Not trying to change the conversation, but also Chrome has malicious behavior without consent.

IMHO, browsers from Big Corps shouldn't be trusted at all. If someone likes to use Chrome, should try to go for Chromium or a de-Googled version of it.

About Microsoft, don't use Office then, move to something else, the world has plenty of alternatives (LibreOffice or SoftOffice are really good ones)

For what it is worth, it seems like even Microsoft can’t make Chromium work without phoning “home” to Google. The new edge preview (at least for me, not sure if A/B testing) still talks back to the mothership at 1e100...

How hard can it possibly be? ungoogled-chromium is a thing and they seem to have gotten it right.

The market leader sets the terms. Behaving maliciously didn't hurt Chrome - consumers obviously don't care. So you fight fire with fire. Otherwise you're at a disadvantage.

Why does anyone on this site ever talk about anything but Firefox. We should all know better, and put our full collective force behind Firefox.

Can't speak for OP, but tu quoque arguements are common!

And unproductive. We should judge each company by each own demerits, not excuse Microsoft's behaviour with Google's and vice versa!

It doesn't sound like mister_hn is excusing Microsoft's behaviour. It's just that, if people think Google is the "victim" here, they are completely wrong. They both have little regard for a user's preference.

People think the end users are the victim here. This equally applies if my default search engine is something else. Bing is still going to override it.

Hear here!

Because the "don't be evil" in this case doesn't apply, speaking of browsers