Microsoft Escalates its War Against Default Browser Workarounds (Premium)

Microsoft’s response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) has been nothing short of astonishing. In sharp contrast to Apple’s belligerent non-compliance, the software giant has seemingly acquiesced to the rule of law, is changing Windows to meet its requirements via the Moment 5 update, and has even gone so far as to publicly document its compliance via a dedicated website.

And then it got even better: Last week, we learned that Microsoft was de-bundling Teams from Office to avoid further EU antitrust action, and that, this time, it would do so worldwide. I praised this decision because it is the right thing to do, not just for Microsoft’s customers, but for itself: Maintaining two codebases, one for Europe and one for the rest of the world, just doesn’t make any sense. Perhaps this common sense would extend to Windows 11 and Microsoft would spread the DMA compliance changes in the product worldwide.

It was a nice dream while it lasted.

Unfortunately, it was also naive: According to Christoph Kolbicz, an IT consultant from Switzerland, Microsoft is instead escalating what I feel is the most abusive and anti-customer behavior in Windows today, its war on default browsers.

This past weekend, I coincidentally documented the anticompetitive and anti-customer behaviors in Windows in my article A Windows 11 Enshittification Checklist (Premium), rating each of the 9 issues I raised by severity level. I rated three Windows behaviors with a “Major” severity level, and two of them are tied to Microsoft Edge: Windows forces you to use Microsoft Edge in certain situations even when you choose a different default web browser, and Edge then goes on to exhibit a wide range of bad behavior whether you chose to use it or not. “Edge,” I wrote, “is a cancer that must be stopped.”

The Kolbicz report is tied to the first of those two issues. And there is some history there, history that I suspect many of you have forgotten. Windows 11 was widely panned for its artificial hardware requirements, numerous functional regressions, crapware bundling, and unfettered tracking when it first arrived in 2021. But it also dramatically changed the Default apps interface that had been in place since antitrust regulators forced it on Microsoft two decades ago. And not in a good way.

Where Windows 10 and previous Windows versions provided customers with a one-click way to set a default web browser (along with other default apps for email, music players, photo viewers, and more), Windows 11 dispensed with that interface, forcing users to tediously configure individual file types and protocols to open with the app they preferred, one-by-one. This was, I wrote at the time, a major regression. But it was also anticompetitive, and designed specifically to make it difficult for users to choose a web browser other than the default, Microsoft Edge.

Third-party tools like EdgeDeflector emerged to return the lost functionality, and some browser makers, like Mozilla, developed their own workarounds. But Microsoft actively changed Windows specifically to thwart these efforts before finally offering users an olive branch or sorts: It finally added a one-click “Set default” button in Windows 11 Settings for web browsers that configures the app you prefer as the default for the htm/html file types and HTTP/HTTPS protocols.

This change appeared to meet the concerns, and it appeased some users. But it didn’t change the behavior I recently rated with a “Major” severity level: No matter which web browser you choose as the default, Microsoft Edge will open when you click a story in Widgets, click a link in Search, interact with Copilot, and in several other situations. Microsoft ignores your choice because the benefits of its corporate needs—getting you in front of its web services and advertising while using a browser that always tracks your activities so it can sell that data to third parties—outweigh its customers’ needs. This is textbook enshittification.

Identifying problems is important, but as a problem-solver, I’m more concerned with fixing them or at least finding workarounds. Coincidentally, that was the subject of this morning’s editorial, From the Editor’s Desk: Problems, Fixes, and Workarounds (Premium). But looking at Microsoft Edge specifically, I have called on readers to not use this web browser because of its malicious behaviors. At the very least, you should try to configure Edge correctly as is possible to minimize its terrible behaviors. And even then, you’ll want to avail yourself of the right browser extensions and third-party utilities.

Not that it matters: You can’t really fix the problems with Edge. Unless you live in the European Economic Area (EEA), that is. There, thanks to the DMA, Windows users are no longer subject to enshittified Microsoft Edge behaviors and can even uninstall the web browser entirely.

That must be nice. But here in the U.S. and elsewhere, we’re stuck. Edge, that virulent cancer inside of Windows, keeps spreading. And Microsoft keeps trying new dirty tactics to ensure that we can’t stop it. Earlier this year, for example, Microsoft quietly changed the way that Edge synced its settings through your Microsoft account (MSA) to include also siphoning data from your configured default web browser, like an e-vampire, each time you launched the browser. When it was called out for this horrible behavior, it pretended it was all a misunderstanding and disabled the behavior. Which you can still opt-in to when you configure Edge. (Actually, you have to opt out of this behavior.)

Bad behavior is like a riding a bike, apparently. And in Microsoft’s case, it’s an addiction it can’t seem to get past: Christoph Kolbicz says that Microsoft quietly changed Windows in the past two months to prevent registry-based methods for bypassing its default web browser limitations. This change impacts users who try to edit the registry directly and, more commonly, third-party utilities that do so on your behalf. Microsoft is literally escalating its war on user choice.

Kolbicz noticed this because he’s written two utilities that were impacted by this change. The first, called SetDefaultBrowser, helps users configure the default web browser from the command line. The second, which supercedes SetDefaultBrowser, is called SetUserFTA (Set User File Type Association), and it’s a more complete file type association solution. So it works with web browsers and other app types.

Or, it used to do that.

“Starting in February, multiple people reported on my blog that setting http and https protocols with SetUserFTA and SetDefaultBrowser stopped working for them – mean[ing], changing the Default Browser was not possible anymore with my tools,” he explains. “Changing the default browser was still working by using the Settings app in Windows, but modifying those keys by scripts or tools seemed to be blocked somehow.”

What he eventually discovered was that Microsoft added/updated a filter driver in Windows called UCPD.sys (where UCPD ironically stands for User Choice Protection Driver) that prevents certain registry keys from being edited. A second IT consultant, Gunnar Haslinger, believes this may be related in part to Microsoft’s DMA compliance (see below), though he also believes—as I do—that this is really about preventing third-party apps from configuring themselves as default apps and replacing the Microsoft configuration.

The good news is that it’s possible to bypass this restriction. (Kolbicz documents some methods for doing so at the end of his post, and he’s updating SetUserFTA accordingly.) But the bad news, which is far more ominous, is that Microsoft isn’t done working to thwart those who are just trying to respect user choice in Windows. It has apparently not learned a lesson at all.

As noted, users in the EU can uninstall Microsoft Edge, and Haslinger found that the new registry blocking could be tied to that: Windows uses a DeviceRegion registry key to determine whether the PC is in the EEA and thus whether Edge can be removed. Preventing this and related registry keys from being edited could thus be a side effect of Microsoft wanting to ensure that users outside the EEA cannot take advantage of this capability and uninstall Edge as well.

Which is exactly what many of us would like to do, of course. Now more than ever.