Welcome (Back) to the Age of Windows/Web Browser Integration (Premium)

We all thought that Microsoft learned its lesson when it tried and failed to integrate Internet Explorer with Windows in the late 1990s. But what’s old is new again: in Windows 11, the software giant has taken major steps to make its more recent web browser, Edge, central to the user experience whether users want it or not. And the parallels between then and now are starting to get more obvious.

I told this story in my Programming Windows series, which later morphed into my magnum opus book, Windows Everywhere. But it’s worth revisiting here because of how familiar Microsoft’s strategy of the late 1990s resembles what it’s doing today.

Entering 1995, Microsoft and Windows were riding high. Windows 3.1 was the most popular operating system in personal computing history and its successor, Windows 95, was set to trigger another and even bigger explosion in PC growth, cementing Microsoft’s dominance. On the side, the software giant was preparing for a more technically sophisticated and future-proof Windows version called NT, with vague plans for it to replace its MS-DOS-based forebearers as soon as possible. And when it came to apps, only native Windows apps mattered in the 1990s: Microsoft was consolidating all its disparate programming environments into a single IDE (integrated development environment) that would go on to be named Visual Studio, making it easier than ever for developers to target its lucrative software platforms.

But then the World Wide Web (WWW or web) happened, first with dial-up connectivity and then with broadband and the speeds needed to drive its own new growth market. While Microsoft was busy integrating an old-school online service called The Microsoft Network (MSN) into Windows 95, smaller and faster new competitors like Netscape were pioneering a new world of websites, apps, and services that it felt were the next wave, one that would replace Windows and native apps.

Microsoft was slow to realize the danger and potential of the web, but then-CEO Bill Gates turned things around very quickly, and by the time Windows 95 shipped, the company had completely pivoted to the web, with the aim of integrating web technologies into Windows and making Windows the best-possible Internet client. And at that moment in late 1995, there was nothing more key to this strategy than Microsoft creating its own web browser, called Internet Explorer (IE), giving it away for free, and integrating it ever more deeply into Windows.

IE started off in an incomplete state and its late arrival meant that it could not be included in the initial shipping version of Windows 95. But both quickly changed. IE 2.0 was bundled with Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, and it was released for Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 too. But it was Microsoft’s integration plans that would later get it in antitrust trouble in both the U.S. and Europe: future versions of IE would no longer be standalone applications. Instead, IE would become the basis for all browsing in Windows, not just the Internet but file system and network browsing as well.

IE 3.0, released in 1996, was the first to seriously threaten Netscape Navigator, and though it offered only limited integration, it was bundled with subsequent Windows 95 versions (OSR-2+). But it was the release of IE 4.0 in 1997 that truly delivered on Microsoft’s integration vision. IE 4.0 included a Windows Desktop Update for both Windows 95 and NT 4.0 that replaced the Windows shell with a new web-based shell with web-like one-click objects and a so-called Active Desktop that could host web content. There was also a Channel Bar, a floating toolbar of content featuring third parties like AOL, Disney, and WB, several standalone Internet apps, and a dramatically improved web rendering engine. Despite the bloat, it was the first version of Microsoft’s web browser to be truly superior to Netscape Navigator.

Microsoft was ready to take things much further: the original plan for Windows 98 was for the Windows shell to display single-click icons with blue underlines that worked just like websites. But by that point, the U.S. Department of Justice was tackling the antitrust implications of Microsoft’s product bundling and finding a friendly ear in Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson. And an internal war over the future of Windows would result in a major step back from this integration plan. Put simply, Windows chief Jim Allchin saw the IE integration and general Internet focus as an overreaction and that Windows, not IE, was the platform. And by the time IE 4.0 rolled out the door, Bill Gates had already accepted Allchin’s argument. The heady push to embrace the web and replace key parts of Windows and its app model with web technology came to an end, to be replaced by an “embrace and extend” solution called .NET that would bring the best ideas of the web to Windows, but in native and proprietary form.

As I wrote in Programming Windows: We Fought the Web and the Web Won (Premium), this crucial decision delayed Microsoft’s total embrace of the open, cross-platform, and web-based technologies that it would later adopt, too late, in a kinder and gentler rendition of the company many years later. It kept Microsoft and Windows on a proprietary path, leading to multiple missteps with app platforms, frameworks, and developer tools, until we arrived in the modern era started by Windows 8 and its disastrous user experience and mobile apps platform. Since then, we’ve suffered from the fallout of that release, as Microsoft continued down a doomed path that landed with a thud as the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), hobbling subsequent Windows versions with lackluster in-box apps and driving app developers away in droves.

So it perhaps ironic that the Windows of today in some crucial ways resembles the Windows that Netscape co-founder Mark Andreessen envisioned, that is, Windows as “a poorly debugged set of device drivers” on top of which web apps would run (albeit it minus the snark). Today, Windows is more sophisticated than ever before, but it also supports a much more diverse and expansive set of application types, not just native apps (in various guises), but also Linux apps, Android apps, and, of course, web apps. Those web apps have also gotten more sophisticated in recent years, and they now provide a lot of native and native-like functionality in Windows. Indeed, some key Windows 11 in-box apps are in fact web apps.

