Firefox can be set as the default browser much easier

Sep 13, 2021 13:55 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has made it more difficult to change the default browser in the modern versions of Windows, including in Windows 10, and the company continues this mission in Windows 11 with an approach that makes the whole thing even harder.

In essence, the whole thing comes down to users manually changing the default browser from the Settings app, something which Microsoft claims serves as additional security protection but which third-party browser makers have criticized for a long time.

And this is all because by making it harder to change the default browser, Microsoft actually increases the chances of people sticking with Microsoft Edge, which at the end of the day, is really good news for the company.

Enter Firefox

But as it turns out, Mozilla has found a way to bypass the modern Windows implementation and introduced a way to change the default browser right from the app’s UI.

In other words, everything works as it did back in the days when Windows 7 was still supported. Users go to a dedicated option in the browser, choose to enable it as the default app on Windows, and that’s pretty much it. No extra steps are required, so they no longer need to go to the setting screen in the operating system.

“People should have the ability to simply and easily set defaults, but they don’t. All operating systems should offer official developer support for default status so people can easily set their apps as default. Since that hasn’t happened on Windows 10 and 11, Firefox relies on other aspects of the Windows environment to give people an experience similar to what Windows provides to Edge when users choose Firefox to be their default browser,” Mozilla said.

It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft blocks Mozilla’s system or not, but for now, the company doesn’t see this update as a good idea from a security perspective.