Microsoft is urging Safari users to switch from Chrome to Bing. If you find yourself suppressing the urge to burst out laughing at that concept, don’t worry. So did we.
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The Redmond-based giant’s latest campaign targets Safari users, telling them to make the switch because Google “may have recently tracked you even though it promised it would not”.
Things move quickly in the tech world, so you might not recall that this saga dates all the way back to February this year.
The internet giant reportedly “used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users”. This was in direct contravention of mechanisms built into the Apple web browser, which are meant to block this kind of tracking by default.
Microsoft alleges that in the time since then:
- Google promised it would not track Safari users.
- Google broke its promise and tracked Safari users without their permission.
- Google used this improperly obtained information to target ads for profit.
- The FTC took action against Google in the form of a record $22.5 million penalty.
When you click on “Try Bing” you get taken to search results for “google record FTC fine”.
As The Next Web notes however, Microsoft can’t effectively reach Safari users on Google with this, unless it somehow figured out a clever redirect. Although that would likely land it in even hotter water than Google was in.
In fact, it’s unclear how Microsoft plans on pushing ordinary users onto the page. Maybe it was hoping they’d Google it.
