Mozilla CEO to Satya Nadella: Default Edge browser is a disturbing aspect of Windows 10

Mozilla announced they are rolling out support materials and a tutorial video to help guide everyone through the process of preserving their choices on Windows 10

Edge is the default browser on Windows 10

If you have been lucky enough to upgrade to Windows 10, then the chances are you noticed the Edge browser has become you default on the shiny new operating system. Yes, the new Edge browser is really good, fast and light, but there are people who believe it is just not playing fair.

In an open letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Mozilla CEO Chris Beard has called this lack of choice a very “disturbing aspect of Windows 10”. “The update experience appears to have been designed to throw away the choice your customers have made about the Internet experience they want, and replace it with the Internet experience Microsoft wants them to have.” he says in the post published on July 30.

Beard has a point, especially since a small tweak like this could wipe out Mozilla Firefox from a lot of systems. “We appreciate that it’s still technically possible to preserve people’s previous settings and defaults, but the design of the whole upgrade experience and the default settings APIs have been changed to make this less obvious and more difficult. It now takes more than twice the number of mouse clicks, scrolling through content and some technical sophistication for people to reassert the choices they had previously made in earlier versions of Windows. It’s confusing, hard to navigate and easy to get lost,” he adds.

[related-post]

According to netmarketshare.com, the different versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still accounts for over 52 per cent of global web traffic. Mozilla’s Firefox is just under 10 per cent, while Chrome has over 17 per cent of the share. Despite this, Internet Explorer is anything but popular and is still struggling for acceptance among the crowds that matter. This is why Microsoft decided to develop a whole new browser and not bother about upgrading IE.

Mozilla announced they are rolling out support materials and a tutorial video to help guide everyone through the process of preserving their choices on Windows 10. “Mozilla exists to bring choice, control and opportunity to everyone. We build Firefox and our other products for this reason. We build Mozilla as a non-profit organization for this reason. And we work to make the Internet experience beyond our products represent these values as much as we can,” Beard’s post says.

He “strongly” urged Nadella to “reconsider your business tactic here and again respect people’s right to choice and control of their online experience by making it easier, more obvious and intuitive for people to maintain the choices they have already made through the upgrade experience”. “Please give your users the choice and control they deserve in Windows 10.”