Microsoft opens Bing to everyone, adds chat history and plugins

Three months ago, getting access to Microsoft's AI-powered search felt like waiting in an endless digital line. Today, Microsoft tore down the velvet rope.

The company announced that the new Bing is officially in Open Preview, ditching the waitlist entirely. Anyone with a Microsoft Account can now jump in and use it.

The numbers behind the first 90 days are staggering. Users logged over half a billion chats and created more than 200 million images via Bing Image Creator. Bing's daily active users crossed 100 million, while daily mobile app installs jumped fourfold, propelling Edge to its eighth straight quarter of browser market share growth.

Making search visual and persistent

Microsoft wants to move search way past boring walls of text. Because humans process visuals roughly 60,000 times faster than text, Bing Chat is adding richer answers with charts, graphs, and refined formatting.

Bing Image Creator is also expanding to over 100 languages, letting users generate art in their native tongue. Multimodal capabilities are coming next, allowing users to upload images directly into chat to search the web.

Productivity is getting a major overhaul too. Chat history is finally rolling out, letting users resume old sessions. Clicking a search link will dock the active chat to the Edge sidebar so you can keep asking questions while reading the page. Edge will also improve long-form PDF summarization and introduce Edge actions to trigger external tasks, like finding and playing a movie directly.

From a search engine to an app platform

Perhaps the biggest announcement is that Bing is opening up to third-party developer plugins, building on the same ecosystem standard as OpenAI.

Instead of just returning blue links, Bing will soon take direct actions on queries. A dinner recommendation chat can tap into OpenTable to book a table on the spot. Complex scientific calculations can be handled directly by Wolfram|Alpha inside the chat window. More details are slated for the upcoming Microsoft Build conference.

Why it matters

For regular users, dropping the waitlist turns Bing from a novel preview into an immediate, everyday utility. Features like PDF summaries in the sidebar, persistent context, and direct exports into Word solve real workflow headaches today without extra subscription fees.

For the industry, Microsoft is aggressively dialing up the heat on Google. By turning the search bar into an action engine backed by GPT-4 and shared OpenAI plugins, Microsoft is trying to rewrite the distribution layer of the internet before competitors can react.

We think turning Bing into a platform is the smartest move Microsoft has made in search in decades. The real challenge, however, will be keeping web publishers happy when the browser answers and executes tasks without users ever visiting third-party sites.