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 brows...