Are you positive you need to use Google Chrome in your Windows PC? Are you actually positive? Don’t fear, for those who’re not, Microsoft will find a way to ask you again. In truth, it’ll ask you even in case you are. And you would possibly end up utilizing Edge even for those who’ve explicitly instructed Windows that sure, in reality, you might be positive that you just need to use Chrome. That’s what a rising variety of irate Windows 11 customers are reporting with some current updates, after they discovered Edge launching with their last-open Chrome tabs.

The Verge editor Tom Warren experienced this firsthand, discovering that Edge launched when he rebooted Windows after a software program replace, disturbingly full with the Chrome tabs he had opened earlier than shutting down. It appeared that, not solely had Edge determined to take over because the default browser (one thing that it’s been extremely aggressive about for years), however it had been syncing knowledge from Chrome within the background with out Warren’s data or permission.

Warren isn’t alone in experiencing this. A small however vocal variety of customers have been reporting related habits from Edge over the previous couple of days, together with those that’ve specified that they need Chrome as their default browser and don’t need to sync or import knowledge into Edge in any state of affairs. Edge will usually ask permission to import tab and bookmark knowledge from different browsers — it’s a typical function, which Chrome and different opponents supply as effectively — however it isn’t imagined to be occurring with out that permission. Edge has, effectively, an an edge on the competitors by being the default in Windows, and syncing throughout Microsoft person accounts with different settings knowledge.

It isn’t clear if this new habits is yet one more instance of Microsoft being overzealous and pushy trying to get Windows users onto its first-party services, like a creepy barfly who received’t take no for a solution, or a bug that’s inflicting this habits to be much more in-your-face than regular. The habits appears to be triggered by a Windows 11 software program replace, and it isn’t common — none of us right here at PCWorld can replicate it. Edge has a setting to routinely import knowledge from the default browser each time it launches. But after I checked on my PC, that setting is disabled, as I anticipated.

But the truth that it’s displaying up for a variety of customers, deliberately or in any other case, is extra damning proof that Windows must freakin’ chill the hell out with its heavy-handed makes an attempt to get customers onto Microsoft’s first-party software program and companies.