Microsoft to auto upgrade some business and education PCs to Chromium Edge in August
Microsoft this week warned enterprise and education customers running Windows 10 that it will start replacing the old, original Edge browser on their PCs with the newer Chromium-based version on or after July 30.
First to get the forced swap will be machines in educational settings, Microsoft said, citing back-to-school scheduling for the prioritization. (Many K-12 schools, along with colleges and universities, are saying, "We will share a business timeline at a later date," wrote Elliot Kirk, senior program manager with the Edge team, in a July 30 post to a company blog.)
According to Kirk, PCs serviced by Windows Update will be automatically upgraded to the Chromium Edge. "This update will not impact devices in education and business updated by Windows Update for Business (WUfB) or by Windows Server Update Services (WSUS)," he asserted.
[...] Organizations that want to stymie this effort can use the Blocker Toolkit for Edge-to-Edge released in December 2019. The kit, which can be downloaded directly from here in .exe format, blocks Windows Update delivery of the new Edge. It does not prevent students or workers from manually obtaining the Chromium-based Edge. This support document, last revised June 30, covers the Toolkit.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fustakrakich on Friday July 03 2020, @03:13AM
Edge performs poorly anyway, and many of its functions are a pain to use
Just let it go, and don't argue
There is only one good browser [seamonkey-project.org]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Friday July 03 2020, @03:33AM (5 children)
Also worth noting, Edge Chromium will be the default browser in the Fall 2020 Windows 10 release.
Anecdotally, I've helped two of my customers deploy this. The killer feature is IE mode. This lets the admins specify sites that require Internet Explorer in the Enterprise mode site list, and Edge chromium will embed IE within a tab to let those legacy sites work. It's awesome because the users get a single-browser experience and the administrators get 99.9% of the traffic out of IE while still maintaining backwards compatibility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @10:36AM (3 children)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @04:49PM (1 child)
It's almost entirely intranet shit.
A public facing website that requires IE is suicide, since no one uses IE anymore.
However, in a corporate environment, where plans to modernize have likely failed at least once, there are still plenty of ancient internal sites with 20 year old ActiveX components on the page required for their operation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:04PM
See also:
https://support.sectigo.com/Com_KnowledgeDetailPage?Id=kA01N000000zFK9 [sectigo.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2020, @07:15AM
Lots actually. Many vendors still use activex plugins. HP ALM is one. There's lots more out there.
You lack understanding and experience. Go and get a job in IT for a large corporation. Come. Join us. The water is fine.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @02:33PM
Enterprise Mode for Internet Explorer is utter crap. I have to support it. It sometimes works, the cache doesn't always refresh, and when you are talking about tens of thousands of machines out of date still using n-1 or n-5 or n-10 version of the xml.. it can really make your day as an admin suck.
TL;DR Hacked up crap that sort of does the job which shouldn't have been in place for more than six months
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @03:37AM (2 children)
Anybody noticing a lot of websites breaking in Firefox recently, like past three weeks?
Did Micros~1 win the browser war at last by embracing and extending Chromium?
What does the Book of Mozilla say about these matters?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @05:42AM (1 child)
It's because a whole generation of idiot web coders think a monoculture is a good thing and coding to standards is stupid. They just check if you're using chrome and if not, assume you're a stupid idiot who doesn't deserve to use their website.
Their loss.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Friday July 03 2020, @05:56AM
That and/or their bosses are telling them to do it that way. And probably because everyone wants to be in the "in" crowd, and doing all the tricky constructs with the world's most popular browser. I'm with you- it's stupid. Why do we even have w3c?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Hartree on Friday July 03 2020, @04:59AM (1 child)
Prepare to get serviced.
We get "serviced" by Microsoft regularly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @01:19PM
This is Not the education you are looking for.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by inertnet on Friday July 03 2020, @08:11AM (3 children)
That update happened this week here already, I saw it on several systems. Of course with a forced reboot into a non responsive state where one had to answer questions first, before the system would be started completely. That browser update is even being pushed as required on Windows 7. The blue screen question of course defaults to "yes, please change my settings and use this wonderful browser".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @01:20PM (2 children)
Windows pushing a program onto your computer hidden as an update? The only thing that could be worse was if it was Inertnet Exploder.
(Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Friday July 03 2020, @01:44PM
In the past Microsoft already had to pay fines in the order of half a billion dollars to the EU, exactly for that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @03:03PM
A windows update pushed to my machine, installed Chromium Edge, changed a bunch of settings, including the PDF one which was opening in Chrome.
Assholes. My settings. My computer. Fuck off.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 03 2020, @11:58AM (2 children)
Wasn't supposed to even have updates still, but for some reason I suddenly had Edge installed automagically.
In the upper right corner was a really faint 'X' to stop the auto config instead of answering questions.
Then in the add/remove programs removal worked.
Then it asked for user comments on the 'experience'.
The situation has lost the idea of providing service to a user, It seems instead to be about serving the user to some other customer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @01:38PM
holy crap
When will windows 7 be safe from their updates? I figured they'd finally washed their hands of it except for the rare critical security update; they earn my goodwill through such gestures, but adding an application I would never install myself and not be very clear about it when they do?
I mean if they did this for the multi-year Windows 7 extended support services that some businesses pay for, and made it an option, then... ok whatever. I'd not get it because I'm not paying for that. But this is crazy, they are almost forcing what should be a choice. well. what else is new. Still, I'd hoped they'd just let windows 7 users die peacefully as they age out, rather than actively try to kill them to death.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 04 2020, @09:06PM