Microsoft Broke a Chrome Feature To Promote Its Edge Browser

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Microsoft issued a Windows update that broke a Chrome feature, making it harder to change your default browser and annoying Chrome users with popups, Gizmodo has learned. An April Windows update borked a new button in Chrome -- the most popular browser in the world -- that let you change your default browser with a single click, but the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient. This petty chapter of the browser wars started in July 2022 when Google quietly rolled out a new button in Chrome for Windows. It would show up near the top of the screen and let you change your default browser in one click without pulling up your system settings. For eight months, it worked great. Then, in April, Microsoft issued Windows update KB5025221, and things got interesting. "Every time I open Chrome the default app settings of Windows will open. I've tried many ways to resolve this without luck," one IT administrator said on a Microsoft forum. A Reddit user noticed that the settings page also popped up any and every time you clicked on a link, but only if Chrome was your default browser. "It doesn't happen if we change the default browser to Edge," the user said. Others made similar complaints on Google support forums, some saying that entire organizations were having the issue. Users quickly realized the culprit was the operating system update. For people on the regular consumer version of Windows, things weren't quite as bad; the one-click "Make Default" button just stopped working. Gizmodo was able to replicate the problem. In fact, we were able to circumvent the issue just by changing the name of the Chrome app on a Windows desktop. It seems that Microsoft threw up the roadblock specifically for Chrome, the main competitor to its Edge browser. [...] In response, Google had to disable its one-click default button; the issue stopped after it did. In other words, Microsoft seems to have gone out of its way to break a Chrome feature that made life easier for users. Google confirmed the details of this story, but declined to comment further.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.