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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ... :)
so just like Chrome then?
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!
What if it were a 9 foot pole that just says 10 on 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.
> 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.
... 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
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.