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Microsoft is once again injecting pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows in a bid to get people to switch to Bing

The software giant first introduced malware-like pop-up ads last year with a prompt that appeared over the top of other apps and windows. After pausing that notification to address “unintended behavior,” the pop-ups have returned again on Windows 10 and 11.

Windows users have reported seeing the new pop-up in recent days, advertising Bing AI and Microsoft’s Bing search engine inside Google Chrome. If you click yes to this prompt, then Microsoft will set Bing as the default search engine for Chrome. These latest prompts look like malware, and once again have Windows users asking if they are legit or nefarious. Microsoft has confirmed to The Verge that the pop-ups are genuine and should only appear once.

Every trick Microsoft pulled to make you browse Edge instead of Chrome

helpImTrappedOnline ,

malware like popup ads

What the difference between a virus and window? A virus is well maintained by its creator.

KISSmyOS ,

“We value providing our customers with choice, so there is an option to dismiss the notification.”

Thank you daddy Microsoft for still letting me click "no" on your invasive popup ad with a dark pattern to make me change my system settings.

joe_cool ,

I wonder what would happen if Chrome asked the user to replace Onedrive with Google Drive on startup.

DingoBilly ,

Use Windows on the daily and still have never seen these at all, on multiple computers as well.

Generally I'd agree it's shitty behaviour though.

decaria_nova ,

cough install Linux

Wiz ,

Strangely, I have not seen this on Firefox with Unlock Origin.

0x2d ,

they don't do it on firefox

Wiz ,

That's the point, my friend!

conciselyverbose ,

These latest prompts look like malware

Are malware.

The constant stream of this horseshit is why I abandoned Windows nonsense again.

joe_cool ,

If I continue to break the law with my car they will take it away.

MS should be forced to sell Bing+Edge as a separate entity.

Wes_Dev ,

Legitimately the only reason I still have a Windows 10 ISO and key sitting on my long term storage drive is because I fear that I may have to install it to use VR whenever I get a new kit.

Please Valve. Pretty please....

Actually, didn't Facebook buy the lens company Valve was donating to and working with to develop their new VR lens tech? I forgot about that. Another reason to hate Facebook. (I refuse to call it the M word.)

TheRedSpade ,

Before my PC died, my Index was working under Arch FWIW. Can't speak for other hardware though

Wes_Dev ,

😍

conciselyverbose ,

I still think it's wild that they just stole the name and bullied their way into keeping it and nothing bad happened.

EmperorHenry ,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

the only thing Bing is good for is for finding porn.

MrBusiness ,

Not so much anymore. Bing and google are pretty shit nowadays (for most any searches). I've been getting more accurate search results with duckduckgo, but I'm still looking for a search engine with better results.

31337 ,

Kagi is pretty good, but expensive. I like that listicles are put in their own small section so you can ignore them. You can boost, pin, demote, or block results from certain domains. You can create and quickly switch between domain list presets to search only specific sets of sites. The only thing I don't like is the exerpts below results don't bold what you're looking for like Google does.

PrettyFlyForAFatGuy ,

duckduckgo just uses bing on the backend doesnt it?

joe_cool ,

It does. I use yandex in my Firefox porn container now.

drawerair , (edited )

Duckduckgo –

We also maintain our own crawler (DuckDuckBot) and many indexes to support our results. Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing. Our focus is synthesizing all these sources to create a superior search experience.

I use Duckduckgo for pic searches. I can easily go to the link of the pic. On the other hand, Google takes me to the site containing the pic.

Another concern of mine re Google is –

Say I'm searching re a car. The search results are riddled with carmechanic.com, carexpert.com, moderncar.com, carstoday.com and others. Idk if those are legit. There's been a lot of misinformation on the Net so I've been careful.

EmperorHenry ,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

mullvad leta and brave search are pretty good about being private

Mullvad leta is only accessible by using the mullvad browser extension with mullvad VPN on the same device.

EmperorHenry ,
@EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

I have noticed that recently...meaning a few minutes before I typed this.

Google has sucked for a long time now and now bing isn't even good for finding porn anymore.

FiniteBanjo ,

Good, let them fight each other to the death. In the meantime, we need to make sure we're all on the same page for reviving anti-monopoly laws in the USA.

maniacalmanicmania ,
@maniacalmanicmania@aussie.zone avatar

https://aussie.zone/pictrs/image/bfe50831-5a78-43ba-b6e7-a11088026f4f.jpeg

Blue_Morpho ,

Years ago I would have been pissed. But Google has gotten so bad that I don't have a problem with MS annoying people to get off of Google.

drawerair ,

Chrome is worse now? What did you experience?

