Microsoft Backs Down, Won’t Warn Users Away From Using Chrome, Firefox

Last week, news leaked that Microsoft’s upcoming build 1809 of Windows 10 (the October 2018 update) would include a new warning system that informed users they already had Microsoft Edge installed when they attempted to download Chrome or Firefox. The new warning — and that was Microsoft’s term for its own message, as you can see from the screenshot below — was the latest in a series of attempts by Redmond to “encourage” users to try Edge and its own Store offerings as opposed to whatever solutions they use already. Microsoft also made changes to existing user defaults in Windows 10 in order to give itself permission to show these warnings and neither change was well-received by the user community.

Microsoft, to its credit, appears to have been listening — at least a little. An update provided to The Verge yesterday claims that this new warning message will not be included in the October 2018 update, but that the company reserves the right to ship these kinds of prompts in future updates. It is not clear if the company will still change the default setting that allowed it to harass users with these kinds of notifications in the first place. As we wrote last week:

Under Settings > Apps, you used to have the option to “Allow apps from anywhere (Default),” “Warn before installing apps from outside the Store”, and “Allow apps from the Store only.” The new options are “Turn off app recommendations,” “Show me app recommendations (Default),” “Warn me before installing apps from outside the Store,” and “Allow apps from the Store only.”

The current defaults and options in Windows 1803.

Microsoft has changed the default from “Allow me to install apps from anywhere,” to “Show me app recommendations.”

Assuming Microsoft moves ahead to ship this new default, it’ll have cleared a path to ramp messages at a later date regardless of how customers reacted to this specific messaging. But we’ll have to wait for the update to drop (or at least a new build in one of the Windows Insider rings) to see how the company handles the question going forward. Paul Thurrott has written that there’s no way this feature was baked in as a test and that the company backing off the idea now, while positive, is just one small step towards repairing the damage that Microsoft has been doing to the underlying OS since 2012. But it is a step in the right direction.

And Microsoft is capable of making those steps. As Windows 10 has evolved, it’s sharply reduced the amount of data it collects, particularly at the “Basic” level of data collection, as verified by multiple independent watchdogs. Such improvements may not address fundamental user dissatisfaction with any level of data collection, but they do represent a practical improvement to the situation as it exists on the ground.

Windows 10 is, in many ways, an excellent operating system. I vastly prefer it to Windows 8, which I skipped on my primary work machine (I used it on testbeds and laptops, but kept my personal rig on Windows 7). The OS has meaningfully evolved since its 2015 launch with a number of features and capabilities it didn’t have three years ago. Hopefully going forward, Microsoft will keep itself focused on improving the underlying OS’ technical capabilities and features and refrain from begware marketing tactics.

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