I am quite confident that the bandwidth cost is absolutely not a concern for Microsoft, and that the obvious goal is for them to capture the market.

The "C/C++" extension github repository is 4MB. Probably the download size for the extension itself is a fraction of that, but I won't bother measuring. It was downloaded 400 times over the last minute (there is a live counter on the extension page [0]).

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscod...

That's a 25MB/s or 200Mb/s bandwidth, for one of the most popular extensions. Multiply by the top 10 extensions and you get the bandwidth of an average home optic fiber connection...

It is a public website and a public service - it's like saying "hey I got free lemonade here, but you can't have it unless I decide I like you first."

If you're giving something away online for free, then you are giving it away for free. I'll never understand the cognitive dissonance of "conditionally free".

A more important question is where do we draw the line of abuse? If someone links to my website and that's okay with me, but someone else does and I don't like it, do I have the right to conditionally block access to them? And do they have the right to circumvent that to regain access that I freely give to others?

> There is a direct cost to Microsoft that these companies are pushing on them. Specifically around bandwidth.

If Microsoft were not be very willing to bear this cost, they would never have built a marketplace into VS Code.

Why does Microsoft have the right to cause users unrestricted bandwidth use through updates and ads and spying? That's a real cost Microsoft is forcing onto users.

If bandwidth is so precious, why isn't Microsoft paying users for the bandwidth they use pushing ads to their PC? Why isn't it considered onerous for them to foist tens of gigabytes in updates every week? This is a direct cost to consumers that Microsoft is pushing on them. Do you think that's fair? Or do you want to admit that your entire premise and argument is nonsense corporate apologism?

maybe they changed some things last I used it, which was maybe six months ago. I've tried cursor twice and had the same issue each time. I saw the dialogue you were talking about and specifically selected to not override the code extension and it happened again anyway. Maybe there was something left over from the previous install, I don't know.

I was using windows and wsl, and they were adding scripts to my profile directory (code.cmd) which then took precedence over vscode, from what I remember. Tracking that down required googling to discover other people who were having the same issue. If this is what I have to do when I first start using a product, it just leaves a bad impression. Additionally it seems that it will hijack the 'code' alias in WSL if you select this option or not, which is where I primarily use it. And then when cursor updates, it seems it will again attempt to overwrite this alias.

I'm not the only one who encounters this issue https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2654 https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/2566 https://forum.cursor.com/t/do-not-hijack-code-shortcut/60671 https://namvu.net/2025/01/cursor-stole-your-code-command-her...

Maybe it works great for other people and they never encounter this issue. Maybe it seems like a petty thing. For me it seems it's implemented to attempt to 'force convert' some vscode users to use cursor all the time, and maybe that works and it's a success from a business perspective. But I won't use it again.

maybe, but their product is basically a reskinned version of that single program, it seems pretty clear they know what they are doing here.

That’s not how companies see it.

From MS point of view it’s Cursor doing it to them.

The way copyright and other rights to your IP you claim to have work in practice, is you need to enforce those claims or loose the rights.

I don't care. I was just surprised at them doing that because I thought MS/VSCode did not allow it.

It would impact users if things escalate and gets more hostile between the two and starts impacting features (like regressions in extension availability)

That's the play when your adversary is regulation--the government moves slowly, court cases move even slower, and you can grease the wheels politically.

That is not the scenario here. Cursor is being hunted by an extremely motivated corporate competitor. Cursor has been leeching the gorilla's blood and the gorilla finally noticed. Microsoft doesn't (necessarily) need the law here. They have it if they need it, but they can kill Cursor without needing to sue them. The disastrous outcome isn't a penalty--it's a critical mass of users switching to Copilot because they can't use their Microsoft extensions in Cursor any more. Cutting off the extensions on the same day that their Cursor clone went live was effectively a declaration of war from Microsoft.

Or, hear me out, Microsoft decides you’d make excellent additions its House of Faces For IDE/Compiler Competitors and your face is on the wall before you know what happened.

Grow fast, raise a few billions, deal with the lawsuit in a few years when you're big enough to buy lobbyists in Washingon DC.

I have lost the hope. Money is always the measure of ethics.

It's what is motivating Microsoft to prevent what Cursor is doing.

All cursor is doing is saying this blob of crap is compatible with their fork and letting you run it. This is akin to browsers supporting extensions from other browsers, and many other scenarios.

What Microsoft is doing is trying to prevent VSCode from becoming spontaneously obsolete because coding with Cursor a) removes you from VSCode and b) does it better.