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Microsoft Wants To Pay You To Use Its Windows 10 Browser Edge (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report by The Guardian: Microsoft has a new browser. It launched with Windows 10 and it's called Edge. The company says it's faster, more battery efficient and all-round better than Chrome or Firefox. You can even draw on websites with a stylus. Trouble is, not very many people are using it. So now Microsoft's trying to bribe you to switch. The newly rebranded Microsoft Rewards -- formerly Bing Rewards, which paid people for using Bing as their search engine (another product Microsoft says is better than a Google product but that very few people actually use) -- will now pay you for using Edge, shopping at the Microsoft store, or using Bing. Users of Edge who sign up to Microsoft Rewards, which is currently US-only, are then awarded points simply for using the browser. Microsoft actively monitors whether you're using Edge for up to 30 hours a month. It tracks mouse movements and other signs that you're not trying to game the system, and you must also have Bing set as your default search engine. Points can then be traded in for vouchers or credit for places such as Starbucks, Skype, Amazon and ad-free Outlook.com -- remember, if you're not paying for something, you are the product.
What else is new? Every banner for every campaign I've ever seen, every special offer, every 100s spam mail I get from anyone, MS or otherwise, is always "US" only when you read the fine print.
Can we get a "US" news filter here so we can filter out the news that have offers only exlusive to US citizens? Please?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
This is what you do when you can't make a better product for your user base; you make a better product for those who prey upon you user base, bill the predators, and if not enough victims show up, you up the incentive.
I use Bing because I find it to be as good as Google or better for searches (especially image/video searches) and maps.
The fact that they pay me to use it is a bonus.
They'd have to pay me a LOT more to use Edge, however. And make Edge available for Windows 7, because fuck Windows 10.
Fuck Micro$oft!!!
A browser that is buggy as hell, has no plug-in support, and just plain doesn't work right. No thanks!
You thought people were kidding it was spyware? Have you formatted C:\ today?
>Microsoft actively monitors whether you're using Edge for up to 30 hours a month. It tracks mouse movements and other signs that you're not trying to game the system, and you must also have Bing set as your default search engine.
Sure thing we should just all format our Linux OS's and switch on over for coffee.
Have you formatted C:\ today?
They've put a lot of work into Edge. Now that it supports extensions and has Adblock, it may even be good enough to use regularly. It sounds unlikely but it's not without possibility that it is better than Chrome in perf.
But Bing? They're nuts. The search results are measurably worse and the user experience is lacking advanced features that makes Google so powerful.
"All around better"
Says the company who's founder once stated that "nobody will ever need more than 1mb of RAM".
Anyone else remember AllAdvantage?
remember, if you're not paying for something, you are the product.
By insinuating that Microsoft may or may not be totally legit but not outright saying it..
You told on yourselves again feds.
You forgot the headline on Slashdot of something like...
Microsoft and Google and Facebook and Twitter and Markmonitor and Cloudflare and many others are all US Government spy apparatuses
Do it? It's a fact but you won't.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/08/05/0329246/popular-bittorrent-search-engine-site-torrentzeu-mysteriously-disappears :) :)
Ask Slashdot: So friends, where do you get YOUR torrents now?
This site is predatory. Fuck you tax robbing FBI punks.
Setting aside the privacy implications of this (at this point, anyone who thinks they aren't being bagged n' tagged when using Windows 10 is either woefully naive or incredibly stupid), I think this warrants another antitrust investigation into Microsoft's behavior.
Microsoft's OS will silently and without permission uninstall programs that compete with the ones shipped with Windows 10, such as Firefox and Chrome. Or sometimes it will just silently and without permission change your default web browser back to Edge. The reason for this is because Edge's default search engine is Bing, which gives money to Microsoft via personalized advertisement brokering. And now they're locking in Edge, Bing, and the Windows Store so the user is given some menial rewards for using the three lock-in-step.
