>Does this mean that old microsoft is back?

It never left.

> edge is a thing

I'm not sure anyone, even Microsoft, really knows why Edge is a thing even; Microsoft already basically has lock-in for some time on consumer computing because of Windows; MacOS, iOS, and Android have their strong competitive pieces of the marketshare by competing on either controlling the entire stack (Apple) or on price and ubiquity (Android), so I'm not sure why the browser wars of all things is a hill that Microsoft is insistent on planting its flag upon.

It's not like Internet Explorer had been relevant for any significant time, and even when it was dominant, it was only so because there weren't any other options and home computers were still new; there wasn't much weight to the browser decision except for people who were invested in such arguments -- everyone else just wanted to see what the Web was and didn't really care how they got there as long as it worked.

As I get it, Chrome was useful for Google because Google already had all that other data from Search, and Chrome just helped ingest more data and add a platform as a gateway to all of other Google's services; Microsoft doesn't really have anything to usher users into. Even Apple hasn't really bothered with this with Safari, which remains fairly simple in terms of integrations and services, and instead uses the entire Mac stack to get people onto its services from any number of given points

So I really don't know why there is so much focus on Edge from Microsoft; with the Bing Chat, I guess they saw a spot where Google was floundering and took a stab at making Edge + Bing a daily thing, but I'm not sure that it's grabbing people like Microsoft hoped it would; that Google is having similar traction issues with Bard makes me think that the AI integration is premature and not the savior either company hopes it will be. The Moat Memo about Google and OpenAI was quite candid assessment of why Google and OpenAI were going about LLMs incorrectly; I think it's not a leap of logic to group Microsoft along with them, as the same concerns from the memo apply to Microsoft; FOSS models and projects are doing far more with less resources than any of the aforementioned companies.

So I really don't get why Microsoft wants Edge to be a thing and why it's trying to make it part of everyone's lives without anything particularly nice. Decisions like the article are something I'd expect to come once everyone's already locked in, not when Microsoft is still clawing for market share. There aren't any "wow-ing" elements to anything you get from Edge, and it's quite lacking compared to other browsers. The things you do get with Edge that other browsers don't have are things that no one really wants; I don't think people like the forcefulness from Microsoft about Edge and at best people tolerate Microsoft's behaviors, I don't think anyone actually wants most of them.

Maybe it's just that because they have nothing to lose, Microsoft is willing to go hard with very aggressive ideas since at best it works and makes them some money, at worst they continue to have no adoption. The failures will be forgotten by an audience with short memory spans who instead just look for the next thing to get dramatic over, so I guess there's not really a downside to what Microsoft does, but man, it has to be an expensive gamble that I just can't see the pay off on.