Office365 Pro Plus won’t hijack your search engine after all

Before we can apologize for trying to forcibly Bing you, we need to let you know how excited you really were about it. (credit: Microsoft)

In late January, Microsoft announced that a near-future Office 365 update would roll out a Chrome extension forcing all searches to run through Bing, regardless of the user's configured search engine preference. Several weeks of torches and pitchforks from sysadmins and users alike seem to have convinced the company that this was a tactical error, and today Microsoft announced a change of plans.

The Microsoft Search in Bing browser extension will no longer be deployed by default to Office 365 Pro Plus users. Instead, administrators will get a new toggle in the Admin Center allowing them to deploy the extension to their organization—and, importantly, the toggle defaults to off.

For now, even when an admin decides to toggle the feature on, it only affects managed (Active Directory domain joined) devices—employees' personal and home computers won't get Binged as a result, even if they've used some of the five legitimate installations per license to put Office 365 Pro Plus on those devices. (Microsoft does plan additional settings to allow more granular control of unmanaged devices in the future, so BOFHs will simply need to be patient.)

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