“All operating systems should offer official developer support for default status so people can easily set their apps as default. “People should have the ability to simply and easily set defaults, but they don’t,” says a Mozilla spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. Mozilla has clearly grown tired of the more complicated way of setting up a default browser, a process that Microsoft is making even harder in Windows 11. Firefox now makes it easy to switch default browsers in Windows. Microsoft tells us this is not supported in Windows. This circumvents Microsoft’s anti-hijacking protections that the company built into Windows 10 to ensure malware couldn’t hijack default apps. Mozilla’s reverse engineering means you can now set Firefox as the default from within the browser, and it does all the work in the background with no additional prompts. Before this change, Firefox users would be sent to the Settings part of Windows 10 to then have to select Firefox as a default browser and ignore Microsoft’s plea to keep Edge. In version 91 of Firefox, released on August 10th, Mozilla has reverse engineered the way Microsoft sets Edge as default in Windows 10, and enabled Firefox to quickly make itself the default.

This one-click process isn’t officially available for anyone other than Microsoft, and Mozilla appears to have grown tired of the situation. While Microsoft offers a method to switch default browsers on Windows 10, it’s more cumbersome than the simple one-click process to switch to Edge. Mozilla has quietly made it easier to switch to Firefox on Windows recently.

Mozilla firefox start page