Microsoft is blocking Google Chrome through its family safety feature

> Microsoft has introduced a bug into Family Safety that specifically targets the Chrome browser and prevents it from functioning on Windows.

In isolation this is understandable. Bugs happen, and it happens at the worst time. But Microsoft has a pattern on dark patterns to pump up the Edge usage, and cant help but this this is somewhat planned.

> Other browsers like Firefox or Opera appear to be unaffected, and some users have even found that renaming Chrome.exe to Chrome1.exe works around this issue.

How is this possibly unintentional?

My family safety feature is called linux.

Our product once suffered from a faulty Windows Defender update, and as I remember, it took about two weeks for Microsoft to fix it. During those two weeks, our product was barely usable for many users because access to a file system was slowed down to a crawl.

So, two weeks before the fix might not be that unusual for them.

I wonder if this is related to the errors I saw this week, when I tried to install Chrome on my kid's computer. Apart from all the popups that discouraged switching to Chrome, the installer failed to run with an obscure error message.

Luckily I recalled there is an offline installer, and when I downloaded that, it worked like a charm.

Feels like a good case for an antitrust complaint if you ask me.

I think this is a legitimate bug. But also that Microsoft is taking its sweet time to fix it.

My dad called me recently asking why some NBC web site told him he couldn't watch their videos with Edge unless he turned his adblocker off, when he hadn't installed one. It turns out Edge configures their builtin one aggressively by default. I'm happier to help him with tech support for overly aggressive ad blocking than the alternative.

Definitely feels like Microsoft is reverting to old ways recently. Did LLMs bring back excessive greed?

I am blocking Microsoft through my personal data safety protocol.