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Microsoft's sneaky plan to switch Chrome searches from Google to Bing:
Microsoft announced today that, beginning in February 2020, Office365 Pro Plus installs and updates will include a Chrome extension that forcibly changes the default search engine to Microsoft's own search engine, Bing.
[...] This new policy only takes places in specific geographic areas, as determined by a user's IP address. If you aren't in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, the UK, or the United States, you should be safe—for now
[...] Predictably, the unruly denizens of Reddit's r/sysadmin—arguably, the closest thing the modern Internet has to the scary devil monastery—are unhappy.
[...] Microsoft's actual stated reasoning for the change is to automatically enable Microsoft Search within the user's browser.
[...] Aside from the potential to enrage sysadmins and users alike, we question the wisdom of conditioning users to search for internal, likely confidential data in their Web browser's general-purpose search bar.
LibreOffice + Firefox anyone?
Additional coverage at: searchengineland
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 24 2020, @11:01PM (5 children)
Can somebody give me a quick rundown of how this behavior works any differently from Chrome or Firefox? And anyway, if it's proprietary enough to warrant keeping a secret, than searching it in that manner isn't going to help much anyway. Everytime I see people needing help with proprietary shit and not having the internal help they need to solve the problems, they will go to the product forum of their choice (Stackexchange, LabVIEW Forums, etc.) and sanitize their example with generic variable names and other altered shit (LabVIEW is pretty cool for this because you can censor bits of a complicated algorithm quickly with MS Paint rather than have to search and replace text or rewrite a whole algo).
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 24 2020, @11:26PM (4 children)
I don't know about Chrome, but in FireFox you can choose which search engine you want as your default. Sometimes I choose Google, and sometimes I choose Duck-duck-go. Somehow I never choose Bing...but I could.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday January 24 2020, @11:41PM
The point I was trying to make was that searching externally to corporate doesn't make a difference whether or not it was Bing, Google, Yahoo, or even DuckDuckGo.
Those are all essentially the same searches, just with different skins, anyway. DuckDuckGo just pretends to suck more than the others so it can fool you into believing that it's less deep-state.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @12:46AM (2 children)
Chrome->Settings->Search Engine->Search engine used in the address bar
You can also add custom search engines under Manage search engines
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:02AM (1 child)
From my understanding, if you do this the extension will just change it back to Bing (hence the reason they install an extension rather than just changing your default). You need to remove the extension first before you change reset your default.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:53AM
Which is why they should burn for it.