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Comment on Microsoft Edge nags users with a 3D banner to change Windows 11's default browser

and you open it directly or through files like PDFs

As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.

I have Win11 in a VM so I can make certain company documents play nice for the Windows users at work, and find it genuinely entertaining how fucky MS have made it. I found the other day that if you link to a document in Excel, but put the link in wrong, it’ll open Edge to warn you about it. Until that point I hadn’t opened Edge at all in that VM. I installed Firefox from an .exe I downloaded in macOS then immediately set it as default.

It’s always nice to shut that VM down and go back to using an OS that doesn’t nag me all the fucking time.

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pycorax@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.

I don’t see the difference here. Opening PDFs in an image viewer is wild too to me and I’ve used both Mac and Windows. For the shit that people give Edge, it’s a pretty nice pdf viewer and of all the browsers, it’s the most fully featured one that I know of.

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- DJDarren@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s not that it opens the link in a browser, it’s that it opens the link in a browser that isn’t the default, and that I’d never used.
  
  macOS has its problems, sure, but I can’t think of a single time when it’s ignored my preference for software.
  
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  - LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’d like to add to this by saying that on my Windows 11 work laptop, I have Firefox set as the default. If I open a link from Outlook or Teams, it will open in Edge. So you’re not wrong, and it’s quite infuriating
    
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kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
PDFs are… Not an image format? It’s a document format that is difficult to edit, and thus mostly meant to be read-only, but a document nonetheless.

An image viewer can’t open a pdf, unless for some ungodly reason it also has a whole pdf reader built into it, which just sounds inane. Defaulting to a browser is icky, and I think stems from browsers having gotten good PDF support before Microsoft could figure it out. This is something that ideally belongs to a reader, either dedicated to PDF, or supporting similar formats, be it documents or ebooks.

That’s like saying that a 3D project file is basically an image format, if it’s built to be rendered out from a viewpoint into an image.

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- Laser@feddit.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It’s not that far-fetched, PDFs in my opinion are closer to vector graphics than to document formats like odt and docx. They have no understanding of format if not using advanced features, like a table in a PDF is just spaced text with lines between them, and text is just independently placed letters. In fact the space symbol doesn’t exist in most PDFs, it’s just that two letters were spaced further apart. So they basically are multiple canvases that are being painted on with letters, lines, fill areas and even bitmap graphics.
  
  Modern PDF actually does further in the direction of a document format by providing the content in a structured way, mostly for accessibility, but also for making the format suitable for automatic processing the contained data.
  
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- DJDarren@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t know what to tell you, Preview is an image viewer that is the default way to view PDFs on a Mac, and does so in a way that I’ve not seen bettered. It opens them without any formatting errors, allows for text selection and copying, and allows for rotation and cropping, as well as combining multiple documents and splitting them up. You just drag pages out and into the Finder to create a new document, or drag a second document into the thumbnail bar to combine.
  
  The rotation ability is the reason I started using my old Mac mini at work. The crappy Dell PCs we’re normally given only have the free version of Acrobat installed, and I got sick of being sent landscape scanned document PDFs in portrait, so used my own MacBook to rotate them.
  
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Mirodir@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.

Can that image viewer extract text so that a user could easily copy/paste it? I think if whatever pdf I was opening didn’t allow me to do that I would be really frustrated.

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- DJDarren@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I can only speak for Preview, but yeah, of course. It’s really useful.
  
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MonkderDritte@feddit.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Plus, pdf.js & co. have a couple of XSS holes per month. Local pdf viewers don’t have XSS holes.

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aliteral@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think web browsers are inherently better than anything Windows has. And I hate how much bloated web browsers are.

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