Scaling Back the Terrible in Windows 11 and Other Stories I’d Like to Tell (Premium)

Early Friday afternoon---which is early in the evening for him, as he lives in France---Laurent pinged me on Teams about a new Windows Insider Preview build in the Dev channel ahead of him writing about it. A short, unexplained note in the "Changes and improvements" list had caught his eye.

"In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links."

Huh.

Laurent assumed, as I did, that this vaguely worded message referred to links in Windows 11 Widgets, Search, and elsewhere. Today, Windows 11 opens those links in Microsoft Edge even when the user has explicitly chosen a better browser as the default, a user-hostile act and a key point of contention for the majority of people who use this platform. Does this mean that Windows 11, in the future but only in the EEA, will actually work as customers expect? Is Microsoft scaling back the terrible, if only for some of us?

I had to find out for sure. This is what I do.

And herein lies a tale, one that some of you may find interesting. Laurent's note set me down a rabbit hole that lasted until the moment my wife, tired of waiting, finally told me that it was past time to go eat dinner. This is a great example of how I spend many of my days, wasting time on some fruitless task, only to be disappointed in the end, with more questions instead of answers.

There were two immediate avenues of exploration. Actually, three.

First, why was Microsoft doing this (and why only in the EEA)? This was most likely a response to a specific new EU law or rule, given the aggressive stance that it's taken against Big Tech. Or perhaps it was a move designed to forestall future actions tied to the alleged product bundling abuses that the EU is already looking at with Teams and Microsoft 365.

The former seemed more likely, and so I looked up what we've written about the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the complementary Digital Markets Act (DMA). The DMA is designed specifically to limit the power of Big Tech "gatekeeper" companies. "These companies provide so-called 'core platform services' most prone to unfair business practices ... [and] also provide certain services such as browsers ... which have at least 45 million monthly end users in the EU ... Parliament ... includes a requirement to allow users to freely choose their browser." [Some of these edits were made to make this browser-specific, but these rules also apply to virtual assistants and search engines.]

So there it is. The EU's DMA went into effect on May 2, 2023. And Microsoft, which meets all of the requirements to be beholden to this regulatory law (essentially a certain financial size combined with a large user base), is clearly in violation by forcing its customers to use Edge in Windows 11 instead of the browser they prefer.

Second, I had to test this for myself. The question was, what was the best way to do that? This change only applies to users in the EEA and it's only availabl...