There’s apparently a team of people at Microsoft who spend all their time trying to come up with sneaky ways to get Windows users to switch to Edge as their default web browser. To be clear, I have no direct evidence that such a team exists, but it seems likely.

The latest trick? Automatically importing Chrome bookmarks into Edge, then sneakily running Edge instead of Chrome, presumably in the hope that some users will fail to notice the difference.

In practise, though, I doubt many people will be fooled, because site passwords are not imported along with the bookmarks. They will, I think, realize that something funny is going on when their site passwords are missing.

I wonder how far Microsoft is willing to go with these tricks. They’ve been doing this kind of thing since the early Internet Explorer days, so it’s nothing new. The company has been spanked from time to time for these shenanigans, but those spankings don’t seem to have been much of a deterrent.

Tom Warren over at The Verge has the details of his own encounter with this latest trick.

UPDATE 2024Feb16: The Verge reports that Microsoft has quietly changed this behaviour in Edge, calling it a ‘bug’. Riiiiiiiight.