Google has always used its popular services to scare people away from using Edge.

While Microsoft’s practical is unethical, let’s not forget that Google is guilty of using similar tactics against its rivals. Interestingly, Microsoft Edge nagging is currently exclusive to Windows 11, so users on Windows 10 won’t see the alert, at least for now. This can be considered misleading by some folks as both browsers use the same underlying tech. Of course, Windows 11’s new alert won’t prevent users from installing Chrome, but the message is clearly designed to discourse users from trying Chrome which is less secure than Edge (according to Microsoft). It’s also worth pointing out that the alert appears when users try to visit Chrome’s download page using any search engine (Bing or Google itself). In our tests, we observed that the notification alert is triggered by a server-side update, so it has nothing to do with the build revision number of Windows 11.

This message won’t appear for most people using Edge stable at the moment (unless they are part of the A/B testing group).