When a company uses its monopoly or near-monopoly on one platform (e.g. desktop OS) in order to break into other platforms (e.g. web browsers, search engines, app stores), and rewards users for obeying or inconveniences/punishes users for not obeying, that's called abuse. It is far worse than AT&T bundling free phones with their service, and that got them split up into multiple companies. And it's several steps advanced from the original case that Microsoft was convicted for, which was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows 95.
start posting `advertising disguised as "news"?
everybody. fuck your shit spies.
With Apple and Google getting into cars Microsoft can't be far behind so will this happen with their cars soon?
Here, here's our car for FREE and while you drive it we'll give you mileage rewards. Just make sure you use BING navigation and BING auto-insurance which will track your driving and mileage habits!
Heck, why not start that with Windows Phones first...
Or they could, y'know.. just make a better web browser?
How about taking the money that Microsoft is going to "pay" to users and:
- Go through Windows 7 (or previous versions, personally I'm using Win 7 for my MS only software development) and fix outstanding bugs
- Create an open source, WebKit based browser that can compete with Chrome/Firefox/whatever without having to pay for users
In the long run, this would be money better spent (ie generate more paying customers) than bribing users to use the substandard products that Microsoft has on it's "Front Line".
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
It tracks mouse movements and other signs that you're not trying to game the system
This sounds like a challenge to me. Can you write a bot that can fool the Edge bot detection system . . . ?
Search on a tech topic. Open the StackOverflow result. Take some time, and follow some of the links to death.
In another tab, search for porn, and follow the links.
Hey presto! Normal user browser behavior!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It isn't news nor is it advertising, it is CYA (cover your ass).
FBI at Slashdot are basically posting a false credibility in the summary. It is two-fold.
1) Microsoft are saying yeah we monitor you but it's just for our legit company strategy (dont say US GOV NO MOE)
2) FBI at Slashdot are saying yep.. see we are on your side pals. We tell it like it is. You are the product with Microsoft. (but not outright saying it)
...Bing as their search engine (another product Microsoft says is better than a Google product but that very few people actually use...
The Bing spider did not follow the instructions (about which subdirectories to skip) I gave it in the robots.txt file on my website.
.
I sent logs and my robots.txt to Bing's support team, and got back an answer along the lines of, ~yeah, we know that sometimes it doesn't follow robots.txt, that's your problem to solve~.
If Microsoft thinks their search spider is so "special" that it need not follow the instructions I give it for my websites, then I don't want anything to do with Bing.
I would never accept a bribe to use M$ software on my own computers. I'm quite happy with Linux and FOSS.
Promoting globalism here. Fuck you and your mindprison nick and your ass forever.
This story is total FBI tactic and they suck at HUMINT. Stick to digging ditches bitches.
If you're using edge or not. This is a pilot program to test their new marketing software.
Microsoft won't sell you product for free. The only explanation: you are Microsoft's product, not customer.
You can even draw on websites with a stylus.
This is just plain lame. If it's a killer feature, then what is stopping other browser manufacturers from duplicating it? If it's not a killer feature, then other browser makers will ignore it and it will die!
How is this feature even useful by the way, it's not a web standard, so it's not as if someone else can see what you are drawing on the web page... unless you cast it to raster, in which case, I can already do this with ms paint and a screen grab... I'm just not seeing how anybody is clamoring for this feature.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
MS manager: xbox is turning into scorpio, and everything is windows 10
Manager 2: hololens is now unaccountably integrated into windows 10. virtual reality email.
manager 3: powershell is now for linux
manager 4:: people will now need to pay money to surf the internet using our browser.
manager 5: windows 10 now runs on the raspberry pi
janitor: guys how does all this make money....
Good people go to bed earlier.
US-based site, right?
The Guardian (on which the advertising is posted), is a British site.
Once I had a system where the power management (sleep) couldn't be turned off, and we wanted to use it for digital signage. So in about eight lines of code I turned an Arduino into a USB mouse and set it to wiggle the cursor every 5 minutes, thereby preventing the system from going to sleep.
