Great! I've always wanted to accidentally send my password to a search engine.

Bing is how Windows makes money now. Kinda like how Android makes money through Google search and ads.

So gotta put that bing touch points everywhere.

I dunno, that doesn't sound like a crazy feature. The purpose of Notepad is many times to look through gigantic log files. When you find the error, you can just select it and then Bing it.

Sure even if your chosen search engine is ddg or gg on firefox (i guess it opens edge maybe) . No politics here. The purpose of notepad is to edit text with no frills. I would have liked better something like unicode encoding selection, minimap or invisible character toggling. Or even better searches options for anyone (regex could be a bit too far..)

As a Mac user it seems crazy that it's an app feature. On the Mac, any app using the system text field automatically gets features like that (spellcheck, dictionary, google, text-to-speech, etc), and as I understand it, Notepad is just a basic wrapper around the Windows text control (hence the 32K limit etc)

That's the difference. Apple had an actual opportunity to restart from scratch and design it right but Microsoft never did

IIRC Notepad won't even open files that are larger than [some pretty low amount of kilobytes]. So it's definitely not being used to look through gigantic log files.

This hasn't been true for over a decade now.

I'm still using Windows 7, so maybe it was improved at some point? If so, why is "Microsoft is updating Notepad" news in the first place?