I just got this popup while playing New vegas. I don’t even use chrome, i’ve switched to firefox. How can this be allowed? Also, this is Win10
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If governments actually gave a fuck about antitrust anymore, it would be. 20-ish years ago, they dragged Microsoft to court over simply bundling IE with Windows. It didn’t even constantly nag you to set as default; just the fact that it was bundled at all was enough to make it into the sights of regulators.
Microsoft clearly uses dark patterns and FUD to lure you into using Bing.
As long as they’re using legal loopholes (or downright do not care because they have enough money to pay any fines) you cannot do anything against it except not using their OS.
I stopped using outlook entirely for this behaviour. Outlook would embed a bing search in your long press menu on android.
What kind of long press menu? I have it installed but don’t have any such menu.
Highlight some text in your browser or an app
Yea I don’t see it
If you press the 3dots does it show in a list?
I don’t have whatever other apps are showing in that list so it was showing up first
This is all I have.
Oh God, that was so annoying! Once I realized which app had added that, I uninstalled it with alacrity. I have to use Outlook for my job, but that doesn’t mean I’ll use the mobile version ever again. And the web-based one actually works fine on Mobile devices.
Yeah absolute pisstake. I’ve moved to Proton Mail and forward any left to transfer emails and use the outlook lite app to manage it, it’s actually not that bad.
Ironic, because I used to use Bing (over Google) and all this kind of bullshit - especially aggressively pushing their chat bot - pushed me away (to DDG).
I mean, it depends on your design of the fines. If you ask for a days revenue per day of violation, this stuff will never happen again (since this is no mistake, it is totally fair price). A month of this and their yearly profit is in the government hand.
Maybe I’m missing something, but why would this be illegal?
Anti consumer and anti competitive. Using their position as the OS to bug the living shit out of you to use their services
Anti consumer and anti competitive.
I’m not so sure how it’s either of those things. I mean yeah, it’s annoying (especially if it’s popping up while you’re playing a game), but I don’t feel like it’s crossing either of these lines. If you click “Don’t switch”, it goes away, and it’s not changing anything without your permission. I’ve never seen it pop up again on my devices. I forget where in the settings it would be, but I seem to recall there being an option to disable suggestions like this, as well (although an argument could be made that this should be opt-in instead of opt-out).
I know this community has a (largely justified) hate-boner for big tech companies, but not every annoyance is a crime. If anything, I’m just glad to see that they’re at least respecting the user’s consent these days; in the before times, Microsoft would just revert all your shit to what they wanted, whether you liked it or not, permission be damned. I lost track of how many WinXP updates would reinstall that Bing Bar (or MSN or whatever they called it back then) without asking me.
Unless there’s another angle that I’m not seeing, I don’t see how this is that much of a problem. If anything, it’s a good advertisement for Linux, though.
I think this sentiment come from the long history of Microsoft repeatedly breaking and then failing to address antitrust requests. At this point people just assume bas faith.
I remember maybe a decade ago how it seemed a big deal anytime they used their OS monopoly to fuck with 3rd parties alternatives. But yeah, I don’t think every popup and annoyance is a crime. There’s a fine line they walk to still push their first-party garbage.
It’s about it being annoying or not. Microsoft is in a market position where they can leverage their different departments to heavily upsell you on other services. They have an unfair advantage that shifts the entire market to their favor, thus making it hard for any competitor to keep up or even enter the market.
E.g. they use every service / product they have to integrate Bing, they artificially limit the use of their chat bot to Microsoft Edge, they show Bing advertisements when you visit their competitors sites, they allow you to use Teams for free under certain conditions (if you already bought other products), they use their foot in the door with Microsoft Office / Windows go upsell you on Azure, …, Game Pass, …
I can go on and on. Some of them aren’t necessarily bad on their own. Some are. It paints a pattern of what Microsoft used to be. They actively used their position to try and create market conditions that would break their competitors or make it at least hard for them to even compete. About 15 years ago a lot of folks believed Microsoft had changed and were playing fair (in certain bounds), they invested a lot into open source and were generally a more friendly company. What we are currently witnessing is them going back to their old ways of doing things. Slowly tying everything back together. Probably under the assumption that this time the governments are sleeping and not really regulating it anymore. A lot of that is happening in the somewhat non-regulated cloud market anyways.
