"continuing to push the boundaries of consent."

If by "push the boundaries" you meant "completely ignore them", then yes. This kind of behavior from MS, or any vendor, should always be considered strictly unacceptable.

Ran into this about two weeks ago. It can be turned off.

Here's the setting to change. It's under File -> Options -> Advanced

It's fucking annoying, admittedly edge is good on its own merits, but you know what pushes me to not want to ever use your product? Anti-consumer practices.

I have been very happy in using FF for my main browsing. It has adblock, NoScript and SponsorBlock. Since I use NoScript I jump on Edge when I want to use a trusted website for payments but I really want to use it less when it does this shit.

I can't wait for the excuse "OoOooh wooooops, that's a bug! Sowwy EU we did not mean to do anti consumer pwactices" as a way to dodge blame

I've been using edge since the first chromium beta. I'm considering moving to firefox just out of spite.

Outlook has a separate setting for opening links. It's very sneaky:

https://www.winhelponline.com/blog/outlook-hyperlinks-edge-default-browser/

Remember when Microsoft got raked over the coals for this kind of behavior, in the 90s?

I tried using outlook this year for the first time in 15 years, and immediately NOPED the fuck out when I noticed it displayed ads in-line with my inbox.

And then there are those rumors that they want to display ads in the settings panel. Fuck Microsoft, they have ZERO trustworthiness in my book

Something something antitrust. Something something browser choice. Microsoft is just asking to be fined €1 billion. Really, someone needs to make a big stink about it in Europe because they'll act before the US does.

“This change is designed to create an easier way for Outlook and Microsoft Teams users to reduce task switching across windows and tabs to help stay focused,” says Katy Asher, senior director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “By opening browser links in Microsoft Edge, the original message in Outlook or Teams can also be viewed alongside web content to easily access, read and respond to the message, using the matching authenticated profile. Customers have the option to disable this feature in settings.”

I don't know if this is a neurodivergent thing but I 500% could never see myself in a position I could say something I knew to be such BS and put my name to it.

I stopped using Windows and converted to Linux. I'm not going to be "one of those people" and tell you that you should too, but I've been using Linux full-time for 3 years for gaming, work, and personal stuff and never felt the need to go on Windows except to use my VR headset, which I haven't used in months. I just built a new PC and haven't even bothered installing my Windows SSD into it in the last 4 weeks since I built it. I may never and just sell my VR headset.

That sounds illegal, especially since they already lost an anti-trust lawsuit for Internet Explorer browser two decades ago. I guess they have enough power now that they don't have to worry about silly things like laws.

That's what we call malware!

That's how it works with Microsoft. Even search in Windows disregards completely your default browsers settings into opening them straight in Edge.

All aboard the anti-trust train 🚂💨

I'll keep using Firefox until I'm dead or it's dead!

I'm personally a Firefox user since it has developed to be so much better imo. However I do have to give credit to Microsoft for having imo a better browser than Chrome despite the fact they are both Chromium based.

Ran into this yesterday, when my manager opened a link and had to call me to help because it didnt autofill his passwords.

This "productivity increase" cost my corporation 15 minutes the first time anyone ran into it.

Sort of related, but this reminds me of a really annoying thing that’s been happening on my work windows 11 machine.

Any time I launch chrome from VSCode to attach a debugger, edge launches along with it, and directs me to a page that says “try the new bing.”

Absolutely infuriating, makes me want to uninstall edge.

Edge is an OK browser that's rapidly being bogged down with bloatware, just like Chrome which it sought to destroy. I'll keep using Firefox and hope the same thing never happens to it. At least they finally killed off IE.

This caused me to rage quit my emails this morning. I'm going to back to Thunderbird.

I switched to thunderbird a little while back when they started adding advertisements that look like actual email into my paid for windows application. Nope.

"Suddenly"? This has been happening for a long time. If you click on outbound links from built-in Windows apps, they used to always open in Edge unless you used a tool named EdgeDeflector to redirect them to your preferred browser. In 2021, they killed EdgeDeflector by making it impossible to redirect links with the microsoft-edge:// protocol baked in, even if you go deep into the registry settings to change this. They will eventually do this to Outlook and Teams too and get away with it, just like they got away with restricting EdgeDeflector.

This kind of horseshit is CONSTANT with Windows updates. I see customer PCs where I know I've set the default browser to Firefox or Chrome, and lo and behold, suddenly everything is opening in fucking Edge.

Similarly, Outlook on Android began to display ads for me around a week ago. So I'm currently using K-9 mail and Etar.

This happened to me this morning. And because the link was from a work email but I was logged in on my personal account, Edge wanted me to sign in to view it, requiring time-wasted on a 2FA process for no good reason whatsoever (obv I just closed Edge and copied the link over to Firefox).

The loss of productivity is large regardless of which method you choose to view the link. May this be the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I am fuming.

Edge was decent when it was first released. It's ~~slowly~~ quickly becoming the 2023 version of Nero Burning ROM from back in the 2000s. A bloated mess.

Oh crap, I thought it was just something I overlooked at work. It has been happening to me too

In no sense is Edge is a good browser. It is built for ads and tracking, and makes surfing the web inherently unpleasant.

How arent Microsoft engineers annoyed by this themselves?Do they even use the products that they make?

I can't reproduce this issue from my Thunderbird on Fedora.

Microsoft: "you no want Microsoft? You want Microsoft. "