My main browser is Firefox. My secondary is Chrome. I'm still :) with Chrome as a secondary.

Blue_Morpho ,

Chrome is great if you stay in Google's ecosystem. But Google has been adding extensions for their own services at such a rate that it was the reason MS gave up and had to adopt Chromium for Edge.

Google has been doing embrace, extend and extinguish for years now.

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

Which means us Firefox users can have some popcorn 🍿

That is until they reach us. I hope they don't.

EdibleFriend ,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-13/firefox-maker-mozilla-is-cutting-60-jobs-after-naming-new-ceo

Someone from Airbnb and Ebay is running the show now. There is gonna be an enshitification speedrun on firefox coming.

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

I guess it's time to panic

EdibleFriend ,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

Firefox users were too smug. This is the universe knocking them down a peg.

Resol ,
@Resol@lemmy.world avatar

Kinda sad that they don't want us to be unique from them.

Wes_Dev ,

Well fuck.

flerp ,

Their tactics aside, copilot is very useful. It's helped me a ton on my education journey. Free and easy access to it on the desktop has been game changing for me.

RatBin ,

It is good but don't abuse it, they're adding it to office as well. Ai generated content is properly marked but it should come with a warning: use with caution. Actually gemini has that warning and google has a natural fear for the digital beast they helped build. Microsoft looked at it, instead, and decided that everyone needed to get all the ai in the world by the means of their products.

flerp ,

I use it because I have learning difficulties and it's nice to be able to ask question after question until I nail down the exact detail that I needed to be able to understand the concept I'm trying to learn. I'll take all the downvotes in the world for this because the benefit I've got from using the service far outweighs anything else.

RatBin ,

I also use that when I'm overwhelmed by the amount of materials I have to write down. Indeed, it's rather good for that purpose.

flop_leash_973 ,

Nothing turns me off of a product or service like the maker begging and trying to trick me into using their wares. Once they start doing that I will usually end up using technically inferior things to avoid them a lot of the time.

Jocker ,

Microsoft convinced me to switch... to Linux

CaptKoala ,

Nearing 6mo since I booted into my windows drive (been a daily user since 98)

Suavevillain ,
@Suavevillain@lemmy.world avatar

Microsoft continues to make me thankful for switching to Linux. It is refreshing to be able to control your computer experience.

Dehydrated ,

Easy Solution: Linux, Firefox/LibreWolf, DuckDuckGo

Fuck Microsoft!

joe_jowhat ,

Duckduckgo once allowed trackers from Microsoft

Source: www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N3792HE

Dehydrated ,
  1. This only applies to the mobile app
  2. They stopped doing this in 2022
  3. LibreWolf comes with uBlock Origin preinstalled, which blocks all sorts of ads, trackers and other malicious JavaScript
joe_jowhat ,

I have nothing to do with Librewolf at all. Don't confuse the two. I just said what Duckduckgo did with trackers based on a search agreement with Microsoft. BTW, this issue was initially exposed by others, not Duckduckgo itself.

spraynpray ,

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Dehydrated ,

    Suggest a better alternative then. Startpage, Mullvad Leta and Whoogle are just Google proxies (and Whoogle is pretty unreliable), SearX, SearXNG and 4get are also just proxies for multiple search engines. There are no good independent search engiens, Brave Search sucks because it's made by Brave, a company notorious for pushing weird NFT and Blockchain shit, Mojeek has pretty bad search results and Kagi requires an account, and only allows 100 searches.

    spraynpray ,

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Dehydrated ,

    And DDG is just a proxy for Bing following that logic. I’d choose those three over DDG.

    Yeah, but if the alternatives aren't better, why not just use DDG?

    Making a new account every 100 searches should be an option (albeit a somewhat tedious one), no?

    That ain't a great solution either

    spraynpray ,

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Dehydrated ,

    Tell me which of the options I listed you would use.

    • Startpage is owned by an advertising company
    • Mullvad Leta is only available to Mullvad VPN customers
    • Brave does a whole bunch of shady stuff, e.g. installing VPN services on people's computers, although they never asked for it

    The other options aren't good either

    spraynpray ,

    [Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

    •
    Dehydrated ,

    Never heard of it.

    https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/6/20/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-search-engine-used-in-the-mullvad-browser

    It's pretty neat and Mullvad is a very privacy-focused company with a great track record. They released their search engine (which is a Google proxy) together with their own browser, which is based on the Tor Browser and developed together with the Tor Project.