Anticompetitive is a matter of antitrust law. Microsoft doesn’t currently have a monopoly on operating systems in the way they did 25 years ago.
Looking online in January they had a 74% share of desktops.
Linux is certainly dominating in the cloud but that doesn’t really make much difference here.
74% market share for desktop OS is actually a lot less than I thought. Guess macOS had a solid comeback
For desktop and laptop computers, Microsoft’s Windows is the most used at 69%, followed by Apple’s macOS at 17%, and Google’s ChromeOS at 3.2% (in the US up to 8.0%), and desktop Linux at 2.9%. In addition, 5% is attributed to “unknown” operating systems - which are likely forms of BSD or obscure varieties of Linux.[4]
From Wikipedia. Not sure when the numbers are from exactly.
Apple has been slowly growing for years. Google took a little with their Chromebooks but they never really took off. Linux continues to grow steadily but is still pretty rare in desktop environments.
Just way for the year of the Linux desktop baby!Any second now, any second
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it’s also notable that Microsoft has no realistic mobile OS of their own, and a huge amount of what used to be done on a desktop OS is now on mobile. Operating an ecommerce site for instance, 65% of the traffic is from mobile phones, even browser vs apps.
According to Rules of the Internet § 12 “if I find something to be annoying, objectionable, or wrong it surely must be illegal.”
Because OP is a crybaby.
It’s not, that’s why they’re doing it.
It is illegal - they’ve already been taken to court and lost over similar practices 20 years ago.
It’s just not enforced anymore - and that’s why they’re doing it.
They were taken to court for bundling a previously paid product (a browser) into their OS for free.
Asking if you want to change your search engine is not the same thing.
I still don’t get how Microsoft got in trouble for bundling internet explorer but now they are completely fine doing this
Anti-trust regulation has gotten very toothless in recent years. The shit many corporations are pulling now is insane when you think back about what happened to ms then.
Because that haven’t cause any harm I guess? Google was punished for pulling the same stunt with Chrome, but they actually succeeded. Meanwhile, few people i know use Edge right now. My cousin used to advocate for Edge until a Windows update wiped his browser clean
Frustratingly, the rulings preventing them from bundling software with an operating system stopped them from building in anti-virus measures. For years when Windows was synonymous with malware, they had their hands tied. 20 years later, they started including Windows defender / Security Essentials. The unnecessary global economic losses caused were immense.
They will be fine doing this for 5 years, then a new antitrust ruling will tell them to stop, and so on.
One of the many reasons why I will never return to Windows.
I still have to use 10 for work, but on the plus side it’s a 5 day per week reminder of just how terrible it is.
In the same boat. and recently of all the issues that could pop up, Teams has decided to become a buggy mess. Their own software on their own OS just stops working after just one year of using the machine.
Not to speak of all the other slowdowns and child-diseases that the thing has developed.
Meanwhile my desktop install of Linux is nearing its 10th birthday, has all sorts of legacy configs that I never bothered to clean up, has moved drives 3 times and to a different filesystem+partitioning scheme, changed bootloader… Yet still is way less of a pain than Windows at work.
I still have to use 10 for work, but on the plus side it’s a 5 day per week reminder of just how terrible it is.
What do you use the rest of the time that you prefer? Serious question, because I’ve been looking at Windows alternatives for a while and I like to hear what’s working better for others.
Everything with a GUI runs POP_OS, because I like how much control I have over app windows via the keyboard. When I’m hyperfocused I like not having to take my hands off the keyboard. It has really good tiling too, but I think vanilla Gnome has mostly caught up in that department.
Agreed
Why wouldn’t it be legal? You are using their product and they put out a notification on it asking if you want to use one of their products. Why would that be illegal!?
Like I understand people not liking it, but illegal?
I am pretty sure they are insinuating that it is antitrust violation. It probably is but our current governance seems unwilling to do anything about anti-competitive practices.
Creating a monopoly with a competitive advantage is illegal in Europe.
It is illegal in Europe.
What is illegal? Asking you if you want to change your default search engine? That doesn’t sound illegal to me so I wonder what law is causing it to be illegal.
What company was it that lost an antitrust lawsuit again? It was something like Macrosoft? Microphone? idr
Microsuck??
Lost is a strong word. Shure they lost the suit. But in reality they were just forced to start playing the politics game.
