How to stop outlook from opening a browser every time I create a meeting?

In my experience if MFA changes are needed, the outlook popups dont allow those pages to be shown. I always have people log into office.com via a browser and see if it prompts for additional info, like setting up mfa etc.. not sure why the prompts wont display in the Outlook windows properly.

However this may also be related to Outlook unexpectedly opens a browser window if OWA is disabled - Microsoft Support which is the overall topic of this thread. You can see on that page that the status is investigating and fix is due sometime next month

We have several users at our office also experiencing this issue, we were told by support that we need 2-FA enabled and have web browser support to solve this issue and prevent opening of browsers. I don't know why that is when we didn't experience this issue before. It seems like it just started for us a month or so ago. Anyone have any advice that doesn't include enabling 2-FA or turning on web browser support?

Yes, webview is a necessity for lots of things. Including 3rd party apps. MS just needs to roll out this fix as soon as they can.

Unfortunately, this did not resolve the relatively-new issue, in which an OWA browser tab pops up, in response to my simply starting the Outlook desktop application.

Uninstalling webview2 was a non-permanent solution.

David,

I feel your pain. Right there with ya!

After a month or so of "relative peace" (no OWA RoomFinder zombie web browser pop-ups), the issue returned (likely as a result of applying a company-mandated Windows update).

This time, I followed instructions from Jacob Greenfield: (thank you, Jacob!)

• In Registry Editor, navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Outlook\Options\Calendar
• Right click on Calendar and select New DWord (32-bit) value.
• Set the Name to ShowLegacyRoomFinder and press Enter.
• Right click the new key, select Modify and set the Value data to 1.
• Close Registry Editor and restart Outlook.

...and this worked for OWA pop-ups that appear when I create new calendar events/meetings.

Unfortunately, this did not resolve the relatively-new issue, in which an OWA browser tab pops up, in response to my simply starting the Outlook desktop application.

Uninstalling webview2 was a non-permanent solution. Worse: I've read that webview2 is necessary to use MS PowerBI -- software I now need to use, so I see that as a non-starter, for me.

Suggestions, appreciated!