Microsoft is stuffing pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows again
www.theverge.com
The pop-ups are back after a brief pause.

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

    • The Pantser@lemmy.worldEnglish
      112·
      3 months ago

      USA companies don’t give a shit about antitrust anymore. Look at Amazon and Apple, the only places they get bit for their behavior are the European countries.

      • AProfessional@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        3 months ago

        the only places they get bit for their behavior are the European countries.

        Even then Apple has been barely bothered. The DMA is the first big test, Apple has clearly not complied in spirit, lets see if that’s allowed and nothing changes.

    • thantik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      38·
      3 months ago

      Yes but Microsoft learned once you start lining the pockets of the right people, nothing happens to you!

    • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.worldEnglish
      27·
      3 months ago

      Yeah, but when they get fined 0.004% of their revenue with each violation then it’s hardly even worth worrying about. Legal penalties are basically minor business expenses to these companies - like buying toilet paper for the office bathrooms.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      24·
      3 months ago

      Isn’t that a textbook antitrust violation?

      Apparently not. Google is nagging Edge users who visit Google services since years to switch to their “secure web browser with frequent updates” (implying that Edge doesn’t get any, despite being the same Chromium thing as Chrome). (Firefox is exempt because FF defaults to Google Search)

    • Optional@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      3 months ago

      BWAHAHAhahahahaaaaaa! Aiiigh! Oh! Oh man. snif. Haha ha. Ahhhhhh fuck.

      Yes. But micro$oft was declared a monopoly 20+ years ago and . . gestures to everything

      what, you want reform? It didn’t have the votes.

    • Pohl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

      Trust is when two or more companies secretly collude against the interest of customers. That is what you would find in a textbook anyway. This is more an abuse of monopoly.

  • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    84·
    3 months ago

    I looked at the links in the source and they’re Windows popups, not Chrome injections. Shitty reporting from the verge.

      • deranger@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        18·
        3 months ago

        Still incorrect, I believe. The pop ups are from Windows. They’re not doing anything to Chrome. Maybe that’s a pedantic technicality but it matters to me, and probably in a legal sense as well.

        Microsoft has plenty of shitty practices to report on, including the browser pop ups in windows. There’s no need to lie for clicks. I dunno what the commotion about The Verge is you’re referring to, I’m just commenting on the headline.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          3 months ago

          They control your OS. Instead of just running the program you told it to, it’s checking what program you are running and then displaying a pop-up intended to make them more profit. Functionally, there isn’t really a difference when the OS can already do whatever injected code might want to do.

          It’s like if your bank is inserting flyers for their investment services into any safe deposit boxes that include stock certificates and arguing about whether they are picking your lock to get in or just opening a door in the back that gives them access to each box.

        • Aatube@kbin.melroy.org
          4·
          3 months ago

          Hmm, to me stuffing doesn’t sound like they’re changing Chrome, but I get your point.

          Edit: oh shoot it’s the first sentence

          • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
            13·
            3 months ago

            It absolutely does?

            Stuffing means cramming something into another thing.

            Microsoft is stuffing pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows again

            That’s a blatant lie. Nothing is getting injected/stuffed/whatever synonym-ed into Chrome. It’s a Windows popup.

            It’s still a textbook abuse of dominant market position, and therefore illegal, so there’s no need for the article to lie and hand MS and their fans the opportunity to dismiss this reporting as being fake news, which it essentially is.

    • UnityDevice@startrek.websiteEnglish
      15·
      3 months ago

      They’re doing this at the OS level, so Firefox can’t protect you from that, the issue is with Windows. They could do the same to Firefox, they just don’t bother.

    • CaptKoala@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      3 months ago

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

      • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
        14·
        3 months ago
        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
        • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
          10·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
              2·
              3 months ago

              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@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                3 months ago

                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@feddit.deEnglish
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            3 months ago

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

            • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
              3·
              3 months ago

              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@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                3 months ago

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

                • Pantherina@feddit.deEnglish
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            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.

              • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4·
                3 months ago

                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

            • Mojeek@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              3 months ago

              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@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                3 months ago

                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!

        • joe_jowhat@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          3 months ago

          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.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      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.

  • qx128@lemmy.worldEnglish
    39·
    3 months ago

    laughs in Linux desktop

    Why do people continue to put up with this? I don’t get any ads or bloatware like “Paint 3D” or “X Box” on Linux Mint. And Linux desktops are so easy to use now! Blows my mind that people tolerate these antics from Microsoft.

    • magnetosphere@fedia.io
      9·
      3 months ago

      Because Linux has a terrible reputation and has no PR or advertising. People think Linux is overly complicated, has WAY too many distributions to choose from, and there’s absolutely no tech support besides what you can find geeks arguing about on a forum.

      • elshandra@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        3 months ago

        Community support is a thing, it’s not the lack of support that’s to blame here - have you ever used Microsoft support? Linux support is much more accessible even.

        A lot of the blame here, is Microsoft’s clever marketing campaign providing windows to educational institutions - with support - for far below cost, in the early days when pc adoption was on the rise.

        Distribution saturation is a barrier to entry and focused support, and it is sometimes more complicated to install and repair. Sometimes it’s easier to repair, because windows is too busy trying to hide its internals from you.

        It’s usually easier to support a remote IT-illiterate person using Linux, by comparison to windows, today.

        e: I guess to be fair, if you factored in community support for windows, your options open up quite a lot. I was more thinking about my own interactions with their support. But enterprise support/problems are not the same as personal ones.

      • FlihpFlorp@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        People think Linux is overly complicated, has WAY too many distributions to choose from, and there’s absolutely no tech support besides what you can find geeks arguing about on a forum.

        As someone who has always used windows since troubleshooting doesn’t sound like a good time for me, you have perfectly hit the nail on the head

        It’s the “I’m in this photo and I don’t like it” meme

    • Defaced@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Only reason I still have windows is for Geforce now. Unfortunately the web browser version doesn’t support 1440p 120fps and it’s stuck using h.264 on Linux with AMD. The good thing is that once it’s setup I don’t really need to interact with Windows much since I literally open GFN and discord and that’s pretty much it.

  • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    37·
    3 months ago

    These latest prompts look like malware

    Are malware.

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

    • Joe Cool@lemmy.mlEnglish
      11·
      3 months ago

      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@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      3 months ago

      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.)

      • RatBin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        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.

      • BradleyUffner@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

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

  • flop_leash_973@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • Zink@pawb.socialEnglish
    27·
    3 months ago

    Good, let these two horrible browsers fill eachother with bloat until they both fall out.

  • KISSmyOS@feddit.deEnglish
    22·
    3 months ago

    “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@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      3 months ago

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

  • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.todayEnglish
    14·
    3 months ago

    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.