Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!!!
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.
...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.
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.