In the new report, Over The Edge 2.0: Do Microsoft’s Design Tactics Still Compromise Free Browser Choice?, two leading experts in deceptive design, Dr. Harry Brignull and Cennydd Boles, build on their 2024 report and find that Microsoft continues to deploy harmful patterns. These harmful patterns — Trick Wording, Obstruction, Visual Interference, Preselection, Nagging, and Forced Action — repeatedly bombard users, limiting their ability to choose and run their chosen browser on Windows PCs.
The Browser Choice Alliance applauds the research team for once again shining a spotlight on practices that distort competition and limit user choice. The report demonstrates how Microsoft continues to deploy harmful patterns against users on Windows 10 and 11 devices at a global scale.
Some key highlights from the report:
One finding is especially timely. With Windows 10 support having ended in October 2025, over 1 billion people have PCs running Windows 11. Microsoft markets its Windows Backup utility as a way to make this transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11 seamless. But the researchers found that when they backed up a Windows 10 machine with an alternative browser installed and set as default, then restored to a new Windows 11 device, the alternative browser was not actually transferred, as a user would expect — but Microsoft Edge remains and is even silently reset as the default.
The report also shows how Microsoft is applying its tried and tested anticompetitive anti-choice playbook in order to override user choice in the nascent space for AI assistants. Microsoft’s Copilot assistant overrides a user’s chosen default browser and opens links inside a side-pane web view that is probably powered by Edge.
Unlike the original report, the new Mozilla report also compares the user experience across four regions: the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Germany. While the overall conclusion holds across all jurisdictions tested, the report demonstrates regional variation. Within the EEA, Microsoft has currently ceased some practices documented in the original report. The researchers attribute this change to regulatory pressure resulting from the designation of Windows as a gatekeeper OS under the EU Digital Markets Act rather than any genuine shift in Microsoft’s approach. Several harmful patterns persist even in the EEA, and users in the US, India, and the UK remain exposed to Microsoft’s harmful tactics. Where compliance ends at the border, so does respect for user choice. There is, of course, currently no browser choice screen on the hundreds of millions of Windows devices in the EU because Microsoft has not yet been designated as a gatekeeper in respect of Edge, despite Edge’s significant and ever-growing presence on Windows devices.
We call on Microsoft to respect its users and stop using its substantial and entrenched power on Windows PCs to steer users toward its own browser in ways that restrict user choice, undermine web freedom, and unfairly tilt the playing field away from fair competition and innovation.
This is an independent report commissioned by Mozilla. All findings reflect the researchers’ own conclusions.
Read the full report here.
