Mozilla finds new way to make itself Windows 11 default browser over Chrome, Edge

Back in July 2024, Mozilla expressed its interest in extending Firefox support for Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 while others like Chrome and Edge had abandoned them. The browser-maker kept its promise and later announced that these Windows versions would be supported till March 2025.

However, Mozilla also understands that they are a small piece of the pie and the majority of Windows users are on 11 or 10 with more and more likely (perhaps forcibly) moving to Windows 11 soon as Windows 10 comes to a close. In fact, Microsoft itself seemingly wishes folks, even on unsupported PCs, will upgrade to 11.

As such, in the Firefox 134 beta 2 (spotted by Windows Report), the company has added a new installation menu that automatically selects Firefox as the default OS browser during its installation. As you can see in the image below, the check for "Set Firefox as default browser" is pre-selected.

The patch "Support setting Firefox as default based on installer attribution campaign" tracked under bug ID 1923868 says:

This patch adds an startup idle task that sets the browser as default if an attribution campaign id of "set_default_browser" is present on first run. This works supports an upcoming experiment where users will have the option to "download as default" via [[ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ | the stub installer marketing page ]].

Users can also see the check during the "Finish setup" progress tracking:

This update comes right after Microsoft seemingly tries to make an effort to improve default browser settings UI after it realized how important default app choices can be for users.

Aside from the new installation menu, Firefox 134 beta has also received hardware-accelerated HEVC/H.265 codec support on Windows:

New

 

• Firefox now supports touchpad hold gestures on Linux. This means that kinetic (momentum) scrolling can now be interrupted by placing two fingers on the touchpad.
• HEVC hardware support is implemented for Windows users.

 

Fixed

 

• Fixed an issue that started with macOS Sonoma where the emoji picker would open and immediately close when opened with the Cmd+Ctrl+Space shortcut.
• Fixed an issue that started with macOS Sonoma where the emoji picker would also insert the character "e" in the selected text field/box when opening the emoji picker using the Fn+e shortcut.
  
  We have also fixed this for similar shortcuts using the Fn key.

 

Changed

 

• Firefox follows now the model HTML specification for transient user activation more closely. This change makes popup blocking less strict in cases where previous versions of Firefox were overly aggressive, reducing erroneous blocking prompts.

You can find the changelog here on Mozilla's official website.

Source

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