Microsoft has never been shy about pushing Edge — the Start Menu, the search bar, random notifications, even a pop-up if you try installing a competing browser. Recently, that pressure campaign got a new entry: search “Chrome” in Bing while using Edge, and you’ll get a table supposedly laying out Edge’s advantages, spotted first by Windows Latest.
One of the listed reasons is, verbatim, “Microsoft recommended.” Bold text beside it declares “all you need is right here,” citing the “added trust” of Microsoft — which is an odd pitch, considering Microsoft and Google are both enormous, similarly resourced tech companies. One giant conglomerate vouching for itself isn’t really a selling point.
The Rest of the List Doesn’t Hold Up Much Better
The other bullet points thin out fast under scrutiny. “Earn rewards” isn’t Edge-exclusive — Brave offers something comparable, and reward points for setting Bing as your search engine work on any browser, not just Edge. The built-in VPN gets listed as an advantage, but it’s been flagged with real security concerns and may not function as a full VPN at all; free VPN access also isn’t unique to Edge, since Firefox and Opera both offer it too. AI gets listed as a differentiator despite reportedly thin actual paid-subscriber numbers, and despite a growing field of dedicated AI browsers already competing directly in that exact space.
Take the VPN claim specifically: security researchers examining Edge’s implementation have raised concerns that it may not encrypt traffic the way a standard VPN client does, functioning more as a proxy layered onto specific browsing sessions than a full-tunnel VPN. Marketing it as a straightforward advantage over Chrome, without qualifying what it actually does under the hood, is the kind of claim that looks worse the longer you look at it.
What Microsoft Isn’t Advertising Is the Part That Actually Mattered
Here’s what’s conspicuously missing from Microsoft’s own marketing table: Collections, the sidebar app list, Workspaces’ original sharing capability — the genuinely useful, tangible features that used to differentiate Edge from a plain Chromium wrapper. Instead of leading with any of that, Microsoft chose “trust us, we’re Microsoft” as a bullet point.
That omission tracks with what’s actually been happening to Edge lately. The sidebar app list and Collections are being retired outright as part of a “simplification” push. Workspaces is losing its share and collaboration functionality in the same stretch of updates. The features worth marketing are being quietly removed at the exact moment Microsoft is short on things to put in a comparison table.
A Browser Can’t Sell Trust Once It’s Cut the Reasons to Trust It
If Microsoft wants Edge to look meaningfully different from Chrome, “Microsoft recommended” was never going to do that work. The actual differentiators — Collections, shared Workspaces, a dedicated app sidebar — were doing that job until they started getting pulled: the features that actually let teams share bookmarks with others, not a vague appeal to trust.