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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 25 2020, @09:15AM
All fine and well as a suggestion (though I have little love for vanilla Firefox)
Unfortunately, for most of humanity, they'd still be running these fine products on a Microsoft platform, one where they control the horizontal, they control the vertical etc. etc....they, if the notion takes them, can still interfere in the operations of other code running on their platform in any way they like at an untouchable low level.
So, Libreoffice and Firefox, yes, but running on any other OS than a Microsoft one..