Windows 10 upgrade resets your default browser to Edge; Mozilla is very unhappy | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10 upgrade resets your default browser to Edge; Mozilla is very unhappy

arstechnica.com

30 pointsRobAley10 comments

Previous discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977836

Why not? Look at how Google is proactively preventing Microsoft from delivering a good YouTube experience on WP: http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/7/4813836/microsoft-reverts-...

All weapons are good in the war for clueless users, the experienced ones will find their way.

I saw this yesterday and the amount of Mozilla hate was weird. I know they've dipped in popularity over the years, but theirs is the only browser I still trust with my data.

Anyway, the option to not set Edge as default was incredibly easy to understand. It asked you to toggle which programs you wanted to set as the new defaults. You uncheck what you don't, click "next" and there you have it.

You're right, but "least shit" is not the best position to occupy.

People hating on Mozilla is about as weird as hating on Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. That is to say - it's not weird at all. You're just saying that because you like their bullshit better than the other company's.

Me personally, I think they're run by a bunch of lying thieves who have been bought out. If they actually cared about openness, they'd have done a lot more with the hundreds of millions of dollars that they've collected over the years.

Mozilla changes your default search engine to Yahoo. I wonder if they would be as upset if Bing had outbid Yahoo for this privilege.

Both companies should be prosecuted under the CFAA for these acts, making unauthorized changes to computers that don't belong to them.

I wonder if Express Settings includes setting the browser back to MS default.

It isn't. When the Express Settings option came up I selected the (well hidden) option not to use it, and unchecked every option I was given. My default browser was still switched to Edge.

Supposedly, the hard-to-spot option not to use Express Settings reveals another, equally hard to spot option later on in the install that lets you set your default browser to something other than Edge.

Not in my experience. I did an non-clean upgrade and found Edge was the default browser. And then when I did a clean upgrade with only IE11 as the default browser I believe it defaulted to IE11 for some reason. So, I think there is some legitimate shenanigans going on here. If the W10 upgrade scripts can infer that I previously had IE11 during my clean upgrade and keep it as the default then it should do the same with any other application preferences.

Most likely the devs were being lazy and possibly paranoid that the initial experience with Windows 10 would be terrible if the application preferences were maintained. But that's just my guess.

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