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I've done some web research on how and when other programs do this on purpose. There's mention of both Firefox and Chrome pinning themselves upon being selected by the user as the default browser. (Usually, this happens at the end of installation.) There are some Epic keys in the Registry that might be inherited from Chrome and perhaps related to this issue:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\Epic Privacy Browser.2HWOP2JV2NGYBXMEFJCMIJ6AFI\InstallInfo\ReinstallCommand -- has a value that includes the command-line option "-make-default-browser"
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Epic\InstallerError -- Does this represent an erroneous report of a failed install? It has a value of '1', even though Epic has installed and is working correctly.
I'm guessing this is an inherited Chrome behavior that has not been adequately turned off in Epic, or whose suppression is being interfered with by something Epic is doing differently -- if, for example, there's code in Chrome to look for some particular bit of tracking data that is deleted by Epic as part of its privacy cleanup (or not deleted by it, for some other reason... I mention the latter possibility because Registry keys are not on the list of things Epic cleans up).
[I've revised this; the language in early drafts was way too strong.]
Well, I'm getting it, too... every time the machine sleeps, hibernates, reboots, or I log out and log back in again, there's Epic back in the taskbar.
Why is there a "feature" to cause it to pin itself in the first place? That very fact makes me suspicious, raising doubts about the motives of the developers (but not in earnest) . "What else are they doing without asking?" I don't believe that any of the following is going on; I have no evidence for it; just my security-minded mind... so please don't hold this comment against me; for the protection of capital-P Privacy we should all be at least mindful of such considerations.
Go ahead, call me paranoid. If I wasn't paranoid, I wouldn't be trying out Epic. If I were the NSA or any other governmental agency whose mission is to know what people want kept secret (or a commercial venture with the same mission, for that matter -- looking at you, DoubleClick), what easier, lazier way is there than to tout a browser as privacy-oriented, and then back-door it in some way? I'm sure that 90+% of those who install Epic are not going to bother to read the source code; and of those who do, how many will likely have the expertise to detect Trojan features that professional spies have made efforts to obfuscate? Those features wouldn't even need to exist yet; even those who analyze the source once aren't likely to do so for every software update -- and the underlying Chrome platform iterates versions often.
My point is that, because it can stimulate such thoughts, a behavior like self-pinning is exactly the kind of poorly thought-out idea that will hurt adoption of Epic.
Here's my system configuration: box has 2 4-core Intel Xeon E5320 procs and 4 GB RAM (yeah, I know that's not much -- but between you and me, I don't think the re-pinning is a hardware problem), an NVidia graphics card, running 64-bit Windows 7 with Service Pack 1. If you need more specific information, tell me which of the several ways to get it from Windows you'd like me to use.
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