Bing AI Chat Is Coming To Third-Party Mobile Browsers, But There's A Catch
Microsoft's Bing search engine has been making some impressive strides in the last few months, having introduced its AI-bolstered search algorithm back in February. Not only has Bing AI been a boon to the engine's ability to find things, but it's also placed it on the proverbial map of AI developments; serving as both a chatbot for users to gab with, and an image-generation tool.
Throughout all of this, however, Bing AI has remained steadfastly exclusive to Microsoft's Edge internet browser, which has also seen some decent growth. After all this time in the oven, Bing may finally make the leap to other browsers — at least partially.
On the Microsoft Bing Blog today, the company made a post celebrating Bing AI's six-month anniversary, highlighting some of the most promising features that have resulted from the AI switchover: including the Bing Image Creator, chat history, Windows Copilot, and Swiftkey.
The post also detailed some of Bing's new and upcoming features. These new features include multimodal visual search, the work-centric Bing Chat Enterprise, and an official dark mode, but the most interesting of the features is the arrival of third-party browser support.
Available elsewhere, best on Edge
Microsoft revealed that it will soon be bringing Bing support to third-party browsers like Firefox and Google Chrome on both web and mobile devices in the near future, though it did not divulge a specific release date.
Microsoft hopes that bringing Bing outside of the Edge browser will help to broaden the engine's audience and influence. It also pledged to support cross-browser development and optimization, ensuring you can get the most out of Bing even if you use different browsers across different devices.
"With so many new, useful features now a part of Bing, we're excited to announce you can start experiencing the new AI-powered Bing in third-party browsers on web and mobile soon," Microsoft's statement reads. "This next step in the journey allows Bing to showcase the incredible value of summarized answers, image creation and more, to a broader array of people."
However, Microsoft conspicuously noted that while it fully intends to bring Bing to other browsers, the engine will maintain the most possible functionality while used on its home turf: Microsoft Edge. Several of Bing's more advanced features will be exclusive to the Edge browser, including chat history, longer conversations, and other features that Microsoft did not specify.