@Araragi Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I struggle to believe that syncing my preferred search provider is so difficult that it is among the last remaining features missing from Microsoft Edge. I believe it is a conspiracy, and here is my theory--having tried and failed to gain traction with Bing as a search engine for over a decade, pushing it down users' throats at every opportunity much like they have done with Edge and a gaggle of other half-baked consumer products no one was asking for...Microsoft refuses to concede that for all their awkward and pushy tactics, users simply don't want to use their bloated unnecessary search. But why should they respect their users wishes? Hasn't done anything for them in the past.
So they made a browser! Or more accurately, they built a fancy hat and put it on top of Chromium. It's got everything Chrome offers and more! It's honestly a better web browser by just about every possible metric. Well done Microsoft. Now they are truly excited about this, because it's effectively putting them back into the same game they had going around the turn of the century where simply by virtue of coming pre-installed with Windows it will pick up some market share (sshhh! don't let the Federal Trade Commission hear you!!), and by taking much of its design cues from Chrome, users might not be so instantly predisposed to loath its very essence and to seek out an alternative as literally the very first action they take with their new PC. Especially considering any effort to change the default browser in Windows away from Edge will be met with a pathetic whine about how unfair it is that the market has driven consumers to have choices. But then the moment they use the address bar to search, they find that their results are strange...unsettling...not exactly wrong, but not good.
"Oh, gross it's f***ing Bing! OK, how do I change this, I know with Chrome I can just right click in the address bar and Manage Search Engines, will that--no. OK, Settings then, I know with Chrome I just scroll down to the "Search Engine" section on the main settings page, and Manage Search Engines, surely that will--no. F***ing Microsoft. Alright, what do I have to do? Let's see, Settings then..."Privacy, Search, and Services"--good lord that's a lot of crap! Fine, whatever. 5th option on the 8th section down and...oh for Christ's sake, you stuffed everything in the world on this single page with 8 sections spanning dozens of options, but "Address bar and search" takes me into yet another separate sub-page! Finally, a drop down to set my preferred search provider. Fortunately my preference is pre-installed, otherwise I would have to go into yet a 4th sub-page to manage my available search engines...
Nice! I have a sweet new browser that, albeit after more effort than should be necessary, allows me to search using a functional service! Cool. Now let's be sure I sign in and setup sync so I never have to do that again!"
I am an I.T. consultant, and I maintain user accounts on dozens of PCs that I use on a regular basis. Not wanting to install additional software on my client's PCs, and just generally being quite impressed by it, I opted to use Edge as my primary browser for work. But having to constantly go in and set such a fundamental and frequently used setting because it's the only thing that refuses to sync is annoying. It can only be that Microsoft has seen real growth in their search market share because of users who don't care or don't realize that it's happening, that they're intentionally leaving it out of the sync. Because they know their search traffic, and all of the related activity that goes with their overstuffed search provider, will take an actual hit if people can set it to Google once and never think about it again, as they should be able to do. It cannot be that difficult. They have done so much good work on so many other aspects of Edge, having a simple string argument in a JSON cannot be beyond their abilities. It must be because they don't want to do it.
