Counterpoint: HUGE disclamer: I'm windows fangirl, and I really love the new Microsoft edge. I have it on my laptop, tablet and cellphone, and I even had it on Linux the last time I gave a chance to Linux.
Like you, at first I thought some features were sleazy, like the coupon. But after using it a bit, I like it: whenever I'm going to buy something on Amazon or somewhere else, I having a big popup telling me it's cheaper on this alternative store OR that I forgot to clip a coupon on amazon is REALLY helpful! It's like shopping.google.com right inside your browser, on a push basis.
It's really hard to make a product that's satisfactory to everybody. You may hate the coupon feature - but I love it. I'm not a big fan of debt to finance consumption, BUT maybe there's a student out there who needs that to splurge on cheap hardware during blackfriday and make a profit by parting it out on ebay?
Also, a feature that's just "meh" can be safely ignored, like the various things Word can do: no, you don't have to display every toolbar if you don't use them.
If the feature is worse than "meh", say if it goes to far, Edge can become a source to made a free software browser, like Chrome became chromium for people who value their freedom and privacy.
And considering all the naughty changes Google has been adding (ex: to make it harder to do ad blocking), maybe that's for the better: I'd rather have Microsoft employees fix the codebase and backport features from upstream, than volunteers: this frees the volunteers so they can concentrate on the more important (and easy stuff), and leave the boring stuff to Microsoft.
Is it more complicated to have chrome -> chromium -> edge -> edgium -> something you will be able to use?
Yes.
But so what? As long as it works, I don't care much.
I urge everyone not to ignore to ignore or dismiss this viewpoint as I do not believe it is an outlier. Without going into the issues associated with 'cheaper' solutions ( that might easily end up not being so cheap once you check the fine print; return restrictions and so on ), privacy implications of MS monitoring your shopping patterns and veiled advertising resulting from MS selling user space to highest bidder, we need to be able to address those and indicate to regular users that there is a real potential for harm that could result from this ( and they will have no recourse when that harm happens ).
So Microsoft is tracking all your checkouts? Why would you want that? And it’s not push, it’s pull because there is no way to store all data locally and keep it updated.
> If you use gmail or outlook or just forward your emails there, I've got bad news for you :)
That's why you shouldn't use those either if you care about privacy. You should use fastmail, zoho or some other service where you are the customer, not the product.
> We all pay more when coupons (cough cough affiliate codes) are automatically applied. It's not surprising that you like the appearance of saving money, your experience isn't special.
You need to think at the system level, and with the time dimension added.
Let's see how it would go down if I followed your advice:
- I use coupons, like everyone else: I then save money
- I take a moral grand stand and refuse to use them: I waste money
- magically (meaning I don't think it'll ever happen), people are inspired by my moral grand stand and almost everybody stops using coupons: everybody saves money
- someone doesn't care about morals, and start using coupon again: they save money
- they post about this "one weird trick", other people decide to join in, they try and realize it helps them save money, I do the same, and we're back to square 1.
And from that point on, more people will be using coupons until almost everybody again uses coupons.
You can't win a fight against the shared preferences of everyone else in the world.
If you think you can, great! Then the best tool is to use politics to legally forbid coupons. If it's such a great idea, you'll certainly have no problem finding a wide popular support for that?
If it's not so popular, then what do you think gives you the right to impose your preferences on the majority?
It may seem better to take this grand stand, but to me, it's pointless: you are just wasting money to feel good, with no chance to do anything else in a larger picture, but feel special or more enlightened.
I personally don't worry about coupons, I worry about how sites can use data about me to dynamically adjust prices to "what I'll pay", instead of giving the same price to everybody. From my understanding sites like Amazon have even been caught doing these practices before. And we already know places like Airline companies do this.
The problem is when sites like Amazon require accounts, there is not much to do to get around being tracked and having dynamic pricing come into play. At least with airlines you can VPN and use private browsing to try and avoid this practice.
There are already solutions: use tor to do price discovery, or report prices or find communities centered around prices like reddit.com/r/buildapcsales
Oh for sure, I even use services like camelcamelcamel on Amazon to ensure I am getting a good price. It's unfortunate that we have to rely on third party services just to get more fair consumer standards.
There's a huge difference between doing some discovery and using a vendor's own coupon codes versus affiliate codes automatically applied by a browser addon masquerading as a virtuous aid. This distinction seems to be have been lost on you. When you use affiliate codes that didn't actually earn your conversion, you are screwing over the company while rewarding corruption.
Like you, at first I thought some features were sleazy, like the coupon. But after using it a bit, I like it: whenever I'm going to buy something on Amazon or somewhere else, I having a big popup telling me it's cheaper on this alternative store OR that I forgot to clip a coupon on amazon is REALLY helpful! It's like shopping.google.com right inside your browser, on a push basis.
It's really hard to make a product that's satisfactory to everybody. You may hate the coupon feature - but I love it. I'm not a big fan of debt to finance consumption, BUT maybe there's a student out there who needs that to splurge on cheap hardware during blackfriday and make a profit by parting it out on ebay?
Also, a feature that's just "meh" can be safely ignored, like the various things Word can do: no, you don't have to display every toolbar if you don't use them.
If the feature is worse than "meh", say if it goes to far, Edge can become a source to made a free software browser, like Chrome became chromium for people who value their freedom and privacy.
And considering all the naughty changes Google has been adding (ex: to make it harder to do ad blocking), maybe that's for the better: I'd rather have Microsoft employees fix the codebase and backport features from upstream, than volunteers: this frees the volunteers so they can concentrate on the more important (and easy stuff), and leave the boring stuff to Microsoft.
Is it more complicated to have chrome -> chromium -> edge -> edgium -> something you will be able to use?
Yes.
But so what? As long as it works, I don't care much.