
Microsoft to force Chrome default search to Bing via Office365 ProPlus installer - Flenser
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/22/21077280/microsoft-chrome-bing-extension-office-365-proplus-installer-default-search-engine
======
styx31
No particular advice here, I just want to point to the fact that bing allows
users to search their organization documents (office 365 files) when using
bing [1] when connected with their org account. This feature is named
"Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365". It's not mentionned in the article. See
original ms doc article for details [2].

So it's not just a way to force users to use bing, it's also a way to push
this feature in front of them.

> By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with
> Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search, including
> being able to access relevant workplace information directly from the
> browser address bar. Microsoft Search is part of Microsoft 365 and is turned
> on by default for all Microsoft apps that support it.

[1] [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/find-what-you-
need-...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/find-what-you-need-with-
microsoft-search-in-bing-0b64be13-f20f-4e17-82b6-4deaea4940fb)

[2] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/microsoft-
sear...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/microsoft-search-bing)

~~~
jhoechtl
We had that back like 10 years ago when google provided a tool (I forgot it's
name, Google desktop search?) which scanned and indexed files locally. It was
accessible through a shortcut, I laid mine to double-Ctrl and upon invocation
it prompted a search bar

It was so great in search quality, number of formats it could index and
performance that at one day I index the whole company file share. People
showed up next to me and I rediscovered files which would have been lost
otherwise.

This tool also integrated after configuration with the browser which issued an
invocation to localhost to integrate local search results. As this was widely
regarded as a terrible security feature to potentially tell google all about
local files, reception of that feature was poor. This feature was the only
incentive for google to provide the tool and therefore the tool got quickly
axed.

~~~
jcheng
I assumed the reason the tool got axed was because in short order, Microsoft
released its own desktop search, and then integrated it into Windows (Vista?);
and Apple added Spotlight to OS X. In retrospect it’s a little surprising to
me that in just a couple of years, the notion of indexing your entire hard
drive went from novel to taken for granted.

~~~
davidy123
I think desktop search existed before Google's. But not a lot of people used
it in my experience. I found Google's to be fantastic,a and it was nice it
showed results in line with the mostly used search engine. I was surprised
when they discontinued it too, and suspect it was some "gentlemen's (anti-
consumer) agreement" between companies around turf.

~~~
conductr
My theory was that google saw it as a way to seed their drive service or the
strategy changed and the future was not desktop

------
tracker1
Dear Microsoft,

Shit like this literally undoes every bit of goodwill you earn. Much like
replacing user's wallpaper for Win7 EOL (why you didn't just put notification
text like "Windows $VERSION - End Of Life - Unsupported" in the bottom corner
instead is beyond me).

I mean, I _WANT_ to see the new MS, which is really present on the developer
tools and azure side of the business. Windows and Office teams seem to be bent
on destroying that at every chance... it's time to fire some upper and mid-
level managers that have these attitudes and make these decisions.

~~~
donmcronald
I'm getting skeptical about the developer tools. The cynic in me says it's
just a ploy to gain market share before forcing everything to an online
subscription like they're doing with Office.

Things like Visual Studio Online, GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, etc. worry
me. Once everything's a subscription and you're paying to spin your mouse
wheel, you lose the ability to spend time in lieu of spending money.

I think it'll happen slowly, but it'll happen. Eventually they'll have a
complete, online only development solution that's charged based on usage.
Development on local tools will get de-emphasized so they lag behind and suck
by comparison and there will be "donations" of subscriptions to educational
institutions to ensure no one ever learns to deal with, or even think of, a
local development environment.

I think it's ok to have ongoing costs like IntelliJ's products. I don't like
the way they screw you with an outdated perpetual license if you drop your
subscription, but it's a hell of a lot better than something like Visual
Studio Online which is literally pay per hour.

Based on the willingness to pay astronomical markup on CI minutes, I wouldn't
be shocked to see people paying $1000 / year (no joke) to use VSO.

