Microsoft can’t spend a week without reminding people of switching to Linux.
I’m fairly sure that they know this will eventually happen. Windows pretty much only exists for them to milk their user base further, while they’re still “hooked” on it. I’m fairly certain that MS knows that Windows isn’t worth long-term investments anymore. So this is the enshittify-and-milk-users phase of the Windows decline. MS already positioned itself so that it doesn’t NEED Windows to be successful. They make most of their money with cloud services these days. And they are internally building up Linux knowledge by having created their in-house Azure Linux distribution as well as hiring some prominent Linux ecosystem developers like the systemd author. Plus, they ported .NET and Powershell 7+ to cross-platform. They will have no problems if, say, in 10 years, Windows loses its dominance. In the meantime, the poor Windows users who still use this clownware are fair game.
It has to be on purpose. They clearly don’t want windows to exist anymore.
I downloaded MicrosoftSettings.exe and ran it on my test PC. The installer is 22.2MB. I have Chrome and Brave set up with their own defaults, and searching from either pulled up Google and Brave Search respectively.
The first screen is titled “Welcome to Microsoft Recommended Search Settings,” with a toggle already switched to “Yes” for setting Bing as your search engine. Small text underneath says the change applies to Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome.
Installing Firefox takes like 3 minutes, you couldn’t spin up one more browser for science?