Bing AI Chat Is No Longer Edge Exclusive With Chrome And Safari Versions Rolling Out
Microsoft will no longer force searchers to use the Edge browser in order to access Bing Chat, its GPT4-fueled AI chatbot. The company now lets you access Bing Chat in Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browser — with some caveats. All you need is visit Microsoft's Bing search engine and the AI chat system will be at your disposal.
First spotted by WindowsLatest, opening the Bing home page on Chrome or Safari now shows a pop-up announcing the arrival of Bing Chat in these browsers. So far, when users opened the Bing search interface in a third-party browser, the Chat option appeared at top, but clicking on it redirected users to install or use Edge in order to converse with the chatbot. Now, doing so opens the dialogue page where you can enter your text prompt and get answers from Bing Chat.
Notably, you can also use other forms of input prompts. Earlier in July 2023, Microsoft announced that Bing Chat can now process images as the input prompt and add a relevant text query with it to find answers. This capability comes to life courtesy of the GPT-4 update, which added multiple-modal capability to the AI chatbot.
Dropping the guardrails to win over users
Bing Chat on Chrome and Safari comes with a few limitations. First, you can only enter prompts worth 2,000 words, while Edge allows you to go all the way up to 4,000 words. That's still not the best in the game, though. Anthropic's Claude 2 can process entire novels within a minute and provide answers based on it.
Another limitation is that you can only ask five questions per conversation if you are using Bing Chat in Chrome or Safari. In Edge, you can ask as many as 30 questions before the conversation resets. The only saving grace is that Bing Chat on Chrome or Safari won't ask you to sign up with a Microsoft account first before serving answers to your burning questions.
It looks like Bing Chat's rollout in Chrome and Safari is being done in a phased manner to certain users, starting with the U.S. It's also worth noting that this third-party browser release is limited to the desktop format, as trying to replicate the same process on a mobile browser promptly redirects you to install Edge browser from the App Store or Google Play Store.