If you've ever used Windows 11, it's no secret that the OS prioritizes Edge over competing browsers. But Mozilla doesn't think you should settle for a lack of choice. In fact, it's accusing Windows of being full of dark patterns and harmful design techniques that force you toward Microsoft's browser.

Mozilla reps tell me they've met with Microsoft about their concerns, but that the company wasn't responsive. "They'll do the minimum the law requires to respect user choice," explains Kush Amlani, Mozilla's counsel overseeing global competition and regulatory work. Mozilla isn’t the only browser maker criticizing Microsoft, either. Vivaldi lead Jon Stephenson von Tetzsner told me he switched to Linux because Microsoft’s OS is so obnoxious. (I reached out to Microsoft for this story, but it declined to comment.)

As someone who's been using and writing about Windows for many years, I increasingly agree with the above sentiments. I'm sick of all the ways Windows 11 tries to get me to use Edge, so I can't imagine how annoyed more casual users of the OS feel.

Europe Proves Microsoft Can Be Forced to Change

Mozilla recently marked 100 days since it released an 87-page report detailing the ways in which Microsoft pushes Edge on Windows PCs. The organization says Microsoft isn't living up to the "principled approach to app pinning and browser defaults" it promised to abide by in 2023. One example is how Windows often displays a “Let’s finish setting up your PC” pop-up after an OS update. This screen has an enabled-by-default option to “use recommended browser settings,” which makes Edge the default web browser.

However, that screen doesn't appear in Europe. European laws now force Microsoft to make Windows more respectful of user choices.

For instance, in European countries, the Start menu opens links in your default web browser rather than in Edge, as it does everywhere else. Amlani says Mozilla wants Microsoft to release the European version of Windows to the rest of the world. However, he thinks this will require government action. As he puts it, "Microsoft can do better when it's forced."

Beyond government action, Mozilla wants to see the public pressure Microsoft to change its tactics, pointing out that recent changes specifically address user feedback. The company is no doubt aware that many other Windows users dislike the way Windows promotes the Edge browser, but the dissatisfaction clearly hasn't been loud enough.

Mozilla argues that Microsoft's tactics are actively hurting its users. "A lot of ordinary people don't necessarily notice that their browser has been switched," claims Amlani. He says the company hears from Firefox users who are confused about why their bookmarks have vanished after Windows changed their default browser to Edge, for example.

Microsoft Isn't the Only One Trapping You in an Ecosystem

Microsoft isn’t uniquely hostile to user choice. For instance, Apple’s iOS doesn’t let you install true third-party browsers in most of the world; competing apps all still use Safari under the hood. Users, again, have more choice in Europe, where laws force Apple to allow fully alternative browsers. Google’s ChromeOS and Googlebook OS also rely heavily on Chrome. In other words, both Apple and Google go far beyond what Microsoft is doing on Windows to favor their own browsers.

Mozilla acknowledges that it has concerns about large tech companies beyond Microsoft. "They want to steer you to their own search engines, their own applications, and then create this closed ecosystem,” says Mozilla's Ajit Varma, head of Firefox.

Even I'm Exhausted by Edge's Encroachments

Windows 11's constant attempts to make me use Edge are beyond frustrating because I genuinely want to like the OS. I’ve previously written about wanting Microsoft to roll out Windows 11's user-friendly European customizations everywhere, and I fully stand by that. Microsoft has moderated Edge's presence in a few other ways, but these efforts don't go nearly far enough.

It's a shame that something as basic as choosing a default browser is at odds with most tech companies' desires to dictate the software you use. These organizations will always prioritize profits, and pushing their products is one way to ensure that. With Windows as the desktop OS market share leader, Microsoft is potentially under more pressure to appear neutral than Apple and Google, but none of these companies should have such anti-consumer policies.

Mozilla Has Motives, Too—But It's Still Right

Of course, Mozilla has a financial interest in competing with Edge on Windows. Recent annual reports show the Mozilla Foundation earns more than $600 million per year in revenue, most of which comes from Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox. Although Mozilla is attempting to diversify its revenue with products like the Firefox VPN, the company’s income largely depends on its contracts with Google. These agreements are confidential, but I'd bet that Mozilla can likely negotiate higher payments from Google if Firefox has more active users.

I understand that both Mozilla and Microsoft are large organizations pursuing their business incentives, but I still side with the former here. If the only way Microsoft can get people to use Edge is by forcing or tricking them, it really needs to build a better browser that more people prefer. I've gotten good enough at thwarting these shenanigans, but no one should have to fight their OS this hard on something as simple as a browser preference.

GridPin is an open-source geocoder for street addresses that runs entirely on your machine. Each country is one memory-mapped file you download once; forward and reverse geocoding then need no server, no database import, no API key and no rate limit.

