Forcing Edge to load a specific URL in a specific browser

aquir 2 years ago |

The Edge browser "experience" was the final straw that pushed me over to MacOS. The whole in-your-face pushy behaviour in Edge is awful. I very often have to install software on new Windows servers and every time when I have to open the browser I have to go through the deshittifaction steps for the default home page and the whole "can I have all your data" wizard. Also Edge tend to "forget" privacy settings with new updates and re-enable many privacy invasive features like Page Preload, Bing etc. And you also have this Copilot sh*t and the whole sidebar with Coupons!?!? It's also creeping over to the Start Menu and the Taskbar.

theyeenzbeanz 2 years ago | |

I really wish the FTC would step in and do something

trelane 2 years ago | | |

It's really weird that there's a giant, Microsoft-shape gap in the pattern of all the recent FTC enforcement actions.

devwastaken 2 years ago | | |

Microsoft is the U.S. military industrial complex's IT support. All of it. They are effectively the U.S. governments tech branch.

loloquwowndueo 2 years ago |

At which point will it be less work to just switch to a sane operating system and maybe use windows in a VM if you need some specific application?

themoonisachees 2 years ago | |

I did that. It's going great, the only time I've needed windows was for VR and playing The Finals when the anticheat wasn't compatible with proton.

If your daily workflow only involves launching a web browser, or gaming, I heavily suggest switch thing to linux. It's really not that bad.

J_Shelby_J 2 years ago | | |

How do you do fellow finals player.

How is performance in a VM?

Also, I assume this wouldn’t work with games like valorant ‘s anticheat?

themoonisachees 2 years ago | | |

Easyanticheat is Linux compatible provided the developers have chosen to enable it. Embark has done so like a month after 1.0.

I don't expect VM performance would be too bad provided I went with the appropriate options, but thankfully I do not need to do that.

bravetraveler 2 years ago | | |

Performance can be excellent, with CPU pinning and a GPU passed through it's nearly native

Valorant is the one anti cheat I gave up on tricking. The rest like ESEA could be fooled by hiding the hyper-v extensions and so on with KVM

jojobas 2 years ago |

Seems to be mostly for MS to override the default (non-Edge) browser?

diggan 2 years ago | |

Yup, like every single link in the start menu will use Edge no matter what browser you have set to as default. Great user experience.

Edit: I see now the author is actually an Project Manager at Microsoft, that's why this is highlighted as a Good Feature and not a bug.

MereInterest 2 years ago | |

Agreed, this is a user-hostile move. The entire point of separating protocols from programs is because the user can choose which implementation should be used on any given protocol.

jakub_g 2 years ago |

An interesting possible usage of this was that it allowed to open a link in Edge from within IE11 (which is better than just saying "IE not supported") - although I never spotted this being used in the wild on real websites.

buremba 2 years ago |

It would be amusing to be able to do:

<a href="bash:rm -rf /">Destroy me</a>

Karellen 2 years ago | |

--no-preserve-root

buremba 2 years ago | | |

--you-know-what-im-talking-about

mytydev 2 years ago |

This title is misleading to what the article is actually talking about and judging by the responses, that was all that was read.

diggan 2 years ago | |

The title should probably be "Forcing Windows to load a specific URL in a Edge" as the article only talks about Windows and Edge specifically.

Overall I think you can expect the responses this got based on the author talking about "The purpose of this URL scheme is to enable Windows and cooperating applications to invoke particular user-experiences in the Edge browser" while as a Windows user, the only time I hit this "feature" is when I click on a link and expect it to open in Firefox (my selected default browser) but instead for some stupid reason it uses Edge regardless.

Surely this will be used against Microsoft in some future anti-trust suit to show how Microsoft still tries to get rid of their competition by ignoring user choice.

acosmism 2 years ago |

i'm waiting to hit this "edge case". i had to

micahdeath 2 years ago | |

I've hit this case. We have an app that uses ActiveX Controls. I use this to force Edge to open specific links away from my app.