Microsoft Are Literally Paying People To Use Bing

Last week, we lost a hero. A true soldier, a resilient veteran, which never stopped fighting for what it believed in - taking half an hour to load emails. I’m talking about Internet Explorer, of course, which after almost 27 years of service, made its last searches a few days ago, leaving an entire generation of elderly internet users who never upgrade their computer totally lost.

Even before its final goodbye, though, poor ol’ Explorer was gradually replaced by Microsoft Edge - it was already the default browser for Windows 11 even before all this. Now, I’d totally understand if out of protest for our fallen friend, many people out there would choose to use a different browser to Edge altogether. That would be a very normal thing to do. Well, Microsoft are doing their best to make sure you don’t do that, as they’re actually offering a paid reward for anyone who sticks with it.

Check out the incredible building process of this water-cooled PC (I doubt this one had Internet Explorer as its browser even before it got killed off)

As highlighted by u/TrueTech0 over on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit, users are apparently being offered 330 Minecoins (yes, really) for searching with Bing on Microsoft Edge for five days. When I say Minecoins, I don’t mean some bizarre new cryptocurrency (as much as it does sound like one), I’m on about the currency you can use within Minecraft to buy stuff from the Marketplace, like skins, worlds and texture packs.

So, how much does that actually equate to in real money? Browsing the Microsoft Store, the minimum amount of Minecoins it seems you can buy in the first place is 700, and that’ll cost you a tidy £5.75 (about $7). Given that this reward offers less than half of that, we can comfortably say you’re going to be getting around £2.50 ($3) worth of Minecoins if you decide to cave to the terms. Yay?

So, whether or not you think that’s worth it is entirely up to you. It’ll still probably buy you a nice new Minecraft skin, if that’s important to you. I personally won’t forgive Edge so easily for its murderous crimes.