    SearXNG and 4get is what I recommend for privacy. They get their results from other search engines but those won’t be able to trace the query back to you. Also, it’s open source and everyone can set up their own instance so there is no incentive to generate profit from your data.

    I tried to use 4get as a DDG proxy, all the instances I tried kept getting blocked by DuckDuckGo. It wasn't a great experience. I also tried SearX and SearXNG many times, I always keep coming back to DuckDuckGo, because it just works and it gives me decent results. With SearX, I often had trouble finding relevant results. I tried various options and different search engine backends in SearXNG, but I never really liked it. DDG is definitely far from perfect, but so are the other options, and I think DDG is the best and easiest to use for less technical users.

    bigMouthCommie ,
    @bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social avatar

    >Brave, a company notorious for pushing weird NFT and Blockchain shit,

    what nft shit?

    Dehydrated ,

    https://brave.com/category/web3-crypto-nfts/

    Mojeek ,
    @Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

    sorry to hear that; if you are using us any point in the future and want to flag this, we have a "submit feedback" button on pages, this is a really useful thing to do for us, as it helps us to identify results which are not so good :D

    Dehydrated , (edited )

    I would love to switch away from DuckDuckGo, and I would be very happy if Mojeek was a viable alternative. I'll try using it for some time and I will report any issues I encounter with the search. Btw it's great that you're on the Fediverse!

    Mojeek ,
    @Mojeek@lemmy.ml avatar

    thanks a lot in advance, and fedi is where it's at ! 💯

    Pantherina , (edited )

    Ublock Origin does not block "malicious Javascript" reliably. You need NoScript for that, and a opt-in approach. Block everything, unblock what you need, hope its not malicious.

    graeghos_714 ,

    I also run disabling addons for java script and flash as well as an overlay remover in Firefox

    Pantherina ,

    Flash should be possible to disable about:config as its legacy technology.

    Could you explain the overlay remover?

    Noscript is the only good addon for blocking javascript and allowing only some parts for specific origins.

    graeghos_714 ,

    Those pop up pages that prevent you from seeing the underlying page. It doesn't happen as often anymore but it's nice to have a way to remove them

    Pantherina ,

    That probably is a Ublock origin filterlist. Did you ever open UBOs settings? Try to not use too many, too many lists increase RAM and CPU usage and are all using badness enumeration so they will be 80% duplicates.

    I dont know if UBO deduplicates them (removes duplicates), that would make sense.

    Dnn ,

    While I actually do that, you cannot seriously recommend it to anyone. Hardly any site works without Javascript nowadays.

    Pantherina ,

    Yes thats why you have the button to click on. I also need to allowlist basically every site I visit.

    There should be some way to share such a list, to reduce the manual work.

    I highly recommend manually enabling Javascript.

    Dnn ,

    Sometimes it's great. If people complain about paywalls, for example, and you didn't even see the pop-up.

    Pantherina ,

    And sometimes it prevents sites from working, because paywalls that are avoidable by blocking the cover are deprecated and nowadays real solutions are used. This means such size will just break.

    Ublock can also remove overlays, and I am sure it you add more lists they will be blocked by default.

    Having less code run in your browser is always recommended.

    Dehydrated ,

    uBO can be set up to block all JS by default, allowing you to manually whitelist each script. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode

    Squizzy ,

    Ddg has content bubbles and tracking that you can stop.

    Turn off location and you will still get results relevant to your area filling the page.

    callmepk ,
    @callmepk@lemmy.world avatar

    “wE VAlue prOviDING oUR CuStomERs With CHOice, So THerE IS An OPtIoN to DisMiss tHE NOTiFiCATiON” - Microsoft responding to Windows Latest regarding this

    jkrtn ,

    I don't understand why anyone uses Windows.

    Murdoc ,

    "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."
    😉

    RatBin ,

    Because it's the most used system in the world and most programs run on Windows? Why wouldn't the average user use it when it comes with the machine and it's rather easy to set up.

    TwinTusks ,
    @TwinTusks@bitforged.space avatar

    Work, proprietary software runs shit on linux.

    BradleyUffner ,

    Because some people don't want to screw around with bash commands that look like Cthulhu incantations, and they can't afford a Mac.

    Adrien_0715 , (edited )
    @Adrien_0715@lemmy.ml avatar

    Laughs in Brave and Librewolf

    0x2d ,

    librefox???

    Adrien_0715 ,
    @Adrien_0715@lemmy.ml avatar

    Sorry, my bad. LibreWolf.

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