You can remove Edge and Bing Search on Windows 11 even if you don't live in Europe

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 601 points –
You can remove Edge and Bing Search on Windows 11 even if you don't live in Europe - gHacks Tech News
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Does this also impact Apple, will they also need to allow removing Safari? If yes, is it possible that they might allow removing other things like iMessage and Apple TV?

On macOS it's always been possible to remove built in apps. To do so now though requires disabling SIP and mounting as R/W. Then you can use something like this to remove all traces https://freemacsoft.net/appcleaner/

They regenerate after an update, there is also a way to remove Edge on Windows by manually running the uninstaller from the terminal with some options, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not easy and you can't just uninstall it like any other app.

there is also a way to remove Edge on Windows by manually running the uninstaller from the terminal with some options

Well to this statement, no. Microsoft disabled that method with the release of 22H2. Attempting to do so now does nothing. I was aware of this and it was shared on Reddit and other forums all the time until it stopped working. In fact, just six months ago people were sharing it on Reddit and realized it wasn't working. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/140d0y2/how_do_i_uninstall_microsoft_edge/

I do agree with the sentiment. It should be easy to uninstall these apps.

Manually removing the files is still an option 😈

I don't understand why they won't allow it even with the command line. People who hate Edge and want to uninstall it to free up disk space should be able to. They will never use it anyway (max accidentally).