A long time ago, I used Firefox as my main browser, and I had been using it since something like version 1.0.4 released all the way back in 2005. Long story short; Mozilla pissed me off with a plethora of arsehattery over a prolonged period and I ended up ditching the browser. In the end after trying a few alternatives I started using the then new iteration of Microsoft Edge. No, it is not perfect. And it is not a match for pre-2017 Firefox. But it works, and for all its faults you can configure it well enough and use the right extensions to turn it into a pretty decent browser, at least if you're a Windows user. Microsoft however continue to do questionable things with its development (and this article is about one of them).
An annoying feature of Microsoft Edge, and a continued example of how anti-consumer Microsoft can be (and how it's a constant battle against them to just have a piece of software they make work as intended without it being unnecessarily irritating in some shape or form), is the recommended settings pop-up. As I've stated above, Edge needs to be configured correctly to get the best experience out of it and that largely consists of turning various features off. They do at least let you accomplish this in almost all regards but, in this case they decided it'd be a great idea to occasionally throw an annoying pop-up in your face that "suggested" you revert the browser to their ideal settings, including reverting the default search engine to Bing if you've changed to something else (oh what a surprise).
You used to be able to go into the advanced settings, known in Chromium as 'flags', and turn this thing off. It was a simple case of typing in edge://flags
in the address bar, and then finding the #edge-show-feature-recommendations
flag and choosing to explicitly disable it. But within the last few months, Microsoft pushed an update to Edge that removed this flag and reverted its setting to the default (if you had it disabled initially). Granted the flags are listed as experimental features that may or may not end up getting completely removed or replaced, but even so it was still a dick move by M$.
Luckily they didn't remove it completely, they just made it slightly more complicated to disable. Now you've got to add an entry to the registry. And here's how:
Open Registry Editor in Windows (just type Reg
in the Taskbar search and it should be the first result, although depending on how much crap you have on your system with similar sorts of names you may need to type RegEdit
instead). When in the editor you just need to navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Edge
although if the Edge
key doesn't exist, you can create it by right-clicking on Microsoft
and selecting a new Key
then naming it Edge
.
Under that key, add a new DWORD (32-bit) Value
and name it ShowRecommendationsEnabled
and you're done. By default the value of the newly created DWORD should already be set to zero (which it needs to be), but if somehow it isn't (possibly because it already existed), then right-click on it and select Modify
and make sure the Value data
field is 0
.
You may need to quit Edge or even completely restart Windows for this setting to start working, but once it does, it accomplished exactly the same thing as the old flag setting they removed. You will now notice however when you open the '…' menu in Edge there will be a added note right at the bottom of the menu that says 'Managed by your organisation' which you can ignore. All it tells you is that you can visit edge://policy
and it'll show you that ShowRecommendationsEnabled
is set, (the policy value should be false).
Microsoft Edge Settings Workaround