Mozilla defeated Microsoft’s default browser protections in Windows
Mozilla recently made it easier to switch to Firefox on Windows. While Microsoft offers a method to switch default browsers to Windows 10, it is more cumbersome than the simple one-click process to switch to Edge. This one-click process is only officially available for Microsoft, and Mozilla seems to be fed up with the situation.
In Firefox version 91, released on August 10, Mozilla reversed the way Microsoft sets Edge as the default in Windows 10 and allowed Firefox to quickly become the default. Before this change, Firefox users would be sent to the Settings section of Windows 10 and then select Firefox as their default browser and ignore Microsoft’s call to keep Edge.
Mozilla’s reverse engineering means that you can now set Firefox as default from the browser, and it does all the work in the background without additional prompts. This bypasses Microsoft’s anti-piracy protections that the company has built into Windows 10 to ensure that malware cannot hijack apps by default. Microsoft tells us that this is not supported by Windows.
Mozilla is clearly tired of the more complicated way to set up a default browser, a process Microsoft makes even more difficult in Windows 11. A Mozilla spokesperson in a statement to The edge. âAll operating systems should offer official developer support for the default status so that users can easily set their applications to default. As this did not happen on Windows 10 and 11, Firefox relies on other aspects of the Windows environment to provide users with a similar experience that Windows provides to Edge when users choose Firefox as their browser. fault.
Mozilla is trying to convince Microsoft to improve its default browser settings in Windows since its open letter to Microsoft in 2015. Nothing has changed and Windows 11 now makes it even more difficult to change the default browser. This seems like the last straw, as Mozilla began implementing its changes to Firefox shortly after the Windows 11 unveiling in June.
So far, Google, Vivaldi, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers haven’t followed Mozilla’s lead, and it’s unclear exactly how Microsoft will react. Microsoft has real security reasons to protect itself against malware with anti-hacking, but by allowing Edge to easily change defaults, it undermines competing browser vendors who just want a level playing field. . Windows 11 makes this playing field even more complicated, and the competition is not happy.