How To Direct Cortana Search Always to Your Default Browser on Windows 10

By default, when you do a search on Cortana and click one that searches the web, you are redirected to Microsoft Edge regardless of which default browser is on your computer. Well, if you don’t like this, you can change this behavior with the help of a little 3rd part tool.

EdgeDeflector is an open source free tool made just to fix this forced behavior by Windows. It’s also a portable tool that only needs to run once. Download the executable from Github and run it on your Windows 10 computer. Click Yes if prompted by UAC dialog box, and give a pass if prompted by the SmartScreen warning. You won’t see any indication that the app was installed but once it’s all quiet let’s go ahead and test it out.

Do a search in Cortana and click one with Search the web, like below.

If everything goes well as planned, the browser option box pops up asking which browser you want to use to search the web.

Select EdgeDeflector on the list, check the option “Always use this app” and hit OK. Your default browser opens up with a search result showing up in a new tab automatically. From this point on, this will be the one Cortana uses to search the web, regardless of which default browser you are using.

Two extra notes worth noting

1. A system wide update such as a new build might revert this back to the default to use Edge browser. If that happens, simply run EdgeDeflector and repeat the steps described above.

2. With EdgeDeflector, Cortana will send all the search the web query to the default browser but still uses Bing as the search engine to deliver the result. If this doesn’t suit you, you can replace it with Google.