Microsoft Edge is apparently usurping Chrome on people’s PCs

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

If you run the Chrome browser in Windows 10 or 11 and you've suddenly discovered that you're running Microsoft Edge instead, you're not alone. The Verge's Tom Warren reports that he and multiple other users on social media and Microsoft's support forums have suddenly found their Chrome browsing sessions mysteriously replicated in Edge.

Without an official comment from Microsoft, Warren posits that the tab-snatching happened because of a bug or an inadvertently clicked-through dialog box that triggers a feature in Edge that's meant to make it easier to (intentionally) switch browsers. The setting, which can accessed by typing edge://settings/profiles/importBrowsingData into the browser's address bar, offers to import recent browsing data from Chrome every time you launch Edge, as opposed to the one-time data import it offers for Firefox.

The setting in question, as seen on a Windows 11 23H2 system running Edge 122. It will offer to continuously import data from Chrome, but not from other browsers. Edge will offer a one-time data import from Firefox, but most other browsers (like Opera) don't show up here. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Assuming it is a bug, this data-importing issue is hard to distinguish from some of Microsoft's actual, officially sanctioned, easy-to-reproduce tactics for pushing Edge. I encountered two of these while installing Chrome on a PC for this piece—one when I navigated to the Chrome download page and another across the top of Edge's Settings pages after I had set another browser as my default.