Make News and Interests Open Links in Chrome on Windows 10

Windows 10 News And Interests Icon

It is finally possible to make News and Interests open links in Chrome, or even in any other web browser of your choice. For that, you can use the same trick as you might have been using for Cortana, to redirect its web content to your favorite browser.

News and Interest is a small taskbar panel that shows a weather forecast, news headlines, finances, traffic, and other information when expanded. Since December 2020, this feature is available on the taskbar for those running Windows 10 preview builds from Dev Channel. See how to enable or disable it, or stop it from appearing when you hover over it with your mouse pointer.

You may remember Edge Deflector, a tiny app for Windows 10 that was created in Cortana era. The software serve only one purpose - to intercept Cortana links and send to to your default browser. Both Cortana and News and Interests use the microsoft-edge:<URL HERE> protocol to ensure that the link is opened in Microsoft Edge. Obviously, Microsoft is interested in making users stick with Edge, its own product. For whose who are not happy with move, Edge Deflector comes into play.

How to Make News and Interests Open Links in Chrome on Windows 10

  1. Download the latest version of EdgeDeflector from GitHub.
  2. Install it by following the setup wizard steps.
  3. Open the Settings app.
  4. Navigate to Apps > Default apps.
  5. Click on Choose default apps by protocol.
  6. Find the microsoft-edge entry in the list, and click on the app icon next to it.
  7. Select EdgeDeflector from the available apps list, and confirm the change.

You are done.

Starting in EdgeDeflector version 1.2.0.0, the app doesn't require administrative privileges, as it makes the changes per-user. Another great change is that the app now shows a post-install greeting page that allows easily configuring the OS to use EdgeDeflector for handing microsoft-edge: links.

That's it.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

8 thoughts on “Make News and Interests Open Links in Chrome on Windows 10”

  1. It should probably be noted that News and Interests won’t open the page for managing your interests in a non-Edge browser (instead you’ll be redirected to the MSN homepage), so if you want to do so, you’ll have do it before changing the default app.

  2. What a great utility! Now if I can just figure out how to make the weather part open Weather Underground instead of MSN weather . . .

  3. Great! Now all we need is an app to redirect us from every Microsoft application into something else. Just anything else will do…

      1. Yeah. I´m experience the same problem here. What about do it trhough registry. If he create an app to easy the procecess, he could tell people what to change in the registry manually.

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