Oh, Microsoft (Premium)

Earlier this month, I wrote that Microsoft would implement new Windows 11 features before its next major feature update. This week, I was proven right, but not in the way I had hoped.

To understand what’s happening here, you need to know two things separate but now linked facts: that Microsoft is deliberately making it impossible in some cases for Windows 11 users to use the web browser they prefer (instead of Edge), and that Microsoft can/will/might update Windows 11 with new features before the next feature update, expected in October 2022; it is testing those new features now in the Dev channel of the Windows Insider Program.

Ready? Let’s dive in.

As for the first of those facts, I reported early on that Microsoft had deliberately made it harder to switch your default browser away from Microsoft Edge in Windows 11, but as others noticed, even going through the official, convoluted steps wouldn’t stop Edge from launching in several instances. So third-party solutions like EdgeDeflector appeared, forcing Windows 11 to accept your choices. And browser makers like Mozilla and Brave implemented workarounds so that users could simply choose them as their default from within those browsers and it would just work. You know, like Windows always had before.

In the wake of all this, Microsoft issued a set of back-to-back crotch punches: in November, it issued a Windows 10 Insider Preview build to the Dev channel that blocked these attempts at respecting user choice. And when users and the media complained, the software giant didn’t just confirm what it was doing, but said that it was doing it on purpose, raising serious antitrust questions.

As for the second of those facts, two weeks ago, I wrote that Microsoft “will” update Windows 11 before October 2022. But I later corrected that article because the Microsoft language I quoted was more circumspect, probably for legal reasons: the software giant literally claimed only that it “could” release new features before October 2022, not that it definitely would.

Sufficiently chastened by this correction, I noted last week that I still believed that Microsoft would release new features to Windows 11 well before October 2022 and that it would likely do so several times, given how incomplete and broken this platform is today. My expectation, however, was that it would wait until early 2022 to release the first new features.

Wrong again, monkey boy.

Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, and like its other supported platforms, Windows 11 was updated with various cumulative updates that contain security and other fixes. But Patch Tuesday also brought an unwanted new payload, too: Windows 11’s first new feature.

Time for celebration, right? Not so fast.

That first post-RTM Windows 11 feature is blocking any attempt to work around the horrible Default Apps interface in Windows 11, just like Microsoft promised it would. The December 2021 cumulative update for Windows 11 includes “miscellaneous security improvements to internal OS functionality” and “quality improvements to the servicing stack.” Among those changes is the new feature. Which screws Windows 11 users further. And when you install it, and you will eventually, tools like EdgeDeflector no longer work.

Fortunately, there are still workarounds, though if we are to take Microsoft at its word, it will block these in the future too. As Neowin notes, for example, another tool called MSEdgeRedirect still works because it uses a different method to work around the Windows 11 terribleness. (But it requires a background process to do its magic, which is not ideal; among other things, it’s flagged by Microsoft SmartScreen.)

So there we are.

As Vivaldi founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner noted this past weekend, the only way to stop Microsoft, which is no doubt counting on antitrust regulators being too obsessed with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to care about this sort of thing, is to hope that antitrust regulators will remember that Microsoft is a Big Tech superpower too, and that it has billions of users, many of which it is harming with this behavior. It is also, obviously, harming competition since it is making it impossible for other browsers to truly become the default in Windows 11.

Oh, Microsoft. You should be better than this. We thought you were better than this.