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posted by martyb on Friday January 24 2020, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-mess-with-the-duck dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by toddestan on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:02AM (1 child)

    by toddestan (4982) on Saturday January 25 2020, @07:02AM (#948388)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:53AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 26 2020, @12:53AM (#948679)

    Which is why they should burn for it.