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Do you use the default Mail client on your PC, the one that comes with Windows 10, to read your email? How would you feel if Microsoft decided to throw in a few ads right at the top of your inbox?
These aren't rhetorical questions — as Windows news site Aggiornamenti Lumia noticed today, Microsoft is already testing that exact idea in a number of countries around the world. According to Microsoft's FAQ, what we're seeing is a pilot program, an experiment, a test that'll theoretically help the company decide if it should actually roll out the feature for real.
Update, 11:52 AM PT: Microsoft comms head Frank Shaw tells us the company has decided to turn these ads off. He also says the experiment was never intended to be tested broadly, which doesn't quite jibe with the existence of a FAQ about a pilot program taking place in several countries around the world, but either way the ads should be gone.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @02:05PM (5 children)
Why would I watch a video in the browser on Linux? I press a hotkey and open it in mpv.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @02:52PM
I wrote why: it's one of the most popular use cases for the mainstream. You and your arcane hackery* are simply too hard for "normal" users. You have to understand that as long as Linux is not as easy to use as Android/iOS/Windows it will not displace them in the mainstream. Which is why most companies are not even bothering to support it properly.
* - mpv uses youtube-dl to download/stream video from most sites, and there is a constant war between youtube-dl and youtube for example. Look at how Google actually made the lives of "alternate clients" a living hell with DASH for an example. And they are correct in doing that from their business perspective - mpv skips all ads while browsers/offical apps generally do not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @06:54PM (3 children)
I think you forgot the step to download the movie before you press you "hotkey".
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @09:11PM (2 children)
youtube-dl - it's integrated into mpv. Plus I use a real browser, so I can bind keys to shell scripts and do whatever I want.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 17 2018, @10:48PM (1 child)
That's is not an universal solution like proper video decoding in a browser. That software delivers bad performance due to being actively broken all the time by content vendors. It does not support all sites and those that it does often break. For example it's impossible to stream a youtube video with the speed being faster than 1x in mpv and it's trivial in a browser.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @05:19PM
Bullshit. I do that all time, mpv has built-in speed controls.