May 03, 2016

When Windows 10 was released, it came with 2 browsers, Internet Explorer 11 and Edge, and despite the fact that Edge was the “new kid on the block” so to speak, it has some great features, detailed in my colleague San Roy’s article Welcome to the New Edge. And in a somewhat daring move, Edge was also made the default browser, which for most people worked well. However, I recently had to do some web research that required me to access quite a number of “older” style web-sites that still heavily use Silverlight and Active X, which are not supported on the Edge Browser. This is actually a good thing – things move and improve quite fast on the internet, and although Silverlight and Active X controls were good in their day, thay are now outdated and can lead to some major security concerns, not to mention performance hits and compatibility issues - Silverlight 5 was released way back in 2011, and while Microsoft still continue to update it for now, it is now definitely considered “legacy” technology. HTML5 is the way to go these days, and I really wish some web developers would get with the times and update their sites.

However, as I said, I had to access a number of web-sites that used these old controls, so changing the default browser whenever I click on a link saved me a lot of reloading, and is actually quite easy to do.

Simply put, open Settings from the start menu, or All Settings from the notification panel (swipe in from the right), click (or tap) on System and then select Default Apps. Scroll down to Web Browser and click or tap on the current setting to select a new option, such as Internet Explorer or even Google Chrome if you have it installed. You even have an option of Look for an App in the Windows Store.

Of course, as well as setting the default Web Browser, you can use the Default Apps section to set the default for any of your Apps, even by file type or protocol, and is particularly useful if you have multiple Apps for common purposes, such as Video players, Music, Photos and Email etc.

So that was an easy and useful option change, and while it helped me a lot during my recent particular research, I have since changed the default back to my Edge Browser – I love the new, faster features of Edge, the ability to right click a word or phrase and have Cortana give me a synopsis in a breakout window, the ability to anotate and save web pages, and I really love the Reader View, which strips off all the extraneous advertising and leaves just the main content – an absolute god-send not only for reading but for printing as well. And now with an easy option to change the defaults I get the best of both worlds!