Not necessarily an answer, but an overview of the topics in the domain space of your question might include:

Revenue Generation: Advertisements and search engine partnerships generate revenue for Microsoft when users utilize their browser.

Ecosystem Integration: Encourages use of other Microsoft products, like Office 365, creating a more unified user experience.

Data Collection: Allows Microsoft to collect user data for analytics, targeted advertising, and product improvement.

Vendor Lock-in: User familiarity with one Microsoft product may discourage switching to competitors, ensuring long-term revenue.

Competitive Advantage: Maintaining a popular browser helps Microsoft negotiate better deals with third-party service providers.

Software Control: Allows Microsoft to guide software standards, impacting how web apps and sites are built.

User Experience: Direct control over the browser allows Microsoft to provide customer support and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.

Thanks, ChatGPT

Yeah, I've reorganized and edited a bit some ChatGPT answers—it's quick at sketching out the big picture, and it's easy to fact- or logic-check if needed. Also helps me catch stuff I might miss if I'm in a hurry.

A generous interpretation is that they don't want to worry about the resources used by internal OS components being compatible across infinite variety of browser vendors, versions, add-ons (and those versions), etc.

Have you used Microsoft Edge recently? It is a dumping ground for all things that Microsoft wants to try in a way that is easier to do than sending A/B testing out via Windows Update.

* Collections

* Shopping

* Browser Essentials

* Website scanning

* Outlook integration

* Games integration

* ...

They have a OneNote feed sidebar now, too. Actually great for quick notes during browsing. Except that it's part of Edge, which is a privacy disaster full of dark patterns.

Your web browsing habits reveal a lot more about you than your desktop habits.

Really hard to hide your web browsing habits from the OS itself. They could trivially grab most of the data, if they wanted.

And lose either 4% of their global revenue or the european market

Default Bing and Microsoft integration. So ad revenue.

> I have to ask a really basic question: Why does Microsoft have such a vested interest in users using Edge over competitors?

FOMO and Paranoia. Anything that looks like a market they might miss out on they get scared, freak out, create a shit product and jump in the market with HUGE marketing/info campaigns to convince everyone theirs is the best product, and then it turns out it's not really a profitable market at all. But at least they weren't usurped.

Advertising is really lucrative. MS wants to get a bigger share of the pie, and that's done by driving people to use Bing. Also, if Bing Chat gets people used to using AI chatbots for search, that dramatically increases the cost of delivering search. Search results are not a huge chunk of Microsoft's revenue, but they are Google's main source of income. Search standardizing on LLM chatbots would take a huge chunk out of Google's margins.

Just see chrome current intention now? What purpose they promote chrome crazily in the early days. It's to monopolize and becoming the dominant player which control how the policy of interneting favor to their ads activity