Microsoft dangles $1 million prizes and Mercedes-AMG cars inside Edge as persistent pop-ups potentially spark fresh “bribery” backlash.
One of the last things I used to respect about Microsoft was when they kept up the development of their own rendering engine, even as Chrome ran away with its popularity. IE6 was a monster, but for a time MS was doing a good job as an underdog by pushing standards compliance. Even if it wasn’t as nice as Firefox, it was important to have more horses in the game of competing browsers rather than creating a monoculture around Chrome.
Needless to say, the Edge appearing in this contest is nothing like what I ever had hope for.
An edge for an edge for an edge.
Let me guess… Existing users are excluded from participating? Cause I ain’t got no pop up banner anywhere. Or is cause I’m European?
Checkout Heluim Browser (GitHub) instead, but keep in mind that they don’t have auto-update. But you can add their windows GitHub repo to your RSS reader to be alerted of any new updates: https://github.com/imputnet/helium-windows/releases.atom
I dunno? You had my upvote but I didn’t follow the link. No auto update. RSS reader? :) The typo?
I’ll now go give it a peek 😉
It looks like they have automatic updates by now
Are you sure?
I downloaded it 2 weeks ago and it had no auto updates warning.
I went with custom setup and all the options were there
On Windows?
Yep
You’re not as much excluded as not included (in the shortlist. Are you a relative to gates?).
Would I be here with a free account if I were? ✌️
They’re just making themselves look trashy and desperate.
What might work is making their software better than everyone else’s. But that requires effort and skill and managerial competence.
Just imagining Clippy in front of a cracked mirror, “jessss a little more rouge and you can’t have too much mascara…”
Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me. - Clippy
https://quokk.au/c/clips/p/784512/nice-hat
You can always trust AI for fashion advice.
All of whom Microsoft doesnt posses.
I bet they still have some good devs who are continually thwarted by management.
Yeah the Power Toys devs seem solid
I mean they’re exclusively writing tools for power users for eventual implementation to mainline as they develop and test simplification that doesn’t alienate the power user… So managers can’t really say they’re doing anything bad or dumb ever because it’s power user features then porting.
Ye, ofc. Just let the good devs cook!
But if we are being honest, if you dint care about privacy, it is a good browser. Its better than chrome. You can check the performance of of both on the same machine. It also has better pdf rendering.
It’s trash. It front pages clickbait and bullshit, has no privacy, and with so many other options why bother?
I am not saying you should use it, i was addressing app quality. The original commenter was talking about business practices but app quality. Which is why isaid “privacy aside”. Privavcy is very important and i would never have someone use chrome or edge but that wasnt the topic.
You could paint it gold with premium genuine alpaca leather interiors, and I would still not use it.
It’s only function is to download a better browser.
You don’t need it for that.
winget install Mozilla.Firefox.enalthough microsoft even stole winget :-(
He didn’t say it was the best, only that it was better than Chrome.
How is my browser downloader going to help me win a million dollars?
Rigged. They won’t hand it out to some rando.
That’s the thing. You have to be some kind of influencer with followers on state backed social media to win.
Someone like MKBHD, to use one example, isn’t going to talk about the guy on Lemmy with no followers who won. He (or someone like him) might talk about a Twitter user with thousands of followers who won so they can cross traffic.
Microsoft and Google want you to use their browser so they can sell your data. Your data, on its own, isn’t worth paying you anything for. So they won’t do it. What contests like this pay for is organic exposure. Which people like us can never give them, which is why we don’t win things.
We started to use ad blockers in the early 2000s because no one could trust they were the 999,999 visitor to the website.
It sounded (and stills sounds) scammy.
For years they ran a program to reward people for using Bing (they still technically do, but the payouts are next to nothing, maybe $5-10 worth of gift cards per year).
10 years ago you could accumulate a passive income of several thousand dollars per year by farming Bing Rewards, Perk (before that company went under) and a few other programs.
Wow, the days of dodgy toolbar extensions never truly went away. They just evolved to become part of your operating system.
The thing that actually baffles me about this is how this looks in the face of their next major competitor in the consumer market, Apple and their macOS.
macOS (or any other Apple product) has never (to my knowledge) had anything like this and it would be extremely out of character for Apple to suddenly change that. With all other manufacturers raising prices (including the Surface as of today) and the MacBook Neo directly competing with the mid tier PC laptops, this is what Microsoft decides to do?
At some point, one would hope that the average user starts to ask the question, can I have a computer that won’t pull this bullshit on me? But I think unfortunately most typical users (especially anyone daily driving Edge) just think there’s too much friction to move away from Windows, and so they stay, continuing to get fucked in the ass by megacorps.
But hey, I’m not in the running for a free car like them. Not like I’ll install Edge onto my Mac or Arch Linux computer and sync my shit with OneDrive.
You know that edge injects a popup into the chrome download page begging you to use edge. It says something like “Hey dont you know that edge is actually built on Chrome as well and blah blah blah copilot AI”
Not in the slightest bit anticompetitive. Nope. Not at all. whistles
Not worth it
Microsoft is a very large lumbering giant that seems to lack a cohesive vision forward, especially on the consumer front. Every single piece of consumer facing software lacks a cohesive design language, and seems to be regressing in usability. No one is truly primed to replace them yet in either the corporate or consumer businesses however, something like the MacBook Neo can certainly take a few points of market share away from the standard consumer
This is what happens when they get MBAs in charge. Same thing happened at Apple. The original guy with a vision in charge (Gates, Jobs) goes away and the company suffers for it.
What vission did Gates have beyond using money to crush competition? Being a pedophile?
Don’t forget jumping over office chairs
At the time of Gates, they wanted to monopolize the operating system market because that was the way to lock people in. People owned hardware and in order to make the most money your needs your OS to be their platform so they had no choice but to pay you.
Now in 2026 everyone’s OS is Chrome. So the goal is to make everyone depend on your cloud storage, on your productivity suite, on your chatbot, your automation platform, your cloud database. Then you give them just a state and then rent it to them in perpetuity.
This is why they don’t mind making RAM too expensive. Drives people to inexpensive devices and subscriptions for services for the hardware they can no longer afford and don’t have the skills to maintain.
Wow. That’s super sad.
Goddamn microsoft. Get it together.
Perhaps make a better product…
Well, cars suck and 1million would be nice but still won’t but me a home where I live.
