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·
    8 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·
      8 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·
          8 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·
            8 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·
              8 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·
        8 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·
          8 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·
            8 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·
              8 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·
      8 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.

    • spraynpray@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      47·
      8 months ago

      This only applies to the mobile app They stopped doing this in 2022

      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.

      • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
        12·
        8 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·
          8 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·
            8 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!

        • spraynpray@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          21·
          8 months ago

          SearX, SearXNG and 4get are also just proxies for multiple search engines

          And DDG is just a proxy for Bing following that logic. I’d choose those three over DDG.

          Kagi requires an account, and only allows 100 searches

          Making a new account every 100 searches should be an option (albeit a somewhat tedious one), no?

          • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
            4·
            8 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

            • spraynpray@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              14·
              8 months ago

              Yeah, but if the alternatives aren’t better, why not just use DDG

              Because those alternatives never explicitly whitelisted trackers from MS.

              • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                8 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

                • spraynpray@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                  1·
                  8 months ago

                  Startpage is owned by an advertising company

                  Yes, if the choice is between DDG and that, I’d choose DDG.

                  Mullvad Leta is only available to Mullvad VPN customers

                  Never heard of it.

                  Brave does a whole bunch of shady stuff, e.g. installing VPN services on people’s computers, although they never asked for 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.

                  The other options aren’t good either

                  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.

                  • Dehydrated@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    1·
                    8 months ago

                    Never heard of it.

                    https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/6/20/introducing-mullvad-leta-a-search-engine-used-in-the-mullvad-browser

                    It’s pretty neat and Mullvad is a very privacy-focused company with a great track record. They released their search engine (which is a Google proxy) together with their own browser, which is based on the Tor Browser and developed together with the Tor Project.

                    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.

                    I tried to use 4get as a DDG proxy, all the instances I tried kept getting blocked by DuckDuckGo. It wasn’t a great experience. I also tried SearX and SearXNG many times, I always keep coming back to DuckDuckGo, because it just works and it gives me decent results. With SearX, I often had trouble finding relevant results. I tried various options and different search engine backends in SearXNG, but I never really liked it. DDG is definitely far from perfect, but so are the other options, and I think DDG is the best and easiest to use for less technical users.