Microsoft Is Nagging Its Users To Switch To Bing, Again

Microsoft Is Nagging Its Users To Switch To Bing, Again

Ah… the never-ending tale of Microsoft’s services and its borderline malware-like behaviors. In this latest episode of Microsoft’s shenanigans, the company is targeting Google Chrome users in particular, persuading users to use its search engine instead. Mind you, similar things have happened before.

As reported by The Verge, users on Reddit have discovered this unwelcomed guest in the form of a new pop-up for Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The prompt advertise Bing and the AI-powered chatbot, and if you agree to the prompt, it’ll change the default search engine to Bing and install “Bing Service” – which is a Chrome extension named Bing Search.

Due to Chrome’s protections against “unauthorized” search engine changes, you will of course be prompted again by Chrome itself to confirm the change. But here, it gets even better – as Engadget noted, a warning from Windows will appear below that says “Wait – don’t change it back! If you do, you’ll turn off Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome and lose access to Bing Al with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3. Select Keep it to stay with Microsoft Bing.”

In a statement provided to The Verge, the company’s director of communications Caitlin Roulston says: “This is a one-time notification giving people the choice to set Bing as their default search engine on Chrome. We value providing our customers with choice, so there is an option to dismiss the notification.” Surely there have to be better ways about it, Microsoft?

So this is where we are today when it comes to the state of the Internet – two technology supergiants trying to gain any advantage wherever possible to make sure you stay on their services. It’s saddening, given that this is the kind of stuff that we originally aimed to eradicate due to how bad popups and browser hijacking had become.

Pokdepinion: Oh my god.