Technology

As a computer user with ~30 years' experience with Windows: why? Why does the browser need to open? Since Windows 98, the OS and the browser have shared common elements. Those get preloaded already whether you like it or not. This is how IE got its performance gains and this is how Edge gets them as well. Firefox once had an extension that did a similar thing, it added a system tray icon that would preload parts of the browser. The effects were not that great, but some people kept it around. I suspect Chrome has similar things in Android/ChromeOS.

So generally I say this is fine, especially since you can opt out and it probably won't touch business/enterprise, government users, and maybe even Windows 11 Pro users who are spared a lot of the bullshit.

As a Mac guy, I don't think macOS is loading any part of Safari without permission. Safari isn't part of Finder (the file manager), it's not part of the OS aside from being included with it. I run Firefox full time on both my Macs.

And of course Linux is less likely to do this. They typically bundle Firefox (some bundle Chrome or something else) and Firefox isn't really meant to do that out the gate, so I doubt it's happening at all on Linux.

But even if I had 11 Home to game on, I'd just opt out, but also accept that it's probably still loading parts of Edge that other parts of the OS use (like the help system, is that still a thing? Haven't seen it since 98 or 2000 or maybe XP).

But also, my Macs and iPhone convert the Windows company to, let me just type it so I can show you, Microslop . Yeah, I set that up. It was funny for a while. It's still funny. Maybe if it stops being funny, I'll disable it.