Office 365 ProPlus Will Switch Chrome's Default Search to Bing

Next month, Microsoft is set to make a lot of its business customers quite angry by forcibly switching the default search engine in Chrome to Bing.

As ZDNet reports, starting with Version 2002 of Office 365 ProPlus, the extension Microsoft Search in Bing will form part of the installation. A side effect of that is the default search engine for Chrome will switch to Bing automatically. Regardless of whether Office 365 ProPlus is already installed or not, the switch to Bing will happen.

The ProPlus version of Office 365 is aimed squarely at business users and adds exclusive apps and services other versions don't enjoy access to. Microsoft's reason for automatically switching users to Bing is as follows: "By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search, including being able to access relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar."

While it may be useful under the right circumstances within an organization, nobody likes forced change and therefore this decision is sure to generate a lot of anger. One look at the Reddit discussion regarding the automatic change makes this clear.

Thankfully, Microsoft is allowing the switch to Bing to be excluded from the installation process, but it does take a bit of extra work on the part of system admins. The exclusion requires editing the configuration.xml file in the Office Deployment Tool or enabling the "Don't install extension for Microsoft Search in Bing that makes Bing the default the search engine" policy. If you're using the Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager or Microsoft Intune, there's a toggle or check box to set ensuring it won't happen. Full details of all exclusion methods are available on the Microsoft Docs support page.

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Microsoft clearly isn't going to win any fans with this decision and system admins especially will be angry if they don't hear about the default change before deploying Version 2002 to potentially thousands of users. Imagine the support requests they'll receive in the hours and days following the roll-out.

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