Separately, Microsoft warns that Windows 11 version 23H2 will reach end of support on November 11, 2025.

I.e., the one that still supports WMR virtual reality headsets and hasn’t had the functionality for those artificially pulled.

You can disable Edge if you don’t want people launching it… “accidentally.” There are a myriad of ways. Most recently I’ve used Edge Blocker, which does what it says on the label. Note that this will cause the opening of any file types associated with Edge by default to silently fail if you don’t reassign them to some other program.

The install Firefox and uBlock origin. Unless your parents deliberately go out of their way to download and install Chrome (and depending how heavy-handed you want to get you could even prevent this by busting them down to a limited user account) they won’t have any choice but to use the correct browser installed on their system. That is to say, the only one.

It’s virtually impossible to exist online these days without generative AI bullshit being shoved in your face with no means to opt-out. It’s clearly not consumers driving this so-called “demand,” because savvy people don’t want this to begin with and never did. Rather, it’s the desperate speculative hype around this dumb nonproduct that’s causing big businesses to set electricity and money on fire with AI slop to no tangible benefit.

A saner response from the UK government would be to tell these companies to either power their AI datacenters with renewables or get out, rather than trying to guilt trip individuals over, of all the goddamned stupid things, undeleted emails.

OP hit the nail on the head. This is once again shifting the blame (and guilt) onto individuals who even collectively have fuck-all impact on the problem in question.

The worst of it is, some people will believe this shit.