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Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

Edge has a feature where it will periodically pull the bookmarks and browsing history from any other browsers you have installed, so they'll then get sent to Microsoft and associated with your Microsoft account. This was initially enabled by default without the user's consent, although I believe now you may have to opt into it if you do a fresh Windows install. I only realized this was a thing because one time my work PC rebooted to install an update, then Edge came up instead of Firefox, but with all my Firefox tabs. I guess this was part of some effort to try to trick old people who wouldn't notice the difference into switching to Edge. Here's a news article about someone else running into this when it started happening: https://www.theverge.com/24054329/microsoft-edge-automatic-c...

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"Old" people? How about the vast majority of the public, which is not represented on HN?

Not to mention that one of the many major UI regressions in Windows is the removal of title bars from application windows, which is fundamental to this "trick." Try opening a PDF in Edge and also in Acrobat. Neither window has a title bar, and they are otherwise almost identical. You have to scrutinize the very few controls around the window to determine which app you're looking at.

Microsoft and its software are trash now.

Adobe provides PDF viewer that is embedded in Edge...

So?

Edge has less browser market share than Firefox right now, it's not the "vast majority."

Vast majority of what?

I don’t believe that, there’s probably some missing data. Outside the techno echo chamber that HNers live in, most people use the defaults. I see people using adware browsers that were installed without their knowledge. Computers are just too complex for most people to notice details like what web browser they use.

Until they inevitable use Google, and it shows a big popup saying something like "Hey there you should use Chrome its way better and faster, click this button to get it" and then they end up with Chrome. Its basically how Chrome got such a large share of the market despite default browsers like Safari and IE/Edge.

Didn't Chrome also come bundled with other software like torrent clients? That is, unless you unchecked a checkbox in the installer for these software, you ended up with Chrome installed? Unless people were careful to pay attention to every checkbox on every installer, Chrome could end up installed without their knowledge.

> so they'll then get sent to Microsoft and associated with your Microsoft account.

The import is entirely local, the "sent to Microsoft" bit is if you have Edge sync enabled. This is identical to Chrome importing your Firefox data and then syncing it back to Google. Except the Edge import was, by reports at the time, accidentally auto-enabled. But you'd still have to sign into Edge and enable sync.

It's been a while since I last used Windows 11, but as far as I'm aware using a Microsoft account will automatically sign you into Edge and Edge sync is enabled by default unless you go into the settings and disable it.

I think it defaults to showing the account in Edge but enabling sync still requires a button click. I'll see if I can verify this with a spare PC somewhere.

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