTube site. When Google added an empty hidden div (something that should have absolutely no effect on a standards compliant layout engine or the video hardware acceleration) it broke something that was more of a benchmark cheat than an actual feature.
I don't know how it worked in detail, but going purely from "adding an empty hidden div broke it" doesn't necessarily mean the feature was a hack.
Maybe it detected that a certain rectangle of the viewport was video only and did hardware acceleration for that, but after adding the empty div the engine decided there's more than just the video in that rectangle and made everything go through the compositor again.
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I wonder if that empty div forever stayed empty. It's not like you can't set a DOM breakpoint to watch for that
Or maybe it wasn't an empty div at all, and broken HTML just got interpreted that way? Fucking HTML...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Or maybe it wasn't an empty div at all, and broken HTML just got interpreted that way? Fucking HTML...
Somebody below said that the div was for ads, as is apparently common on other providers too...
Why is there no darn link to the comments on mobile..."
magicalist 22 hours ago [-]How many sites put invisible DOM elements over the videos?
A lot of them? Vimeo, for instance, has a number of opacity: 0 and hidden divs over the video. Twitch has at least a couple of opacity: 0 divs on top.Maybe we're interpreting the phrase
hidden empty div over YouTube videos
differently? That's the structure I assume they were talking about."
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@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@ChaosTheEternal said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Some people think, and I tend to agree, that Microsoft's "hardware acceleration fast-path" was a hack that relied on very specific HTML layout of the YouTube site. When Google added an empty hidden div (something that should have absolutely no effect on a standards compliant layout engine or the video hardware acceleration) it broke something that was more of a benchmark cheat than an actual feature.
Whether Google did this intentionally or accidentally, Microsoft fell into a trap that it set for itself. Microsoft guy says, "we couldn't keep up" but then says that the issue is fixed in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.
That's because Microsoft put itself in a position of only being able to update Edge twice a year when the new updates are released.
Updates are released a lot more than twice a year.
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Someone from El Reg putting me in my place when I accused them of producing brittle software:
You don't understand. You HAVE to disable hardware acceleration in that case, because Javascript could rewrite that empty tag to make it contain something which might be over the video window, which would require software rendering.
I can't attest to the veracity of that comment however...
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@pie_flavor said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
That's because Microsoft put itself in a position of only being able to update Edge twice a year when the new updates are released.
Updates are released a lot more than twice a year.
EdgeHTML updates, however, have only been going out with the major OS feature updates. One supposed reason why is that the engine is tied to the other UWP applications and thus they have to do a lot of compatibility testing so the engine changes don't break anything too badly.
Two years ago the plan was to separate the UI and rendering engine updates so something would be updated more often, but that hasn't happened. Presumably Chromium Edge can just be a Store app and updated whenever while legacy EdgeHTML can get patches only when absolutely necessary.
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@Onyx said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@sweaty_gammon said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Oh great we are going to have a mono-culture of browser engines.
Speak for yourself, I'll use browsh!
Ok, it's FF's engine, but still!
Ooooh, chunky!
Does/can it have vim keybindings?
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@ChaosTheEternal Above and beyond that specific example, what do you guys think about the underlying ideas:
1a) a browser engine might include hacks & tweaks that make it "better" (for some measure of better... typically faster but that might not be the only thing) on some specific pages, relying on some quirks of those pages.
1b) a browser engine should include such tweaks (and update them regularly as the pages evolve).2a) a company that both owns an engine and some pages (i.e. Google) might purposefully break such hacks & tweaks by changing its pages (and to give its own engine an advantage).
2b) such a company should do so as often as possible.For me question 2 (in both variants) is a bad thing, with 2a somewhat acceptable but not good (as in, business is not about making friends etc. -- in another variant of the same question, if Google were to implement a brand new technique in its browser that requires pages to add specific code for it to work, and would add that code to its own pages, that would probably be OK?).
I'm much more divided on question 1 though, in principle I don't like it but from a narrow user perspective I would be tempted to say that I don't really care about the engine in isolation, all that matters is that in my own personal use cases it's "better".
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@remi said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
@ChaosTheEternal Above and beyond that specific example, what do you guys think about the underlying ideas:
1a) a browser engine might include hacks & tweaks that make it "better" (for some measure of better... typically faster but that might not be the only thing) on some specific pages, relying on some quirks of those pages.
1b) a browser engine should include such tweaks (and update them regularly as the pages evolve).That's fine.
2a) a company that both owns an engine and some pages (i.e. Google) might purposefully break such hacks & tweaks by changing its pages (and to give its own engine an advantage).
The word "purposefully" changes this from life as usual to abuse of monopoly.
2b) such a company should do so as often as possible.
And that's outright evil.
For me question 2 (in both variants) is a bad thing, with 2a somewhat acceptable but not good (as in, business is not about making friends etc. -- in another variant of the same question, if Google were to implement a brand new technique in its browser that requires pages to add specific code for it to work, and would add that code to its own pages, that would probably be OK?).
It's not a variant of the same question, it's an entirely different problem. It's the difference between "NVidia has partner programs with video game developers where they optimize code so it runs faster on NVidia GPUs" and "NVidia has partner programs where they put in code the main purpose of which is to make the game run slower on AMD and Intel GPUs". Having exclusive technology and making use of it is fine (it creates lock-ins when successful, but the technology benefits everyone, including end users). But deliberately sabotaging competitors' products is something else entirely.
I'm much more divided on question 1 though, in principle I don't like it but from a narrow user perspective I would be tempted to say that I don't really care about the engine in isolation, all that matters is that in my own personal use cases it's "better".
