Recently, Mozilla has quietly made it easier to switch to Firefox on Windows. Although Microsoft provides a way to switch the default browser on Windows 10, it is more cumbersome than a simple one-click switch to Edge. This one-click process is not available to people outside of Microsoft, and Mozilla seems to be tired of this situation.
In version 91 of the Firefox browser released on August 10, Mozilla reverse-engineered the way that Microsoft set Edge as the default in Windows 10 and enabled the Firefox browser to quickly make itself the default. Before this change, users of the Firefox browser will be sent to the Windows 10 settings section, and then you choose the Firefox browser as the default browser, thereby ignoring the request from Microsoft Windows to keep the default settings of Edge.
Mozilla’s reverse developing means that you can now set the Firefox browser as the default browser in the browser, and it does all the work in the background without additional prompts. This circumvents Microsoft’s protection measures for its own browser. The company established this protection measure in Windows 10, claiming to ensure that malware cannot hijack default applications, and Microsoft has made this process more difficult in Windows 11.
People should be able to set default values simply and easily, but they don’t, a Mozilla spokesperson said in a statement. All operating systems should provide official developer support for the default state so that people can easily set their applications to the default state. Since this did not happen on Windows 10 and 11, the Firefox browser relies on Windows Other aspects of the environment provide people with an experience similar to what Windows provides for Edge.
Since the open letter to Microsoft in 2015, Mozilla has been trying to persuade Microsoft to improve the default browser settings in Windows, but it is clear that Microsoft has not responded to this, but it has made it more difficult for Windows 11 to switch the default browser. This seems to have exceeded the limits of Mozilla’s endurance, so Mozilla began to implement its changes in Firefox shortly after the unveiling of Windows 11 in June.
So far, Google, Vivaldi, Opera and other Chromium-based browsers have not followed the pace of Mozilla, and it is unclear how Microsoft will respond. Microsoft does have some real security-related reasons to protect against anti-hijacking malware, but by allowing Edge to easily switch defaults, it undermines the level playing field for rival browser vendors.
