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Microsoft IT Technology

Microsoft is Forcing Outlook and Teams To Open Links in Edge, and IT Admins Are Angry (theverge.com) 139

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has now started notifying IT admins that it will force Outlook and Teams to ignore the default web browser on Windows and open links in Microsoft Edge instead. Reddit users have posted messages from the Microsoft 365 admin center that reveal how Microsoft is going to roll out this change. "Web links from Azure Active Directory (AAD) accounts and Microsoft (MSA) accounts in the Outlook for Windows app will open in Microsoft Edge in a single view showing the opened link side-by-side with the email it came from," reads a message to IT admins from Microsoft. While this won't affect the default browser setting in Windows, it's yet another part of Microsoft 365 and Windows that totally ignores your default browser choice for links. Microsoft already does this with the Widgets system in Windows 11 and even the search experience, where you'll be forced into Edge if you click a link even if you have another browser set as default. Further reading: Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature To Promote Its Edge Browser.
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Microsoft is Forcing Outlook and Teams To Open Links in Edge, and IT Admins Are Angry More

Microsoft is Forcing Outlook and Teams To Open Links in Edge, and IT Admins Are Angry

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  • Isn't this going to be an anti-trust violation? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @01:08PM (#63494672)
    again?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by dbialac ( 320955 )
      If Google is doing it...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by poptix ( 78287 )

        They are, and it annoys me to no end.

        Clicking a url in the news feed opens it in a (chrome based) window in news feed. Same in Chat, and YouTube. The worst part is *paying for YouTube Premium* and seeing ads on YouTube because the webview window uses separate cookie jars.

    • again?

      Why wouldn't they? If they get slapped with a few million in settlement and make 10x that in traffic surges, it makes sense, doesn't it?

      The people at FTC/DOJ want to work at MS and make the big bucks someday too, so it behooves them to play ball.

      • Why wouldn't they? If they get slapped with a few million in settlement and make 10x that in traffic surges, it makes sense, doesn't it?

        If history is anything to go by , once the europeans get pissed off, "a few million" is barely a rounding error. The lasts time they pulled this stunt , the EU slammed them with a â561 (About 620mil USD) fine. Prior to that in 2004, that fine was about £381 (nearly $800mil at the time)

        The europeans don't mess around. And they *cant* be happy about these sh

    • Re:Isn't this going to be an anti-trust violation? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @01:17PM (#63494702) Homepage

      I can't see any way to interpret this as anything than a flagrant antitrust violation.

    • It hasn't so far. The list of cases where windows ignores your browser choice is embarrassingly long. Honestly I'm surprised it took M$FT this long to save over office users. As opposed to just windows users.

      Hell we're really only one step away from you clocking the Chrome or Firefox icons and Edge popping up instead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      These kid-glove anti-trust punishments are not working. They go right back to their old rat habits when the cat's away. Spank Harder!

    • They don't enforce those laws anymore.

    • Re: Isn't this going to be an anti-trust violation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by simlox ( 6576120 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @05:03PM (#63495444)
      The anti-trust agencies can't handle these big companies. The rules have to be simpler: break up all large companies no matter what. Break up can be done by forcing larges companies to pay stock dividend so large they have to sell of parts - oppositeof the currentsituation, where these companies keeps buying up the competition and increasing their stock value. That way the stock holders won't loose their investment, but the control of that investment will no longer be concentrated in one company.

      • Dividend is a payment handed out based on earnings. Current or previous years.
        It is a decision of the share holders if dividend is paid out.

        There is hardly any way from outside to force a company to pay out dividend.

  • I mean, we all saw the signs with Windows 10, why would they stop when they release windows 11 which is just windows 10 but more in the direction they want it to go?

    I don't know what we're going to do, they know it too. It's the bait and switch, get everyone dependent on services they offer and are now integral to your business, then start forcing the crap policies that would have stopped people from adopting their technologies in the first place.

  • I wonder what the EU Antitrust authorities will have to say about this.

  • Don't like it? Don't use it. Choose an employer who saves money on their software budget.

    • Re:Well (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:14PM (#63494910) Journal

      Most 3rd party biz software assumes an MS infrastructure. Being a renegade from MS will create practical integration headaches. MS has biz by the balls.

      • Most 3rd party biz software assumes an MS infrastructure. Being a renegade from MS will create practical integration headaches. MS has biz by the balls.

        That's not true for most applications. Most things are web based these days, for the few things that aren't, there's wine.

