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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.
A browser that is buggy as hell, has no plug-in support, and just plain doesn't work right. No thanks!
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.
Anyone else remember AllAdvantage?
Fuck Micro$oft!!!
I will not. Have you seen how many viruses they have?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
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!
...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.
Nothing like facts to drive your point home...
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
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.
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 ... :)
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
Wow, real insightful and snarky, ya know, substituting the S with a $. I somehow think people were doing that before you were born.
Wife got a new laptop, win10. Tried figuring how to do something in Win10 (was different than earlier versions). Couldn't. Did a search. Default was BING. No luck. Entered same search terms into Google, and as well as serving up relevant looking links, it gave me the answer outright. Google knows more about Win10 than BING does. WTF?!?
And Edge crashes her laptop a lot.
back in the day we botted sites to keep clicking on the ad.
Seems like now is a good time to script up a Macro using edge to search bing for every word in a dictionary...The laptop I was using to see the preview builds of win 10 will do nicely.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
M$ 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.
It says a lot about the state of US news consumers if you think an advertisement for a brand loyalty program is "hard news."
Breakfast served all day!
... 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.
"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.
> 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.
Free windows 10 you are the product, The non free version of win 10 is the very same OS nothing is diffrent except you now have to pay for it and you still are the product. Isn't that unfair?i think it is.
Jack of all trades,master of none
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"?
I see no Edge in Fedora and neither Debian. How is the package called?
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
... 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.
Yes, but it's true. US news is mostly a bunch of BS about the Kardashians and the like.
Chandler is the home of the most advanced fab in the world. And yes, Intel still assembles parts in Singapore, among other places, I just listed them as an example.
In fact even some of the cheap crap electronics you buy from China are made from parts here. I live within miles of an Avnet plant where they make things like resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc, that are shipped straight to China for assembly into PCBs that later make their way back here inside of a smartphone or a refrigerator.
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.
That says a lot about the state of US reporting, A lot of US hard news articles are UK newspaper based, and not reported much, if at all in the US.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
There you go US Based and more computer/tech oriented.
Just a suspicion the Guardian was used because Pravda isn't what it used to be and the Russian State organs are now about Russian Nationalism not communism.
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.
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.
Microsoft can keep their money. As a general rule I block Bing at the firewall level.
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!
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.
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.
Is The Guardian serving up the Microsoft ads to everybody, or just to US users? There will always be a few cases they will get wrong, such as non-US users of corporate networks of US-based companies, but they should be able to get it right at least 95% of the time.