It turns itself back on after a few days if you do that. Again, setting aside whether one should, it's something you can't do (or I haven't been able to find a permanent solution).
Are you sure about that?
My understanding was that disabling Defender via the GUI should only be temporary, but disabling it via Group Policy would stick.
They're better labelled than they were when the change happened a year ago, so you're correct that they now say which version they apply to (thanks for updating my understanding). But those labels make it obvious that there are quite a few things you can't do with group policy with a Pro license (like disable the windows store or Cortana entirely). Better than the previous state where you'd disable Cortana in group policy, but Cortana would cheerfully continue to run..
Disabling Cortana via Group Policy is the first thing I did on my system and it has never re-enabled itself.
I haven’t tried disabling the store, as I use it, but you should be able to disable that via Group Policy too.
I was setting aside the question of whether the lack of control was good or bad; I was just reacting to your "only two things out of your control" formulation which I thought was a bit pat (if you follow me).
Well I was really meaning in relation to updates, but I think that most of their restrictions are reasonable.
We can agree to disagree there (I think firefox is doing well from an engineering perspective these days).
I think Mozilla have mostly been doing a great job with Firefox recently, but there's no question that power-users disabling telemetry worked against their own interests.
Mozilla has been stripping out advanced options from Firefox for a few years now - ever since they started focusing on using telemetry data to direct its development.
For example: tab groups was stripped out of the browser, and released as an add-on instead.
There were a
lot of complaints, but the data Mozilla had said that no-one was using it.
As is typical when that sort of thing happens, the add-on has been neglected (last update was over a year ago) and it is no longer compatible with Firefox now that Mozilla have stripped out support for legacy add-ons.
I personally think anything more than opt-in (not opt-out) telemetry is an abusive practice, unless it's a one-time deal during installation or something. If Microsoft is taking steps to make what they're sending user auditable that's astep in the right direction, but still less than ideal.
A lot of this is the "XY Problem". People are trying to achieve X, but ask about their proposed solution Y.
For example:
Someone asks how to completely prevent Windows from downloading updates.
Their actual problem is that they don't want Windows to restart the computer to install updates when it is idle.
So rather than enabling the option in Windows that prevents automatic restarts, they've now disabled updates altogether which puts Windows in a broken state that causes more problems further down the line -
like this intrusive error message when you're six months over-due for a feature update.I don't think it's a bad thing that the OS tries to prevent a user from putting the system in that state.
It generally shouldn't impact the advanced users that know how to manage updates correctly.
