Microsoft built an app whose only job is to put Bing in your browser

There's a new file sitting on Microsoft's own download servers. It's called MicrosoftSettings.exe, it weighs 22.2 MB, and it does one thing: change the default search engine in whatever browsers you have installed to Bing.

Windows Latest and Notebookcheck both went through it this weekend. The app is titled Microsoft Recommended Search Settings. Launch it and you get a welcome screen with a single option, already toggled to Yes, offering to make Bing your search engine. Click Accept and continue and it installs the "Microsoft Bing Homepage & Search" extension, which also swaps your new tab page for the MSN feed. Then it opens Microsoft Rewards, in case points help. It handles Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Edge.

Chrome, to its credit, notices. It pops up its own prompt asking "Change back to Google Search?" and names the extension that made the change. Microsoft's extension then puts up an overlay of its own arguing against that. A pre-ticked box, a search and new-tab takeover, and a nag when you try to undo it: that is, feature for feature, the pattern that gets a third-party extension labelled a browser hijacker.

The important caveat is that this isn't being pushed at you. It's a standalone download, not in the Microsoft Store and not arriving through Windows Update, and Microsoft hasn't said anything about wider plans for it. Worth knowing it exists, though, because you can't rule out finding it preinstalled on a new PC. If your searches or new tab page have changed and you don't know when it happened, Tendvane's "browser hijacked" repair wizard walks through the search engine, homepage and new tab settings in each browser and shows you which extension is holding them.