        There's a sad fact though that some IT decision makers have vested interests in MS via shares and there isn't much you can do to persuade them that alternatives exist.

        • IMO there is absolutely no reason today for a typical, ordinary LOB system to be based on anything besides open-source and cross-platform technologies.

          And that's probably 95% or more of new software development today.

          There's still the need to maintain legacy software and to integrate parts of it into overall more modern systems. I'm working on that right now. A Web front end over a 15+ year old C# code base, targeting, for the moment, the Debian Linux subsystem inside ChromeOS.

          But if anyone starting a new

  • ... and even I think this is a trash move.

  • Why are IT admins who use Windows mad about this? Are they actually mad that a company with zero trust is going to do something underhanded? Why is anyone using Outlook or Teams?

    Outlook is a terrible email client, it's so bad it can be used to describe other terrible things! 9/11 – That was an Outlook of a day! The black plague – That was an Outlook in our history. If you want an email client there are many excellent choices, and if you want one that's rock solid, easy to use, and ticks a

    • While I don't use Outlook or Teams (much), my company does run them, and 100% felt it was an improvement over Google for everything but spam blocking. People that like Outlook like it or love it.

      I hate giving more money to Microsoft, but it feels like everyone else dropped the ball in serving companies like us. Better solutions are out there, but are not well tailored to us.

      • My employer switched from O365 to Google Workspace or whatever the fuck it's called. The Google office suite is utter garbage, I don't know why we didn't just switch to OpenOffice.

        • I personally prefer Open Office, Only Office, LibreOffice over G-Office (can't think of the name either), or MS Office. I don't mind paying for tools if that payment is bringing benefit to it, but I hate throwing money at bad software, just to throw money away.

        • Completely agree. Unfortunately due to the formatting quirks of Word there are a few issues with the free options. Damn I miss WordPerfect 5.1 sometimes.

      • Really? I can't think of a single office level Microsoft product that I like enough to warrant switching to. I'll exclude stuff like Azure, as that's not "office level".

        Which tools get your gold stamp?

        • People generally like Outlook, and Word/Excel are known knowns. Teams they find better integrated than everything we tried before.

    • meh, as usual, the devil is in the details and a lot of nuance is being left out of the click-baity headline and summary.

      Admins are able to circumvent this by policy in enterprise environments. In small businesses, users can change a setting in the browser to revert back to the system default browser.

      • Okay, not as funny, but then if there's a workaround no one should be that mad or upset.
      • The problem is that as users, we feel we're in a constant battle against Microsoft for control of the computer. We want a company that gives us features that benefit us instead of forcing things down our throats and having their fans say that it's not that hard to fight back.

        • Sadly, that behavior is far from unique to Microsoft.

          But it ought to be opposed no matter who engages in it.

          One way would be by using and supporting open-source and Free alternatives whenever possible, even if, initially, they are less convenient or featureful.

    • I'd gladly tolerate Teams only allowing links to open in Edge if that was the only annoying thing about Teams.

    • Re:That's hilarious! (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:29PM (#63494960)

      Why are IT admins who use Windows mad about this?

      Unlike your experience as a end user, Microsoft has historically been quite empowering to admins giving them vast control over how both Windows and office applications work. IT admins are mad about this because this represents a complete deviation from the norm, treating the IT admin like the home user pleb.

      just grab Thunderbird

      How good does Thunderbird integrate with groupware? Slack, Teams, Active directory? Does it play well with Exchange 365? No? Your mistake is thinking that IT admins are after an "email client". Outlook is not just an email client, and comparing it to thunderbird is like asking why Hamilton doesn't ride a bicycle around the F1 track, after all the goal is to just go in a circle right?

      Incidentally as a home user I tried thunderbird. I just need a dumb email client. But I do need a client that understands that you may have a different login for your IMAP server compared to your SMPT server. That highly complex concept is too much for simple Thunderbird so I ended up having to go to a more capable email client. No not Outlook, just the default email app that comes with Windows met my ridiculously simple requirement of being able to receive and send an email. Thunderbird didn't.

      Teams? Teams is the single worst communication platform, period?

