There are now two versions of Windows on this planet. One of them respects the browser you chose. The other herds you, politely and persistently, back to the one its maker prefers. Which version you get depends not on engineering, not on principle, but on the accident of your address — and Mozilla, marking the hundredth day since it published its evidence, has decided to stop waiting for that to change.
The evidence was a report called Over The Edge 2.0, the second independent study by Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, two leading specialists in deceptive design. It documented how Windows, Edge, Bing and Copilot are built to steer people away from the browser they picked. Mozilla published the report in full; the researchers published their evidence for anyone to analyse. The timing matters. Browsers have become a key distribution layer for AI tools and services, and they still determine much of the privacy and security people rely on daily. Steer the browser, and you steer which AI services reach the user — and which protections come with them.
Mozilla did the diplomatic thing first. It shared the report with Microsoft and talked through the issues, hoping that a company confronted with independent evidence of harmful design would want better for its users. The conclusion it reached instead is worth repeating in Mozilla’s own words: “Microsoft will respect user choice only when it is forced to.” For a company whose operating system runs on more than a billion machines, the foundation notes, the standard for respecting people’s choices is legal compliance. Not what is best for users. Not Microsoft’s own published principles. Not what is technically feasible. Not even what it already does for users in Europe.
The geography of a choice
That last point is the one Mozilla finds most shocking. A better version of Windows already exists and is already shipping — but only inside the European Economic Area, where the Digital Markets Act forced the issue. Live in the United States, India, the United Kingdom or almost anywhere else, and your freedom to choose is measurably worse. One hundred days on, Mozilla lists what people outside the EEA still endure. The Windows 10 message “You’re almost done setting up your PC” uses tricky wording to pull people off the default they picked. Windows Search and Widgets open links in Edge rather than the browser set as default. And Windows keeps Edge as the default for common file types like PDFs and SVG images even after another browser has been chosen.
Europe, meanwhile, has merely graduated to a softer captivity. Edge remains pre-pinned to the taskbar there, which Mozilla says appears to directly violate Microsoft’s own “principled approach to app pinning and app defaults.” Copilot, the company’s AI tool, opens web links in a side panel instead of the chosen browser in every region tested, Europe included. And Windows Backup — the tool Microsoft uses to guide people through the migration to Windows 11 — silently tries to make Edge the default when it restores a PC, while failing to properly carry the user’s own browser across.
Most of the patterns documented in 2024 are still in place. The 2026 patterns, Mozilla says, are worse: new surfaces like Copilot and the Windows 11 migration have simply become fresh territory for the same old habits. It is the way of institutions with a monopoly’s memory — each new doorway is fitted, by default, with their own turnstile.
Ask the law, not the conscience
The asks have not changed. Give all Windows users the fairer designs already live in the EEA, wherever they are located. Stop the remaining harmful practices in the EEA itself and ship that standard worldwide. Honour browser choice everywhere it is currently ignored — Windows Search, Widgets, Copilot and Windows Backup restoration. And apply Microsoft’s own 2023 app-pinning principles to Edge itself.
Mozilla insists the report was never about intent but about accountability; “Statements about intent are not a substitute for action,” it says. Having stopped waiting, it is now taking the findings to regulators and policymakers. In Europe, it observes, the DMA is the only thing that has ever moved Microsoft; everywhere else the lesson has been the same — the company ships fairer design only when a regulator requires it.
So the appeal goes out, like a dispatch to distant ministries: let the regulators of the United States, the United Kingdom, India and Brazil pay attention. Microsoft can do better. It already has — for the Europeans. Until the rest of the world receives the same, Mozilla says, it will keep pointing at the company’s choices and at the hundreds of millions of users who wanted something different.