And that is unique to the modern era. Where an app like Clipchamp is literally a cross-platform web app that can be used identically on Linux and the Mac, the web-based apps of Windows 8 used web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in proprietary ways; that is, they were not web apps, and they could not run on other platforms. That evolution is interesting all by itself.

And while Windows 11 isn’t just about running web apps, it is perhaps important to remember that its in-box web apps are quietly running on Microsoft Edge, Microsoft’s latest web browser, and its rendering engine, under the hood. (You can also install web apps using competing browsers like Chrome and Brave, and those will run in the context of those browsers.) This is perhaps the most subtle example of Windows/Edge integration, and its predecessor, Windows 10, works similarly.

But Windows 11 brought with it some curious—and anti-competitive and consumer-antagonistic—changes that summon up memories of Microsoft’s late 1990s antitrust abuses. The original version of Windows 11 eliminated the ability to change your default web browser with a single click, for example, and purposefully led users who wished to do so down a sinkhole of confusing UIs. (This was only partially fixed in the second version of Windows 11, after many complaints.)

Worse, Windows 11 will launch Microsoft Edge even when you do figure out how to make your preferred web browser the default. When you open Widgets and click on a story in the news feed, it will open in Edge, not your default browser. And when you use Start search or Search highlights via the Start menu and click on a web link of any kind, Edge will again open.

Ignoring users’ explicitly configured preferences is reprehensible, but it’s doubly so because these actions drive users to Microsoft websites like Bing and MSN, and put them in front of Microsoft advertising, while using Microsoft’s web browser, a product that not only tracks you as you use the web but sells that information to advertisers. It’s a non-virtuous cycle, if you will.

But heading into the third version of Windows 11, called Windows 11 version 23H2 and due this fall, we see the next escalation of Microsoft’s Windows 11/Edge integration plans. 23H2 will include a major new feature called Windows Copilot that seemed exciting when it was first announced—given all the hype around AI this year—but has since revealed itself to be something much less. And much worse.

While I understood that the first preview version of this feature was incomplete, I was nonetheless shocked by how simplistic and unimpressive it was when I tested in it late June. Curious about this, I discussed it with my technical go-to, Rafael Rivera, who revealed to me what it really was and, in doing so, revealed its true purpose. Wait for it. Windows Copilot is nothing less than an instance of Microsoft Edge running in a sidebar on the Windows 11 desktop. So it is nearly identical to the Discover pane in the browser itself, but integrated into the Windows shell instead of Edge. It obviously uses Bing and Bing Chat for its non-Windows AI-based functionality, just like that sidebar. And because it is Edge, it must track your activities just like the full browser does.

Whether this is surprising or disappointing to me or anyone else is sort of beside the point. And in retrospect, it feels obvious: not only has Microsoft been pushing Windows users to use Edge against their will and then into its web-based sites, services, and advertising, its entire consumer AI push this year has been web-based. But this Windows Copilot sidebar isn’t just yet another entry point for Edge, wanted or unwanted. It is the return of that Windows/web integration strategy from the late 1990s, where a key new Windows feature and user experience—arguably the marquee new feature of 23H2—was created entirely with its web browser technologies.

In other words, Microsoft controls this platform, and rather than create a native version of a new feature or app, as it would for, say, File Explorer, it has instead simply used the same web technologies that it’s using elsewhere. So, yes, it’s about that forced Edge usage complaint I keep making. But it’s also about the web being mature enough that Microsoft feels comfortable using it for a major new Windows feature. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe it’s done that since the Windows Desktop Update functionality in IE 4.0. That’s from 1997, over 25 years ago!

But even if I am wrong about that—don’t be shy—this still represents a major escalation of Edge (and thus Bing, MSN, and Microsoft advertising) integration in Windows 11. Which I think we can all agree is one of the most controversial things about this platform, if not the most controversial. With Windows 11, Microsoft set down a path that ignores user preferences and artificially and dramatically expands the usage of Microsoft products and services that most users would never have done willingly. And in the coming third release of this platform, it is dramatically expanding on that strategy with Windows Copilot.

On some level, I don’t personally mind that Windows Copilot is a resource-wasting instance of Edge, given that I use another browser. But the privacy implications are always problematic, and I don’t like that any clicks in Windows Copilot that open a web browser window will do so in Edge regardless of my default browser choice too.

But who knows? Maybe Microsoft can evolve Windows Copilot into something more sophisticated in time, especially on the Windows (non-web) side. (The current functionality is beyond lackluster, no matter what you think about Edge or Bing Chat generally.) Or maybe we’ll need to wait on some antitrust regulators to examine Microsoft’s Edge integration strategy and force the company to do the right thing. Heck, it happened before. So it can happen again.