Microsoft Blocks Edgedeflector In Windows 11 Try Msedge Redirect Instead

EdgeDeflector has long been a convenient utility to stop Windows from forcing users to open links in the Edge browser. With the Windows 11 Insider build 22494, however, it looks like Microsoft has rendered the tool useless and made it harder to escape the grips of the native Chromium-based Edge browser on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

EdgeDeflector typically parses microsoft-edge:// links and redirects them to https://. In a blog post, the developer of the tool Daniel Aleksandersen says that you can no longer set anything other than Edge as the protocol handler for microsoft-edge://protocol.

Instead of hooking into the microsoft edge:// protocol handler, MSEdge Redirect filters and passes the command line arguments of Microsoft Edge processes into your default browser. This tool is immune to modifications Microsoft has done in the Insider build. You can check out the project on GitHub.