Yes hello John Windows my microwave account name is Oobe\bypassnro

it has better anti fingerprinting than firefox? That's nice to know

I’ve noticed this on political posts too, among others and I’ve wondered the same thing.

I'm pretty sure if Firefox/Mozilla decides to change their policy on something, most forks of firefox will have no choice but follow the same path

afaik all firefox forks are really small, just like chromium forks

Mozilla might not have as much conflicting interests though, I'll admit

Sometimes bad people do good things.

They haven't blocked the windows feature, they're using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.

The only two there that bother me are the affiliate code thing (reminds me of the Honey drama) and installing extra software without consent. The first was a bad call and probably related with how their ad replacement stuff works (if anything, they should merely axe affiliate links; Firefox has that as an option), and this"solution" to the latter is pretty odd to me:

reinstall the browser without admin rights

Why would a browser need admin rights in the first place? I haven't used Windows in well over a decade, so I don't think that particular one would be an issue for me.

The rest can be grouped as:

• bugs - bug fixes generally don't get prioritized until enough users complain; I would be very picky if I was an at risk person (activist or whatever) and would probably only use Tor browser
• opt-in services
• their marketing department

My options for chromium browsers are:

• something with ineffective ad blocking
• Opera - I used it before it became a chromium browser, then it went downhill; not FOSS
• Brave, with all its warts

Since ad blocking and FOSS are my prerequisites, Brave basically wins by default.

While I agree with most of what you said, typical users won’t run into these issues unless they’re doing something more technical (e.g installing blender or something), in which case they can ask for help.

Can 800 year old grandma Doris use the feature? Can the average person who writes comments on YouTube videos? Minion meme posting facebook aunts? If not, it's not ready for mainstream.

I don’t think these people can install Windows or are pros at using it either, and in which case it’s the responsibility of whoever installed the OS to guide them through it a little like I did with my parents (they’re in their 80s and they’ve been using Linux for the past five years just fine), and I imagine those kind of people to only care about browsing the web and maybe viewing a PDF every once in a while.

So, you're saying that browsing history, in literally any browser on the market, is a bug not a feature?

surreptitiously

Oh, wait, I actually missed that! How is something that you need to purposefully turn on "surreptitious"? Like... Holy fuck, people, this is supposed to be the community of tech-literate people, so maybe stop fear-mongering in read about Recall a bit? It's opt-in, it's limited to a (as of now) extremely small number of NPU-carrying devices, it's offline.

If you don't like it, just don't fucking turn it on.

Just block with unlock why choose browser based on a ad block feature that is worse (injecting own ads/adware and therefore trying to dictate who is allowed to grab your attention) than the ad blocking extension?

I recommend Firefox, due to best compatibility with uBlock (fuck manifest v3) and additionally have a DNS filter in your network, like pihole or adguard.

On the go, use wireguard VPN to always be digitally home, and get your ads blocked (as well as tracking organisations) like that.

It's a good thing that microsoft is trustworthy and you can believe everything they say. And that malware never misuses resources of the system on which it is installed.

Actual optional things are disabled by default.

Optional like how it reminds me every 3 days that it wants my info for "customization" purposes, and I can only sleep the notification for another 3 days instead of telling it to fuck off?

They have been so predatory, at this point no one should see anything they do as benefiting end users.

And how do you know it's not malicious in nature? I'd like to know what your definition of "malicious" is if you're just fine with letting a Corpo run system look at everything you're doing.

Well, semantically yes, not all telemetry is spyware. However regarding Windows telemetry it's indistinguishable from spyware - you have no idea nor control over the data gathered, measured and processed.

The crux is that Windows telemetry is opt out, opting out can't be done during installation, and historically opting out wasn't sticky. Additionally some Windows telemetry is still being sent despite opting out.

That makes Windows telemetry fulfill all spyware criteria.

diagnostic

I think it is useful to send crash reports, but the user should have power over it (see: when macOS generates a crash report, it asks the user if they would like to send it)

engagement measuring

That is your data they are taking to make money off of without your consent, and I consider that malicious. There are ways to do that with consent. See: Steam’s annual hardware survey

You consider actual, literal spyware as being merely telemetry?

Microsoft is known for making things “optional” at first then eventually forcing it down everyone’s throats. Removing offline accounts is one of them.

It’s not so much the technology itself is malware, but its behavior replicates that of malware.

Right. So you're all panicking just in case.

That's what's being swept under the rug as "alarmists being loud".