I just ran Edge – Microsoft’s new web browser – on my Windows 10 test computer, and the ‘Favorites’ bar went berserk for a few seconds. At first I thought there was some kind of display bug, but then I clicked the arrow at the far right end of the bar, and could see a lot of new Favorites, including many in folders. Some of those favorites were familiar, and some were not.

I eventually realized that Edge had automatically imported all the Chrome bookmarks from every Google account that had ever logged into Google, using Chrome, while logged into Windows with my Microsoft account. I leave the computer logged in, which is normally not recommended, but this is also my main media computer, and there’s nothing personal on any of its drives. Also I trust my roommate.

Chrome knows when you’re logged in to Google, and shows bookmarks and other settings specific to the current Google user. These settings are stored locally, keeping each Google user’s settings separate, but storing the data in the profile of whichever Windows user is currently logged in.

There are two problems with this. First, I don’t think this import process should be automatic. It’s the kind of thing that I want to do strictly on demand, and in fact you can do that: in Edge’s Settings dialog, click the ‘View favorites settings’ button to see the import feature. Second, Edge should not assume I want to import Chrome bookmarks for all Google profiles. Now I’ve got a mess to clean up, and I can’t be sure it won’t happen again. So I’ll stop using Edge.

I’m running Windows 10 Insider Preview build 10576, which just installed itself earlier this morning. I can’t be sure the Edge problem is related, but it seems likely.