"Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black".
-Henry Ford, My Life and Work (1922)
I suspect Chrome was misusing an API, because according to the article
"the worst was reserved for users on the enterprise version of Windows. For weeks, every time an enterprise user opened Chrome, the Windows default settings page would pop up. There was no way to make it stop unless you uninstalled the operating system update. It forced Google to disable the setting, which had made Chrome more convenient."
Enterprise maybe didn't like settings getting changed that way (conflict with group policy?). If it was constantly opening new windows, it's probably because it was constantly calling an API (probably in the wrong or an undocumented way). So it would make sense to change how the API works based on a known bugged application.
Which makes sense.
Apple oughta put a stop to this nonsense.
1. There's a global default browser setting: follow it.
2. Almost no app needs an embedded SFSafariViewController just to open random links
2b. Extend this to photo pickers (especially those that expect access to the entire library)
I would bet this is an application shim of some sort. Hardcoding behavior like this into the shell is risky. Shims often target based on process name and executable path on disk (but can be configured to also match resource info).
I would dig into it, but I cannot repro the issue on Win10.
If that was what Windows was intending, and Google found a way around it with sneaky automatic API calls, and Windows fixed the exploit which then resulted in those sneaky calls popping open Settings every time, that would be fine and Google would be the bad guy.
Sounds like that was not what happened here, Windows did some ugly hack (up to and including ‘relying on a Chrome.exe process name’, like, come on) and in fact doesn’t even have a “make request then approve in Settings” workflow, so yeah Windows is the bad guy here. Google is still a little bit bad - you’re fucking up my UI by forcing a self-promotion button into my tab bar, that’s not cool - but overall this situation is a point against Microsoft.
(Personally I’m glad the extent of browser wars for Mac is some apps doing some trick to make you choose between “Chrome”, “Safari”, or “the default browser [Safari]” every time you click a link. I want to use the default option every time automatically, that’s what default means.)