My wife is having minor memory problems. She uses the Firefox browser and things generally go smoothly. But at least once a day, the Edge browser opens spontaneously and covers the Firefox window. I have told her repeatedly to close the Edge browser, but she doesn’t remember and doesn’t realize that she is not looking at the Firefox window. I point out the little Edge icon on the tool bar, and show her how to close it, but she doesn’t remember from one time to the next.
BTW, at first it happened very time she woke it up in the morning but I found that it had inserted itself on the start menu. I removed that and rebooted. But now it just opens at random times. Her computer came with Win 11 already installed. Thank god I still have Win 10.
Of course it is her default browser. Trouble is Edge randomly opens and hides it. I have no trouble deleting it and once or twice a day she has to ask me to help.
I’d guess that she has one or more applications (or visits websites) that ignore the default browser setting, and are opening Edge anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that they’re Microsoft news apps or something like that.
Is she trying to open something from the Start Menu? If you go to the start menu and begin typing the name of the program you want to open, Windows will autofill as you’re typing. However, if it autofills a program you don’t have, and you’re not paying attention, it looks like a program on your computer, but when you hit enter it’ll spawn an Edge browser to download the program with.
Here’s what I mean.
When I start typing ‘fusion’, it shows my Fusion360. Hitting enter, even with just ‘fus’ typed, opens Fusion 360
When I type “gimp”, the start menu shows me gimp, however, I don’t have gimp on this computer, when I click it or hit enter, it opens Edge. Notice how similar they look.
If that’s what’s going on, I’d guess Windows doesn’t have any built in method for using a 3rd party browser in that situation. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if there’s 3rd party program or some registry changes that could fix it.
Come to think of it, again if this is what’s happening, there might be a setting so Windows doesn’t treat the start menu as a search engine.
Back in the mists of time Microsoft got sued because they bundled their own browser with Windows. So, Microsoft embedded the browser into the OS and claimed it was an integral part of the OS and could not be separated.
It worked in court. It also means you can’t delete it.
If I use the widget in the lower right of my screen (a part of Windows 10 at least, not sure about Windows 11) a window pops up with various items of interest (presumably). Anything I click on in there open in the Edge browser even though it is not my default browser.
EdgeDeflector is extremely old, and probably doesn’t work anymore. The other one was made to replace it.
Go for MSEdgeRedirect. Get the stable version. Install with the default options, except also enable the PDF viewer option when it shows up during the install.
This is exactly what I thought of when I read the OP. I normally use both Chrome and Edge, but if I click on one of the ‘items of interest’, it opens in Edge.
I agree. I can’t say for sure but sounds like the work of some malware or a virus. If your computer is doing things you never told it to do then something else is.
Maybe her mouse is glitching and “clicking.” Hard to say without more info.
