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
Duckduckgo once allowed trackers from Microsoft
Source: www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N3792HE
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.
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
I also run disabling addons for java script and flash as well as an overlay remover in Firefox
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.
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
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.
While I actually do that, you cannot seriously recommend it to anyone. Hardly any site works without Javascript nowadays.
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.
Sometimes it’s great. If people complain about paywalls, for example, and you didn’t even see the pop-up.
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.
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.
Ah, in that case they are a highly trustworthy company whose products I will happily use in the future. They only allowed trackers with one of their privacy promising products and they stopped doing that after they got called out on it. Thank you for clarifying that they are one of the good ones.
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.
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
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!
thanks a lot in advance, and fedi is where it’s at ! 💯
And DDG is just a proxy for Bing following that logic. I’d choose those three over DDG.
Making a new account every 100 searches should be an option (albeit a somewhat tedious one), no?
Yeah, but if the alternatives aren’t better, why not just use DDG?
That ain’t a great solution either
Because those alternatives never explicitly whitelisted trackers from MS.
Tell me which of the options I listed you would use.
The other options aren’t good either
Yes, if the choice is between DDG and that, I’d choose DDG.
Never heard of it.
They installed a Windows service that was needed to run their VPN. That service on its own does nothing. That what I heard at least. I didn’t look to much into it since I don’t really care. Brave sucks and I wouldn’t trust it, so I agree on principle. Also worse than DDG.
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.
>Brave, a company notorious for pushing weird NFT and Blockchain shit,
what nft shit?
https://brave.com/category/web3-crypto-nfts/