In a blog post, Microsoft announced the new feature coming to Edge soon. According to Liat Ben-Zur, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, “Microsoft Edge is here to alleviate some of the stress by helping you keep an eye on products you’ve recently viewed and alert you of price changes.”
The feature will be built into the Edge browser, where many users might be annoyed. There are plenty of websites and browser extensions that offer price tracking, and if a user wants them, they can download them. Adding these shopping features at the browser level will add to the perception that Microsoft is adding bloat to Edge with features designed to make the company money through affiliate revenue.
Microsoft cites some of the other shopping features it has added to the browser, and there are quite a few. “This feature, combined with our other built-in tools like price comparison, price history, easy access to customer ratings and expert reviews, and our auto-fill coupons tool, it’s as if Microsoft Edge became the personal shopping assistant you’ve always needed,” says Ben-Zur.
While these all sound like positive features, there are plenty of users who would prefer these not to be part of their browsing experience automatically, and it could ultimately push more users away from Edge and towards third-party browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
Of course, with Microsoft making it more challenging to change browsers and even blocking third-party tools that override direct to Edge features in Windows, changing isn’t as easy as it once was.
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