Microsoft is blocking Google Chrome through its family safety feature

33 chrisjj 15 6/20/2025, 6:29:46 PM theverge.com ↗

Comments (15)

bitpush · 3h ago
> Microsoft has introduced a bug into Family Safety that specifically targets the Chrome browser and prevents it from functioning on Windows.

In isolation this is understandable. Bugs happen, and it happens at the worst time. But Microsoft has a pattern on dark patterns to pump up the Edge usage, and cant help but this this is somewhat planned.

tdeck · 1h ago
Actually I think this is unacceptable even in isolation. Chrome is one of the most popular Windows applications. If they aren't testing for regressions with Chrome, they aren't testing adequately.
neepi · 22m ago
Incompetence reins there. A few years ago I was working on an MSI deployment for something and Defender decided to think it was a virus. Turned out it was an MSFT DLL that we included with it that was tripping it. Took a whole month for them to sort it out.
AlienRobot · 24m ago
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
abetaha · 9m ago
I wonder if this is related to the errors I saw this week, when I tried to install Chrome on my kid's computer. Apart from all the popups that discouraged switching to Chrome, the installer failed to run with an obscure error message.

Luckily I recalled there is an offline installer, and when I downloaded that, it worked like a charm.

DoctorOW · 27m ago
> Other browsers like Firefox or Opera appear to be unaffected, and some users have even found that renaming Chrome.exe to Chrome1.exe works around this issue.

How is this possibly unintentional?

damnesian · 1h ago
I am blocking Microsoft through my personal data safety protocol.
BrouteMinou · 1m ago
Lol lol lol your so funny man XD XD your da best4vr <3 <3

... Is that what you were looking for?

tchbnl · 57m ago
I think this is a legitimate bug. But also that Microsoft is taking its sweet time to fix it.
Analemma_ · 25m ago
Google occasionally breaks YouTube in Firefox, and also takes its sweet time to fix it. Just the nature of the beast in this industry it seems.
neepi · 21m ago
The nature of the beast is I use yt-dlp and vlc as my YouTube client. If they’re going to be assholes, I’m not bothered.
privatelypublic · 43m ago
Like google is any faster when they have issues. Oh wait. They're worse.
akazantsev · 1h ago
Our product once suffered from a faulty Windows Defender update, and as I remember, it took about two weeks for Microsoft to fix it. During those two weeks, our product was barely usable for many users because access to a file system was slowed down to a crawl.

So, two weeks before the fix might not be that unusual for them.

McDyver · 56m ago
My family safety feature is called linux.
CM30 · 4h ago
Feels like a good case for an antitrust complaint if you ask me.