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From the «all's fair in love and browsers» department:
Title: Microsoft’s Recent History of Dirty Tricks With Edge
Author: John Gruber
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 2025 16:34:27 +0000
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/28/23702274/microsoft-edge-developer-bing-ai-chatbot-advertisement-google-bard

Following up on yesterday’s item regarding Bing masquerading as Google[1] to
trick Edge users into searching with it, this Mastodon post from Timo Tijhof[2]
lists a few other such subterfuge tactics they’ve pulled recently. My favorite
was this one[3] from last year: when users opened a tab for “bard.google.com”,
Edge inserted an ad in the tab barencouraging the user to “Compare answers with
the AI-powered new Bing”[3]. Ads in the tab bar, jeebus.

There’s also a longstanding practice where if you search for “Chrome” or
“Chrome download”, Edge shows a special pop-up[4] encouraging you to stick with
it rather than switch. Google pulls a similar thing, using popups across its
web properties to encourage users of other browsers — perhaps especially Safari[5]
, unsurprisingly, considering how much money they pay Apple each year[6] — to
switch to Chrome, often with the implication that Google recommends switching
for security reasons, not financial ones.

As a comparison, the best search engine in the world, Kagi[7], is so scrupulous
that they don’t screw with the order of the results for the search term “Orion”[8]
, even though that’s the name of their own web browser[9]. (If you missed it
over the holidays, I had a great interview with Kagi founder Vlad Prelovac on
The Talk Show[10] last month.)
★ [11]

Links:
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/08/bing-google-masquerade (link)
[2]: https://fosstodon.org/@krinkle/113795844747185778 (link)
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/28/23702274/microsoft-edge-developer-bing-ai-chatbot-advertisement-google-bard (link)
[4]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/2/22813733/microsoft-windows-edge-download-chrome-prompts (link)
[5]: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7746732?sortBy=rank (link)
[6]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-seeks-defend-googles-billion-dollar-payments-search-case-2024-12-24/ (link)
[7]: https://kagi.com/ (link)
[8]: https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/01/orion-kagi-search-results-2025-01-09.pdf (link)
[9]: https://kagi.com/orion/ (link)
[10]: https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2024/12/24/ep-416 (link)
[11]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/01/09/microsofts-recent-history-of-dirty-tricks-with-edge (link)