      Worst for whom? Actually you seem to be completely clueless about why people pick these applications. It has nothing to do with what the end user is doing. Teams is used because Teams integrates with the rest of the Office ecosystem. The fact it is a communication client is separate. Outlook is used because Outlook integrates with the rest of the Office ecosystem. The fact it sends emails is separate.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 )
        Well, I'm not clueless about IT management, I just refuse to pick crap products. The Office ecosystem is a trash based ecosystem, MS Office can't do a single job better than any of the other office products such as LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, etc

        Teams is the worst for people who have to communicate in any meaningful manner. Teams is unstable to the point that it's a write-off. Even if I ignore that fact it lacks Linux support, which is enough to bench it, it's unstable and crashes constantly

      • Re:That's hilarious! (Score:4, Informative)

        by WaffleMonster ( 969671 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @08:47PM (#63495862)

        Incidentally as a home user I tried thunderbird. I just need a dumb email client. But I do need a client that understands that you may have a different login for your IMAP server compared to your SMPT server. That highly complex concept is too much for simple Thunderbird

        Thunderbird even ancient versions of it has always had separate authentication settings for incoming and outgoing messages. You can have any number of SMTP servers, any number of IMAP accounts and each IMAP account can be linked to a default outgoing SMTP server.

        • Thunderbird even ancient versions of it has always had separate authentication settings for incoming and outgoing messages.

          Ancient versions did and I enjoyed using it.
          The version I did didn't.
          I just checked again. Yes it's back!!!! It looks like they completely changed the configuration screen sometime in the past couple of years. I'm happy for them.

          Too bad. I have a solution. They missed their chance during the endless UI fuckarounds that Mozilla is so well known for. It very much did *NOT* have this ability when I tried it. I fucked around in the settings for half an hour before realising I had better things to do than fight

          • Ancient versions did and I enjoyed using it.
            The version I did didn't.
            Same for me.
            And you could even delete an SMTP configuration, well, you could, but it did not go away. It simply did no longer show up in the GUI. But: it remained to be the default one. Completely ridiculous. As I knew the contents of it, I grep'ed the file system: nothing to find. Security by obscurity, lol. They encrypted it ... could not figure in which damn file it was.
            So I deleted the whole user and set it up again.
            So: the only soluti

      • And why do companies use the Office ecosystem?

        End users know (more or less) how to work it. Office would be traded in a blink of an eye by companies, if there was something better for the end-users they employ or that they have access to more knowledgeable/better end-users. As long as all the versions from Office installed on-premise and/or the cloud are not too different from each other, Office applications integrate moderately well. That does not make Office into a good product, just less bad than most of

        • Office would be traded in a blink of an eye by companies, if there was something better for the end-users they employ

          No it wouldn't. Office is sold on its features and capabilities, not on its end users. The fact of the matter is Office is not an email client, a word editor, a spreadsheet, and a presentation software. It's a completely interconnected ecosystem of applications and services which integrate with a host of wide spread enterprise services and solutions offered by a single vendor.

          Companies love this. Why go to company Y, when company X offers software which also works with all the other software I already get f

    • If you think Outlook is bad on the client side, well it's way worse on the server side! 8-(

      • HAHA! You're not wrong on that one. Exchange was terrible the last time I had to deal with it. I have to thank Microsoft for making me love Linux! Microsoft did such a horrible job at server software, they forced me to become a real administrator and not a glass sweeper.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by micheas ( 231635 )
        Active Directory is the Microsoft equivalent of Sendmail. Architecturally insecure and the only real security solution is to dump it for a replacement. (RedHat and Google both have replacements for AD, much like the *nix world has postfix and qmail)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sjames ( 1099 )

      Mostly because they're stuck with it due to policy from above. Policy can't make them like it.

    • Teams? Teams is the single worst communication platform, period? Does it actually take the top spot? Ignoring the fact it's unstable, and ignoring the fact it lacks solid platform support, it's a digital violation all star that has NAM BLA taking notes!

      Once signed up for a teams account to run some online meetings and while meeting quality was good I found it impossible to do basic tasks. Meeting displays our contact phone and email addresses to participants. There is literally no way to change or even hide the invalid made up email address generated by Microsoft.

      To do so as far as I was told by MS requires going all in and having Microsoft host your domain/email. So you are stuck with unprofessional looking contact that does not even work as an intent

      • Microsoft is a lost cause incapable of producing anything of value without continuously fucking with you.