~~~
elorant
It will happen only if they develop a bulletproof self-hosted environment for
corporate clients. Otherwise the enterprise clientele will never trust writing
code at an online environment that they don't own.

------
bla3
The Edge team is trying really hard to create a "we do things right" story
around their project. They must be annoyed that a different department
squanders the goodwill they're working so hard to create with stuff like this.

If you're a team in a big company and you're trying to optimize for long-term
success, you better have the power to stop other teams that try to drive
short-term success with campaigns that hurt you.

~~~
uncle_j
Very large companies like Microsoft usually have a problem of the left hand
doesn't know what the right hand is doing.

~~~
CamperBob2
They should go next door and ask how that's working out for Boeing.

~~~
uncle_j
Well there is a bit of a difference it is unlikely a web browser is going to
directly cause of a person's death.

------
kalleboo
Google doesn't really have any right to complain as they've had Google Chrome
and the Google search bar as drive by installs in third party software
installers

[https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-
reader/201...](https://www.labnol.org/software/chrome-with-adobe-
reader/20123/)

~~~
danShumway
Yeah, but _I_ have a right to complain.

Microsoft pulls a consumer-hostile move, and the first thought of a lot of
commenters on here (not just you) is, "what is the impact on Google?"

Who cares about the company? Stop messing with my computer behind my back.

200 years from now, someone on Mars will be reading the headline "Google
Drones Lethally Injecting iPhone Owners On Sight", and there'll still be
people on HN who's first reaction is to wonder whether or not that counts as
anti-competitive towards Apple.

~~~
wizzwizz4
This is an enterprise system, though; it won't be running on _your_ computer,
but business computers. Still bad, but _less_ bad – arguably on the level of
Google pushing its search engine in Chrome and Firefox to begin with.

------
rkagerer
People are going to get fed up with all these stupid, user-hostile tricks
coming from the major tech companies. I'm not just talking about this one
incident. There's a bar that's not only lowering, but crashing fast.

Ploys like these tend to be a symptom from companies about to become obsoleted
by innovators who actually understand and give a shit about their target
audience.

~~~
thrwaway69
I have been hearing that for a decade. I remember the time when installing
anything would change your browser's search engine. Those companies are still
alive and going.

What eventually hurt their market space wasn't some trendy hippie customer
oriented startup but other "lesser evil" big companies with bigger pockets.

~~~
rkagerer
There's nothing hippie about capitalizing on the opportunity created when a
market leader alienates its customers by letting its products rot with pain
points.

In some ways Google is just as sinister as Microsoft ever was. It's not any
sort of intentional master plan, it's simply what happens when you lose sight
of the user. Some of the crap being pulled by today's incumbents... They might
as well put a little imp in the box that beats you with a whip to drive the
behavior they want from you.

All of them began as tiny startups with a couple of smart people and
disruptive tech... take a long enough view and I'm still optimistic the cycle
will continue.

~~~
lioeters
Yes! I believe "the people", in this case the users who are getting
abused/exploited/disrespected, need to be more attentive and vocal about
borderline illegal behavior of corporations, tech companies included.

It's shame how Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al have behaved in
recent years, patronizing and manipulating users on a mass scale with a
brazenness and near impunity. (OK, Microsoft deserves some love with VS Code,
TypeScript, and other open source goodness, but..)

I'm with your optimistic comment that the pendulum is swinging back. These
companies have lost sight of users, what "customer care" means, and they're
leaving an increasing gap in the market for more humane service and
technology.

------
downvoteme1
I think people are missing a key point here . This is included with the pro
plus installer which is exclusively a business product. My company installs a
bunch of tracking and other crap software on my windows machine in the name of
data privacy, security and other bullshit. All it does is makes my i7 laptop
with 16 gigs of ram behave like a slow crappy laptop. So if you have an issue
with this complain to your work organization because somebody higher up made a
decision to go with Pro plus .

~~~
cosmiccatnap
Have you ever tried to 'bing' a python error you've ran into? This is
specifically bad because it's a business product meaning that trying to get
work done will only get harder.

