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Comment by noahtallen | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s reasoning is that features like search is an end to end experience. That’s odd to me — it just opens a web page. Is there anything special about it being in Edge that we don’t notice?

I mean, obviously it’s BS, but are there PMs who actually think it’s better for the user to override the default browser for things like this? A side note: one frustrating aspect of this problem is that my browser extensions are never installed in Edge. So things like password autofill in a lot of the MS auth flows (which appear to be web-based, as far as I can tell) just don’t work

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Well obviously they lose telemetry when you leave the ms ecosystem, so the user journey has effectively ended at that point /s

> things like password autofill in a lot of the MS auth flows (which appear to be web-based, as far as I can tell) just don’t work

Cynically I could believe this is partly by design. If they manage to get you into edge often enough, sooner or later you'll set up your workflows in edge as well out of annoyance. Maintaining two separate browser environments is a burden, and sooner or later a lot of people will give up and stick to the browser you have to use in many cases.

Do they really need Edge to gather your data if they own the OS?

> Maintaining two separate browser environments is a burden

For my personal use I have 4 distinct browsers (FF, Brave, Ungoogled Chromium and Falkon) but I guess I'm probably an outlier ;)

> Do they really need Edge to gather your data if they own the OS?

"Need?" No. But that wasn't the question MS asked themselves. The question was probably "More data or less?" Framed like that, it's unfortunately obvious why they chose this route.

What's your reasoning behind using 4 separate browsers? I've tried Brave and Chromium but I don't see any reason to switch between my usual Firefox and another browser (unless a webpage doesn't work at all on FF)

Everyone in a technical role at my company uses one “normal user” browser and one “privileged account” browser.

This is to avoid confusion; no chance of doing some administrative action accidentally because I recognize the different UI elements of Firefox vs. Edge.

Browser containers/profiles/whatever don’t present visually different-enough UX to each distinct persona.

Well, no, it's not just opening a web page. It's opening a search engine, see, and that's completely different.

But I think that is in fact the difference. It's not that Microsoft wants you to use Edge for that so much, it's that they want you to use Bing for that. Edge is just so they can drive you to Bing.

I don't get it.

Bing has been around for so long now, and it's always been mediocre. Surely it's not a profit center. Anyone have insight about that?

If so, what are they trying to gain? Is it a rogue PM at Bing or Edge or Windows shitting it up for everyone else?

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