I tried to read all the links, but there are still some questions:
So Google has a button to make it the standard browser and a group policy to do that automatically. This computes the userchoice hash based on the SID, obfuscated formulas, the create time of the registry key (minute only, retrying when the minute has changed while writing).
Now MS publishes an update which breaks this (But how?). Gizmodo says it only happes to "chrome.exe". Google implemented the userchoice hash algorithm, but now they disabled "the experiment".
And now?
When will Google come up with another solution? Does the group policy still work? What exactly did the update from MS change? Did the userchoice algorithm change somehow?
Does the button in Chrome to set the default even still work?
I thought the whole point of the hash was it could change arbitrarily with windows updates to stop programs reverse engineering it and then setting file associations or browser choice directly in the registry.
So Google has a button to make it the standard browser and a group policy to do that automatically. This computes the userchoice hash based on the SID, obfuscated formulas, the create time of the registry key (minute only, retrying when the minute has changed while writing).
Now MS publishes an update which breaks this (But how?). Gizmodo says it only happes to "chrome.exe". Google implemented the userchoice hash algorithm, but now they disabled "the experiment".
And now?
When will Google come up with another solution? Does the group policy still work? What exactly did the update from MS change? Did the userchoice algorithm change somehow?
Does the button in Chrome to set the default even still work?
Here's how userchoice is or was implemented: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/0dfc676a46a... https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/58e203f9ba9...