Despite its popularity, Microsoft has decided to kill off its 365 browser extension for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. It’s currently unclear what the company will be replacing the extension with (if anything at this point).
In a support document, the company announced that it will be retiring the Microsoft 365 browser extension. According to the document, the extension will no longer receive any support from the company after January 15, 2024.
The Microsoft 365 browser extension (formerly named Office browser extension) is a free extension available on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome that gives you access to your Microsoft 365 apps and documents on the web. This extension will reach retirement and end of support on January 15th, 2024.
In addition to ending support, Microsoft will also pull the extension from the Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome web stores so, if you want to get your hands on it, you better download it soon.
After this date, the extension will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes, or technical support. The Microsoft 365 browser extension will also be removed from Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome web stores as an extension add-on.
The Microsoft 365 extension allowed users to have shortcut access to Microsoft’s most popular apps as well as a user’s most recent documents. According to a report from The Verge, the extension was quite popular with over 6 million users on Chrome and over 4 million users on Edge.
Of course, those kinds of numbers aren’t much to a company like Microsoft, which normally trades in billions of users — not millions. It’s currently unclear if the company plans to replace the 365 extension with something else in the future — most likely, we could see the company build an extension for Microsoft Copilot. However, that would only be useful for Chrome since Copilot is already heavily integrated into the Edge browser.
If you want to get ahead of the game and remove the Microsoft 365 extension from Chrome or Edge before Microsoft stops supporting it, the company has outlined the steps you need to take in the support document. That might be a good idea since — not only will the extension lose any bug fixes or enhancements — it will no longer receive security updates as well.
