Finally, a truly silent uninstaller for Microsoft Edge Chromium

I applaud Microsoft for taking Google’s Chromium project and building a decent web browser around it, finally the death of Internet Explorer! Unfortunately, I have found that many people I work with unknowingly start using the new Edge browser because Microsoft forced it on them. This is bad form Microsoft, a dirty trick. The reason this is a problem is that most of the people I work with use Google Workplace products instead of Microsoft 365, and they don’t realize that by switching away from Chrome, even though it is Chrome(ish) based, the synchronization with Google Workplace and your Chrome profile does not work in other browsers. Fast forward a year or so and something happens to their Windows install and they assume everything is backed up like it always has been, only they aren’t syncing anymore. This is sad, and totally preventable if Microsoft would stop forcing their browser on people. Let us choose!

Anyway, that leads up to the search for an uninstaller for Edge, that can be done in an orchestrated fashion and easily applied regardless of what orchestrator or management system you use, so a script seems like a natural conclusion. But, while it makes perfect sense to me (and I image you since you are reading this), it is lost on Microsoft. So, their so-called silent uninstaller requires interaction with the desktop, by way of popping up a browser to tell you what a terrible decision it is to remove Edge, and how you are going to break the internet, burn down your computer and possibly kill a puppy by proceeding. So, you have to close the window to finish the uninstaller.

I am super excited that I finally figured out how to automate it without having to interact with the desktop. So here we go, buckle up, this script is ugly but it works!

Find the uninstaller

You first of all have to find the uninstaller, because the path to the setup.exe is in a path that changes because the version number is in the path. You can find the version number with the dir command, then pipe it to find "8" to give you only lines that include the number 8 (currently the version is 8.9x.xx), then add it to a full installer path with a for loop. Like I said, ugly. Here is the code below.

set MSEDGEPATH=c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application
for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('dir /b "%MSEDGEPATH%" ^|find "8"') do set MSEDGEVER=%%i
set MSEDGESETUP="%MSEDGEPATH%\%MSEDGEVER%\Installer\setup.exe"

Deal with Edge running in the background

You would think you could just run the uninstall now, and it would work. NOPE! If Edge is running in the background, it’s always running in the background 🙄, you will need to kill it or acknowledge a message. So let’s kill any version of Edge with taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f and taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f. Then you can run the uninstaller, so we let both of those commands first and ignore any errors if the program isn’t running, then we run it after, for good measure. Here is the code for the uninstaller with the task killing.

:uninstall
  echo Uninstalling MSEdge Chromium found at %MSEDGESETUP%
  taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f
  taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f
  %MSEDGESETUP% --uninstall --system-level --verbose-logging --force-unistall
  taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f
  taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f

I will not take no for an answer

I have read post after post on the interwebs of people frustrated that the installer still prompts you despite the claim to be a silent uninstaller, or that the command just doesn’t work. This is because, in my experience, when the uninstaller runs you will get another browser window begging you not to uninstall Edge. Microsoft, you are so needy, GOSH!

So here is the rub, if you try this from a remote shell the command hangs waiting for someone to close the browser window. So even still it won’t run truly silently. A workaround is to open another shell and then do the taskkill commands, then the command completes. That’s LAME. So how do we do that in a script? We can start a new cmd process that sleeps for 30 seconds and then runs the task kill command.

When I promised ugly, I meant it… this is UGLY! But, you know what, it works. So here it is, the full silent uninstaller for Microsoft Edge Chromium. I hope this saves someone some time, if so please share it with someone, or give my business a Google review.

@ECHO OFF
  set MSEDGEPATH=c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application
  for /f "tokens=*" %%i in ('dir /b "%MSEDGEPATH%" ^|find "8"') do set MSEDGEVER=%%i
  set MSEDGESETUP="%MSEDGEPATH%\%MSEDGEVER%\Installer\setup.exe"

:block
  echo Blocking MSEdge Chromium from installing blocker toolkit...
  start \jptechnical\disable_edgechromium.cmd /B
  goto :uninstall

:uninstall
  echo Uninstalling MSEdge Chromium found at %MSEDGESETUP%
  taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f
  taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f
  start cmd /c "timeout 30 && taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f"
  start cmd /c "timeout 30 && taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f"
  %MSEDGESETUP% --uninstall --system-level --verbose-logging --force-unistall
  start cmd /c "timeout 30 && taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f"
  start cmd /c "timeout 30 && taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f"
  taskkill /im:MsEdge.exe /f
  taskkill /im:MicrosoftEdge.exe /f
  goto :end

:end

Bonus: Blocking Microsoft Edge Chromium from installing

After all this hard work, wouldn’t it be a bummer if Edge came back again on the next update? Yeah, it is, a major bummer. This script is referenced above, and it blocks the future install. So far it seems to be working.