Copilot is now Microsoft’s peanut-butter cup

“You’ve got peanut butter in my chocolate! You’ve got chocolate in my peanut butter!”

A somewhat obscure Gen X reference, true. But that’s what’s going on with the most recent iteration of the Microsoft Copilot app within Windows.

Historically, Copilot has lurked within the various apps and services within Windows: in Office apps like Word and PowerPoint; providing helpful assistance with Copilot Vision as you navigate unfamiliar apps; and offering to summarize documents within Microsoft Edge. But Copilot also lives within Windows as its own, (ignored) standalone app. Can you guess what Microsoft has up its sleeve? In a word, bloat.

The Copilot app is now adding browser capabilities, which will, if needed, open an integrated browser window as a sidebar to the main Copilot app. Microsoft positions it as a sandbox of sorts: in this context, Copilot will only have access to the tabs you open in that conversation, though it will save those tabs in the context of the conversation. Returning to that chat will mean opening up those tabs again.

So: Edge now has Copilot inside, and Copilot now has Edge inside. Fortunately, it’s all confined to the Insider (beta) versions of Copilot for now, specifically app version 146.0.3856.39 and higher. They’re rolling out to all Insider channels, however. But Microsoft isn’t delivering the same bits to everyone.

“As part of this update, some features like Podcasts and Study and Learn mode from Copilot.com are getting added, while others may be pulled back while we iterate on the experience,” Microsoft said.

A recent report from SimilarWeb claims that Copilot website usage (not the app) is at 1.1 percent of AI market share, behind ChatGPT at 64.5 percent and Gemini at 21 percent. Microsoft needs to do something to increase Copilot app usage. Will these be the two great tastes that go great together?