~~~
rosybox
I use Bing regularly, I made it my default search engine just for kicks about
2 months ago just to see how terrible it was and for the most part I can't
even tell the difference. Sometimes I can't find what I want and then I search
Google and it can't find it either. I can think of exactly two times in the
last two months when Google found something Bing couldn't. One was when I
searched for Hearthstone cardback browser and Bing couldn't find the link to
it, but Google did, but it was like halfway down the page. I actually prefer
not giving Google any more info about me and still getting decent search
results.

Honestly the worst part about Bing is coworkers seeing I use it. It's kind of
embarrasing, but it's stupid that it is because it's actually a good search
engine.

~~~
lucb1e
> the worst part about Bing is coworkers seeing I use it.

I use Bing Images (because I don't like DuckDuckGo's image search) and link
people there sometimes, and I used to have a Bing-branded wallpaper just to
call attention to that there is a choice. Didn't even work, nobody around me
finds that weird, many already use DDG or chose to remain with Google.

Bing seems to have switched away from branding a Bing logo onto their
wallpapers, though, so that's no longer a thing.

------
blobs
I moved back to linux (fedora) a while ago, what a relief and what a joy it is
compared to Windows.

I use Firefox with duckduckgo search engine, no pages full of ad results like
with google nowadays. I cannot think of 1 single reason to install Windows 10
and use Chrome browser, you just bite yourself with that choice.

~~~
zeta0134
The primary reason I boot into Windows is to play videogames, especially VR,
which just isn't stable on Linux yet. But that's not a bad compromise either;
my Windows boot is for companies that are _happy_ to sneak rootkits onto the
OS to detect cheaters, and honestly I'm totally okay declaring my Windows
partition unsafe, and booting back to a sane OS to do real work.

It's really a shame, because the core OS underneath Windows 10 is fairly
solid. It's specifically the user interface and Microsoft's behavior around
telemetry and advertising their own products at the expense of the end user
that turns me off Windows as a platform. Like, I feel like if they focused on
making Windows a solid and _boring_ OS that was so stable and reliable that no
other choice made sense, their overall brand image would improve so much.
Experiment elsewhere, the OS is not the place to tarnish your users' good
will.

------
est31
The title only mentions "Office 365 installer", but note that only Office 365
ProPlus is affected, which is a product targeted at businesses.

~~~
abrowne
And Education. IIRC that's the version the large university I work for
provides for students, faculty and staff

~~~
Cu3PO42
Student checking in. This is indeed the version that my University supplies at
a discounted rate.

------
Longhanks
This infuriates me insanely. By what right does Microsoft think it is ok to
manipulate a third party software by injecting their own code?! This is
outright malicious. Malware.

I hope the EU fines them and forces Microsoft to stop such actions (as they
forced them to stop bundling IE with Windows a couple of years ago).

It's time these big corporations get broken up. It really is. Stop f*cking
with my hardware and the web.

~~~
badrabbit
By what right does google set the search engine to begin with? They use their
browser's popularity for a competitive advantage and that's legal.

Now, your comment is popular because of the hype train but nobody complains
when a linux distro has a non-google default search for chrome or firefox.
Microsoft(or any OS maker) has a competitive advantage also by dominating the
desktop OS market like Chrome dominates the browser market,the installer gets
to configure the browser.

Anyone has the right to bundle 3rd party software and make n installer that
configures the software a certain way,even if the config gives them a
competitive advantage.

I don't disagree with your comment about corps getting broken up but I
disagree with this being your reason. Think of it the other way "It is now
illegal to make installers that change default settings of the publisher" that
would sound as more of a reason to get worked up over to me.

~~~
LeonM
> By what right does google set the search engine to begin with? They use
> their browser's popularity for a competitive advantage and that's legal.

