Do you know what page is displayed when Edge mysteriously opens by itself? Is it on the Edge start page or some other URL?
Another vote for hitting the F1 button. It’s near the ESC key, you might be trying to hit it or another F key inside some program’s window but the focus isn’t where you think it is, etc.
Seems to be some URLs she loaded before realizing it wasn’t Firefox and that asked for passwords she didn’t recall.
Yeah. I use Windows 11 with chrome as my default browser. I also use edge for some stuff, so i usually have an edge widow up in the background. So my situation is different. But i never have edge randomly pop up.
Just want to pipe in that I will never, ever use Edge on principle alone, and on my Windows 11 machines I do periodically (like, once a month) find Edge randomly open on my machines (work and personal) and something asking me to make it the default.
I tried something different today. There are web sites that automatically update themselves*. So when the edge browser showed up on her computer unbidden this morning, I closed every open site (there were a half dozen) instead of just closing Edge. Of course, at that point, Edge also closed. Will this work? Time will tell. If it hasn’t opened spontaneously by Christmas, I will assume that was it.
- We get veggies delivered every Friday from a local roof-top farm operation at any time between 9 AM and 6 PM. They estimate a delivery time every Friday morning and continually update it through the day with no action on my part until it is delivered.
Can you not just make the appearance of Firefox distinctively different (themes, IIRC) so that it’s obvious which is being looked at? I did this with the work laptop, where the default browser has to be Edge in order to work certain programs, but I use Firefox for most other things.
I’d rather not get involved in that. So far, my latest fix (closing all the Edge tabs) seems to have worked.
I just was using Mrs. FtG’s laptop. I was using the touchpad to hover over something to see what its popup was. Edge opened up, with that scary “Do you want to try Copilot? C’mon, all your friends are trying it. Or are you just chicken?” For some reason it also has a pane of “apps” that I never, ever use. (Gotta grab one of those debloat scripts to get rid of those.)
I have no idea why using a touchpad to hover would bring it up. Must be moving my finger wrong. (As opposed to how I moved my finger after Edge opened.)
I wondered if co-pilot was triggering any of this, but I’m not sure. All the computers I have with co-pilot, I’ve disabled it in as many places as I can, down to disabling the co-pilot button on the keyboard.
Not directly related to killing Edge, which is not my favourite browser* but I succesfully used the “nuke it from orbit” option with my ex-girlfriends mother. Relationships might die, but tech support is forever.
So her Windows was fucked. Too fucked to fix without a reformat/reinstall. But… I knew she only used it for email, Word, and internet.
Therefore, i created a boot partition and installed Ubuntu Linux, and installed a theme that was based on Windows XP. I created symlinks to her Windows filesystem. I installed Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird.
I then used some simple hacks to change the icons of those apps to be the same Windows icons as what she was used to, and … sorted. So easy, so satisfying.
* while Edge was not (and probably still is not) available on XP, she did have IE. I strongly suspect that much of her issues can be traced to one source: my girlfriend’s younger brother, at that time aged 13. Boys will be boys, after all. I did tell him the secret, and also about “private browsing” mode.
I did that on my g/f’s xp laptop. Except i just totally zapped windows 'cos i couldn’t
get it to dual boot.
Maybe if you changed the default Firefox colors and appearance to something very different from Edge’s your wife will see the obvious difference when an Edge window “randomly” opens and she can just close it.
ETA: damn, damn, damn! @Mk_VII beat me to it. I thought since i had read about 25 of 32 posts I wouldn’t find myself “upstaged”. But no. Sorry. Still think its a good idea, though.
It is a good idea though. I will do it. My other idea of closing all the Edge windows (and not just the browser) did not work. Or maybe I will wait till my son visits in February. Believe it or not, he was on the Win-NT programming team and is now a Microsoft millionaire, so I cannot damn them too strongly.
similar here … I am not certain, my kids all have it clear that they are using Linux Mint and not Windows … for 95% of all household use cases (browsing and netflix mostly) … clearly the better solution …
once you get heavy into the office-suite - you are hosed and need windos