Mozilla cries foul on changes to Windows 10's default browser settings

Mozilla cries foul on changes to Windows 10's default browser settings

In a recent blog post and open letter by Mozilla to its CEO, Satya Nadella, Microsoft has come under fire for the changes made to default settings in Windows 10, with Mozilla CEO Chris Beard going as far as to say that "user choice has now been all but removed [in Windows 10]."

He goes on to state:

The upgrade process now appears to be purposefully designed to throw away the choices its customers have made about the Internet experience they want...On the user choice benchmark, Microsoft's Windows 10 falls woefully short, even when compared to its own past versions. While it istechnically possible for people to preserve their previous settings and defaults, the design of the new Windows 10 upgrade experience and user interface does not make this obvious nor easy.

If the strong language used in this post wasn't enough, Mozilla has also penned an open letter to Satya Nadella, outlining all the issues they have with the new version of Windows. The company claims that changes to the default API settings are now less intuitive and make it harder for users to use third party apps, with changing your defaults requiring twice as many clicks compared to previous versions of Windows.

The letter ends with the following exhortation:

We strongly urge you to reconsider your business tactic here and again respect people's right to choice and control of their online experience by making it easier, more obvious and intuitive for people to maintain the choices they have already made through the upgrade experience. It should be easier for people to assert new choices and preferences, not just for other Microsoft products, through the default settings APIs and user interfaces.

It looks like Microsoft is under increasing fire regarding its new browser, Microsoft Edge, as Symantec - the company behind Norton Antivirus - have already taken issue with the lack of extensions, arguing that it leads to a less secure experience for users. Following that, we now have Mozilla, one of Microsoft's biggest competitors in the browser space, all but accusing the company of being anti-competitive.

Source: Mozilla