Later, I wanted to wanted to guess someone's PIN number over night, so with a few lines of code I set the Arduino to act as a USB keyboard and type in every possible PIN, waiting a few seconds between tries.
Now, Microsoft is willing to pay me to wiggle a mouse around and occasionally click. Hmm ... :)
and you must also have Bing set as your default search engine
They had me until that sentence.
So they will pay you to use the internet browser, so long as you set it up so that you can't actually use the internet.
^this.
Because that is the only way that I will use it.
Browser User as a Service vendor here: My pricing structure starts at $10,000 per month.
HMU.
Who did what now?
I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole
Wife got a new laptop, win10. Tried figuring how to do something in Win10 (was different than earlier versions). Couldn't. Did a search. Default was BING. No luck. Entered same search terms into Google, and as well as serving up relevant looking links, it gave me the answer outright. Google knows more about Win10 than BING does. WTF?!?
And Edge crashes her laptop a lot.
back in the day we botted sites to keep clicking on the ad.
Seems like now is a good time to script up a Macro using edge to search bing for every word in a dictionary...The laptop I was using to see the preview builds of win 10 will do nicely.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
seeing how the "edge" browser is a windows 10 exclusive....
Microsoft actively monitors whether you're using Edge for up to 30 hours a month. It tracks mouse movements and other signs that you're not trying to game the system, and you must also have Bing set as your default search engine
If you're using Edge, you're using Windows 10, so Microsoft is probably doing that anyway...
M$ was paying users to use Edge before using a token economy. The proble mwith Edge is that M$ gives you nowhere in recent version to have it automatically dump the the cache and clear history. If I wanted to sell my browsing privacy to some faceless monopoly I'd run Chrome.
... by the sheer volume of people who think that anything they do on the internet, regardless the "precautions" they take to try to maintain their anonymity, is really anonymous. Or that Microsoft is more evil than ANY other tech company. But if self-delusion lets you sleep better at night, so be it.
Windows 10: free*
Edge: we'll pay *you*
Could it be that the price of Microsoft products are finally approaching their actual value?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
and then in the search bar i do the actual search in google TROLOLOLOLOL
"Microsoft Wants To Pay You To Use Its Windows 10 Browser Edge"
Lol, no, not even if they paid me.
Look, I'll admit that I've done a LOT of shameful things for money, but even I have limits, low as they are.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Can I script it and run it in a VM?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
So is this how the economy will work when robots take all the jobs? Because otherwise I don't see how this makes sense.
About 2008 or so, when they didn't have Bush to kick around anymore. They don't dare talk about Obama or the democrats that way. And if you criticize them now, it means you're a Trump supporter by default.
> Yes, because electricity is free.
An Arduino in a sleep, wake cycle like that will have average power usage of about 0.005 watts. That's $0.005 per year (one penny every two years).
> There are a lot of dumb people here.
And we just found one of them.
1. Sign up for this program.
2. Sue them for violating labor laws.
3. ???, IANAL and it probably won't work
4. Profit!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
... When they let me uninstall Cortana and all the apps including the store. I also want a proper Start menu like in Windows XP and 7. That's my price.
I see no Edge in Fedora and neither Debian. How is the package called?
Wise.
What a disaster trying to tie Microsoft and globalism together and suggesting acceptance. G.T.F.O.
I, _______, employee of the public of the United States of America, am fucking stupid.
Sincerely,
X_______
Malaysia. Figure out what gen of chip that is :)
I don't know about YOUR chips, but plenty of them weren't made in Chandler Arizona. Lots of them aren't even designed in the US (Hello, Israel!!!)
It would be pretty awesome to get paid for pretending to use their shitty browser instead..
Now I can get paid to watch porno.
Edge has no Adblock as of yet, so a lot of websites are almost unusable. Bing is fucking terrible compared to Google, so that's a no-go. Rewards? Kiss my ring.
