Microsoft is herding the masses back to Microsoft

Summary: Microsoft is trying to gain an 'Edge' in the game by preventing people from getting the Web browsers which they actually want to use -- all this while publicly pretending to have ended its anti-competitive abuses

AT THE beginning of this week we saw openwashing of "Edge" (the "Blue E" by another name) in Microsoft propaganda sites (1105 Media) and among Microsoft boosters like Microsoft Peter. This was mentioned even in Phoronix and Ogg's Monty wrote that "to be fair, this isn't as fantastically unlikely as some pundits have been saying. After all, MS does own an IP stake in Opus."

Microsoft adopts VP9, Opus, Ogg and Vorbis because it has to (the Web has these media formats all over it, including in high-profile sites such as YouTube), not because it is playing nice or anything like that. The same goes for implanting a driver for the proprietary Hyper-V inside Linux, which necessitated GPLv2 for the driver itself (after Microsoft had been caught violating the GPL).

"Edge" is a bunch of nonsense (rebranding of IE) for Vista 10, which is so anti-competitive that Mozilla openly complained. Don't let Microsoft use this catchup with VP9 et al as a publicity stunt. As this new article serves to remind us this week, "Microsoft is trying to persuade users to keep Edge, the company's new browser that replaces Internet Explorer, when they search for "Chrome" or "Firefox" on Bing.

"The discovery, made by VentureBeat, shows that users who use Edge in Windows 10 to search for other browsers get a small message that says: "Microsoft recommends Microsoft Edge for Windows 10" with a link to a page explaining why."

Well, welcome the 'new' Microsoft. It uses one monopoly to illegally gain another. ⬆

"...[Windows 98] must be a killer on shipments so that Netscape never gets a chance..."

--Former Microsoft Vice President James Allchin in an internal memo