        That might be the best statement I've read about Microsoft all year :)! I was in a call with someone from Azure Support about a problem where the Azure Portal would crash when I accessed it from Firefox. The person tells me "Firefox isn't supported", "We only support Safari on Linux". Ignoring the "Safari on Linux" part, they also asked me to install Edge, and as a one off I tried, but they had botched signing keys that wouldn't let it install. The persons' response, to paraphrase: "Oh, well, that's Lin

    • Thunderbird? Seriously? I rather install an old Netscape ...

      You look at stuff from the wrong angle. They run microsoft. So obviously use Outlook/Exchange. No idea about Teams. I only used it at glorified video chat - which in comprehensive icons that have wrong translated tooltips.

      • There are tons of great email clients, some graphical, some text based, but all of them are better than Outlook! I like Thunderbird as a daily email client, but Mutt, Pine, Alpine, Geary, or Evolution, are all great.

  • Sounds like it's par for the course. They've been doing this for 30 years and the government does nothing about it. If we didn't break them up in the 90s when we should of, what makes you think they are ever going to do anything of the sort now?

  • Same as the old Microsoft.

  • What is the big deal (Score:4, Insightful)

    by u19925 ( 613350 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:08PM (#63494886)

    Common guys what is the big deal. When you marry an abusive husband, you should enjoy the pain. If your default browser is chrome and when the link opens in edge, all you have to do extra is login if the link needs login. If the link comes from a party who hasn't tested on edge then you just need to go on customer support for couple of hours and argue with a poor person on the phone telling them to fix the site. If you need to bookmark the link, just copy the link, go to chrome, open it and put it in bookmark. I mean you enjoy Windows. Can't you do these little things to show your joy?

    • ... do these little things to show your joy?

      This is what Microsoft, Apple and Google (Chrome and Android) depend on: You giving-up at the start, and using the now-crippled merchandise you bought, or accepting that your computer can't 'perform' a part of your work-flow.

      Bosses should be angry because, the OS is making employees less efficient. Instead, bosses see the cost of doing things right (more staff and/or migration) and choose enabling the greed of Microsoft, Apple or Google.

  • Easy, but painful fix... (Score:3)

    by Midnight Thunder ( 17205 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:18PM (#63494924) Homepage Journal

    There is an easy fix, but many organisations won't like it: ditch Windows and move over to Linux... or macOS. Certainly the OSs will have other issues, but like choosing a partner, you choose which set of issues you can live with.

  • Thanks for making life more difficult again, MS! (Score:4, Informative)

    by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @02:26PM (#63494944) Journal

    Just a few days ago, I had an issue where I needed to use Chrome instead of Edge to get around a problem, and it was with Microsoft's own content!

    One of our users requested we install Visio Pro on his PC. He didn't have a Visio Pro license assigned yet, so I went into our O365 admin panel and gave him a "Plan 2" license for it (the type that lets you use the desktop app as well as just the cloud based Visio Pro via browser session).

    Well ... after that, I kept fighting to be able to download Visio Pro to his PC. Every time I pulled up a link that should have taken him to the web page where he could click to install additional Microsoft applications? It wouldn't acknowledge that he was allowed to get Visio Pro! I cleared the browser cache and refreshed the page multiple times over the next 5 minutes. Nope .... Edge just wouldn't display it as an option, even if I signed him out and back in.

    Finally launched Chrome and pasted the same link I'd been visiting in Edge. Guess what? It now showed Visio as an app he "owned" and had a link to click to download it.

  • That was some time ago, back when everyone was complaining about the complexity of setting the default browser in Windows 11. Then they gave people what they wanted and now it forces Edge again.
  • A two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Which, given their no-bit product "quality" levels is quite understandable. If they had not been able to get away with being "incompatible" so long, MS would have ceased to exist a long time ago. As soon as reasonable (actually implementable with reasonable effort) standards on document formats and executable formats will be enforced by law (and that is going to happen at some point for all widely used mainstream software), MS is history. They cannot and never could compete on merit.

  • Google has been pushing every monopoly tactic they could to boost Chrome's market share, and no one complained. People let Google write the new playbook, and Microsoft is now following it.
  • Yet another reason to be glad I do almost all of my work on GNU/Linux.

  • I use Outlook and Teams at work but I've found the web versions to be faster. I just open outlook.office.com and teams.microsoft.com in Firefox. Outlook in particular responds faster (for me) than the desktop app -- though it' still pretty sluggish. Teams in the browser is about the same experience as the desktop version (which is currently an Electron app anyway), but at least you only have one browser engine running, saving a few hundred megs of memory.

    So obviously, links also open in Firefox. One thi

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