Popular web browsers are free to download and use, with companies monetizing through sponsored content and advertisements displayed within the browser interface. Users can designate any installed browser as their default, controlling which application automatically opens web links and HTML files.
Web Browsers Overview
Now, all these browsers are essentially free. They either come on the systems when you purchase it, or you can download it for free and put it on your machine, and it's up to you which one you want to choose to use on your regular basis. And you probably want to make that one your default browser.
Before we get into that, I will say that the companies that make these browsers give them away for free.
So here I have Firefox open, and notice when I open it there's a bunch of shortcuts to different sites and different things that I can see here. For instance, I've got Amazon, which is sponsored, Temu, which is sponsored, Overstock, which is sponsored. And then we see these articles down here. So really where these companies make their money is through this advertisement, by putting stuff in front of you. And so that's one of the big reasons why all of this is for free. They want you to use their browser.
I find the Microsoft browser to be the most cluttered and to put the most in front of me. Not only that, but because I use Windows machines, I find that Microsoft is trying to really do anything they can to get me to use their browser and no one else's browser. And it's become more and more difficult to change the default browser.
Let's take a look at what the default browser actually is. What I'm going to do is type in techknowsurge.com and hit enter. And I am going to drag a shortcut onto my screen here. Notice I've created this using Edge right here.
Well, let's close this out. And now I'm going to double-click this shortcut here. And it opens up in a different program. It opens up in Chrome, because that's what I have set as the default browser. But I can change that. What Windows allows me to do is choose what browser I want.
A good example of this: I'm going to close out of Firefox and Chrome. Let's go ahead and open up Chrome. When we open it up, it's going to do a check to see if it's the default browser. And it says, "Oh no, it's not the default browser. Do you want to make Firefox the primary browser?" And that's essentially saying the same thing as default browser. So I'm going to say, "Yeah, let's do that, let's set this as the primary browser."
And it pulls up a screen that allows me to make Firefox the default browser. So for HTM and HTML, Google Chrome is the primary browser right now, and I'm going to set Firefox as the default for it. And now what that does is it changes that, so Firefox now is the default browser for HTML.
Let's go ahead and close out of this now. And notice my icon changed for the shortcut. I'm going to double-click on it to open it up, and now it's using Firefox. So that's an example of how we can change our default browser to whichever one we want to use. And we can see down here that it is using Firefox as the default browser.
So you've got options on which one you choose as your default browser.
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