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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> Kolbicz believes this change may be to comply with Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to ensure fair competition and the prevention of anti-competitive practices by six large companies, known as "gatekeepers." These designated gatekeepers are Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft, who had until March to comply with the new regulations.

So, they comply with the act by... increasing the gatekeeping? I'm a bit confused TBH...

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I would assume that the intention is that the user sets their default (e.g. Firefox) and this prevents Microsoft from changing it back to Edge.

So, when a user downloads and installs Firefox (already a lot of effort), they will now additionally need to look up a tutorial on how to set Firefox as the default browser, because Firefox won't be able to do it by itself? Yay, progress...

Also, Microsoft doesn't need to create a driver to stop itself from doing nefarious things, it could just simply stop doing those things?

Firefox couldn't do this on its own previously. They'd still have to go through the system menu. If Firefox asks to be the default it just takes you to that menu. Default browser settings have been corrupted by capitalist perverse incentives for a long time. There's big money in being a default so MS and OEMs and Google/FF have been fighting this war forever. The EU just got sick of it, again. Hopefully this is the last time we have to mess with this.

MS pushing Edge as the default without user permission, again, is the problem. I've booted my computer from an update to find Edge my default. Also Outlook will use Edge as the default for opening links even if your system browser is something else. This can be changed with a setting in Outlook, if you can find it.

Per usual MS finds value in anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices. This is how they please stockholders as a publicly traded company.

Firefox can easily open the defaultapps dialog and prompt the user with some text what to do. This is a nothingburger. There is no conspiracy.

Try it yourself: start, run... ms-settings:defaultapps

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