First, the facts. When you upgrade from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 with “express settings”, it does indeed reset all of your default apps and their file associations.
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Microsoft has defended its behaviour, stating, “We designed Windows 10 to provide a simple upgrade experience for users and a cohesive experience following the upgrade”.
After calling on Microsoft to “make it easy, obvious and intuitive for people to maintain the choices they have already made”, Mozilla also announced the launch of a tutorial video and support materials to guide users through the process of preserving their choices on Windows 10. “We’ve had a couple of, sort of, practice runs with phone and PC“, Belfiore says, before pivoting to the presumably brighter future with Windows 10, “We now have all the devices lined up”. What Beard is asking for is flexibility and “choice” on users part to make their own browser decisions and there’s nothing wrong in that per say. Following two antitrust rulings in the 2000s against the bundling of Media Player and Internet Explorer, Microsoft was forced to offer different versions of Windows in Europe. “These changes aren’t unsettling to us because we’re the organization that makes Firefox”, he writes. Absolutely not. Windows 10 users can switch right back to Firefox is they choose to – it is not hard.
Even at first glance, Edge seems like a vast improvement over its predecessor: fast browsing, minimal popups (thanks to a built-in popup blocker), and more importantly, no sporadic crashes. Of course, we’ve also included some notes on how to fix these issues… if a fix is even available. The only problem is, all the searches go through Microsoft’s Bing search engine. They have always tried to achieve the same with its Internet Explorer but never really succeeded in their plans.
Beard said that the cause of concern was not due to his position in Mozilla, the maker of competing browser Firefox, but because of the Microsoft’s lack of respect in respecting the choices that users have previously made as they used older versions of the Windows operating system. Users can follow the same process for Chrome, or any other web browser.
Windows 10 is Microsoft’s excuse to unleash a powerful new Internet browser.
Microsoft has since yanked the blog post by Penn that outlined the bump in Bing usage.
In previous editions of Windows, it might have been unlikely that Beard’s open letter would have any effect, but with Windows 10 Microsoft has made it clear that the OS will continue to evolve long past its initial release.
The company is targeting 1.5bn machines to install Windows 10 in the next three years.
“We strongly urge you to reconsider your business tactic here”, Beard told Nadella.
Online comment as the details about Microsoft’s proposed data-scooping and sharing activities have circulated have been scathing.
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Gains are predicted to come from new users, as well as current users who will end up using Bing more frequently as a result of the changes in Windows 10.
