In case you run the Chrome browser in Home windows 10 or 11 and you have all of a sudden found that you just’re working Microsoft Edge as a substitute, you are not alone. The Verge’s Tom Warren stories that he and a number of different customers on social media and Microsoft’s assist boards have all of a sudden discovered their Chrome shopping classes mysteriously replicated in Edge.
With out an official remark from Microsoft, Warren posits that the tab-snatching occurred due to a bug or an inadvertently clicked-through dialog field that triggers a function in Edge that is meant to make it simpler to (deliberately) swap browsers. The setting, which might accessed by typing edge://settings/profiles/importBrowsingData into the browser’s tackle bar, affords to import latest shopping information from Chrome each time you launch Edge, versus the one-time information import it affords for Firefox.
Andrew Cunningham
Assuming it’s a bug, this data-importing challenge is tough to differentiate from a few of Microsoft’s precise, formally sanctioned, easy-to-reproduce ways for pushing Edge. I encountered two of those whereas putting in Chrome on a PC for this piece—one after I navigated to the Chrome obtain web page and one other throughout the highest of Edge’s Settings pages after I had set one other browser as my default.
Microsoft has additionally used system notifications, particular Edge-specific pop-up messages, and full-screen post-update messages about “really helpful browser settings” to push Home windows customers into working Edge and utilizing Bing. (I personally would adore it if PCs I have been utilizing for months or years would cease asking me to “end organising [my] machine.”)
Edge is predicated on the identical Chromium shopping engine as Chrome, and most customers in all probability would not discover a lot of a distinction in how most pages render in both browser. However Edge is centered on Microsoft’s services and products, beginning with a Microsoft account but additionally extending to coupon codes and different buying notifications, the Microsoft 365 app suite, and generative AI instruments like Picture Designer and the Copilot chatbot.
Microsoft has gotten extra aggressive about the way it pushes all the things from Microsoft account sign-in to Microsoft 365 and Recreation Move subscriptions in recent times, one thing that has made a “clear” Home windows set up really feel a lot much less clear than it used to. Whether or not this Edge data-import factor is a bug, it is telling that it isn’t instantly apparent whether or not it is a bug or one thing that Microsoft did deliberately.
