Remember when Microsoft Edge used to promote itself when you searched for other browsers? Well, it's doing something similar, this time to push Copilot.
When you search for Gemini, or ChatGPT on Bing, Microsoft displays a promotional ad that recommends Copilot. This has been happening for a while now, despite complaints from users, criticism from browser makers, and more. It never misses an opportunity to highlight Copilot in Edge. There's of course, Copilot Vision and Copilot Voice, which is now available for all Windows 11 users.
Microsoft's marketing strategy appears to be evolving. It's no longer confining itself to Bing to promote its own AI service on Edge. According to a report by Windows Latest's Mayank Parmar, Edge on Windows 11 is nudging users who visit ChatGPT.com or Perplexity.AI or DeepSeek towards Copilot. How? When you visit Microsoft's AI rivals, a small alert appears in Edge's address bar that says "Try Copilot". That's interesting. Deciding to try it, I booted up my Windows VM to check, and guess what?
It's real, and this on the stable version of Windows, Edge stable, not some Beta or Canary. The address-bar button is not just a piece of text, you can click on it to open the browser's built-in sidebar that lets you access Copilot. The button doesn't have a right-click menu. One thing worth noting is that the button collapses to just display the icon.
So, this button is an ad, right? Well, at least it's not an intrusive pop-up that promotes Copilot. But, it's still noticeable, but not very distracting. It also seems to vanish after a while, at least after I switched to different tabs. I couldn't find a way to disable the button. Is it unethical to promote Copilot like this when visiting third-party websites? I don't know.
The report says that the Try Copilot button also appears on Comet browser's download page, and OpenAI's GPT Codex. I can confirm that, and I'm assuming that Edge is promoting Copilot based on the parent domain. Curiously, the Try Copilot button doesn't seem to do that on Gemini's web version, or Google.com. It's unclear why it wouldn't do that on Google's domains. I didn't get the button on Mistral's Le Chat, Proton Lumo, Claude AI, either. That's a good thing, the button doesn't appear on all web pages.
Note: Proton, Claude had address-bar buttons that promoted their own app. That maybe why Try Copilot didn't appear.
What about you? Do you mind the Try Copilot button?
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