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Devil's advocate: if the link is in a Windows component, then it would somewhat make sense that clicking the link would open it in a first-party application which the OS vendor can control. If the association with http: URLs somehow got messed up (e.g. the default web browser got broken due to something outside Microsoft's control), you'd be in a worse situation than if the Control Panel etc. used a simpler but fully supported first party web browser.

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Core help links in Windows used to use an embedded version of the system browser (at the time IE) originally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compiled_HTML_Help. If they wanted to do that today for the above reasons they could do the same with WebView2 which is the OS embedded version of Edge. Instead they are launching the external instance of Edge which can still be screwed up for reasons outside the OS's control (such as an experimental edge://flags option that causes a crash on launch).

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