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

docs.microsoft.com

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

#11

Post by lorenzfx »

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.

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

#12

Post by jbob2000 »

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.

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

#13

Post by Someone1234 »

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.

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

#15

Post by basch »

lorenzfx wrote: post #11

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.

Im not going to pretend most people probably dont want chrome, but lets not ignore all the dark patterns and confusing language they used to get installed and take their market share in the first place.

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

#16

Post by jabberwik »

jbob2000 wrote: post #12

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.

If I'm that special type of business client that is actually using Microsoft Search, cool, maybe I want an easy option to change the default engine. But that should be opt-in. Because Microsoft Search is also opt-in. They are deploying this to all O365 customers, regardless.

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

#18

Post by JohnFen »

anotheryou wrote: post #14
JohnFen wrote: post #10

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.

> Support for the Firefox web browser is planned for a later date.

Yes, but that support will undoubtedly be for the new incarnation for Firefox, which I also don't use.

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

#19

Post by rchaud »

Lammy wrote: post #3

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.…

Your assumption is probably correct, but it also seems like an unusual coincidence, as 2002 was when Microsoft reached a final judgment on the case that DOJ brought against them in 1998 [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor...

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

#20

Post by mthoms »

jabberwik wrote: post #16
jbob2000 wrote: post #12

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.

If I'm that special type of business client that is actually using Microsoft Search, cool, maybe I want an easy option to change the default engine. But that should be opt-in. Because Microsoft Search is also opt-in. They are deploying this to all O365 customers, regardless.

> They are deploying this to all O365 customers, regardless.

According to the article, it's only the "ProPlus" version of Office 365.

For now ;-)

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