Ways to use it:

• Python: pip install gridpin
• a command-line tool
• DuckDB: INSTALL gridpin_ext FROM community
• an MCP server for AI agents: uvx gridpin-mcp

An address the file cannot place comes back empty rather than guessed.

Benchmark. Share of first answers within 150 m of an independent reference coordinate; same queries and same truth for all three engines; empty answers count as misses:

Where it does not win: on clean German addresses the three are level, on Brazilian distorted addresses GridPin and Photon are level, and Photon leads on clean Brazilian addresses and on the other Spanish sets. Method and full counts: https://gridpin.dev/bench

Coverage is a handful of countries so far (list on https://gridpin.dev/); the US is not covered yet. Browser demo, nothing to install: https://gridpin.streamlit.app/

Disclosure: the code, tests, benchmarks and this post were written with AI coding agents; I direct the work and make the decisions. Feedback is welcome, especially addresses it gets wrong.

The ReactOS open-source operating system has seen its NTFS file-system driver mature to the point that it can be finally used for installing and using ReactOS with it. NTFS formatting support is also finally now possible with this driver too.

Hitting this major milestone of its NTFS driver maturing to the point of installing and using the ReactOS operating system itself with it also puts the project one step closer to its elusive beta release.

ReactOS posted to X today this big goal being realized of the NTFS driver being much more mature for handling ReactOS installations.

It is important to note though that the ReactOS NTFS driver still lacks caching leading to slower performance than other NTFS drivers/platforms, journaling, and security support are also not yet implemented. There is also the possibility of other undiscovered bugs they note.

A nice milestone for ReactOS and the latest in a variety of nice achievements they have made so far in 2026.

Interview with Liam Quin

As FreeCAD is completely open it often gets used for really interesting experiments and academic research. Recently we became aware of this excellent paper, “Machine-optimized parametric computer assisted design (CAD) of a stable flying wing UAV glider”.

It’s a fascinating piece of work, a flying wing uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) is designed parametrically in FreeCAD. Eleven parameters are broken out which control the wing geometry and these are automatically adjusted. Each wing iteration then is converted into a mesh and subjected to testing using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) via the CFDOF workbench. The CFD workbench is an excellent FreeCAD workbench that collates a lot of open source tools and solvers, most notably OpenFoam, together in an easy to set up, GUI driven environment.

As each wing iteration is meshed and in turn analysed, the macros run to adjust the parameters in response to the results, dialling in the optimisation of the wing design. All the scripts and macro are available on this repository but do note that they indicate that this is only running well on version 1.0. It would be great to see others pick up on this work aiming for compatibility with newer versions. It also requires pretty serious machines to run well, think lots and lots of cores!

Also mentioned in the excellent paper, which is freely available for all here, is that the optimised wing design was then made in real life and test flown by an experienced UAV pilot. The wing was made from foam which was cut and formed with a hot wire cutter. Interestingly elsewhere in the FreeCAD community there is the amazing Foamcut workbench which creates CAM files/Toolpaths for hot wire cutting machines, of which there are many open source designs. One can’t help but think that FreeCAD is becoming the go to CAD solution for fixed wing UAV!

New features

Read aloud: Add the high quality Kokoro voices, which sound much more natural than the Piper voices, especially for English
To use them, select the Piper backend in the Read aloud configuration and choose one of the Kokoro voices. The voice will be automatically downloaded the first time it is used.

News download: Support for downloading news from websites that block automated access by using the camoufox browser
Some news sites, such as The New York Times, The Economist and The Atlantic, block all lighter weight ways of fetching their pages. Recipes for these sites now use the camoufox browser, which is automatically downloaded the first time such a recipe is run. Recipe authors can use it by setting browser_type = 'camoufox' in their recipes.

PDF Input: Support for right-to-left text and better handling of multi-column pages
Add support for reading images in the AVIF format
Tag browser: A new option to sort hierarchical tags that have only children but no actual books as folders, before all other tags at their level
Closes tickets: 2144044

Edit book: Check book: Allow skipping of problems of a particular type
Closes tickets: 2120771

Edit book: ToC View: Indicate what ToC entries, if any, are in the file being currently edited
Edit book: Check book: When auto fixing invalid ids also update CSS selectors
E-book viewer: Add an option to display the immediate parent ToC section in headers/footers
Closes tickets: 2169454

E-book viewer: Allow e-books to store up to 1MB of data persistently
Closes tickets: 2168471

E-book viewer: Print to PDF: Allow specifying margins in metric units
Closes tickets: 2148707

Tag mapper and HTML/CSS transform rules: Add the ability to search the rules
Closes tickets: 2150408

Allow removing individual entries from the search history dropdown
Closes tickets: 2167642

