Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature to Promote Its Edge Browser

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[Alex5723]

https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-windows-google-chrome-feature-broken-edge-1850392901

Windows borked a feature that let you change your default browser, and some users saw popups every time they opened Chrome. It’s the 1990s again for Microsoft.

Microsoft issued a Windows update that broke a Chrome feature, making it harder to change your default browser and annoying Chrome users with popups, Gizmodo has learned.

An April Windows update borked a new button in Chrome—the most popular browser in the world—that let you change your default browser with a single click, but the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient.

“Every time I open Chrome the default app settings of Windows will open. I’ve tried many ways to resolve this without luck,” one IT administrator said on a Microsoft forum. A Reddit user noticed that the settings page also popped up any and every time you clicked on a link, but only if Chrome was your default browser. “It doesn’t happen if we change the default browser to Edge,” the user said. Others made similar complaints on Google support forums, some saying that entire organizations were having the issue. Users quickly realized the culprit was the operating system update.

* Uninstalling Windows 11 22H2: KB5025239, Windows 11 21H2: KB5025224, and Windows 10: KB5025221 “fixed” the problem.

Outlook and Teams link ignore user defaults and open in Edge by default now

Links in Microsoft Outlook open in Microsoft Edge by default now for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers. The change is coming to business subscribers and the Teams application as well.

A support document, available here, confirms that it is the new default behavior: “If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, browser links from the Outlook app will open in Microsoft Edge by default, right alongside the email they’re from in the Microsoft Edge sidebar pane.”

Apple’s Safari surpassed Edge for second place browser market share.

• This topic was modified 5 months ago by Alex5723.
• This topic was modified 1 month, 3 weeks ago by Just another Forum Poster.

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Alex5723 wrote:

For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up.

Only at enterprises using an outdated method to set Chrome as default:

Set Google Chrome as Default Browser

Setting the policy to True has Google Chrome always check whether it’s the default browser on startup and, if possible, automatically register itself. Setting the policy to False stops Google Chrome from ever checking if it’s the default and turns user controls off for this option.

Leaving the policy unset means Google Chrome lets users control whether it’s the default and, if not, whether user notifications should appear.

Note: For Microsoft®Windows® administrators, turning this setting on only works for machines running Windows 7. For later versions, you must deploy a “default application associations” file that makes Google Chrome the handler for the https and http protocols (and, optionally, the ftp protocol and other file formats). See Chrome Help ( https://support.google.com/chrome?p=make_chrome_default_win ).

Supported on: Microsoft Windows 7

Registry Hive HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Registry Path Software\Policies\Google\Chrome
Value Name DefaultBrowserSettingEnabled
Value Type REG_DWORD
Enabled Value 1
Disabled Value 0

Set Google Chrome as Default Browser

Alex5723 wrote:

There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update.

The sensible method was to disable that outdated policy:

We use the Chrome ADMX as well to set that gpo setting, “set google chrome as default browser” .. but guess what, the notes in that GPO say it only applies on Windows 7. I just set my test OU’s GPO for this to ‘not configured’ and the issue went away on my test systems that I have checked so far. So in my opinion this GPO setting is probably safe to remove, because it wasn’t working anyway, given it says there it only applies to Windows 7.

which many admins used to fix their config the day after the update..

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2361 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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Alex5723 wrote:

Links in Microsoft Outlook open in Microsoft Edge by default now for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers.

Ultimately though, if this experience isn’t right for you, you can turn off this feature the first time it launches in Microsoft Edge, and then in Outlook settings at any time after that.

Stay in your flow with Microsoft 365 on Microsoft Edge

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2361 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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This just happened to me today (M365 Business Premium). Links from Outlook were opening in Edge and I got this message…

Links from Outlook open in Microsoft Edge so you can see your email without switching apps

See your email alongside the page you opened without switching apps when you open links in Microsoft Edge.

You can change this setting at any time in Outlook. This will affect links opened from supported Microsoft 365 apps.

Umm, well I was switching apps now because I use Firefox as my default. Disabled it right away.

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FAQs available at Outlook emails open next to web links in Microsoft Edge

Windows 11 Pro version 22H2 build 22621.2361 + Microsoft 365 + Edge

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