Microsoft is pushing the new Chromium-based Edge browser to people in ways that sometimes aren’t compatible with its users. Microsoft has been promoting its full features or how it can compete with the big boys, like Google’s Chrome browser, and Edge appears to be suffering from fraudulent add-ons.

Google and Mozilla have fought for years to prevent abusive or malicious browser extensions from infiltrating official stores, and Microsoft is now fighting this battle.

And a bunch of fake versions of the popular Edge browser add-ons are starting to appear, as are other browsers. There are many add-ons and add-ons available for the browser, even though they no longer have the status they were years ago.

Some of these add-ons provide additional convenience, such as picture-in-picture placement for sites that do not offer this feature. Other additional functions promise to provide security, by adding a VPN to your browser.

Given that these add-ons exploit your web browser and your browsing activities, it has become an ideal hacking and snooping tool, especially since it can easily trick users into installing it.

This is easiest when plugins use a popular or trusted brand name while redirecting searches to another site, and search engine redirects are usually part of a scheme to generate fraudulent revenue.

Reports indicate that add-ons do nothing but hijack legitimate searches, but the privileges they require offer the potential to do much worse. One of the biggest problems with browser add-ons is the almost non-existent checking process.

The Chrome Web Store limits the access of add-ons, but anyone can still submit add-ons to the Chrome Web Store or Edge Web Store, and they can also submit them under false names.

Microsoft has removed these fake add-ons at the moment, but it is only a matter of time before they appear again unless the software giant can completely fix the add-on problem.