Find Default Browser using SCCM CMPivot Query

In this article, you’ll learn how to find default browser using SCCM CMPivot query. Thanks to CMPivot query, you can easily find the default browser on your SCCM managed computers.

When it comes to using browser, it’s a personal preference. Not everyone likes the same browser. Your favorite browser could be Chrome or Firefox, but other users may prefer Microsoft Edge.

In most organizations, the users are allowed to use their own favorite browser. It doesn’t matter what browser you use, if your default browser lets you complete your work, you are good to use it.

However, some organizations prefer to use one browser and employees have no choice. In such cases, you don’t need to spend time on finding the default browser. It’s understood that there is just one browser used in the entire organization.

When you have a huge number of computers, each of the computer could have a different default browser. With Windows 10, you can go to default apps and manually change the default browser from Edge to something else.

SCCM has many built-in reports to find the default browser used on computers. The report name is default browser counts. This report shows a count of default browsers across client devices. While this report shows the default browser usage, there is no option to run it against a specific device collection.

When you have a mixed combination of browsers used in the setup, you can use SCCM CMPivot to find the default browser on the devices. I prefer CMPivot over SCCM report because it is quick and more accurate.

CMPivot is a useful utility that can simply your tasks. When you run a CMPivot query, it immediately runs a query on all currently connected devices in the device collection and returns the results. To learn more about CMPivot, refer to CMPivot for real data in Configuration Manager.

If you are interested in exploring CMPivot, you can check out some popular ConfigMgr CMPivot queries.

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We will use a built-in CMPivot query to find the default browser in SCCM. The SMSDefaultBrowser CMPivot query will help you find the default browser on your SCCM manged computers.

How to find Default Browser using SCCM CMPivot

Let’s find out the default browser using SCCM CMPivot tool. Launch the SCCM console and navigate to Assets and Compliance > Overview > Device Collections. Right-click a device collection and select Start CMPivot.

In the search box, type Browser and look for SMSDefaultBrowser. Right click SMSDefaultBrowser and click Insert. The CMPivot query “SMSDefaultBrowser” finds the default browser on the computer.

When you click Insert, the SMSDefaultBrowser query is inserted in the query box. To run the query, click Run Query. Depending upon the machines in the device collection, the CMPivot query runs on every computer and returns the default browser information.

In the below example, I am running the query on a smaller set of devices in my lab. The query successfully completed on 5 out of 7 devices. The other devices could be offline, and hence you see some failures.

Before you run the CMPivot query, ensure the devices are online. Now in some cases not all computers in the SCCM device collection are online due to users located in different time zones. If you see some clients offline in results, don’t be surprised.

Among the ones that were online, you can see that few machines have Microsoft Edge as default browser. While others have Chrome and Internet Explorer as default browser.

If you want to find the default browser on a single computer, you can run the below CMPivot query.

SMSDefaultBrowser | where Device == 'computername'