I hate Windows 11 a little less because of this free, tiny app

I like Windows 11 a lot less than I liked Windows 10—and that was before it started advertising to me incessantly and filling up every nook and cranny of the experience with “AI” I neither wanted nor asked for. But one of the oldest annoyances is that it still demands I use Microsoft’s Edge browser and Bing search for everything, including the searches made in the otherwise very handy Start menu search.

I’ve previously tried various remedies for this thorn in the side of my PC experience, but Microsoft has patched and updated Windows often enough that they’ve all stopped working. I eventually gave up and resolved to leave the Start menu hobbled by Microsoft’s over-eager branding, even though I’d much rather use the tools I chose for myself (Vivaldi as my browser and DuckDuckGo as my search engine).

Such things are sent to try us. By Microsoft, specifically. Which shouldn’t be poking its nose into how individual users want to use the operating systems we’ve paid for. I’m not bitter, no, why do you ask?

But a recent Windows laptop purchase—this one, in fact, yes, sometimes we jump on our own deal posts, too!—brought these annoyances front and center once more. I stared at the Windows 11 setup process for 40 minutes, prodded at each step to pay Microsoft more money for 365 or Copilot or OneDrive, so I decided it was once again time to see if I could wrestle the Start menu away from Redmond’s panopticonic clutches.

A little Googling DuckDuckGoing led me to MSEdgeRedirect, which does what it says on the tin. This little tool redirects web searches from the Windows 11 Start search bar to any browser you want, using all the major search engines. You know, the way it should’ve worked from the start.

This is a neat little package, requiring only a standard installation, without any constantly-running-in-the-background programs. In addition to redirecting the web portion of the search to your true default browser, it can also handle most of the widgets that appear in the taskbar. Weather, news, images—if you use any of them, you can redirect them to your preferred browser and an alternative service (such as Accuweather).

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MSEdgeRedirect still works as of July 2025, on my home-built desktop PC and my Snapdragon laptop. I can’t guarantee that it’ll stay working for any given amount of time. It’s a freebie on GitHub, and Microsoft has updated Windows to bork these kinds of tools before, which I consider to be a self-serving betrayal of customers like me. Customers that Microsoft might want to be a little less cavalier about pissing off these days.

But for the moment, it works. I hope it makes Windows 11 a little less annoying for you, too, especially if you’ve recently been forced to hop onto a new machine or operating system.