If you’re one of the billion-plus users of Google Chrome on Windows, then Microsoft has just confirmed an urgent fix that seriously impacts your privacy and security.
Chrome is the leading desktop web browser worldwide. Period. Google’s platform has approaching 65% of the market, with Microsoft Edge a distant second with less than 13%. And while Safari obviously dominates on Apple, overall it’s an also-ran.
And so it’s no real surprise, as I reported earlier this month, that Microsoft is hard at work to turn its dominant desktop position with Windows into a more commensurate share of the browser market. But its approach has come under attack.
Now, an update to the Edge installation on Windows has just been confirmed—this is critical, but it only addresses part of the problem still impacting millions of users.
A few weeks ago, independent research sponsored by Mozilla—the developer of Firefox, called out Microsoft’s market tactics: “We find Microsoft repeatedly using harmful design to influence users into using Edge,” they claimed, including “harmful preselection, visual interference, trick wording, and disguised ads patterns to skew user choice of which browser to install… [and] to push the user towards Edge.”
Despite it being sponsored by Mozilla, the report is really all about Chrome. because there’s little point in Microsoft targeting Firefox’s 8% of the desktop market, when Chrome’s 65% is sitting there as a big, juicy target.
“Users may be alarmed,” the report explained, “when they see Edge promotional messages appear within the Chrome download page, reasoning that since the banner is unusual it must be very important… Such interruptions occur whichever browser is being installed, but “if the user is looking to download Chrome… Microsoft takes an even more aggressive approach, intervening twice more in the user journey.”
At the same time and with the same implication, Chrome users on Windows started to spot a mysterious copying of their Chrome tabs and other settings to Edge.
As reported by Android Headlines, “users on various social media platforms have reported Edge ‘stealing’ their data from other browsers on their devices. It is true that Microsoft has been working on a feature to import your data from other browsers. However, according to these reports, not only is this feature on without consent, but users are having trouble getting it to stay off.”
The setting itself is intended to ease the transition from Chrome to Edge, for those users who buy into the aggressive marketing tactics—many of which imply security benefits from moving from Chrome. It’s a double-whammy. On a fresh Windows machine, the Chrome install is interrupted with Edge ads, and then users find they don’t need to do anything material to simply move across. It’s nicely automated.
Microsoft has never confirmed or commented, of course. But now the issue has suddenly been fixed. “Edge has a feature that provides an option to import browser data on each launch from other browsers with user consent,” Microsoft explains. “This feature’s state might not have been syncing and displaying correctly across multiple devices.” That’s one way of describing the issue. In any case. “This is fixed.”
Edge fix
While this applies to all browsers—theoretically, the issue and fix is really all about Chrome and the ongoing battle between Google and Microsoft for browser market share that’s now spilling into the brave new world of generative AI.
Put another way, the majority of Windows users with Chrome installed on their desktops no longer need to worry about the secretive, non-consensual transfer of personal info across to Microsoft Edge. That’s a very critical fix. Edge should update for you in the background, with no action required on your part.
Whatever you take from the reports and now this fix, set against Europe’s DMA, such “gatekeeper/gateway” tactics will come under ever more scrutiny. Microsoft has not yet commented on the inferences being made. Realistically (and unusually), in the case of Edge Vs Chrome, Microsoft is a relatively niche player and so wouldn’t ordinarily trigger concerns. It’s the alleged manipulation of Windows users that counts, given that the OS is even more dominant than Chrome.
As Mozilla said in a blogpost to accompany its research, “with the implementation of DMA in the EU marking the start of a wave of global competition regulation, we hoped that the barriers to browser competition would be dismantled. However, even where there is movement in the right direction, improvements have been incomplete and are grudgingly offered only in markets where regulators have forced platform owners to make changes to respect browser choice.”
I have approached Microsoft for any comment on the fix, given recent reports.
