I haven’t seen a recent post about this.
This is a handy tool to have for anyone sick of Microsoft’s shit and those who are slowly transitioning out of their ecosystem. It forces Windows to open your default browser instead of Edge every time you accidentally click on certain links in the Start menu, the toolbar widget, or open the help page by pressing F1.
It’s simple to install and also lets you customize other actions shown below:
As shown in the image, the additional redirections include Bing Discover, Bing Search, MSN News, MSN Weather, Bing Images, PDF Viewer. Additionally, you can disable CoPilot, redirect Spotlight, Bing Chat, and Windows Store Apps.
Official site: MSEdgeRedirect.com
I know it’s a meme retort, but what about that was weird? The perception of elitism is one of the biggest reasons people don’t adopt linux; criticizing windows for it’s many spectacular flaws is a good thing to do, but “hacking” the OS to get it working is something we in the linux sphere do all the time (and most of us enjoy it, even). Besides that, using Group Policy or a registry flag to disable the edge takeover is arguably less hacky than the ritual bloodletting ceremonies I had to go through to get ARC drivers working in debian. Windows sucks, let’s just tell people the real reasons for it instead of setting them up for disappointment when they do eventually try linux and find that you still have to put effort into it if you’re doing anything nonstandard.
The big difference is that hacky shit in Linux almost always happens because of oversights, whereas Windows actively fights you on things you want to do. This means that a solution that worked for some forum poster 10 years ago has a pretty good chance of still working today (if it’s even still necessary), whereas Microsoft would see that fix as a bug and try to “patch” it. You would never have the fuck around like this just to get your default browser to be, y’know, the default.
Not to mention trying to troubleshoot Windows always means having to browse through a half dozen forum posts of people having your exact problem, but the only replies are some IT script that takes 3 paragraphs to tell you to reinstall whatever program, with no follow up when that inevitably doesn’t work.