Microsoft Edge is the default browser in Windows 10. However if you’ve installed Google Chrome, Mozilla FireFox or any other browser then this browser might be unwanted and you want to get rid of it.
However there is a problem with removing Microsoft Edge from Windows 10. As we speak in Windows 10 Build 10240 it’s impossible to remove Microsoft Edge as it’s a Core feature of Windows. Those cannot be removed. If you attempt to remove Microsoft Edge using Powershell and the Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage you will get the following error:
PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_20.10240.16384.0_neutral__8wekyb3d8bbwe | Remove-AppxPackage Remove-AppxPackage : Deployment failed with HRESULT: 0x80073CFA, Removal failed. Please contact your software vendor. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80073CFA) error 0x80070032: AppX Deployment Remove operation on package Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_20.10240.16384.0_neutral__8wekyb3d8bbwe from: C:\Windows\SystemApps\Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe failed. This app is part of Windows and cannot be uninstalled on a per-user basis. An administrator can attempt to remove the app from the computer using Turn Windows Features on or off. However, it may not be possible to uninstall the app.
If you have trouble reading the above code then here is the error message included in the code “This app is part of Windows and cannot be
uninstalled on a per-user basis. An administrator can attempt to remove the app from the computer using Turn Windows”. Windows suggests using Turn Windows Features on or Off to remove Microsoft Edge but it does not appear in that list and therefore cannot be removed using that method.
So how do you get rid of Microsoft Edge? You can’t. At least not in the terms of saving the space the program uses on your hard disk. You can however mark the folder as read only and make it impossible for Windows to access the files. This will render Microsoft Edge unusable. Due to the risks of taking ownership and doing this in the Windows folder we will not explain that here on WindowsInstructed. The folder you will need to change is found in this path C:\Windows\SystemApps\. Look for the Microsoft.Edge.XXXXX folder in SystemApps.
I personally hope that in the future Microsoft makes it possible for us to remove Microsoft Edge. For now we simply can’t.
