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 available, for now, via a Dev channel build. Obviously, the easiest thing to do was to install Windows 11 in a virtual machine (VM) and then enroll it in the Dev channel. But which version of Windows 11? If you look through the product language choices under “Download Windows 11 Disk Image (ISO) for x64 devices” on Microsoft’s Download Windows 11 site, you’ll see many, many options. Stupidly, I went with “English International” the first time, only to find out the only choices were UK/English. (Thanks, Brexit.) So I went with French and installed it in Virtual Box.

Hilarity ensued. I know I little bit of French and understand Windows 11 Setup better than most, so I figured this wouldn’t be too difficult. Differences between the French keyboard assumed by the installer and my U.S. English hardware keyboard were mostly overcome by just pressing each key combination I could until I found the right characters. The only one I failed with was the “@” character I needed for my Microsoft account (MSA). (CTRL + ALT + 0 did the trick.) The French, it’s like they have a different word for everything.

Once I was in, I updated the VM with Windows Update, rebooted, enrolled in the Beta channel, rebooted, downloaded the new build in Windows Update, and then rebooted again. Unlike the Beta channel, which represents Windows 11 version 23H2 and is a very fast install thanks to it being an enablement package, this one took a while. And since there was a lot of downtime, I alternated between babysitting the install, reading about the DMA, and uploading more videos to the YouTube channel.

And … I couldn’t see any behavioral changes. I installed Brave. I configured it as the default web browser. And then I clicked on web links in Widgets and Search highlights. And they all opened in a new tab in Microsoft Edge, just as they do today in the shipping version of Windows 11, even though I had specified Brave. By this time it was 4:30 pm.

My third avenue of exploration was my ace in the hole: Rafael, who, as you know, is the most capable Windows internals expert there is. Concurrently to the start of all this, I had pinged him with Laurent’s note with a few questions. Among them, if Microsoft was enabling this for EU customers, surely that meant there would be an easy way to enable it for everyone. He agreed, and while I was installing Windows 11 and upgrading to Dev, he was doing the same. He had a few frustrations of his own, but if anyone was going to figure this out, it was him.

But no. He, too, saw the same results, albeit with slightly different regional settings and using Firefox. An hour passed. We tried different things. Nothing worked.

This raised a few questions. Was this just a typical low-quality Insider Program issue, had they simply not thrown the switch on this feature in this build by mistake? Was it tied to the Insider Program’s terrible use of A/B testing, and this was something that would roll out to some but not others? Did we completely misunderstand what Microsoft meant by “system components” that would now use the default browser to open links?

There’s no way to know. But based on the little information that we have here, it does appear that Microsoft plans to finally respect user choice with web browsers, if only in one region in the world. I’m very curious to see this. Still.

And I had hoped to write about that, late yesterday and then, as time went on, this morning. Instead, I wrote what you see above, the story of a semi-wasted afternoon. (I did at least get many new videos up on the channel, so there’s that.)

But as noted, this happens to me a lot.

Just the day before, I spent an incredible amount of time installing the Insider Beta channel on three different PCs, later upgrading each to the new build that came out that day with new features, and then trying and failing to use ViveTool to enable Windows Copilot many, many times before Rafael figured out the new codes required to do that now. Literally several hours.

This was all for a Hands-On Windows recording—these involve me recording the screen locally and Benito at TWiT recording me on camera remotely via Zoom—with one episode focusing on Windows Copilot, and so I was happy to finally get it working, with less than an hour to spare. I tested Copilot on the PC I would record the show on using the queries I would use later in the show, took some notes, and just made our 4:30 recording time. I had done it.

We started recording. I talked a bit, opened Windows Copilot, typed in my first question—“give me a five-day itinerary for Mexico City”—and hit Enter. As before, hilarity ensued: it came back with “Something went wrong. Please try again later.” That happened again and again and so I gave up. We stopped recording. And we moved on to the next show, which is an overview of Windows 11 version 23H2 in which I discuss Copilot and bring up the UI but explain we’ll be doing a separate show about that in the future … without mentioning that it had just failed spectacularly. I had wasted most of that entire afternoon getting this one thing to work. And then it didn’t.

And that is exactly what many of my days feel like.

Technology is amazing. But it can also be frustrating. I’m reminded of the time my mother, by then close to 70 years old, told me that she wanted to figure out how computers worked. My response was that if she had made it this far in life without doing so, she should just spare herself the aggravation. Today, she uses an iPad, but she struggles with that too. I can only imagine what she would have thought of Windows.

So why even bother? Because sometimes, many times, it all comes together. As much as I hate it when things don’t work, I love it when they do.

But yeah, the defeats really do stand out.