In order to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Microsoft is planning a number of changes to Windows to comply with this new legislation. Ars sums them up nicely:
- Bing’s web search from the Start menu and the Edge browser can be uninstalled
- Third parties can add to the Windows Widgets Board feeds
- Third parties, like Google or DuckDuckGo, can provide the built-in web search results that Bing once had exclusively
- Windows users who choose to sync their Microsoft accounts will have their pinned apps and preferences synced, seemingly keeping their EEA-enabled choices
- Windows will now “always use customers’ configured app default settings for link and file types”
All of the above will be exclusive to the EU/EEA, so Windows users elsewhere are out of luck.
Quoted text appears in gray color because we it was copy-pasted from the dark mode Ars website. Always use Ctrl-Shift-V to paste into rich text fields, that will drop the invisible formatting rules.
So, how can you use this version of W11 without living in EU?
There was a trick to get a “clean” Windows, by choosing “English (World)”:
https://www.minitool.com/news/install-windows-11-without-bloatware.html
I wonder whether we will have similar success for EU versions. Usually Microsoft will bundle all ISOs into a single one, provisioned later by a tool. If that is the case, it would be really useful for those of us this side of the pond.
I find the list quite shocking. These all look like things I’d immediately want to change (removing Bing, Edge) or would find infuriating if they weren’t the case (Windows unilaterally changing my file associations). It astonishes me this isn’t the default for all Windows installs everywhere.