No, I can't really see it. I also value my privacy so I don't think their offer will work for me. I've got friends doing this and they only get an store credit card for $5 every 3 months, not really worth it IMHO!
Twinstiq, game news
Fuck off cunts. :D
... Microsoft finally got nearer to a true price point for using their products.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
The tales of M$ just get stranger and stranger...
... Microsoft you speak of?
"We must never stop at all until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of this earth." -- Ro
If you have to pay someone to use your browser, your browser may just SUCK. No thanks macrosuck, I'll stick with chrome.
It's better to be hated for who you are, than be loved for who you're not.
betamax was better than vhs too.....
The phrase "you couldn't pay me to use that" comes to mind... I have to admit, I use edge to watch Netflix, beyond that, it is possibly the worst browser experience I have had in 25 years.
I'm happy to use Edge .... As soon as they make it legacy compatible with Internet Explorer such that websites I MUST use for work DON'T BREAK while USING EDGE.
So, when monkeys fly out of the butt of the microsoft flag, then.
P.S. I really wouldn't mind if they'd fix the bug that causes EVERY WEBPAGE I open to prompt me to use the "Windows 10 Preferred" Edge. See above.
Apparently Microsoft execs are wondering why people are using Firefox, Chrome, Google and Linux instead of Edge, Bing and Windows.
It is scapegoating and denial to say that the problem is popularity alone.
The answer is that Microsoft products, while usually well-engineered under the hood, are awkward in interface and exhibit a corporate mentality of control in forcing us to use other Microsoft products.
In what is clearly a shock to all the first-decade MBAs out there, people hate being forced to do things, and they hate schlocky time-wasting interfaces. Microsoft has made only part of the product, and that is why they are lagging.
Why did people stop using IE, Edge's ancestor, which was once a market leader? Answer: security problems, a cruddy interface, and being forced into using other Microsoft schemes like Windows Live or whatever.
Instead of looking at the actual reasons why their products are failing, Microsoft execs are dancing around the edges, looking for excuses for failure. This is a shame because it dooms to failure the quality work done by Microsoft engineers.
Alternative Right.
Always the desperate cunts
I would actually be tempted - Firefox has gotten increasingly sucktastic, and Chrome has some glaring deficiencies as well, so if I had already been forced onto Windows 10, I'd certainly have tried out Edge, and if it wasn't actively noticeably *worse* than FF or Chrome these days, I'd happily use it if they were paying me. Hard to pass up free money.
But must use Bing as your default search engine? Frack that. (Moot point anyway for the moment, I'm staying with Windows 7 for as long as I possibly can. Eventually, though, my machine will die, and I'll be forced onto 10. So at that point...)
It's horrible, has a ton of bugs and doesn't properly support JavaScript or CSS, we had to end up blocking it on my companies website just to be safe.
If adblocker worked on edge I would use it. Chrome and firefox have adblocker. How is Edge better!?!? Also why cant I have "Image Picker" addon with Edge?! I like these 2 addons and Edge does not have them.. Is it because Edge does not have addons? I think so..
Even IF I were going to potentially try Edge, there was a lesson I learned as a child, and it has held to this day as zero fail: When something seems too good to be true.....
Well, you know the rest. The suckers that actually think that MS isn't getting that $ worth PLUS MORE at the expense of said suckers are very unfortunately under-educated. Even more unfortunate is the number of people that will jump right on it and keep this sort of BS alive.
Yes, Slashdot is an American based site, but it has users all over the world and especially in English speaking countries. If Slashdot didn't want us, they'd restrict registration to US residents only. That said, yeah, expecting Slashdot to a filter that blocks out US news is being a bit precious. That Microsoft has to pay people to use their shitty browser is hilarious no matter where you live.
Microsoft can keep their money. As a general rule I block Bing at the firewall level.
Except his mouse wiggler requires his computer be running Edge when he doesn't need it.
So you omitted all the electricity his PC is sucking down.