I'd say it's customer expectation. The slogan in the Chrome website is: _Now
more simple, secure, and faster than ever - with help from Google built‑in_
[0]

So, if I install Chrome I expect Google search to be built-in, and I am okay
with that because it was clearly stated on the product page.

Now, when I install Office, which is _not_ a browser to begin with, I don't
expect it to change my default search provider.

[0] [https://www.google.com/chrome/](https://www.google.com/chrome/)

~~~
wdobbels
Exactly. The browser provides a URL bar that is coupled to a search engine. It
makes sense for the browser to provide you with a default option for that
search engine. A web browser is something that needs to be on every computer;
so it makes sense that the OS installs a default web browser.

What doesn't make sense is that some software (office) tampers with your
preferences for a (mostly) unrelated piece of software (chrome). That is not
office's responsibility.

~~~
lonelappde
Do you know how many years and millions of dollars the US government spent
prosecuting Microsoft for their belief that " web browser is something that
needs to be on every computer"?

~~~
jchw
That’s, to my knowledge, a pretty big misrepresentation of the case, that from
my understanding has quite a few facets.

> Microsoft would terminate Compaq's licence if it removed IE and substituted
> Netscape, or even if it put the Netscape icon alongside the Explorer one.

~~~
wizzwizz4
That sounds like the G-suite on Android.

------
proactivesvcs
Microsoft introduced a feature in Internet Explorer 11 to specifically combat
this type of abusive action, that is the interference of browser settings by
third parties, via extensions. It's a shame to see them on the other side of
their users' interests.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
I thought Chrome had similar protections (both in terms of policy and
technical enforcement) - while of course the browser can't protect itself
against software running with root privileges, it can ensure that any attempt
to pull this off requires tampering that would clearly be considered malicious
by most, and I thought that Chrome was doing just that.

------
acd10j
People here are justifying Microsoft stance of modifying default browser in
third party browser, What if they get away with this and what we could see is
that, after every windows update Microsoft would change default search engine
in Windows to bing.

------
mkup
I guess, Google can, in turn, extend Windows 7 support in Chrome until 2029.

------
rjmunro
If this is something that IT admins can opt in to, rather than compulsory, it
sounds like a good feature. The article hints that might be the case.

If this happens by default, in a user hostile way, Google could respond by
having their installers set the default search engine in Edge to Google.

~~~
blackearl
It's opt-out. Here's the email they sent out to admins recently:

You must exclude the extension before you install or update to a version of
Office 365 ProPlus that installs the extension for Microsoft Search in Bing.
Implementing the exclusion after the extension has been installed will not
remove the extension.

• For new installations of Office 365 ProPlus, the Office Deployment Tool may
be the best method, as outlined in this support document

• For existing installations of Office 365 ProPlus, modifying the Group Policy
may be best. Enable the policy setting Don't install extension for Microsoft
Search in Bing, which makes Bing the default the search engine.

• If you use Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (current branch), from
the Features section, set Microsoft Search as default to the Off position.

• If you use Microsoft Intune to deploy Office 365 ProPlus, clear the check
box Microsoft Search as default on the Configure App Suite pane.

~~~
jedieaston
My Intune instance does not have these checkboxes yet, I wish they'd make the
changes before they push the new Office, or there'll be heck to pay.

------
giovannibajo1
I haven’t followed closely, but Chrome took many steps over the years to make
sure software installers couldn’t sneakily install extensions. How is this
possible?

~~~
est31
Google does offer a method to install extensions in an automated way for
business use cases:
[https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6306504?hl=en](https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6306504?hl=en)

I guess that Microsoft uses that method in the Office 365 ProPlus installer
(also targeted at businesses).

