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I have a local Apache webserver set up and I was accessing my site via Microsoft Edge. I have the hosts file and Apache's VirtualHosts set up to let me access http://app.local.tld (this points to 127.0.0.1).

In Edge's developer tools, I saw the following request when loading my page:

http://ieonline.microsoft.com/suggestions/ie/dominantimages?qry=url:http://app.local.tld

This returned an XML response:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<dominantimageresponse xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Search/2013/dominantimage">
    <url>http://app.local.tld</url>
    <imagedata></imagedata>
</dominantimageresponse>

What is this request/response for? What is Edge asking Microsoft for about the URL I am going to? http://app.local.tld only exists on my machine, so it's obviously not useful to them.

EDIT: I also see a request to

https://t.urs.microsoft.com/urstelemetry.asmx?MSTel-Client-Key=SOME_KEY

Some searching revealed this URL may be for "SmartScreen", so I think this is unrelated.

EDIT 2: Might dominantimages be for Edge's "live tile" or "top sites"? When I change the URL in the query to http://microsoft.com, I get some more data back.

http://ieonline.microsoft.com/suggestions/ie/dominantimages?qry=url:http://microsoft.com

This gives:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<dominantimageresponse xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/Search/2013/dominantimage">
    <url>http://microsoft.com</url>
    <imagedata>{},{0|0|2.09999990463|http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f5/Microsoft_logo_and_wordmark.svg/220px-Microsoft_logo_and_wordmark.svg.png^0|0|0.899999976158|http://c.s-microsoft.com/en-us/CMSImages/BTS_StoreYellow_0715_768x768_EN_US.jpg?version=0746beba-3539-1599-1ea6-ae1ce691fa15^0|0|0.600000023842|https://assets.onestore.ms/cdnfiles/onestorerolling-1508-24008/shell/v2_5/images/logo/microsoft.png}</imagedata>
</dominantimageresponse>
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  • Your guess is most likely the answer - it probably asks the MS server for an image representation of the site for used in the live tile or top sites page.
    – Chin
    Aug 28, 2015 at 19:09
  • @Chin: Yeah, that makes sense.
    – gen_Eric
    Aug 28, 2015 at 19:13
  • It's kinda funny that Microsoft uses Wikipedia for its own logo.
    – gen_Eric
    Aug 28, 2015 at 19:18
  • The fact that it uses a Wikipedia image makes it sound to me like it's more likely related to Cortana/Bing Search. Also notice the XML schema reference contains the word "Search" and that the URL contains the word "suggestions."
    – Josiah Keller
    Oct 22, 2015 at 16:04
  • 1
    That privacy statement does mention pinning. So that's probably what it is, then.
    – Josiah Keller
    Oct 22, 2015 at 17:12

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