When edge first came out, I tried it, and it worked pretty good, but it didn't have the extensions and other things for blocking ads and that kind of stuff I've grown to love. So I went back to my usual browser. :(
Some stuff happened, and I had to use edge for a few things. They've done updates to it since I'd used it before, and now the thing is so freaking SLOW!
Microsoft also made it the default with one of the updates without telling me it would or had changed it.
So I'd click on something in a program, and it would launch the browser, and suddenly edge would start to come up...
I said "start to come up" because after about half a minute, I'd get tired of waiting for that piece of #### to load and would fire up chrome. Chrome would start up, and have the page fully loaded before edge that had at least half a minutes head start had anything. Often I was done reading the page and had already closed chrome before edge would finally get anything.
It went from ok but not what I want to absolute and utter trash in less than a year.
If microsoft wants anyone to actually use that ####, they're going to be paying through the nose!
Seriously, so often I search on Google and it returns irrelevant results and often results that don't even include my search terms. This is a recent development in the last 10 years or so.
I'm a hard-core type. Using Linux as my primary OS for over 20 years, since 1994 or so. I was using Google before anyone had even heard of the company. I hate Microsoft with everything I have. Still, Bing is better. Go figure. OK, it's not so much that Bing is better as much as it is that Google seriously sucks. I mean, if I put a term in my search, especially if I put it in quotes, then FUCKING RETURN RESULTS THAT I TYPED IN! This pisses me off more than you could ever understand.
When I tried Edge during some troubleshooting (one web site worked with Edge but not Firefox when using Flash), the site reported that it was being accessed by Chrome, which I don't even have installed. Hmmmm?
Bing maps in general do suck, though they work OK on a phone. Google maps suck less once they actually finish displaying all their tiles, but for some reason they are very slow to load and respond to dragging around. For just basic mapping, I often use Open Street Map - but no satellite pics.
You couldn't pay me enough to make it my main browser.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Why would we use it if it doesn't even have basic extensions like chromecast? I found an MS answer saying to use chrome! http://answers.microsoft.com/e...
According to MS support page Edge doesn't support javascript. That's a bit of a downer ;)
"While Windows 10 does support JavaScript, the Microsoft Edge web browser does not. You cannot activate or enable the Java plug-in on the Edge browser. However, Windows 10 also includes Internet Explorer 11. If you encounter JavaScript content in Edge"
https://support.office.com/en-...
Only dumb birds land downwind.
Microsoft Edge tracks your mouse movements (among other things) and they wonder why no uses it. Windows 10 tracks mouse movements and keylogs everything you type. Spying on everyone in your family without consent is equivalent to a peeping tom or cyber stalking. Yep, it's exactly what everyone said it was going to be, a trojan horse.
Force updating to an operating system is unacceptable. Ignoring privacy settings is unacceptable. Removing the ability for the user to control what their PC is doing is unacceptable. Microsoft behavior is unacceptable. Windows 10 is unacceptable.
A company wanting to "pay you" to use their product is a company that is admitting their product is failing.
This sounds like paying Beta testers to do the job... is it still Beta?
I've seen it a bunch of times. People still want to use the old stuff. I use edge, and unfortunately IE. Certain sites I use have to not only use IE, it has to be a certain version or the Microsoft back end won't work. Standard Microsoft crap. So fragile.
I'm sorry but I don't think a rewards program is considered bribary. Or my local gas station has been bribing me to drink their smoothies for the past few years, or my cell phone company. Or wait valves been giving me kick backs for years in trading cards and sales. Reward programs are bribes by only the loftiest definition of the word they are designed to increase customer retention and awareness for other products they have that you might want. Very rarely does the value of anything you get exceed the money you are putting in to earn those rewards, and at no point does anyone start palming you 100 dollar bills. I'm sorry but reporting on a rewards program is about as newsworthy as reporting that they are going to be using a different kind of packing foam in their boxes, and about as morally reprehensible as a slightly eggy fart.