Microsoft installing Office web apps without permission on Windows 10

The Verge reports Microsoft is at it again by pushing Office web apps to users of Windows 10. The reporter says the software giant pushed out an update that rebooted his PC without permission. No notification was given about this either. Some people on Twitter are complaining about lost work because they were taking a short break and their PC just rebooted without prior warning.

Microsoft installed unsolicited, web app versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook on his PC. Interestingly, these apps open in Edge by default, even if that's not your default browser.

These aren’t full free copies of Office, by the way. They’re just shortcuts to the web version you could already access in any web browser of your choice, which double as advertisements to pay for a more fully featured copy.

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Microsoft seems to think our computers are free advertising space, a place where it can selfishly promote its other products — even though they were told roundly in the ‘90s that even bundling a web browser was not OK. Now, they’re bundling a browser you can’t uninstall, and a set of PWA web apps that launch in that same browser. (Yes, they fire up Edge even if you’ve set a different browser as default.)

Pretty nuts to see Microsoft doing this again after the bad press they received after the automatic rollout of the Chromium-based Edge browser.