According to statistics from netmarketshare.com, at the time of writing this note, desktop users use Chrome as their first browser with 68%, Firefox second with 9%, Internet Explorer third with 7.50%, and Edge with just over 5% in fourth place. This means that even though all of us have the Edge web browser installed on our Windows PC, almost no one uses it. For this reason, and if you are outside that 5%, you might want to prevent Microsoft from installing Edge (Chromium) on your computer.
Microsoft's Edge browser is not bad at all. It is an excellent alternative and works much better than its predecessors. But clearly, for whatever reason, few people use it. It has not met user expectations, and that is why the vast majority move to the most popular web browsers. The new version of Edge based on Chromium is implemented on Windows computers through updates, as always. If you oppose Microsoft arbitrarily installing Microsoft Edge (Chromium) on your computer, follow the steps below.
Five steps:
For this task, we are going to use Blocker Toolkit from Microsoft. This toolkit contains a script that we will use to block automatic updates of Microsoft Edge (Chromium) by creating a registry key.
- Once you have downloaded Blocker Toolkit on your computer, it will ask you to choose a folder and extract the files to the selected directory (they are dependency files).
- Then you will need to open the folder where you extracted the program. Look for "EdgeChromium_Blocker.cmd". Right-click on "EdgeChromium_Blocker.cmd" with the auxiliary button of the mouse, open the properties and copy the file location.
- At this point you will need to open a CMD window as administrator. From the window, paste the path you copied in the previous step.
- Next, after the path, you have to copy the following: /EdgeChromium_Blocker.cmd
It should look like path/EdgeChromium_Blocker.cmd
- This action will execute the script and show you the options to allow or block automatic updates of Edge (Chromium) through Windows updates.
- To block Edge updates (Chromium), write the following code (prepending the file path): /EdgeChromium_Blocker.cmd /b
It should look like path/EdgeChromium_Blocker.cmd /b
At this point, automatic updates of Edge (Chromium) on your computer will be disabled. If you later change your mind and want to install the Edge (Chromium) update, simply change the letter 'b' to 'u'.
The good thing about the method offered by the official Microsoft service 'Blocker Toolkit' is that you can disable or re-enable Edge (Chromium) updates whenever you want.
