Edge ads on Chrome pages, disabling IE, Firefox dead after KB5022906?

[German]Today another small collective article around the topic Edge, Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is about the deactivation of Internet Explorer, which is supposed to happen in February 2023. With the patchday (14.2.2023) probably not everything was deactivated at IE. And with the preview update KB5022906 from February 21, 2023, there could have been collateral damage that kicks Firefox out. In addition, Microsoft has once again gone massively overboard by running large-scale ads for Edge on Google Chrome pages.

Edge ads on Chrome pages

It seems like an act of desperation: Anyone who uses the bing.com search engine and searches for the Chrome download page sees a notice that there is no reason for this download. The following tweet shows such an insertion in the browser window of the Google Chrome download page:

Has been going on for some time, as the following tweet from February 19, 2023 shows.

I tried it once in the Ungoogled browser with Bing, the search for Google Chrome brings an advertising banner, but to test the new browser from Microsoft. Here is the German edition:

By the way, this Edge ad also comes up when searching for Vivaldi, Firefox and even Edge. Somewhere on Twitter I also saw a tweet that someone in Edge got to see this ad. Neowin.net had picked up in this article, writing about the Edge Canary build injecting an ad into Chrome download pages. The banner shown at neowin.net in the article can also be found in this tweet. Either ChatGPT is just spinning free, or the Microsoft folks can't get even an ad to be even halfway context sensitive. They just can't. Will Dormann also addressed it in this tweet.

IE is being retired …

It is a long announced topic – the Internet Explorer is to retire and February 2023 was chosen by Microsoft as a "farewell month". I had covered it in the blog post Reminder: Internet Explorer 11 will be retired on February 14, 2023.

With the Windows 10 security update, Microsoft is forcing the redirection of all Internet Explorer 11 calls on affected operating systems to Microsoft Chromium Edge. I had reported on this in the blog post Windows 10: Microsoft disables Internet Explorer 11 on Feb. 14, 2023.

The optional, non-security "C" version, preview update is scheduled to remove visual references to IE11 for certain Windows 10 versions on May 23, 2023. No later than June 13, 2023, the planned Windows security update ("B" version) will remove all IE11 visual references, such as the IE11 icons in the Start menu and taskbar. Then IE 11 will be history in most Windows versions and its tasks will be taken over by Microsoft Edge.

Did the 1st attempt went wrong?

Shortly after the patchday, however, I came across reports that IE was not really disabled, even though Edge and Windows updates were installed. In the discussion here in my German blog and in other comments, it was reported that IE was still present in Windows 10 (discoverable in the Start menu, etc.). In parallel, I came across a series of tweets from Tero Alhonen on the subject.

Conclusion: IE is redirected to Edge, but there are websites in a whitelist that are opened in Internet Explorer after all.

Does the 2nd attempt also kill Firefox?

I can't really quantify the whole thing yet, but noticed. Regarding my German blog post Windows 10 20H2-22H2 Preview Update KB5022906 (21.2.2023), blog reader Wolfgang left the following comment:

Ich kann das Ganze noch nicht wirklich beziffern, aber aufgemerkt habe ich schon. Zu meinem Blog-Beitrag  hat sich Wolfgang mit folgendem Kommentar gemeldet:

IE and FF dead after update!
Edge runs -there can be only one?
On 9 PC with us, completely different hardware!

I asked for more information in a reply – a search on the internet didn't reveal anything yet. Can anyone confirm this effect? I suspect that the preview update KB5022906 for Windows 10 (20H2 to 22H2) may have been used to fix the bug:

This update addresses an issue that affects IE mode. The text on the status bar is not always visible.

or while touching up the silencing of Internet Explorer, Firefox was broken at the same time.