Re: Can anyone get Edge Copilot to work without logging in after July 2026?

On Tue, 7/28/2026 8:07 PM, Ant wrote:
> Same without using Edge. MS really want users to log in. :(
> 
> 
> In alt.comp.microsoft.windows Maria Sophia <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Can anyone get Edge Copilot to work without logging in after July 2026?
>>   https://copilot.microsoft.com/
> 
>> As of this month, whenever I use MS Edge to go to Copilot, no matter what
>> tricks I use, it wants me to immediately log into a mothership account.
> 
>> I can only find one trick that still works, and it only works in Edge.
>> But with no other browser can I get copilot to not ask for a login now.
> 
>> Q: Other than sidebar Copilot, did you Copilot in Edge just recently ask
>> for a login to a mothership account every time you go to it using Edge?
> 
>> NB: A separate thread on the Firefox ng shows nobody can do it there.
>>  Newsgroups: alt.comp.software.firefox
>>  Subject: Recently, did your Firefox stop using Microsoft Copilot in anonymous mode?
>>  Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:00:07 -0700
>>  Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> 

That's understandable, once you consider the attack surface
these projects offer to the not-so-honest public.

1) Commercial usage of a consumer test item.
   They also offer a commercial version, paid tokens, and they have
   to implement a usage counter to stop abuse. If you do enough free
   queries, I bet you'll get stopped eventually.

2) It's a lot like running a USENET News server without authentication,
   and then being surprised when the server is filled with sporge or a flood.
   Authentication makes it easier to track abuse or note abuse patterns.
   Like when Kimi is scraping your datacenter. Or OpenAI is attacking Huggingface.
   Or... you get the idea.

I don't particularly blame them for having some amount of tracking
on the activity.

You can always run a local model, if you don't like this. Scroll down, to the text section.

   https://lmstudio.ai/docs/app/system-requirements

Start with a small model, and see if the speed bothers you. I get 9.7 tokens per second
or so, as an output speed. The best machine you can buy, is estimated
to produce 3000 tokens per second, or 300x faster roughly. That's what
running locally (without a GPU...) buys you. Not all the machines Microsoft
runs, are even remotely that fast. They have experimented with inference
on "old beaters", less than optimal boxes. I've had a couple sessions
that seemed excessively slow. But that's what I expect them to do, is
calibrate the service. Sometimes the thinking stage is so fast, you
don't even know half the output tokens have already been emitted,
and you have to scroll down to see how much progress it has made.

And I don't do a lot of these local sessions. For this discussion thread,
I have done my fourth query, which was to write a C program, which it did.
I did not constrain the problem enough, for a practical output. The
problem is, I attempted to "type in a one-liner", and that's a mistake.

And this is a reminder about working style.

    Take a text editor. Prepare your query. Add guard statements and
    anti-cheat text. Think about all the holes that are left in the
    query. Spend ten minutes if you have to...

    Then, paste the paragraph of text, into the query box. Press
    the "Up Arrow" icon on the right of the pasted text, to start the query.

Preparing the query in an offline manner, helps you write better
queries. Which is important if you are paying for the tokens.
"If you shoot from the hip, you get shit for answers..."

   Paul