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
    12·
    9 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.

    • spraynpray@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      9 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
        3·
        9 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
          13·
          9 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
            2·
            9 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·
              9 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·
                9 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.