I remember them feeling pretty Blue about it.
Since everybody on this comm seem to be circlejerking, let me how to tell you how to get rid of this POS. Shit’s called BGAupsell and resides in Windows\Temp\MUBSTemp, set yourself as owner of the file via your admin account and then delete it and replace it with an an empty EXE file that you assign ownership to yourself with. Then you write protect it and you’re done. If you just delete the dir or the file, it’ll come back next major update.
NOW, to really give MS a punch in the dick, you’re also going to want to disable the search menu ad as well:
https://www.howtogeek.com/826967/how-to-disable-bing-in-the-windows-11-start-menu/
And all of you fucking *nux newfargs, grow up. Also, don’t fucking drink and root you lusers.
Or you just install Linux and be done with it.
Yes, I am THAT guy. It looks and feels like windows, but prettier, nicer, and better. No more corporate rules bullshit, no more anti virus bullshit, no more bullshit.
Yes, most games do work now.
Yes, most windows software has equal or better alternatives, or run natively through wine.
You don’t have to put up with Microsoft bullshit.
Get rid of office, Hotmail and teams while you’re at it and get working software.
*facepalms in having told the newbie not to drink and root*
You’re the reason most of us don’t really tell others that we run Linux.
Because…? I’ve used Linux on desktop for over 20 years now. Yes. I have a multi monitor (3 monitors) setup with a cool looking 3d desktop (bling mostly to show off, make people come for the bling, stay for the awesome computer experience) and I’ve loved every minute of it.
Every single time I see another one of these posts I tell people to come to Linux, we got cookies
Have fun with your digital Stockholm syndrome and corpo mindshare.
Man, people like you are why we have to call it GNU/Linux. You have no core principles.
Yeah, you clearly are a newbie if you missed the obvious flag that my username presents. I’m a fucking old sysop you nimrod. I know Win, *Nux, Netware not because I want to know, but because my fucking job requires me to know. And you know what you figure out after a while of messing around with all of the crap that exists? Nothing is pure.
So yeah, you be 16 year old me and repeat my own mistakes. Rant about corpo crap without even knowing what a job is. Rant about fucking principles when you still afford them. Also give me the spiel about how FOSS is superior to closed source because arbitrary reasons. If you live long enough, you’ll get the nuance to stop spouting crap that doesn’t mean shit outside of your bubble.
Seriously, you are literally teenage me. I’m so glad I grew out of this phase. But man, you seriously need to pick up a fucking sysman every once in a while and stop sniffing the farts of the in-crows of popular lin distros.
No , you just gave up. Stop lying to yourself. You hide behind muh affordability because that’s the convenient excuse to use to not think about this.
The status quo will benefit you for giving up entirely and disparaging those who advocate for freedom.
“Teenage me” sounds like a mask off moment for you being a bitter out of touch person. You endorse the status quo and hide it under emotional rants of being more mature than the rest of us.
“Nothing is pure… Rant about corpo crap”
I’m only commenting to this because I don’t want younger folks or to be caught up in your self hate spiral.
Its GNU/Linux because clowns like you exist and won’t shut up. People deserve better, they don’t deserve someone like you frothing at the mouth at the fact that you don’t believe a better world is possible.
You’re incredibly lucky that a majority of “Linux”/tech communities tolerate you.
I didn’t so much give up as I was forced to reconcile the false narratives posed by the bubble I was living in versus getting the fucking job done at the end of the day. Having to actually work according to legal standards, KPIs, milestones and visions really makes you realize the limitations of certain systems and the pitfalls of them. That only comes with experience.
And I don’t fucking *need *communities to tolerate me, because I don’t care. Again, you’re speaking like some teenager on Twitter that’s worried about likes more than someone whose got insight. If I need a *nux server for anything, I’ll use it. But I’m not going to let blind FOSS bullshit idealism bar me from getting the job done at the end of the day.
Now, if you had any brains you’d realize that smugly telling windows lusers to switch their OS is only going to piss them off. If you REALLY wanted to be a suave motherfucker, you could tell the users how to fix their shit and then tell them WHY shit like that happens (99% because win is a mono system, which *Nux isn’t) and then suggest a distro that would work for a switch, maybe link to some handy guides or shit like that.
But no, you’re 16 year old me instead who giggles at Tux memes and tells people to switch when they ask for help. Fucking cringe.
