Microsoft appears to be up to old tricks again in terms of pushing its Edge browser, and in this case, apparently poaching data from Chrome – something which has happened in the past.
The duplicitous pop-up in all its glory, or lack of it (Image Credit: The Verge)
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The Verge’s Tom Warren reports that a colleague on the tech site, Richard Lawler, ran into an odd situation with Edge where the browser fired itself up on boot-up of their PC.
Specifically, this was a Microsoft pop-up promising Windows 11 users the opportunity to ‘enhance’ their browsing by setting up the Edge web browser (with Copilot).
One of the sly tricks here is that at first glance, it appears there’s only one available option, a highlighted button to ‘Confirm and continue’ with setting up Edge (presumably as your default browser).
Sneaky trick number two is that the way to get out of the dialog box is a small ‘X’ in the top-right of the pop-up, but as The Verge notes, this is sort of camouflaged in the background alongside sparkly stars that are there for decoration.
And for the third and final piece of sleight-of-interface here, there’s a greyed out looking checkbox some users may not even notice, which is ticked by default, and grants permission to Microsoft to port over your data from other browsers ‘regularly’ – meaning poaching your tabs (and other data) from Chrome (or another web browser for that matter).
Just let Edge stand on its own merits
Microsoft told The Verge:
“This is a notification giving people the choice to import data from other browsers. There is an option to turn it off.”
Well, there might be a choice to turn it off, but the whole way this is engineered is frankly underhand, and not for the first time from Microsoft.
The problem is that Edge is actually a pretty good browser when considered on its relative merits. But when pushed in front of you constantly with these kinds of tricksy pop-ups, this just annoys and frustrates Windows users, and turns them against using Edge purely on principle – even if it is an increasingly viable alternative to Chrome.
Microsoft hasn’t seemed to have learned this lesson, though, from which we can perhaps conclude that sadly, these nagging and duplicitous sort of tactics must see some success. It’s likely to be short-term gain for long-term pain, though, and overall Edge adoption is not looking all that robust going by data from analytics firms.
As per the latest report from Statcounter, Edge is on 13.5% for desktop browser share worldwide, admittedly now in a comfortable second place, but obviously still a long way behind top dog Chrome on 65.2%.
This isn’t just about Edge, either, but Microsoft trying to drum up users for OneDrive, its Microsoft Account, Copilot, and other services besides with nudges, recommendations, pop-up prompts and other such nags within Windows 11 (and 10).