Apple is under fire, and the European Union is not disarming, with constant warnings to the Cupertino company to comply with regulations. As such, after some Europe-specific news in the first beta of iOS 17.4, and now in a review of this version, users are faced with the requirement to choose the default browser. As happened before with Windows, now it's Apple's turn.

Apple last night released a revised version of the first beta of iOS 17.4, which implemented several changes required by EU digital market legislation.  This release reveals one of the measures which has been announcedbut was not in effect last week: Display a panel when you first open Safari to give users the choice of default browser.
The list includes, among others, Brave, Opera, Aloha, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Firefox, Maple Browser, Qwant, Edge, Safari, Chrome and Onion.





Selecting a browser will redirect you to the App Store, and installation automatically changes the default browser.
If you change your mind, you can change this choice at Definitions > Safari > Browser Prepared.  New European legislation also gives browsers the option to use their own rendering engine (they all currently use Safari's WebKit engine), but Apple only allows this in the EU: it's not clear whether developers will accept the prospect of keeping two different versions.  From your browsers.