Microsoft makes a pleasing concession

Microsoft is continuing its journey with Bing Chat, its conversational agent that is popping up everywhere. It will be all the more so since soon, it will no longer be necessary to go through the Edge browser to use it.

For several months, Bing Chat has been intruding everywhere. First in Bing, the search engine of course, but then natively in the Edge web browser, and it will soon be in Windows 11 directly. However, Microsoft also wants to convince those who come out of all these frames, by offering the possibility of using Bing Chat in other browsers.

Use Bing Chat on Chrome or Safari: it will soon be possible

If roundabout ways already exist to use Microsoft’s artificial intelligence tool on browsers other than Edge, they are not ” officials and therefore limited to the most expert users. The mediaNeowinreported a few days ago that Mikhail Parakhin, head of advertising and web services at the firm, said support for third-party browsers for Bing Chat was in the experimental phase.

A few days later, Microsoft goes further. The American site adds that a user on Reddit recently showed that he was able to use Bing Chat on Safari and Chrome. When questioned, Mikhail Parakhin confirmed the information, specifying that he was experimenting with this deployment, which is gradual. For the moment, it works a priori only with Chrome and Safari, but we can think that other browsers will be compatible, like Firefox. In theory, browsers based on the Chromium kernel will also be compatible, Chrome and Edge relying themselves on this kernel.

Why Microsoft is turning to other browsers

The reason why Microsoft tends to add this support is after all logical: to impose itself in terms of artificial intelligence and conversational assistant, it must be available on all platforms. However, today Edge is far from being the most used web browser.

In May 2022, it had just over 10% market share, in second place ahead of Apple’s Safari (9.61%) and Mozilla Firefox (7.86%). But Microsoft’s software is above all very far behind its Google equivalent, Chrome, which accounts for two-thirds of market share.