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> Edge is somehow integrated into Windows 10 so by removing it you could break the OS. (Just why??)

One technical reason is probably that the majority of it - the engine - is also what drives Webview2 (a web view that you can embed into your applications just like you could embed IE into your applications).

That's probably the case but then windows should just force webview2 to be its own package independent from Edge's main browser UI.

Or better yet, build the Edge browser so that it's actually an app using webview2 to help ensure that webview2 has a great API experience and is actually easy to use.

>After a few days of scratching my head I found out that due to a bug, that specific update [1] can't be installed unless Edge is installed (prior to the update).

Holy cow, thank you so much! Pretty sure it was updating from 20H1 KB5003214. I was stuck on that one. I've been having this exact problem, which is pretty annoying because of the combination of how easy it is to accidentally update and that "undoing changes" takes about 3x longer than the update itself. Looking at "Installed Updates" after the fact it says that it pushed through KB5004331 in mid August, but I kinda don't believe that, as it has been continually giving me this BS; it literally happened last night. Installing Edge just now fixed it. I only really use Windows for leisure, so I was lamenting having to deal with a reinstall, which was what I was reading was the needed course of action.

They got slammed by anti-trust over integrating Explorer before. They should be slammed 10x as hard over this.

The difference is that IE/Edge no longer dominates the market. There is a fair competition between browsers now, so there is no need for an anti-trust lawsuit. Or if there is, it should be against Google.

Microsoft got in trouble for bundling, that is, using their Windows monopoly to unfairly advantage IE over Netscape. They still arguably have a monopoly position on the desktop and they're using the exact same tactics they used in the 90s, so yes they should get in trouble for this all over again.

Wasn't the issue that Windows dominated the desktop OS market, which they used to push their own browser, not that IE dominated the browser market? And the former is still true.

Microsoft is still using it's near-monopoly position on the desktop to push it's browser. Exactly the same thing it was slammed for before.

> Another "Why would you ever want to do that?" story: IIRC, in Windows 8 there was a semi-official way to place your home directory on a different drive than your system directory. Back then I had a 128 GB SSD I wanted to use as a system drive for Windows, but because my downloads folder quickly accumulates a lot of baggage (> 50 GB) I wanted to place it on another drive. A few years down the road the upgrade to Windows 10 failed with a mysterious error code. Again, after a few days of scratching my head I found out that my setup (with the home directory on another drive) is not supported for the Windows 8.1 to 10 upgrade.

That bit was eventually fixed – while I had to move the ProgramData folder back to C:, I successfully upgraded from 7 directly to 10 with my home directory on a different drive.

Although yes, it's apparently still not officially supported – supposedly it breaks installation of apps from the store (but so far, I don't really care about the store anyway), and somewhat more annoyingly, I suspect that during major OS upgrades some misguided migration routine that is hardcoded to C: gets to run, because at least twice now I've noticed file paths in the registry being rewritten to suddenly point to C:\Users, when they actually need to point to D:\Users.

For GP's case, they should just move Download directory to D: that is officially supported by GUI, rather than move entire %HOME% to D:.

> I guess I was too spoiled with the UNIX way (of separate mount points inside a unified hierarchy) to see the error in my ways... (/s)

FWIW it's totally possible to mount a volume at a folder location instead of assigning a drive letter, so you actually can mount a separate drive at C:\Users separate from the rest of C:\ or whatever your system drive letter is.

I went so far as to delete the installation directories of any versions of Edge that I could find. Nothing appears to be broken, and I haven't really had to deal with it since (other than random updates seemingly reinstalling it, so I just remove the directories again).

From Win 95 was always the case that IE/Edge is an integral part of Windows.