erwan

And as a bonus you have less customers to provide support to!

I mean it's probably possible to craft a Windows virus that targets Linux through Wine, but I don't think a generic Windows malware would do any damage on Linux.

Because the "default path" is different, a free trial would have way less conversion than the current system.

With a free trial you have to take an action to buy it. With a refund you have to take an action to be refunded.

Or they could do it like SaaS, where you're automatically charged at the end of the trial unless you decide to cancel before... But that's a bit convoluted and it wouldn't bring much compared to the current system.

Personally unless it's a dirt cheap game I do enough research before buying and I rarely have to refund. But I definitely refund if the game is not at the level of quality that I expected.

Their market share is up but still less than 10%.

I just don't buy games that don't run on Linux.

There are already too many games I want to play for the time I have so the very few games that don't run on Linux are not worth my time.

But the virus will be stuck in its wine prefix, right?

An emulator simulates hardware with software. That's why it's slower than running on the original hardware, unless you're running on a hardware significantly faster than the original.

But Wine is not an emulator because it mimics software with different software. You still run on the same hardware, that's why wine/proton only runs on x86.

So the whole "wine is not an emulator" might sounds like pedantry but it's not. It's an important distinction. Because it's not an emulator there is no inherent perf cost.

People like to be higher on the road, especially higher than other people.

I'm not saying Firefox is less good or anything.

Just that I'm not surprised Microsoft doesn't bother targeting Firefox with this popup. Microsoft's goal is to get more market share and going after Firefox users is not going to get much of it. Even if they somehow convince every single Firefox users to use Edge they would still be far behind Chrome.

The future as imagined in the 80's

Chrome is where the market share is.

Also the 2 people per month downloading Firefox probably do it for privacy reasons, harder to convince them than a user using a Big Tech browser to use a different Big Tech browser.

It's cheaper to change all the meters one more time than going back to a human driving his car from house to house to do manual readings...

Also better for the environment.