34 PCWorld MARCH 2020NEWS MICROSOFT WALKS BACK CHROME SEARCH PLANS
Users can click the
magnifying glass
search icon to switch
out of Microsoft Bing.consent. The support document also makes
the greater intent clear: Microsoft’s adding
the tweaks to Chrome first, but “support for
the Firefox web browser is planned for a later
date,” it says.HOW TO BLOCK MICROSOFT
FROM CHANGING
CHROME’S SEARCH ENGINE
IN OFFICE 365
IT admins who don’t want the extension
installed have a way around it. Enterprises can
use either the Office Deployment Tool or
Group Policy to prevent it, but it has to be
done before the extension itself is installed. If
an admin waits too long, they’ll have to run a
command (go.pcworld.com/rncm) to
remove it.
Fortunately, it sounds like individual
users will have the option of disabling
Microsoft Search as well—though it’s notclear whether admins can lock this down.
To disable Microsoft Search and restore
Google as your search engine, users should
be able to click the magnifying glass search
icon next to the address bar in Chrome, and
then toggle off the Use Bing As Your
Default Search Engine selection.
Unfortunately, Microsoft’s efforts to “help”
users with Microsoft Search could easily be
seen as just another example of the
company’s heavy-handed approaches to, say,
upgrading users to Windows 10 (go.pcworld.
com/nw10). The next natural question to ask
is: Could Microsoft do this to consumers,
too? Here’s something to think about: In the
new, Chromium-based Edge, Microsoft
hasn’t touched Chrome’s choice of search
engine. But it has buried Edge’s search-
engine options (go.pcworld.com/bury) in a
deep level where they’re difficult to find, and
made Bing the default.