Stop Edge from taking control of PDF's permanently!!!

I have battled the same problem for about 2 years. Sometimes resetting the default in settings lasted months, and sometimes it would revert several times in one day. The shortest time I had Adobe as my default was 7 minutes before it switched back. I have Adobe Creative Cloud, and prefer using Chrome for my browser, so I had no need for Edge at all. Funny enough, at the top of this page Edge is trying to get me to switch to Edge as my default browser - persistent sucker.

In frustration, I turned to my company's IT department. They somehow got Edge uninstalled. I wish I knew how they did this so I could share the secret with all of you.

It has been a blissful and quiet 4 months since that was done... until this morning. When I opened a document, Adobe had a big pop-up asking if I wanted to make Adobe my default PDF reader. I went right to settings, and sure enough, Microsoft Edge was there as my PDF default program. Only it was just the words "Microsoft Edge" and a blank blue box, no Edge logo. Extra persistent sucker.

So even thought the program is no longer on my computer, Microsoft is still trying to push me to Edge. I'm so frustrated. The claim that certain functions of the computer require Edge to run is false, since I've been running for months without Edge and without problems. My Adobe is up to date and I use it all day, every day. Why is this still happening?

Full reformat not the solution. I tried that last year and Edge was hijacking my default pdf with a few weeks. Just purchased a brand new machine with fresh copy of Windows 10 Pro and Edge hijacked my .pdf defaults within a week. Microsoft has known this since 2015 and refuse to fix it. This needs to be reported to the The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for anti competitive practices. Microsoft does not want you using anything but Edge browser and pdf. Worse case they should tell users that they cannot use a non Microsoft pdf editor instead of the non stop heads games of telling users that changing the default .pdf in settings will fix.

Again, there's thousands of complaints on-line since 2015, guessing 100's just in this forum.

Pathetic!

A more specific analysis of the events happening.

"Before" status: Foxit Reader is set as default pdf reader, ACDSee was configured to _not_ associate itself with .pdf files.

I just opened ACDSee's config dialog and enabled that it should associate itself to pdf files. I started recording events in Process Monitor and then clicked "ok" in that dialog. The following is what happends afterwards, filtered for the Registry path shown.

1. ACDSee is reading the current system config and presumably checks if it matches its own config - here it reads the default pdf reader as it is configured in Windows,
2. As it did not match, ACDSee overwrites the config now. Apparently it does not write a new "Hash" value, I _guess_ this is how Windows detects there was an unauthorized change.
3. (Next I double-clicked a pdf file on my desktop.) Explorer.exe therefore starts to read the registry values related with pdf files.
4. It tries to read the missing hash.
5. Apparently it noticed the missing hash, as now it overwrites the default pdf application with Edge.
6. And writes a matching hash.
   (Afterwards, Edge is fired up and displays the pdf file)

I had the same issue; starting in 2017 and happening until now, Feb 2021 on W10 v2004. Although configuring either Foxit Reader or Adobe Reader as my standard PDF reader, it got reverted to Edge after a period of sometimes only minutes and up to like 3 days.

I tested everything, GPO rules, regedit changes, removing Edge etc.

In the end I discovered that my ACDSee image viewer actually caused this behavior - it was configured to be associated to PDF files. When skipping through a folder that had a pdf file between images it would skip over the pdf, but made Windows revert the pdf association back to Edge after closing ACDSee. I could reproduce on a second computer.

I unchecked the PDF file association in ACDSee and that fixed it.

Maybe this helps a few users reading along.

Hello Lester,

In addition, you can turn on Always open PDF files externally in Microsoft Edge using the tutorial below to stop PDF files from opening in Microsoft Edge by default.

https://www.windowsq.com/t/how-to-enable-or-disable-open-pdf-files-in-microsoft-edge.600/

Of course, you need to set a default app you want other than Microsoft Edge to open PDF files instead.

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/5507-choose-default-apps-windows-10-a.html