~~~
giovannibajo1
This seems a method for enterprise administrators that centrally manage Chrome
installation. That page doesn't seem to show a way for third-party software
providers to bundle extensions into installers.

~~~
sempron64
Since Office is a first-class Microsoft component in Windows Update, I'd
assume they can use the Windows Updates mechanism to set any group policy or
registry settings they need to manage Chrome.

------
starfallg
Considering MS Office has overwhelming market share in the office suite space
for businesses, this will surely attract attention from the regulators, no?

~~~
Phylter
Only if it ruffles enough customers feathers.

------
GlitchMr
This is malware, as simple as that. Chances are Google will soon blocklist
this extension as side-loading extensions is NOT supported, see
[https://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/protecting-windows-
users-f...](https://blog.chromium.org/2013/11/protecting-windows-users-from-
malicious.html).

------
C1sc0cat
A counter to the incessant nagging google forces on people who use google
search with a browser other than chrome

~~~
muro
Nagging != Install

~~~
C1sc0cat
still F&%ING annoying though

------
aj7
And just try to save your Excel spreadsheet to Google Drive without having to
click all over the place. And autosave only works when your stuff is saved to
their infrastructure? Childish, destructive behavior.

~~~
mthoms
Autosave _only_ working when saving to your local OneDrive folder is
infuriating.

As every HN reader knowns, there is no good technical reason for this. It's
anti-competitive bullshit, pure and simple.

~~~
sdoering
thanks for pointing this out. I have to use MSO in the future because of
corporate s __t. would not have realized this until to late.

------
zadkey
The EU courts are going to have a field day with this one. I expect some fines
to come out of it.

They talked about this in the reddit article that was linked,but I feel it
warrants further discussion.

~~~
ec109685
Google is likely just going to block this behavior.

~~~
solarkraft
How, when installers get root privileges?

~~~
propogandist
Chrome browser is constantly updated, whereas installer just runs once. They
can change things in an update

------
floatingatoll
HN may not be the target audience for this feature, but I've absolutely
proposed writing a browser extension to synthesize confidential search results
with public search results before, because it's a need that remains unmet to
this day. If Bing is integrating their confidential cloud with logged-in
search, that is a game-changer. I hope everyone gets past the visceral
reaction against it and starts building browser extensions that compete. It is
possible to do this without depending on a single search engine to perform
synthesis for you. Metacrawler can live again.

------
jakear
Please do correct me if I’m missing something, but this seems like a lot of
uproar over not much... the article states that this only applies to
enterprise, who would most certainly have IT admins, and those IT admins are
able to block the extension through Group Policy. They’ve also been given one
month prior notice about the change. This also only applies accounts which are
owned and operated by IT, making it IT’s decision what happens on them, not
the actual users.

Disclaimer: I work at msft, nothing related and no knowledge of this besides
the article. Opinions are my own.

~~~
JC5413789642675
A bit underhanded, given the text from the bulletin.

"Once this feature has rolled out, your end users can change their search
engine preferences only via the toggle in the extension; they cannot modify
the default search engine in browser preferences."

------
merb
well the default office365 installer, is bad anway. without
[https://config.office.com/](https://config.office.com/) it already installs a
lot of unnecessary crap. sadly in config.office.com they made the choice to
opt-out the feature (it's a checkbox:
[https://imgur.com/a/O43EI2M](https://imgur.com/a/O43EI2M) sorry for german
language)

------
idclip
Oh they are burning down the house pretty badly. I think even good ol bill is
cringing at recent events. My god ..

But, it takes a fire to feed a forest sometimes. Let them

~~~
jannes
Cringing?? Are you familiar with the MS of the 90s? The stuff that happened on
his watch was not much better.

~~~
idclip
I am, but honestly, i actually feel this is worse.

~~~
solarkraft
Changing people's defaults search engine is worse than EEE?

~~~
idclip
Combined with ads in word? Sorta.

I still remember the toolbar days. They were indeed dark.

