Interesting anecdote that demonstrates honoring consent might actually keep bugs at bay.

Been pulling my hair out debugging a relative’s persistent BSOD (once every ~6hrs) after nudging them to take the first degoogling step by switching browsers.

I could not believe at first that a user space program, especially a Windows Store sandboxed one, could affect anything in the kernel, but analyzing every single coredump shows the exact same trigger: Firefox attempted to rename the UrlAssocistions/http registry key in the UWP sandbox’s virtualized registry hive, triggering an access violation in the Registry system service and crashing ntoskrnl.

It turns out that there is a secretly enabled config "browser.shell.setDefaultBrowserUserChoice.regRename" that causes Firefox to attempt this renaming periodically despite the user already having unchecked the “check if default on startup” option . A quick search reveals that it was a vestigial A/B testing feature that was already slated for deprecation, but remained in the current version and a perfect storm of I’m guessing UWP kernel memory bug and Firefox dark pattern triggered this outcome.

Damn! Thanks! 🤘🏼

Time to switch that off, asap.