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

    • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
      141·
      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
        102·
        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
          22·
          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
            31·
            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
                13·
                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.

      • joe_jowhat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        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.

        • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12·
          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.

          • 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!

            • 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

                • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  3·
                  3 months ago

                  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