Microsoft has built a small Windows app whose only job is to make Bing the default search engine in every browser on your PC — Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Edge included. It is called Microsoft Recommended Search Settings, it ships as a standalone MicrosoftSettings.exe download from Microsoft’s own servers, and it works by pushing a Bing extension into each browser it finds.
The app was first spotted by Windows tester Xeno Panther, who found the executable and noted that it asks you to switch your default search to Bing and then opens a Microsoft Rewards offer once setup finishes. Windows Latest downloaded and ran it, and reports the installer weighs 22.2MB.
What the Bing search app actually does
Two things are worth being precise about, because the story is being read as Microsoft silently changing settings on people’s machines. It isn’t that — at least not yet. Windows Latest reports the app is not being pushed through Windows Update and is not in the Microsoft Store; you have to download and run it yourself. And the first screen does show you what it’s about to do: it’s titled “Welcome to Microsoft Recommended Search Settings” and carries a toggle for setting Bing as your search engine, with small print saying the change applies to Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
The catch is that the toggle arrives already flipped to “Yes”. Click “Accept and continue” without reading, and the app installs an extension called Microsoft Bing Homepage & Search for Chrome into your browsers. Chrome’s own permission warning for that extension says it can read and change all data on all websites, display notifications, and change the home page, search settings and start page to bing.com. That is a lot of reach for a search-default switch, and it means the extension sits in the path of every page you load, not just your searches.
Chrome pushes back. It shows its own “Change back to Google Search?” prompt when an extension hijacks search — and according to Windows Latest’s testing, Microsoft’s extension plants a second box directly beneath it, with an arrow pointing at Chrome’s “Change it back” button, reading “Wait, don’t change it back!” It warns you’ll lose Bing search and wallpapers and nudges you toward “Keep it”. Accept the whole flow and Chrome’s new tab page becomes the MSN feed.
That last part deserves a plain reading. A prompt engineered to sit under the browser’s own warning, telling you not to act on it, is a dark pattern. It is not a feature. And the Microsoft Rewards page that opens at the end — points in exchange for your default search — is the incentive layer on top of it. What Microsoft gets is your search queries and your new tab page, which is to say your attention and the ad revenue attached to it. What you get is a few Rewards points.
How to undo it: remove the app, the extension and the search default
Removing the extension alone is not enough — the search default it wrote can persist. Do all three steps.
1. Uninstall the app
- Open Settings on Windows 11 (
Win + I). - Go to Apps > Installed apps.
- Search for Microsoft Recommended Search Settings, click the three-dot menu next to it and choose Uninstall.
2. Remove the Bing extension
In Chrome, click the three-dot More menu at the top right, then Extensions > Manage extensions (or type chrome://extensions in the address bar). Find Microsoft Bing Homepage & Search for Chrome, click Remove, and confirm. If the extension’s icon is visible next to the address bar, you can also right-click it and pick Remove from Chrome.
Brave uses the same Chromium extensions page at brave://extensions. In Firefox, open about:addons, go to Extensions, and remove the Bing add-on from its three-dot menu.
3. Put your search engine back
In Chrome: three-dot More menu > Settings > Search engine, then use Change to pick Google (or whatever you had). In Firefox: open about:preferences#search, find the Default search engine dropdown and set it back — there is also a Restore Default Search Engines button on the same pane if the list itself was altered. In Brave, go to brave://settings/search.
Also worth checking afterwards: your new tab page, since the extension changes that too, and your browser’s homepage setting.
Why this keeps happening
This is not new territory for Microsoft — Windows Latest documented a near-identical two-layered Bing pop-up in Chrome back in March 2024. It sits alongside a broader pattern of Microsoft components arriving on Windows 11 that you didn’t ask for and can’t easily see, like the OneDrive app it installed for you and then hid from the Start menu.
The practical advice is unglamorous but holds: on Windows, be suspicious of any executable whose entire purpose is to change a setting you already control from within the browser. If you want Bing, you can set it yourself in two clicks, without granting an extension permission to read and change every website you visit.
Source: XenoPanther on X, via Windows Latest