Special-casing websites by browsers is not much different from other standard industry practices. Windows has always done detection of specific old programs and turning on and off various compatibility options based on it on per-program basis. Graphics drivers have had hardcoded game profiles for over a decade now - the reason why new driver versions are released so often is because new games are made and new profiles must be added. I'm sure there's a lot more examples of how software treats two things differently based on specific knowledge even though on paper it should behave identically - to a great benefit of end user. I see nothing wrong with extending that to popular websites. As long as it's done to improve user experience, not make it worse.
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@Gąska said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
For me question 2 (in both variants) is a bad thing, with 2a somewhat acceptable but not good (as in, business is not about making friends etc. -- in another variant of the same question, if Google were to implement a brand new technique in its browser that requires pages to add specific code for it to work, and would add that code to its own pages, that would probably be OK?).
It's not a variant of the same question, it's an entirely different problem.
I'm not sure, I think there is some kind of continuum from one to the other. You can start at the second question I wrote (inventing new tech + changing their site to make it possible to use it), then progressively you could imagine that, for example, using that new tech in a website means it breaks some optimisations done by other (for example, although it's entirely asspulled, you could imagine that the empty
<div>
thing would be needed for whatever new tech Chrome would have). From there you could have "using the new tech can be made in such a way that it doesn't break other engines but it requires a lot of effort (compatibility code etc.)", and then "it doesn't require a lot of code but it requires to do something" and then "we could make it so that your engine still works but we're, on purpose, not going to do so". The final step is the question I asked initially ("we can easily break you're engine and we're doing so").I'm playing devil's advocate here, I agree with you on hindsight that they are two different questions (there is a positive intent to harm in one case vs. passively letting harm happen), but I'm trying to keep things open and imagine how one could progressively slip from one to the other, and how fixing a boundary might not be so easy.
I'm still not convinced whether 2 (a or b) should be morally reprehensible, or if it's just the facts of being in a competitive business. Or both at the same time?
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@Parody said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
EdgeHTML updates, however, have only been going out with the major OS feature updates. One supposed reason why is that the engine is tied to the other UWP applications
I don't know what the deal is with Microsoft, but they always have to do everything in the most over-complicated, convoluted manner possible. For example, let's pretend that you actually want to run Edge, but you accidentally deleted the shortcut. No problem, just find the .exe file and click on it.
Except, it's not located in
\Program Files
. No, creating a web browser that is a normal, stand-alone program, just like every other web browser that has existed since the beginning of time, would make too much sense. That just not The Microsoft Way®.Edge is special. It's a SystemApp
so you'll find it in
C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe
And WTF is 8wekyb3d8bbwe?
But wait, it gets better. If you click on MicrosoftEdge.exe, nothing happens. In order to run Edge you have to create a shortcut that contains The Magic Incantation®:
explorer.exe shell:Appsfolder\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MicrosoftEdge
Serously Microsoft? WTF?
https://i.imgur.com/SglRVEH.png
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@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Edge is special. It's a SystemApp
so you'll find it in C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe
And WTF is 8wekyb3d8bbwe?Btw, all UWP Apps look like this, except they're located in C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folder.
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@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
But wait, it gets better. If you click on MicrosoftEdge.exe, nothing happens. In order to run Edge you have to create a shortcut that contains The Magic Incantation®:
explorer.exe shell:Appsfolder\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe!MicrosoftEdge<blakeyrant_mode>
Fuckin hell, why can't those open-sour morons design something sensible, with a nice GUI, instead of relying on that ancient crappy technology called the CLI, and passing some special arguments to the process that nobody knows about. And I bet that this is not even properly documented anywhere.And they don't even know or care about the standard of the platform they are working on. Microsoft designed a perfect OS, with a standard place where to put your executable, it's even in the path's name "Program Files" you stupid piece of shit. Unbelievable
:table_flip.png:
</blakeyrant_mode>
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@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
you accidentally deleted the shortcut
Disregarding the fact that you can't delete every shortcut for Edge:
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@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
Except, it's not located in \Program Files. No, creating a web browser that is a normal, stand-alone program, just like every other web browser that has existed since the beginning of time, would make too much sense. That just not The Microsoft Way®.
It's a UWP App. It follows the UWP convention of being in a per-user-installable bundle. But since it's used for a bunch of things (out-of-box experience and other UWP apps' browser), it goes in a secure location.
@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
And WTF is 8wekyb3d8bbwe?
The Base32 version of Microsoft's public key thumbprint for Store Apps. Because hex is too long.
@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
But wait, it gets better. If you click on MicrosoftEdge.exe, nothing happens.
One EXE can have multiple apps. Mail, Contacts, and People
arewere (until Windows 10 1803) the single app "Windows Communication Apps"; the specific UWP app you want to launch gets specified in the launch contract invocation sent to it once the EXE starts up. This was done so that all of the bonus services (e.g. tile updates, streaming audio, embedding in another app) can live in a single EXE, a single process.I know all the stuff I've listed up until now can be done differently and has historically been done differently. I know that UWP Apps are annoying as a whole. But "a UWP app doing things the way that all UWP apps do" is business as frakking usual.
@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
In order to run Edge you have to create a shortcut that contains The Magic Incantation®:
Wait,
microsoft-edge:
is a magic incantation now? I could getms-xbl-3d8b930f:
being too magic, andhttp:
andhttps:
being reassigned away, but that first one should be drop-dead easy...
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@TwelveBaud said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
I know all the stuff I've listed up until now can be done differently and has historically been done differently. I know that UWP Apps are annoying as a whole. But "a UWP app doing things the way that all UWP apps do" is business as frakking usual.
IOW, the original statement:
@El_Heffe said in Place Your Bets: How Will Microsoft Screw This Up?:
I don't know what the deal is with Microsoft, but they always have to do everything in the most over-complicated, convoluted manner possible.
...is more correct than he thought because it all applies to a lot more than Edge.