You can tell when you're dealing with a big company when one side of the business does a user-friendly thing and the other side does the opposite. For example, the games side of Microsoft is making the Xbox App and Microsoft Store downloads better by letting users place their games in whatever storage folder they want. That's a good thing since it means you can better manage your game data and spread it across multiple storage drives.
On the other side of the coin, Microsoft's new operating system is forcing users to use the Edge browser whether they want to or not.
The news comes courtesy of Daniel Aleksandersen, creator of the EdgeDeflector app and owner of Ctrl.Blog (via PC Gamer). Aleksandersen recently installed Windows 11 and notes that new file protocols make it really hard to get around using Edge as your default browser.
To start, rather than having a single "default browser" setting as you do in Windows 10, Windows 11 has individual link associations for http, https, and html files. They naturally default to Edge, and you have to individually set them to a different browser if you want to use something like Chrome or Firefox.
But that's not the worst of it. If you use any sort of Microsoft widget on Windows 11, such as the weather app, you'll be forced to use Edge whenever you click a link that opens a browser. That's because the file association for widgets is permanently set to "microsoft-edge://" and cannot be changed. And trust me, Aleksandersen tried everything.
Worst of all, Aleksandersen's EdgeDeflector app doesn't work anymore either. Previously, the app would let you get around defaulting to Edge all the time after installation, but the tricks that Aleksandersen used don't work anymore with Windows 11.
Aleksandersen noted in his blog post that Microsoft got in trouble for making Edge too hard to bypass back in 2009 when the EU ruled Microsoft was using its market dominance to push its browser. This forced the default browser setting in the first place and is why Windows 10 lets you use Firefox or Chrome or whatever you want.
Given that Microsoft is just repeating the same mistake it made in 2009, one can guess it's just a matter of time before the EU slaps Microsoft's wrist again and we go back to using whatever browser we want. In the meantime, Windows 11 is slowly rolling out to the rest of the world, but with this news, I'm in no rush.