File Association Hijacking (Stop it!)

M

Macintosh Rescue

Member
Parallels Desktop is a program that I've always found extremely frustrating but I keep using it because of it performance advantage over competing products.
Currently Parallels Desktop with Applications sharing options hijack just about everything they can for example: why would I want all video files to default to opening in Windows Media Player when macOS already has software for doing this?
When using Windows or another operating system it is generally for the purpose of running software that does not run on macOS only, and I do not want my Mac automatically starting entire operating systems to open files that macOS applications already handle.

It is certainly appropriate to have some programs open in another operating system automatically for example Microsoft Publisher files amongst others.

I am aware of how to manually correct this however the point is that I shouldn't have to, and it is poor user experience when a piece of software requires one to recheck things that were working perfectly fine before are still working correctly.
 
I will second this. It's SO STUPID to assume that I want all my Mac files opened in Parallels just because I want the benefits of application sharing, like Coherence view mode. Instead, now I can't use that feature because Parallels couldn't be bothered to allow us to manually select the handful of file types we want to open in Windows.

Yet another software company handicapping a decent product because of god knows whatever reason which certainly didn't include thinking about user experience. You can find other threads asking about this same problem, then someone from support shows up to offer some useless canned advice and then disappears never to be heard from again. High performance product handicapped by stupid UX backed by unhelpful support.

I'm really sick of these tech companies screwing their users. PARALLELS... ARE YOU LISTENING?!? STOP SCREWING YOUR CUSTOMERS. FIX YOUR PRODUCT, because the day VMWare offers similar performance, you lose.
 
Yeah. This is dumb. I forgot that Parallels did this when I decided to switch to it from VMWare Fusion. I now have serious buyer's remorse. I don't understand what part of enabling Coherence requires associating every filetype that can be opened in Windows so that it WILL be opened in Windows. My Mac is perfectly capable of playing MP4s and opening DOC files. Why would I want to open a virtualized OS to open and app to open a file I could have had opened 30 seconds sooner? I want my money back.
 
Still happening in 2024. I double-click on a MP4 file, and Windows is launched to display it in Photos. Why? I dunno. It is creepy and frustrating that changing it in Mac's "Always Open With" repeatedly does nothing.
 
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