Stop Edge from automatically converting numbers to call links
Photo by Pedro Ramos on Unsplash
To phone or not to phone?
I'm a Windows user (at least, at the moment) but I have always felt a strong aversion to its "I know better what you want, I'm waaaaaay smarter than you"-way of handling things.
Also, it has been ages that I had last used MS's browsers like IE or Edge for actual browsing - indeed, I am only using them now to test if the pages I am building are displaying right.
Edge's solution of automatically converting numbers to phonable links was not the best innovation, I dare say. I understand the underlying usability concept, but such a solution most probably breaks the design, let alone the fact that not all numbers are intended to be phone numbers by content creators.
Long story short, luckily there's a short fix for this problem. To whichever tag you want to stop the behaviour for, you just add the following attribute:
x-ms-format-detection="none"I have applied it to the <body> tag to disable the feature globally.
Then, for the numbers that you still want to convert to actual phoneable links, just apply an <a> tag with the protocol "tel":
<a href="tel:+36.........">
CALL US [or your actual phone number]
</a>and then apply a simple CSS rule to override the default link styling, if necessary.