[kllrnohj]

If you tap on a search result in "ok google" it'll launch in your default browser, not necessarily chrome.

The forced launch into Edge is the only kinda suspect thing here. Of course the voice goes through each companies respective search engines, they kinda have to to work unless there's some standard for voice queries I'm not aware of. But forcing it to launch in Edge is questionable since there's nothing special there.

[grahamburger]

Google Now actually just changed this so that it always launches in Chrome (like in the last couple of days.) You can launch it in your default browser through the hamburger menu after launching in Chrome. Pretty annoying actually - if anyone knows if it can be changed I'd love to change back. I rely on my search results opening in Firefox so that they get synced with my history and I can pull them up quickly from any device.

EDIT: Here it is on the 'What's New' list from the play store: http://imgur.com/6UGN2Dz they call it 'Open inside the app' but it's a chrome web view.

[thomasjames]

Yes, it is very unfortunate. This first started happening yesterday (for me), and I was kind of bummed that it didn't open in Firefox like it used to. It is stuff like this that lends credence to the EU's issues with Google. I am not sure why they feel it is worth it to just put stumbling blocks to user choice like this at every possible chance.

[SEMW]

Settings -> accounts & privacy -> toggle "open web pages in app"

[gohrt]

There's no user-controlled setting for that. Send in-app feedback to complain.

[biot]

  > Of course the voice goes through each companies respective
  > search engines, they kinda have to to work unless there's
  > some standard for voice queries I'm not aware of.

There is. Convert the voice query to text, then send the resulting text to the user's preferred search engine.

[kllrnohj]

Does not trigger the same (and spoken) response that at least Siri and "Ok Google" do.

And there are plenty of commands that don't result in a normal search at all, such as "ok google, what song is playing?" or "ok google, when is my next flight?"

[biot]

Of course, but both fall back to a plain old web search when the request can't be processed specially. In those cases, why not fall back to your search engine of choice?

[cbr]

You get better transcriptions and better search results if you give your search backend a probability-weighted list of possible transcriptions and let it combine that with what it thinks you might be trying to search for given the context it has for you.

[0x0]

As an end-user I'd like to choose to use my preferred search engine with a singular voice-to-text query, rather than an array of possible voice-to-text-queries, even if it means losing context...

[TheSoftwareGuy]

As another end-user I have the opposite opinion.

[WorldMaker]

Edge already has Cortana-specific browser chrome. (Some restaurant pages, for example, will light up Cortana's halo in the address bar and clicking that will open a Cortana sidebar full of action cards like "Create a Reservation".) It's not surprising that the plans are to continue adding Cortana functionality in Edge, and to work to make that hand-off between "Taskbar Cortana" and "Edge Cortana" as seamless as possible.

Theoretically they could probably leverage extensions to other browsers, but making sure users had those extensions installed and handing off to those extensions would presumably be A) a bunch of additional work for the teams involved, and B) threaten to show a bunch of seams between the application boundaries, hurting the suspension of disbelief that Cortana is an "individual" working in our favor, potentially weakening Cortana in the public's eyes.

[kllrnohj]

So this is ActiveX v2 then? It's not just loading a URL with plain html5 on the other end?

[WorldMaker]

If anything it's most closely akin to the old Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox Sidebar efforts:

http://edmullen.net/mozilla/moz_sidebar.php http://edmullen.net/mozilla/images/moz_shot_05.jpg

It's loading HTML (and maybe XAML, like Firefox allowed XUL) into a sidebar that may interact with the page it's pulled up alongside.

[jimbobimbo]

If it doesn't require restaurant pages implement something on their end - no, it's not "ActiveX v2".