My favorite is how when you right-click some highlighted text in Edge, before the "Search the web for this" button, is an additional "Search Bing for this" button.
I'm sure the product designer's thought was, "Maybe they just forgot how excellent Bing is, and they will decide to click this Bing button, rather than using the non-Bing search engine they explicitly configured before!" And not "Let's trap some accidental clicks."
Oh this is diabolical IMO. I just tested it to understand what's happening.
Below "search the web", there is always a "search in sidebar" option. "Sidebar" basically splits your window and loads your search in the new pane. I assume this is some custom webview, but it looks very, very similar to a new window/tab.
The kicker: only Bing search can be loaded in the sidebar. So when you change your default search engine away from Bing, the text changes to "search Bing in sidebar" -- because they didn't implement the sidebar for anyone else, but wanted to keep the option there.
Surprisingly, when I tried Edge this feature was really useful. Of course it would be better if they asked me which search engine should pop up. But given Edge is too far from dominant market position, I don't see what legal recourse one could suggest to force the choice unless you entirely ban cross-promotion and product bundling.
I can see a modest excuse for restricting the sidebar view to Bing, in that you need to have a reasonably suitable display format for the results.
Microsoft can be aware of and support the case from both sides, but I could imagine Google detecting "User-agent = Edge and the window width=300px", and sending some experience-ruining CSS or JavaScript to try to nudge users back to Chrome.
I know there was a while where various Google properties were unreasonably clunky on Firefox, and I can't imagine it was by accident; doubtless a trillion-dollar company can wire up a few CI instances to make sure things load well on non-Chrome browsers.
I agree and did try messing with the views a bit vs. bing.com and realized it's not the same. Fair enough!
But to introduce a sidebar in a chrome-based browser just to ship Bing? and then add it to every right click context for only Bing, overriding your other search preferences? and the sidebar just redirects you to open the search in a new tab/window anyway (was at the bottom of the screen for me)?
I'm sure the product designer's thought was, "Maybe they just forgot how excellent Bing is, and they will decide to click this Bing button, rather than using the non-Bing search engine they explicitly configured before!" And not "Let's trap some accidental clicks."