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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>Brave, a company notorious for pushing weird NFT and Blockchain shit,
what nft shit?
https://brave.com/category/web3-crypto-nfts/