from Hacker News

Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default search engine

by ecaron on 1/22/20, 7:35 PM with 27 comments

  • by Lammy on 1/22/20, 7:47 PM

    This seems like it will just start a cat-and-mouse game with Google releasing Chrome updates to break their extension, like Firefox's "extensions.installDistroAddons" toggle.

    Also I assume "Version 2002" means "2020, February", but that seems unnecessarily confusing in a way the Windows 10 "20H1"-style versioning isn't. Doubly so considering Office XP was co-branded "Version 2002" eighteen years ago! https://i.imgur.com/4814T6a.jpg

  • by mike_d on 1/22/20, 9:16 PM

    I remember the great lengths Microsoft went to cleaning up Browser Helper Objects, toolbars, and extentions that kept changing the IE default search engine and homepage.

    Chrome will need to add similar enforcement, and will likely end up removing the ability for addons to change these settings like Microsoft eventually did.

  • by greycol on 1/22/20, 8:23 PM

    It might be a bit of a stretch but I wonder what standing someone has to sue when search results are noticeably worse and changed in this way.

    e.g. I just searched "<my town name> emergency" in google and bing. Bing came up with a travel site and several news articles. Google came up with a map with the local emergency department as the highlighted pin and urgent care as subsequent pins.

    Google's little blurbs are also very handy in this case with instructions popping up as the first result when I search snake bite treatment and seizure care. (Actually I went through a few more emergencies after that and was pleasantly suprised how good google was at turning up instructions for emergency care)

    It wouldn't surprise me if the monetary pressure associated with medical care in the US and the deep pockets of microsoft made them a tempting target.

  • by Someone1234 on 1/22/20, 9:50 PM

    If you want to prevent this without installing the Office ADMX January update, you can set the following registry entry:

          [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate]
      "preventbinginstall"=dword:00000001
    Save the above in a .Reg file and execute.

  • by ecaron on 1/22/20, 7:43 PM

    The comments on the bottom, plus the UserVoice (https://odinsiders.uservoice.com/forums/920533-distribution-...) really emphasize how this change is impacting customers.

  • by lorenzfx on 1/22/20, 9:35 PM

    Isn't this behaviour making use of their market power and should be looked at by the antitrust authorities?

    Overriding user's preferences with a forced installation of an extension reminds me very much of the old Microsoft I had hoped was gone for good.

  • by mtarnovan on 1/22/20, 7:52 PM

    > Office 365 to begin setting Bing as Chrome's default browser

    shouldn't that read "...Chrome's default search engine"?

  • by 93po on 1/22/20, 10:19 PM

    Looking forward to the day that windows apps run in a container that prevents access to anything but itself and requested permissions

  • by JohnFen on 1/22/20, 9:30 PM

    At least they're warning us! Sadly, we're forced to use O365 where I work, so this makes me doubly glad that I don't use Chrome.

  • by jbob2000 on 1/22/20, 9:43 PM

    Read the post before you get your knickers in a twist. The purpose of this change is so a special type of business client can allow their employees to search not just the web, but also their company’s internal resources.

    Considering that most businesses provide their employees with company laptops, this isn’t something that is going to affect consumers.