Ctrl blog: “Brave and Firefox to intercept links that force-open in Microsoft Edge”

Microsoft has inadvertently re-heated the web browser wars with the company’s anti-competitive changes to Windows 11. It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser.

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So, how did we get here? Until the release of iOS version 14 in September 2020, you couldn’t change the default web browser on iPhones and iPads. Google has many apps for iOS, including a shell for its Chrome browser. To tie all its apps together, Google introduced a googlechrome: URL scheme in February 2014. It could use these links to direct you from its Search or Mail app and over to Chrome instead of Apple’s Safari browser.

These vendor-specific URL schemes were introduced to combat Apple’s anti-competitive behavior on its iOS platform. Microsoft just turned the racket on its head and changed more and more links in its operating system and apps to use its vendor-specific URL scheme. The original sin was Apple’s, but Microsoft is gulping the juice of the apple with gusto.

Daniel Aleksandersen

I haven’t paid much attention to the default browser controversy in Windows 11 since I use Edge as my default browser anyway, and have no intention of upgrading from Windows 10 anytime soon. But this bit of context is certainly illuminating: the primary culprit was Apple and its relentless drive to lock down iOS and prevent competition. Funny how rarely this connection is mentioned whenever the press criticizes Microsoft…

This new browser-specific URL scheme looks intriguing, but from my own testing it is far from widely supported. On my Windows 10 laptop, it only works in Chrome, whereas Edge redirects the user to a search results page when using the googlechrome:// or microsoft-edge:// URL schemes. On my Samsung smartphone it seems none of the browsers recognize them, instead triggering a search. I agree it is a bad practice for the web, encouraging segregation among browsers, which should ideally treat any URL identically, but it’s not exactly widespread, at least for now.