MSEdgeRedirect Adds a Europe Mode to Uninstall Edge

The MSEdgeRedirect utility is one of a few different ways to prevent Windows 11 from ignoring your web browser choice. But now it has a most welcome new feature: It can be used to uninstall Microsoft Edge from Windows 11 using a new Europe Mode feature.

“Europe Mode sets your PC region as ‘in EU’ and should be a permanent patch,” MSEdgeRedirect  developer Robert Maehl writes in the release notes to the latest version. “I have verified that this method lets you uninstall Edge, but I have not verified other features [that EMEA users will soon have]. A second method to be added later requires taking ownership and modifying a System32 file to tell the system whatever region you’re in is part of the EU. This yet to be added method will likely be reverted every few Windows Updates but should at least work temporarily.”

That second method is something I’m investigating right now myself: There’s a plain text file called IntegratedServicesRegionPolicySet.json in C:\windows\system32\ that Microsoft will use to toggle the new Digital Market Act (DMA) compliance changes that Microsoft is making in Windows 11 whenever they go live in stable. You can use this file, which needs to be taken over before it can edited, to globally enable/disable individual features (“Edge is uninstallable,” “File Explorer Search is third party extensible,” “Third party search providers show in search,” and many others) or add your country (“US”) to the list of locales in which each feature is made available.

My understanding is that you can now edit this file in one or more Insider channel builds in which Microsoft is now testing these changes, but I’ve not tried it yet. But you can see (and edit) this file right now on stable if you want to just see the list of new features that are coming—JSON files are more easily human-readable than XML, I think—in Notepad or whatever text editor. I will experiment with this over the holidays and write something up when/if possible. But I worry that this is almost too easy and wonder whether Microsoft will do something to hide, obfuscate, or prevent users from seeing or screwing around with this feature list.

Anyway. I’m not necessarily recommending that anyone uses MSEdgeRedirect to uninstall Edge, as I haven’t tested this yet either. And my ongoing recent experience with an Edge-less Windows 11 in Tiny11 demonstrates that there are some issues with removing the browser. For example, some apps rely on the Edge WebView 2 runtime libraries (which can fortunately be installed separately). And when you click on an item in Widgets or Search highlights, you just get an error message. Of course, this problem can be solved by MSEdgeRedirect. So … proceed with caution. Maybe test in a virtual machine (VM) or a scratch PC you don’t care about first.

MSEdgeRedirect 0.7.5.1’s Europe Mode enables other DMA-related features, of course, and there are a lot of bug fixes too. You can learn more at the MSEdgeRedirect page on GitHub. There is a download link there as well.