Ok, so I don’t condone this behavior by Microsoft or Google, but I do use edge at work since we are a Microsoft heavy company with Sharepoint, teams, outlook, and all that. If we were using Google I’d surely use Chrome, but edge bakes in your Microsoft work profile to the browser and when searching on Bing you can find documents on your internal network easily. I also like the fact that edge supports vertical tabs out of the box.

So here’s my defense of Microsoft taking these steps:

* Google promotes Chrome on YouTube, search, and gmail. Strategically Microsoft needs a message to counter the pop ups on Google sites that are leading to the Chrome download page. It would be much more annoying if you saw this message every time you visited YouTube or Google. The author presents it as the case of someone actively seeking to download Chrome but they could have been lead to the download page from another Google property.

* Many people don’t know that both edge and Chrome use the same engine. When my company mandated edge, people reflexively complained even though they don’t lose anything in terms of speed, extensions or compatibility. For many people knowing that edge has the same browser engine is informative - most non geeks won’t keep up with that.

* if you are working at a Microsoft company, your data is already in the hands of Microsoft and your employer so there’s little privacy to be lost by continuing with edge, but by switching to chrome you bring a 3rd party into the mix.

  * you could argue a lesser version of this for all windows users with the integrations that Microsoft has been pushing.