Microsoft’s Recent History of Dirty Tricks With Edge

Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google to trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite was this one from last year: when users opened a tab for “bard.google.com”, Edge inserted an ad in the tab bar encouraging the user to “Compare answers with the AI-powered new Bing”. Ads in the tab bar, jeebus.

There’s also a longstanding practice where if you search for “Chrome” or “Chrome download”, Edge shows a special pop-up encouraging you to stick with it rather than switch. Google pulls a similar thing, using popups across its web properties to encourage users of other browsers — perhaps especially Safari, unsurprisingly, considering how much money they pay Apple each year — to switch to Chrome, often with the implication that Google recommends switching for security reasons, not financial ones.

As a comparison, the best search engine in the world, Kagi, is so scrupulous that they don’t screw with the order of the results for the search term “Orion”, even though that’s the name of their own web browser. (If you missed it over the holidays, I had a great interview with Kagi founder Vlad Prelovac on The Talk Show last month.)

★ Thursday, 9 January 2025