Add a button to Preferences->Look & feel->Main interface to reset the main window layout
Create your own Adventure: Allow exporting and importing saved games
Speed up various operations on large libraries, such as startup, deleting many books, sorting by series, searching and refreshing the Tag browser
Kobo driver: Add support for newer firmware
Closes tickets: 2168472

Windows: Unregister calibre from default programs and clear its caches when uninstalling
DOCX Output: Make images inside links clickable
Bug fixes

EPUB 3 to EPUB 3 conversions: Preserve ids on nav elements so links to them continue to work
Closes tickets: 2169441

PDF Output: Fix some trailing content at the end of individual HTML files being lost when the files use multi column layout
Closes tickets: 2142731

PDF Output: Fix a regression in 9.x that caused conversion of some books with vertical writing to not work correctly
Closes tickets: 2146979

DOCX Output: Fix non-breaking spaces not being preserved
Closes tickets: 2167710

FB2 metadata: Clear series, comments, etc. from the file when they are cleared in calibre
Closes tickets: 2168996

E-book viewer: Fix dark mode theme color overrides conflicting with e-book CSS when the book uses filters to change image colors in dark mode
E-book viewer: Update the "Pages from paper edition" value faster
Closes tickets: 2169232

E-book viewer: Fix an error when pressing ctrl+shift
Closes tickets: 2169575

Layout actions: Fix saving/restoring layout not restoring which of the alternate book list visualisations is currently active
Closes tickets: 2136805

Book list: Respect horizontal alignment setting for all icon only column types
Closes tickets: 2168620

Cover grid: Fix one cover being rendered too small in some circumstances
Content server: Various fixes for older browsers when using the book details page in the /mobile view
Content server: Various security hardening fixes
New news sources

World Socialist by Paulb223
Poetry Magazine by flurbs
The Believer by flurbs
Respekt by Vector Rilke
Improved news sources

The New York Times
The Economist (needs subscription)
The Atlantic
Reuters
Heise
La Jornada
Naked Capitalism
The Saturday Paper

Release news for version GIMP 3.2.6

The FreeCAD team has just announced the first release candidate for FreeCAD 26.3. If you’ve been waiting to get your hands on new features and help by reporting bugs, this is a great time to start.

What we need from you:

Download the build for your operating system from the assets below and run it against your own work. Real models and real workflows find things that test suites do not.
Report anything new and not yet reported on GitHub (please use the search).
Regressions against version 1.1 are the most valuable reports at this stage. If something worked in 1.1 and does not work here, say so explicitly.

The issue tracker on GitHub has a list of open blockers and known critical issues. We expect the number of those to temporarily go up in the coming weeks as people discover issues and report them. There will likely be several release candidates a few weeks apart, each with more fixes.

D.eSystem 6.1.8 (Alpine-Lake) is the first version of D.eSystem which can write .TXT files in a FAT32 image which is located in the RAM. D.eSystem 6.1.8 also got a redesign with D.UI 13 I have planed to fix the github repo in future (D.eSystem 6.2.x time) D.eSystem 6.1.8: https://github.com/D-electronics-scratch/all_D.eSystem_versions/releases/tag/v.6.1.8

NetNewsWire 7.2 for iOS has passed App Store review and is available or soon will be.
It has the same hide-unread-counts feature the Mac app has — you can hide them entirely or replace them with a dot. See the settings screen, Appearance section.
It also fixes a bunch of bugs — see the release notes for the full scoop — including one we’ll call out specifically: where the releases notes say “Sped up Today and unread count queries” the notes are underselling a pretty big performance enhancement and battery-use fix during refreshing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudo

Development Update, August 2026

The latest version of NetNewsWire for iOS supports iPhone Duo, which is very much a novel iPhone with toolbars running up the side and all kinds of behavior.
How we did it: we didn’t do any work at all. We built the app using Xcode 27.1 and the default iOS SDK that comes with it, and that’s it.
Here’s the thing, though: we were already using standard controls — toolbars, navigation controllers, split views, etc.

We've open-sourced our Accessible Components Library, and, as you might expect, this includes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. But, we thought, "Why stop there?" So, we've also published our documentation, including the accessibility requirements, test scenarios, and even the working automated tests which validate each one.

Looks like an especially obvious case of using LLMs for copyright laundering.

I think that every software is political to an extent. And even when software tries to make its "not political" is in itself this act is political in itself.

With Linus recent suspicious statement regarding the Linux kernel, I believe we should at least try to think on it or debate on it. What is the political intention behind this?

All feedback are welcome.

Valve has finally released the CAD files for its Steam Frame VR headset and VR controllers, officially allowing modders and creators to create and publish their own Steam Frame accessories—as long as they're published under the correct Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International license. The CAD files are published on GitLab, and they include both 3D models and technical drawings and documentation for reference when designing accessories.

Forgive the smelly domain.

This is a fantastic short essay by Rich Hickey.