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How to switch default programs on Windows 11 – Guide
When you open a file on your computer, it starts in the application set as the default program – a text file will open in Notepad while the music will play in Windows Media Player. However, you may want to use a different application as the default instead of the one Microsoft wants you to use. Fortunately, it’s quite simple and can be done with just a few taps. Here are some ways to change the default apps in Windows 11.
How to Change default apps in Windows 11
In Windows 11, you can’t just choose an app to play all the video file types I mentioned above. You need to choose an app to open each one individually. See how:
- Open the Settings app and tap the Apps section in the left menu. The Settings app is more hidden than in Windows 10; on this operating system, the setup application is always available right above the start button button. In Windows 11, you need to look for a gray gear icon. You can pin the Settings icon to the Windows 11 Start menu, but it’s not there by default.
- Choose the second option, Default Applications. Instead of showing the app type the way Windows 10 does, Windows 11 lists all the apps on your machine. You can search for an app or the file type you want to assign to an app.
- Click on the app you want to set as the default for a file type and you’ll see the list of all the file types it can handle: Note here that Microsoft Photos is handling all photo file types, as the icons for this program appear below for the file extension entry.
- Click the file type for which you want to change the default application. So you see a menu.
- The last step is to simply choose an app from the list. (Incidentally, this application selection dialog is one of the few window types that Microsoft hasn’t added rounded corners for.) After that, you must repeat the process for each file type you want to use with that application.
Another way to change a default app is to right-click a file in File Explorer, click Open With (which is more convenient and consistent the second option in the Windows 11 context menu), and then choose to Choose another application option. it opens up the same app checkbox as the first process, except with a checkbox for “Always use this app to open [extension] files.” After that, just check the box and click OK.
The easiest way: on installation
With the first method, you need to understand what file types you want to work with, although I would expect most PC users to know that JPG is an image and DOC is a document. That said, the process of changing default apps in Windows 10 is even easier because it allows you to do this for all relevant file types at once. This is still a possibility for some apps on Windows 11. Firefox, the popular privacy-focused web browser, and VLC, a Swiss army knife for media libraries, are two examples.
fire Fox
The first time you run it on Windows 11, the Firefox browser asks if you want it to be the default browser. If you don’t make this choice on the first run, Firefox will continue to show you a banner at the top of your browser window with this prompt. In my tests, choosing the option at startup or the banner option worked fine.
Surprisingly, Google hasn’t implemented an easy way to make Chrome the default browser on Windows 11. The Make Default for this browser option requires you to go to Settings as described above and change each file type in turn.
VLC Media Player
VLC is an old school open source application, famous for being able to play almost any media file. Choosing to make VLC the default media player at installation sets it as such for over 70 file types. Unfortunately, several important file types remained under the purview of the Movies & TV and Groove Music apps. In the VLC preferences, there is an option called File Extensions Association, but that simply indicates that you should go to the Settings > Applications > Default Applications section as described above.
Final note
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