Last edited Sat Feb 7, 2026, 02:03 PM - Edit history (1)
There's a Windows-level setting that's called "Default Browser", but what this controls is "what application does Windows open when you click something that appears to be a URL". Things that look like URL's are things that start with http:// or https:// or www. and things like that.
When you change your default browser in Windows, this has the further effect that it changes the "default application to open" when clicking on files that end in certain file extensions, the most obvious being ".html", to whatever you chose as your "default browser". You could see this in action if you click on your desktop, create a new text file, type "Hello World" at the top, save, then go into Windows Explorer, change its extension to .html (assuming you aren't hiding the showing of file extensions in the Windows Explorer settings and hence can see your file extensions to change them), and then when you click that file icon, it will open up the application you set as the default application for .html files, such as Chrome.
If you then change your Windows "default browser" after, then that browser app would open up your .html file, because, again, when you change your 'default browser', it changes the default app to open for .html files. You can also change what to open .html files manually to whatever app you want to at System/Apps/Default Apps, like you could say you want .html files to open in Notepad if you wanted.
Important to note, this setting does NOT change the effect of clicking the Chrome shortcut on your desktop or start bar. That shortcut still opens Chrome regardless what your default browser is, because the shortcut is to "Chrome", not "Windows default browser".
Now, within Chrome, you have three pertinent settings.
One is the "Default Browser", which, within Chrome, just allows you to change the Windows default browser app to Chrome. It's not really a Chrome setting, it's a shortcut to be able to make a particular Windows setting to a particular one (which has the effects I described above).
Two is the "Search Engine", which if you click on in Chrome settings, you'll see at the top "The search engine you choose will be used for features like searching from the address bar", but another thing it does is set Chrome's Default Home Page (the third of the settings). If you choose "Google" as the default search engine, your default home page (i.e what page you go to when opening Chrome, assuming you also have Chrome setup to visit a particular URL upon opening, which is the default behavior but there are other options) will change to www.google.com.
If you changed it to Yahoo search engine, it would makes the address bar use Yahoo (as its search engine) and ALSO change your default homepage to a yahoo search engine landing page.
This is what was messed up, and probably happened when you installed an application who's installer sneakily changed the default home page (in any browser settings it could find on your computer). This led you to being at some yahoo search engine landing page (its equivalent of www.google.com) when you opened Chrome. Yahoo pays money for app developers to put this bullshit into their installer programs, usually small devs that really need money.
Then, when you went into Chrome settings and reset its default search engine to Google, it also changed the default home page back to www.google.com, so next time you opened a tab (or chrome itself) you landed back on a familiar-looking google page, and recognized you were in Chrome, but you actually already were, just on the 'wrong' page. The setting of Chrome as 'default browser' may or may not have 'done something' but was not intrinsic to the problem you had.
Make sense?
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