Church
You sort of missed the point where Linux gives you freedom. Linux is built for users, windows is built for marketing, and it shows. It makes Linux nice for end users and it makes windows nice for the marketing department, sales and the share holders.
Windows SUCKS in it’s daily use and even after all these years it’s still a Swiss cheese security wise. Yes, people would face issues with Linux too. Of course they will. But it will be a while different class of issues, not caused by a “fuck the user” attitude like Microsoft has it, but issues that will be solved because on Linux people actual care.
Yes, keep rehearsing the old propaganda. Doesn’t mean shit to the normie that still uses Windows because they’d rather have support than shitty half or undocumented systems that do shit they’re not supposed to at the worst time. For what it’s worth, you’re completely right. 100%. But reality makes all your right irrelevant. So, rather than fucking around and trying to convert people, maybe just lay off the bullshit and leave them be? Or … you know, git gud and help out?
I do.
I help people with Linux wherever I can.
I make companies use Linux. My own company uses Linux everywhere, it was built in from the start.
What you’re saying is a chicken and egg problem. Companies would love to give support go Linux users but then they need Linux users…
The internet needs more people like you.
Excellent instructions, nice clear and to the point.
Nah it doesn’t. He is being a dick. You probably can Google that. He missed the point of the entire topic. Nobody was positing how to remove it because this topic wasn’t about that. If someone would have asked about it in the first place people would probably have provided solutions.
It’s only illegal if it’s enforced
They got in trouble for setting internet explorer as the default and had to pop a prompt when you installed windows a while ago.
I don’t think asking if you want to is illegal though. But it could be as they are using their ownership of the operating system to push you towards their other products.
Run a debloat script for windows from christitustech. And if you want to start from fresh install w10/11 ltsb/ltsc and run the debloat script, that is the safest option, if you don’t want to swap to Linux.
I especially love that it was blurry. I shit you not, a blurry popup telling me to switch the search engine like some 2010 malware.
It’s shit like this that will eventually drive me away from windows. I was baffled when it appeared.
As someone who was recently driven, leave it. It’s never going to get better, only worse. And linux is only going to get better the more you understand it.
will eventually
no time like the present, eh ;)
Idk man I’m pretty busy… With… Something less tedious than installing an operating system lol
The penguin is patient and will welcome you when you have the fish / time.
If you are unsure i’d personally would also advice you to start with a dual-boot setup, so you can always temporary switch back if you get frustrated with something (or are under pressure from outside forces to get something done) and dont know how yet.
Normally when you return later with a clear head you’ll likely be able to find a solution to your problem that doesnt require you to switch the OS.
Just a suggestion.
Have a nice day anyways!
Once upon a time I dual booted every computer I had. Not sure why I fell out of the habit really.
Something less tedious than installing an operating system lol
Jeez. I remember 25 years ago when we reinstalled Windows every 6 months to a year or so as a matter of course. It was literally recommended to do so because of the buildup of cruft and garbage. These days, people can’t be bothered to download an iso and press a few “next” buttons.
I’m not going to try and argue that I’m not being lazy, but the actual process of installing the OS is the least onerous part. Software beats it by a mile.
You’d be surprised. Ubuntu is basically download it for free onto USB drive, plug in USB drive, start computer, choose to start Ubuntu from drive, try it out, if you like it click install, and you’re done.
+1 on this recommendation. Live distros are definitely the best way to dip your toe in the Linux desktop world without accidentally wrecking your system.
In Europe it isn’t. But I got it too. Even worse, my default browser was changed to Bing after an update.
Even worse, my default browser was changed to Bing after an update.
Is this not literally quite almost what their first big antitrust case was all about (shipping their OS together with Internet Explorer, back then) that almost got them broken up by the state?
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European here. Which law is this breaking, exactly? Pretty sure advertising is legal
It’s no ad, it’s nudging. Without being asked even. They don’t show you a list of search engines to set as default, they ask you to switch to Bing. My system just switched to Bing without asking.
It’s no ad, it’s nudging. Without being asked even. They don’t show you a list of search engines to set as default, they ask you to switch to Bing. My system just switched to Bing without asking.
Everything is legal in the US if you can lobby enough
Not quite. You can also break the law, pay a fraction of what you grifted, say sorry and then continue.
The people at Microsoft who remember the ftc action have retired I guess
