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From ComputerWorld:
Microsoft on Thursday began blocking rival browsers and search providers from using Windows 10's Cortana search box, the operating system's prime search real estate.
While Gavin didn't name names, Mozilla's Firefox modified Windows 10 so that when that browser was made the operating system's default, Firefox's selected search provider generated results from in-Cortana queries, with the ensuing pages appearing in Firefox, not Edge. Other browsers, such as Google's Chrome, did not go that far, but third-party extensions available in the Chrome Web Store did.
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Microsoft Declares Cortana Search box as Bing- and Edge-Only Turf
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If your hands are clean and your cause is just and your demands are
reasonable, at least it's a start.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DrkShadow on Saturday April 30 2016, @02:23AM
You _can_ uninstall Cortana.
There is, in the registry, a key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\something\something\packages. (Do a find, match full word.) That key has under it a thousand more keys, one of which will be named something with "cortana" in it. (Do a find again, from that start, not matching full word.) I don't have the name off-hand, as I've removed it. It has a subkey, Owners, which specifies Windows 10 Pro or Home or some such (basically "the core of the operating system" (and these are packages too, I believe)). Right-click that key, and reset the permissions, so that you can clear the contents of the owners subkey.
With that done, take the name (with version number at the end), and do:
dism /online /remove-package /packagename:"<that-cortana-package-name~1.0.0.0.0.456>"
Repeat this for each package mentioning cortana. I think there's only one.
Drawbacks? Well, the search is gone. Unfortunately, the Windows 10 start menu doesn't expand to show your programs, so you can't actually access a program except by launching it from Windows Explorer or the command line (or the taskbar, if it's pinned). The start menu search is gone. The files search may be gone. I haven't investigated too far in depth. I've also noticed that my start menu only stays up for one, maybe two seconds before it disappears. (I removed a lot of other packages at the same time, ..) I can click it again, but the same behavier results.
Removing cortana is possible, but a royal pain. Remover beware. (You can do the same thing with xbox packages, phone, sms, windows app store, some telemetry, and so on..)
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Saturday April 30 2016, @02:51AM
That it isn't as simple to remove as any other app spits in the face of efforts like MinWin [wikipedia.org] to make Windows a more versatile platform. Is this the new integrated IE problem again?
I wonder how many CPU cycles (and electricity!) are wasted on things like Cortana, so-called security apps, and general lazy or time-crunched programming?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 30 2016, @04:20AM
Not to mention the privacy invasion and wasted bandwidth as Microsoft uses Cortana to submit your searches back to the mothership. Alas, Cortana appear to be this generation's IE in terms of something that should be removable but, as implemented, doing so manually will break other things for no good reason.