Edge Is Pretending to Be Chrome

I don't think there was any official announcement, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft is secretly trying to trick you into using Edge. Well, it has always been trying to trick us, but this time it's even more aggressive. You can no longer tell Edge from Chrome. Just go ahead and try.

Just last week, I wrote about Edge trying to get users to launch it automatically at boot time. Shortly after, I noticed that Chrome was asking for the exact same thing. Today, I clicked on the weather app on my Windows machine, and of course it opened Edge and asked me to set it as the default. I dismissed the popup and noticed that the website was pushed down from the top by another browser message, this one asking to transfer my data from my other browser to Edge.

Bring your favorites, passwords, history, cookies and more from other browsers each time you browser in Microsoft Edge.

I visited a few other pages and saw a bunch of ads, which reminded me to switch back to Chrome. I did, but I noticed something odd: when I tabbed between the two browsers, I couldn't tell which was which.

Can you tell the difference

I know they are both built on Chromium, but until fairly recently Edge had a distinct Microsoft look. It seems Microsoft is aggressively pursuing the fight for the front page of the internet.

On my mobile device, I use the Outlook app for one of my email accounts. I noticed that when I click a link, instead of opening it directly in my browser, the app asks whether I want to open it with Microsoft Edge. Note that Edge isn't even installed on my device. Microsoft is trying every tactic in the book to get in front of the user.

The front page of the internet is still the only race that matters for large tech companies. It doesn't matter whether your product is good or bad; your success largely depends on how many eyes you can get on your app. Google owns prime real estate. It is the default search engine on most desktop browsers. It is the default on all Android devices, with a negligible margin of error. It is the default on all iOS devices, for a cool $20 billion a year. And of course, it owns the largest ad network in the world.

If Microsoft owned the front page today, it wouldn't be able to monetize it as well as Google does. It's one thing to own the front page; it's another to consolidate data from every branch of our web activity. For example, if I look up a product on YouTube on my TV, Google can later retarget me with an ad for that product while I'm reading an article on my iPhone. Microsoft has little to no presence on my iPhone.

This mesh of front pages is what makes it worthwhile for Google to be the front page on every device. Even OpenAI has started tracking user web activity outside its own website in an effort to better monetize its position.

Google continues to win even though its language models don't top the benchmarks and are often beaten by much smaller models. Meanwhile, Microsoft still doesn't have a model to its name, so it is trying to look enough like Google that people won't notice.

Google Search and Bing Search play with the same theme.

PS: It was a challenge to take screenshots for this post because half the time I didn't know which browser I was using.

PS2: Edge makes it so hard to navigate between browsers because it puts each browser tab you open in its own ALT+TAB menu.