------
Edward9
I really like these corporative battles. Seems it's the only thing that keeps
the market being for consumers and not for profit.

~~~
tr4cker
I don't like malware tho'

------
Mindwipe
This feels very stupid from MS, the bad publicity must surely outweigh the
tiny increase to a product that's not substantive and underperforms anyway.

Presumably a product decision by the same people who though inserting 200%
additional whitespace into Outlook would go down well.

------
sequoia
Google is doing everything it can to tighten its stranglehold on the entire
WWW, if another behemoth like Microsoft wants to put up a fight, I say have at
it!

I certainly am not shedding any tears for Google, who relentlessly funnels
people into their tools, automatically logs them in in chrome, pushes their
products into schools to get young people into their data-vacuum as soon as
possible. Not to mention shady practices like AMP trying to force developers
to use their own version of HTML & serve their content on google.com, "or else
say goodbye to your search ranking."

MSFT is definitely "picking on someone their own size" and certainly not doing
anything more underhanded than what google routinely engages in, so I don't
see the issue.

~~~
zamadatix
One doing it is bad so 2 doing it is great? Competition is usually good but I
don't think this kind of competition is actually helping get rid any of those
problems just changing who's name might be on the particular problem today. No
amount of giant tech companies shuffling is going to result in the return of
an even playground for all in those areas.

~~~
jlarocco
At this point it's hard for me to feel sorry for anybody still using either
Google or Microsoft.

They've both been bad actors for years now, and the excuses people come up
with to keep using them anyway have worn very thin.

------
OrgNet
While this is bad, Google got Chrome installed on many computers using equally
bad practices (Chrome defaults to Google search), which might be worst because
they got executable files installed.

------
zpallin
The article does not mention whether or not Firefox will also be affected.
Does anyone know if Office365 ProPlus already does this or are they just
ignoring Firefox?

------
misir
Why people are complaining about that? If you don't want it just change your
search engine to whatever you want. That just take a minute.

PS: Just for experimenting I switched to Edge (new) & Bing to see what's
different. And I really liked Edge, it's faster than chrome and has some
privacy controls like cross domain cookie handling. Tried firefox before edge.
But did not liked it, because It's ui is crap also some functionalities may
not work because devs are optimizing the websites mostly for chrome.

But Bing as a search engine is not powerful like google because of lack of
data.

------
kunglao
I think a large number of people can't tell a browser and the search engine
apart anymore. They are so entangled, internet to people means something that
when they click on it, it shows the iconic Google search page. Wonder how that
happened. I heard that Google is introducing Chromebooks to school kids. By
the time these kids graduate, they'll be confused by any computer that is not
a Chromebook.

I think if the OS, browser and the search engine belongs to the same company,
its perfectly fine to set it as the default. As long as on first launch they
give a clear option to choose something else.

------
tinus_hn
Previously discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22121150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22121150)

------
rvz
I don't know why people here are surprised about this. Companies like
Microsoft are not interested in acting in the interest of users and their
privacy, but they do whatever they please with their products; thus you don't
own them. If there are laws to prevent this, they'll find other ways in
bending them to continue to do nasty things.

With that, personally I don't trust any company with a closed source OS these
days and will treat all closed source programs as malware.

------
ourmandave
Seesh, even Adobe gives you a McAfee checkbox.

------
ragerino
It's old Microsoft all over again!

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Old Microsoft never went away, despite what the kids think. It just put on
some new clothes and pretends it has been reformed.

------
qwerty456127
That's stinky but doesn't really hurt. Once I was given a new Windows 10 PC at
the office, I've tried Edge (the classic, non-Blink version) and sicked to it
because it's A LOT faster than Firefox. I haven't bothered to change the
default search engine and the results Bing gives are Ok.

~~~
jupp0r
YMMV, bing search results do not work at all for me.

~~~
qwerty456127
I guess this may depend on the subjects you search information on and the
country/language. I used DuckDuckGo and StartPage before that and was
satisfied too. On a rare occasions when these wouldn't give me what I need I
just go to Google manually.

------
adriantam
IANL, anyone feels this is an invitation to another antitrust investigation?

------
tr4cker
Another reason to hate MS.

------
moron4hire
By what source is the claim that this is being forced verified?

