making IE my default browser

Roadkillv1 · 6 Sep 2010 at 10:34

some pleb this morning has downloaded chrome onto the system and made it the default browser, and this causes issues with some of our systems and opening report related pages. any other computer this would be easy to solve and just do it via the menus. howeverrrrrrrrr being a work area you need system admin priv's to do that. is there any other way of making IE default again without the tools menu or control panel etc. it's a nuisance and causing lots of extra work.

RedGooner · 6 Sep 2010 at 10:38

Have you tried removing chome first, and then firing up IE, and it should ask you if you want IE as your default.

We BANNED Chrome at our work place, its more troublesome than it works, and its designed for home use at best.

paradigm · 6 Sep 2010 at 10:42

Running on active directory?

If so, make it a group policy, I force IE to be default on all machines on the domain.

.Simon · 7 Sep 2010 at 10:47

I know there is a registry setting to set the default browser but can't remember it at current, have a look at these two links:

Set default browser per user utility

Some registry entries to explore

On that second link you would probably want to look at HKEY_CURRENT_USER instead of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE as Chrome installs under a user account and doesn't make any system wide changes.

Also, and this might be a quicker way, you can set Internet Explorer to check if it is the default browser via the following registry entries:

Code:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Check_Associations"="yes"

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main
Check_Associations"="yes"

That should give you the prompt next time you launch Internet Explorer. It's a workaround if you can't access the control panel.

ruskie · 7 Sep 2010 at 21:58

I'll assume you are in a AD Domain environment? You could write a logon script to set IE as the default browser on startup. Compliment this with a Software policy GPO to prevent the execution of 'firefox.exe'

Have you got an acceptable usage policy that a user has signed? These documents usually mention that they agree to not install 'unauthorised' software. You could flag to you users that you will take disciplinary actions against a user caught installing unauthorised software.