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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • That’s exactly what Microsoft did in the 1990s after an antitrust lawsuit for hindering free browser selection: integrated Internet Explorer into Explorer to have an excuse for having it preinstalled.

    The EU is taking similar steps but I tgink Edge WebView will stay essential. Removing it on a laptop broke biometrics (aka Windows Hello: fingerprint sensor and face recognition) and I had to use a restore point. Seems sketchy to use a browser engine for essential security features – at this point, I would hope I had triggered some OS tamper-detection because the alternative is an OS whose login system is infected with an unpopular browser not because it enhances security but out of spite, and I don’t think exploiting legal loopholes leads to most secure solutions.













  • I don’t disagree with you. I could have still messed up in a subtle way but at least the consequences don’t seem to be too serious.

    Anyway, I don’t think it’s (third party) malware (that is, not by me or Microsoft) for another reason: viruses and trojans are not what they used to be. Unlike the 1990s, you won’t find much modern malware that does nothing but annoys the user (corporations, other users and freeware vendors do it plenty). People do it fir profit and they make adware, ransomware and cryptostealers, not some script kiddie’s batch file in the Startup folder that opens all executables in System32 simultaneously.

    When Firefox started opening several blank tabs every second, I immediately knew it wasn’t malware but a misconfiguration: turns out it was trying to open a PDF in itself. I think this is another little mistake I made.