Today, I had the displeasure of opening Microsoft Edge, Windows 11's built-in web browser. A dialog window popped up and asked me whether I wanted to set Edge as my default web browser, to which the answer is obviously "no," "never," "absolutely not," or "I'd rather use Linux," however such options weren't available. The only options I had were "Confirm" and "Set Later," which means the same thing as "remind me later," and just makes this popup appear again after a few days or weeks, or who knows long, as if the only thing that is preventing me from setting Edge as my web browser is merely time, and not the fact that a piece of software that does things like this is simply repulsive and I'd rather never touch it if I had the choice.
The popup is also misleading in other disgusting ways. Normal web browsers simply ask the user whether they want to set the browser as the default browser. That's all it is. There is a browser, it wants to be the default one. How can you possibly get this wrong? Well, someone at Microsoft managed it. Instead of telling the user what the popup is really about, it misleads the user by having the first line be "Use Microsoft recommended browser settings," as if to give weight that this recommendation is a good one.
Google doesn't say "Use Google recommended browser settings" to make Chrome the default web browser, nor does Mozilla do it for Firefox, or Vivaldi does it for itself, so why does Microsoft do ii, if not to fool someone who isn't good with computers into using Microsoft's web browser while thinking that's actually beneficial to them?
I have a very strong reason to believe that using Edge would be detrimental to such person's mental health compared to literally any other web browser.
Putting whatever technical capabilities of browsers aside, Edge's default homepage is MSN.com, which is full of [REDACTED]. This means the first time you open Edge, you're probably going to see an article about [REDACTED] on MSN, because there is always an article about [REDACTED]. The type of user who would be mislead by this popup is also the sort of user who wouldn't know how to change their homepage. By showing this popup, and making Edge always open from the start menu when you search for something instead of just opening the default web browser like anyone would expect, Microsoft is guiding users into being exposed to [REDACTED]. And that's just not right. Nobody deserves this.