Microsoft to force Chrome default search to Bing via Office365 ProPlus installer

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 &quot;Microsoft Search in Microsoft 365&quot;. It&#x27;s not mentionned in the article. See original ms doc article for details [2].<p>So it&#x27;s not just a way to force users to use bing, it&#x27;s also a way to push this feature in front of them.<p>&gt; 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.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.office.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;article&#x2F;find-what-you-need-with-microsoft-search-in-bing-0b64be13-f20f-4e17-82b6-4deaea4940fb" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.office.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;article&#x2F;find-what-you-need-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;deployoffice&#x2F;microsoft-search-bing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;deployoffice&#x2F;microsoft-sear...</a>

Dear Microsoft,<p>Shit like this literally undoes every bit of goodwill you earn. Much like replacing user&#x27;s wallpaper for Win7 EOL (why you didn&#x27;t just put notification text like &quot;Windows $VERSION - End Of Life - Unsupported&quot; in the bottom corner instead is beyond me).<p>I mean, I <i>WANT</i> 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&#x27;s time to fire some upper and mid-level managers that have these attitudes and make these decisions.

The Edge team is trying really hard to create a &quot;we do things right&quot; story around their project. They must be annoyed that a different department squanders the goodwill they&#x27;re working so hard to create with stuff like this.<p>If you&#x27;re a team in a big company and you&#x27;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.

Google doesn&#x27;t really have any right to complain as they&#x27;ve had Google Chrome and the Google search bar as drive by installs in third party software installers<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.labnol.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;chrome-with-adobe-reader&#x2F;20123&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.labnol.org&#x2F;software&#x2F;chrome-with-adobe-reader&#x2F;201...</a>

People are going to get fed up with all these stupid, user-hostile tricks coming from the major tech companies. I&#x27;m not just talking about this one incident. There&#x27;s a bar that&#x27;s not only lowering, but crashing fast.<p>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.

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 .

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

The title only mentions &quot;Office 365 installer&quot;, but note that only Office 365 ProPlus is affected, which is a product targeted at businesses.

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.<p>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).<p>It&#x27;s time these big corporations get broken up. It really is. Stop f*cking with my hardware and the web.

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&#x27;s a shame to see them on the other side of their users&#x27; interests.

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.

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

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.<p>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.

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?

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

This is malware, as simple as that. Chances are Google will soon blocklist this extension as side-loading extensions is NOT supported, see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.chromium.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;protecting-windows-users-from-malicious.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.chromium.org&#x2F;2013&#x2F;11&#x2F;protecting-windows-users-f...</a>.

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

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.

The EU courts are going to have a field day with this one. I expect some fines to come out of it.<p>They talked about this in the reddit article that was linked,but I feel it warrants further discussion.

HN may not be the target audience for this feature, but I&#x27;ve absolutely proposed writing a browser extension to synthesize confidential search results with public search results before, because it&#x27;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.

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

well the default office365 installer, is bad anway. without <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;config.office.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;config.office.com&#x2F;</a> it already installs a lot of unnecessary crap. sadly in config.office.com they made the choice to opt-out the feature (it&#x27;s a checkbox: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;O43EI2M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;O43EI2M</a> sorry for german language)

Oh they are burning down the house pretty badly. I think even good ol bill is cringing at recent events. My god ..<p>But, it takes a fire to feed a forest sometimes. Let them

I really like these corporative battles. Seems it&#x27;s the only thing that keeps the market being for consumers and not for profit.

This feels very stupid from MS, the bad publicity must surely outweigh the tiny increase to a product that&#x27;s not substantive and underperforms anyway.<p>Presumably a product decision by the same people who though inserting 200% additional whitespace into Outlook would go down well.

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!<p>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 &amp; serve their content on google.com, &quot;or else say goodbye to your search ranking.&quot;<p>MSFT is definitely &quot;picking on someone their own size&quot; and certainly not doing anything more underhanded than what google routinely engages in, so I don&#x27;t see the issue.

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.

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?

Why people are complaining about that? If you don&#x27;t want it just change your search engine to whatever you want. That just take a minute.<p>PS: Just for experimenting I switched to Edge (new) &amp; Bing to see what&#x27;s different. And I really liked Edge, it&#x27;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&#x27;s ui is crap also some functionalities may not work because devs are optimizing the websites mostly for chrome.<p>But Bing as a search engine is not powerful like google because of lack of data.

I think a large number of people can&#x27;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&#x27;ll be confused by any computer that is not a Chromebook.<p>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.

Previously discussed here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22121150" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22121150</a>

I don&#x27;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&#x27;t own them. If there are laws to prevent this, they&#x27;ll find other ways in bending them to continue to do nasty things.<p>With that, personally I don&#x27;t trust any company with a closed source OS these days and will treat all closed source programs as malware.

Seesh, even Adobe gives you a McAfee checkbox.

It&#x27;s old Microsoft all over again!

That&#x27;s stinky but doesn&#x27;t really hurt. Once I was given a new Windows 10 PC at the office, I&#x27;ve tried Edge (the classic, non-Blink version) and sicked to it because it&#x27;s A LOT faster than Firefox. I haven&#x27;t bothered to change the default search engine and the results Bing gives are Ok.

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

Another reason to hate MS.

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

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

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

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

It&#x27;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.

i hate to say this, but at this point it really doesn&#x27;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 :(<p>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.

That sounds like an excellent plan.

I know this generally sucks, but given google&#x27;s recent track record maybe this isn&#x27;t the worst thing.

Loving the new Microsoft.

since google does chrome os, microsoft should simply ban all google products from their platform altogether as a direct cmopetitor :D :D :D<p>I&#x27;d love to see them fight it out.

Use Linux.

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.

A lot of a weird arguments here. You are OK with Google being the default and not Bing? Sounds silly to me.<p>Have you heard of &quot;other browsers&quot; on iOS and how Apple forces them to use Safari specs?<p>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.

This is good news, given the circumstances. Google doesn&#x27;t show a welcome screen in Chrome to select your default search engine, and this action somewhat helps with mitigating that imbalance.<p>Considering Chrome&#x27;s market share, it&#x27;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.