~~~
JC5413789642675
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployOffice/microsoft-
sear...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployOffice/microsoft-search-bing)

~~~
albreth
This source confirms the exact opposite. The extension install can be
prevented by using the documented group policy.

~~~
moron4hire
Additionally, it looks like this is a product intended for enterprise
deployments, where the admins would probably already be comfortable with
managing group policies. This is basically how software ends up on your
computer in big companies.

Because otherwise you could be like Deloitte and have some jaggoff management
consultant leak all your clients' private email addresses because they didn't
follow internal technology policy and used Google Docs to stow it all.

------
jaimex2
Sounds like a Chrome issue if true. Bug report filed yet? :)

------
trimboffle
Why can’t users choose their default search on installation?

------
paultopia
it would be nice if some of the CFAA abuses that are a plague on the world
actually get directed at companies who do this kind of crap

------
Causality1
It's all the more infuriating when you consider how Windows 10 throws a hissy
fit if you should dare to change your default browser from Edge to something
else.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
Not just the constant notifications but it even shows messages on the lock
screen!

------
thrownaway954
i hate to say this, but at this point it really doesn't matter which search
engine i use as they all have ads as 90% of the results above the fold :( it
saddens me that this is what has become of the search market :(

and let me just get this out of the way now by saying, no, i will not use
duckduckgo as my search engine cause it has given me nothing but _the_ most
irrelevant search results i have ever seen.

------
kUdtiHaEX
That sounds like an excellent plan.

------
jaboutboul
I know this generally sucks, but given google's recent track record maybe this
isn't the worst thing.

------
executesorder66
Loving the new Microsoft.

------
_tkzm
since google does chrome os, microsoft should simply ban all google products
from their platform altogether as a direct cmopetitor :D :D :D

I'd love to see them fight it out.

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pojntfx
Use Linux.

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kome
Google did the same for years with any kind of installer, I remember
installing CCleaner and finding Chrome on my computer for no reason. They put
chrome everywhere using super shady techniques.

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chirau
A lot of a weird arguments here. You are OK with Google being the default and
not Bing? Sounds silly to me.

Have you heard of "other browsers" on iOS and how Apple forces them to use
Safari specs?

This is more of you folks having an issue with Microsoft itself, not what they
have done. Because your favorite company is doing it already and you just
choose to look away.

~~~
Kuraj
I'm not OK with software messing with my other software.

I install Office because I _need it_ , not because I think it and everything
else Microsoft has made is the best thing ever.

~~~
s_y_n_t_a_x
Lets not pretend browsers are like other software. They are essentially a VM
that can run remote untrusted code.

Software has changed the start page, search providers, and installed plugins
into browsers for a very long time, this is nothing new.

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dessant
This is good news, given the circumstances. Google doesn't show a welcome
screen in Chrome to select your default search engine, and this action
somewhat helps with mitigating that imbalance.

Considering Chrome's market share, it's only a matter of time until Google
will be required to show a search engine choice screen in the browser, they
were already ordered by the EU to do it for the default Android browser and
search engine.

~~~
boudin
I don't know how forcing people to use another search engine is better is good
news. It's not like Microsoft is giving a set of options here. The way
microsoft is trying to force its products through its other products (like
edge and bing in windows 10) is sad and really annoying.

~~~
dessant
Microsoft is doing the same as Google, they set a default search engine that
can be changed, instead of offering an active choice before setting a default.

Both companies behave inappropriately, but then again, actions like these are
needed to highlight how choices are made for us, and to shake us out of
complatence.

~~~
funnybeam
Actually Microsoft are installing a chrome plugin that forces the search
engine to Bing so users can’t change the default back until they remove the
plugin

