It’s just becoming less relevant now that more browsers natively handle the protocol.īrave Software is also considering taking things one step further. You may, of course, continue to use EdgeDeflector and let it do its pro-consumer choice thing regardless of your preferred browser of choice. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with this.) Neither codebases attribute the code to EdgeDeflector, although both are clearly inspired by it. It’s not the only way to parse them, it’s not the best way to parse them, but it’s the way every third-party implementation now parses them. The new implementations in Brave and Firefox follow the exact parsing logic I wrote for EdgeDeflector. Firefox’s implementation is part of its overall Windows 11 shell integration work. It has yet to pass review and get merged into Firefox, but the ball is rolling. Mozilla developer Masatoshi Kimura has also written patches to implement the protocol into Firefox. However, it’s not the only browser doing so. This makes Brave the first web browser to implement support for Microsoft’s anti-competitive URL scheme. It’ll pop up as an option when you click on a microsoft-edge: link. So, you no longer need to install EdgeDeflector if you’re using Brave as your default browser. The Brave web browser added support for the microsoft-edge: URL scheme with version 1.30.86, released last week. I created EdgeDeflector to also recognizes them and rewrites them to regular https: links that would then open in your default web browser. Only its Edge browser recognized these links, so it would open regardless of your default browser setting. Instead of using regular https: links, Microsoft began switching out links in the Windows shell and its apps with microsoft-edge: links. The latter issue is something I addressed in 2017 with the release of EdgeDeflector. It made it more difficult to change the default web browser and has expanded the use of links that force-opens Edge instead of the default browser. Microsoft has inadvertently re-heated the web browser wars with the company’s anti-competitive changes to Windows 11.

Microsoft edge app for firefox