Honestly a good change. Defaults should be handled by the OS. If a software wants to be your default, it should ask the OS to present the selection screen and allow the user to choose the option.
Yeah, this is a ragebait headline (and I’ll admit that it caught me). This is actually in line with what you see on Android and most Linux distros. It’s also likely that Microsoft doesn’t want you to easily change from Edge, but still. This is better than allowing an application to silently change which applications open things on your computer.
Unless the OS screen adds tons of clicks and popups to click though to change the default. Not to mention its kind of funny how easy it is to switch back to Edge. This is a anti competitive feature pretending to be a security feature.
As long as that applies to all browsers equally. I don’t know the current state of things but if I remember correctly, Firefox already circumvented the earlier default protection method, because Microsoft made it so that their own Edge browser didn’t require those extra steps that were forced upon all other browsers.
After reading the article it seems likely this is still the case. They said operating system links still open in edge even when you have another browser configured, so Microsoft is still putting Edge in a privileged position. I guess we just have to wait and see how privileged it ends up being.