14 DAY TRIAL // Chris Beard, Mozilla CEO, has written an open letter addressed to Microsoft, taking aim at the company's policy on handling changes made to default applications in Windows 10.
Only a week ago we were reporting on a Mozilla engineer's rant on the same topic, but now it seems that the big guns are out, and the man in charge himself is sounding the alarm on a shady tactic from Microsoft that seems to fit right in with strategies from the classic browser wars between IE and Netscape back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
In his open letter, Mr. Beard has two points that he stresses out as problematic.
A complicated process that deters users from changing the default browser
The first is that it "now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows."
"It’s confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost," says Mr. Beard, detailing a process which is truly more long-winded than the previous one-click experiences other versions of Windows included.
We say long-winded because it's not truly complicated, but some users may still get lost mainly because it's a new UX (user interaction) model which involves popups and scrolling down through options, and they may easily be confused and tricked to believe they've done something wrong, abandoning the process.
Microsoft didn't heed Mozilla's warnings prior to Windows 10's release
The other big problem Mr. Beard has with this issue is that Mozilla did try to address this problem, reaching out to the Microsoft staff, but this attempt of opening a communications line has landed on deaf ears.
Mr. Beard, in a separate post on Mozilla's blog, also went on to reiterate how he sees Microsoft taking a giant step backwards through the use of these kind of tactics.
"It is bewildering to see, after almost 15 years of progress bolstered by significant government intervention, that with Windows 10 user choice has now been all but removed" said Mozilla's CEO, making a veiled mention on Microsoft's multiple antitrust cases in the EU.
Update: The open letter to Microsoft has reached Hacker News, where one user has pointed out the irony in Mr. Beard's attack on Microsoft for not giving users the chance to choose what they can use with Windows. He rewrote the letter as from the point of a "random Firefox user" to Mr. Beard, blasting him for forcing Pocket integration and overriding existing user preferences for the browser's search engine. Touche Internet! Touche!
