Windows 10 comes with a new browser called Edge, which replaces Internet Explorer as the default option for surfing the web, but it’s no surprise that some users still prefer Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome for the time being.
As you might have heard, Mozilla has recently blasted Microsoft for making it too difficult to replace the default browser in Windows 10, changing the original behavior and requiring additional steps to do that.
Basically, in Windows 7 and 8.1, pressing the “make default” button in Firefox or Chrome replaced the default Windows browser instantly, but in Windows 10, you need to go to a dedicated screen to do that.
So in third-party browsers on Windows 10, when you press the same button, you are redirected to this screen and only then you can configure which browser you want default. This is actually the workaround that developers have come down to in order to comply with Microsoft’s new system.
How to change the default browser
So to do this, open the Settings screen from the Start menu and open the System section. Then, click on the “Default apps” menu and look for the web browser category that’s placed at the bottom of the window.
Click “Microsoft Edge,” and from the list choose the new browser you want default in Windows 10 – remember that the app needs to be installed on your PC when you do that.
As an alternative way, you can click the “set default” button in Chrome or Firefox and you get redirected to the same screen, again letting you choose the default browser from this list.
Right now, it’s not yet clear whether Microsoft has any plan to change this approach in future updates, but given the fact that default apps aren’t supposed to change too often, it’s not such a big deal to manually configure your defaults every once in a while.
