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Comment by doyouevensunbro | Hacker News Reader

I’m using Windows 11 and nothing forces open Edge on my machine. Every link opens in Brave like I told it to.

What happens when you press Win, type a query, then press enter, quickly? In Win 10 that opens a Bing search in Edge for me, no matter what settings I try. Very annoying when I type "(Win)chr(enter)" to open Chrome and get a search instead. If I do it slow it will sometimes work.

I haven't tried it on Win 11 because that was what caused me to drop Windows altogether. (Everyone has their straw).

I have the same issue but even worse: If I do it too fast it works! Somehow it takes longer to find the app than it does to suggest a websearch, so I need to wait 1-2 seconds after typing not to open edge...

Start menu search is unfortunate broken in Windows 11 (even more so than in W10). It needs to do a Web search before returning results, which makes it too slow to be reliably useful in my opinion.

It's easily solved by installing Power Toys and using the search feature from there instead (activated with alt + space, like in Linux & Mac)

I disabled the ability to search the web through the start menu long before they started with the edge shenanigans. As far as I'm concerned that isn't the operating system's job, and the only things I should see when I search there are things actually on my computer.

I do the same thing with Apple's Spotlight.

The last time I checked, you can't change this to use anything but Edge either.

> What happens when you press Win, type a query, then press enter, quickly?

Also on Win 10. I get, in the start menu, "no results for <search term>". I know I turned of web searching when installing, but it's been so long I might have used registry keys[1].

[1]: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/how-to...

I use Windows 10. I'm not sure what settings I applied (I did do quite a few), but I don't get that.

If I do Win+aoeuaoeu+enter, nothing at all happens. It just sits with a search box open showing "No results for aoeuaoeu". I can't actually see any way of getting to a browser search window from there (whether my preferred browser or not). So I must have found some way to disable that behaviour completely. Keep trying?

(FWIW yes that is the way I open my browser: win+fire+enter. Nothing bad happens if I do it too fast.)

I believe you've disabled Cortana or "search the web for result".

A while ago I uninstalled IE from my pc. I'm not sure how, but now when I do what you say nothing happens. It says "search the web" but I guess it can't find IE so it just fails silently. It took me a while to recall that I uninstalled IE in a tantrum in the past so that puzzled me for a while

I launch apps from the Win key all the time, never ending up in Edge. The worst for me is ending up in “Internet Options” when I want to launch IntelliJ.

Try typing something that ends up doing a "search" is what they're suggesting.

The windows spotlight links from the landscape photos on my windows lock screen always open edge. I haven't dug in enough to find if there is a way to change that.

I dug through a bit (in mid 2022) and there isn't a native way to do this. You will have to use edge deflector or something like that. I am not sure if the brave/firefox intercepts added more recently work.

This drove me so mad I bought a Mac mini to replace my surface pro (which I wasn't using as a tablet anyway). Good job MS!

Try opening help or press F1 with the desktop in focus. This normally opens Edge.

Don’t ever hit the help menu. So the problem is that MS opens help in it’s own browser? That complaint seems disingenuous at best.

Except edge then opens and presents you with some message about setting it to the default browser (which a lot of people will just click ok to make it go away)

That an internal OS system (help) opens in the OS browser I'm willing to accept. That every browser says "please please make us the default browser" is annoying but hardly unique for Edge. This is just the combination of the two.

I don't think enough people use Win+Type+Enter queries, nor F1 help in Windows to make the discussion very interesting compared to the really interesting ones like which browsers will open a hyperlink in a non-browser app.

Edge is the only browser that periodically captures you in a full screen multiple pages nag screen when it's not default. It's also the only browser able to set itself as default without further interaction.

It's not behaving the same as any other browser.

It does that when it's the default, too. I only occasionally use Windows, so couldn't be bothered to install something else. Yet, I feel that every other time I start it, I'm presented with some "use edge! it's so cool!" screen I have to sit through. It also insists on changing the search engine to bing. I'm usually pretty cautious and try not to press "ok" just so it leaves me alone, yet it managed to change it. For my needs, pretty much every search engine is good enough. I prefer google since I can convince it to use dark mode and use English instead of my local language (even though windows is set to use English as its display language).

How is it more acceptable because it's a combination of two things? Lots of objectionable outcomes are a combination of multiple factors!

Because I accept both things on their own, and I accept that the combination of them follows naturally. Then I must (reluctantly) accept unfortunate outcome of the combination.

I wouldn't say it's reasonable that browsers could never suggest they be made default, and I don't think it's reasonable that you can't have some OS function that wants to show e.g. a help section use the OS embedded browser.

That might be acceptable if no thought went into the combination of the two things.

I accept people must work at height. I accept that people occasionally fall over by accident. We have guard rails and harnesses so that I don't have to accept people falling to their death every time they trip at height.

For example it wouldn't be ridiculous to think that if the browser is tightly coupled with the OS (to the point that it doesn't change when you set the default browser) that you can have the embedded browser opened with a no nag/no ad flag set.

Just because its 2 things you'd otherwise accept doesn't mean it isn't a dark pattern. Lots of dark patterns (like the setting up of privacy / data sharing settings on google) do similar things.

Except the same is applied to the start menu, help pages, system links, just to name a few.

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