Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google
Microsoft has paused its latest pop-ups, for now.
i’m sure the free market will solve this. we just need to wait for a new company to pop up, make a new operating system, ensure windows programs are properly emulated, convince the majority of people and businesses to use it, and then use its new monopoly for good.
Free market ideas always sounded like cartoon level intelligence to me. Some kind of a perfect world where everyone acts morally and people are well informed and chooses the right companies etc.
its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions. the part im talking about is:
The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.
the first part refers to a kind of "smoothness assumption", where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a "smooth" curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored
And yet they call communism is too utopia
But that's not how it works. Free market ideas don't expect a perfect world, they instead expect an imperfect one. You don't need everyone to make food decisions, you just need enough people to make good decisions so the market caters to them.
It's the same idea as democracy, you don't need every voter to make a good choice, you just need a plurality. As long as enough people make decent choices enough of the time, democracy works. The free market is just democracy, but with money instead of votes.
In both cases government has a role. I think governments should add in longer term costs to the market, but in a way that preserves choice as much as possible (i.e. carbon taxes instead of carbon limits). I think governments should educate the population to increase the chances that they'll make good decisions at the polls.
In the specific case of Microsoft, things were competitive until the government looked the other way WRT antitrust law. There's a lot of shady stuff that happened in the first couple decades that Microsoft existed, yet they largely got a free pass.
2024 is the year of the linux desktop!
I mean operating systems are free to be entirely honest
MS screwing us with software. Apple screwing us with hardware upgrades. Linux out there taking all survivors
Wait what's apple been up to?
LOL what are they not up to?
To put it very succinctly: they want to control you and your very expensive hardware that you buy from them.
Linux suffers from being a patchwork of hobbyists updates, corporate additions, and patchy distro support. When it comes down to it, if you have an issue, you either have to solve it on your own or hope and pray the elitists on StackOverflow are in a good mood.
Honestly, every OS kinda sucks.
Apple and Microsoft support aren't exactly awesome, either, unless you're a big business with deep pockets. At least with Linux, the system is open, so if there is a way to solve my problem, someone has almost certainly found it already and added it to Arch Wiki or Stack Overflow or something.
Yet almost every os in the world relies on some sort of "hobbyist" updates. Including windows.
High time for another antitrust, huh
That's the problem
And nobody is doing something about it!
It's sad, because Edge is actually a pretty good browser, but all this shit just makes everyone hate it.
Also, every Google page I visit gives me an annoying "Download Chrome now!" popup, so MS i guess is just using the same strategy Google used.
Haven't installed fresh windows in a few years but I distinctly remember the past few times I installed Windows 10 I had the weirdest issues trying to download Firefox or chrome, like the webpage or download button was broke. I had to get my browser through ninite
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications
"""unintended"""?
How do you implement shit like this by mistake and push it out to be executed on people's computers by mistake?
“I slipped and programmed a pop up. Whoopsiedaisy”
It was the intern!!!1!1!!
The unintended part was people noticing and it making it into the news cycle, everything else was very clearly exhaustively planned and intended.
That's because they're a malware company:
this has been going on in several different forms for years now so I’m just counting the days until the next annoying pop-up appears.
The solution is to not use their products. Use Linux.
I would use Linux if my primary reasons for using a computer worked properly. Games are a lot better these days than it was and always improving so there is light at the end of the tunnel in that respect but Traktor DJ software not so much.
As far as I know the only alternative on Linux is mixxx and that was just no where near as good the last time I used it. Maybe it is time to try it again......
Win11 is malware, lol. But anyway, I've never come across anything like this for all my years of using Windows Enterprise editions.
Well windows is malware OS so nothing new
Not saying it's okay in any way but Google does this with Chrome all the time on Amy Google page
Guys, I keep reading this, but it's not the same thing. At all. You don't want to get Google's crap? You don't visit their crap websites. There are so many websites in this world to visit to avoid Google's crap. You just don't type anything with google on it in your address bar. The only way to avoid Microsoft's crap is to install another operating system in your desktop or laptop. It's just not the same thing. At all.
Microsoft should be forced to do what they have forced Google to do in Android. At least where I live, in EU. Ballon tips to have the option to use another browser and an option to disable Edge and all the crap asking all the time to use Edge. Like the android ballon tip and the option we have to at least disable Android Chrome.
Major difference: Android is open source and Linux-based. Everything is made up of components z which are quite close together, but can be separated. In Windows everything is glued together. You can't separate it. You can't remove explorer.exe (Windows' window manager) and replace it with another. You can replace your android Launcher, and you can replace your Linux desktop environment. Heck, you can even install a tiling window manager on the MacOS, Apple's locked down desktop OS!!!! But not on Windows.
I fully agree, as a person who actually likes windows, and who's career it made in IT support, I'm sick of this BS they're pulling. I want people to like windows (except Win11, fuck Win11) because is some ways it's really awesome, but that'll never happen like this.
But at least you don't pay chrome, with windows instead you need to pay a license to use it.
Debatable, considering all that's stopping you from using it for free is a watermark and lack of personalization options.
Plus, I'm using the Windows 10 Education key my college gave me, and my Windows 7 Home key from way back in the day would work too, as well as the Windows 8 key that came with my Surface Pro 3. The cost feels like a formality tbh.
The fact that Microsoft's constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn't triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.
If you're thinking of the EU, it's probably just the vogonlike bureaucracy, so in about the time that Windows 12 comes out, they'll be ready. Can't say it bothers me, if Microsoft is attempting to take marketshare from Google, though.
Install Linux, problem solved
My work computer is macOS and I've never seen a recommendation to use Bing despite using a ton of Microsoft products for work.
My personal computers run Linux, and again, no MS spam.
So yeah, don't use Windows and you won't get MS spam. You should probably also use DuckDuckGo or another privacy-centric search engine.
I've dropped google search for DDG some 4 years ago, never looked back.
If these days I just try google search for laughs it's just sad, it's full with bot spam now
They need to ask the question "will you ever choose to use a Microsoft browser?" and then remember the answer and stop the nagging. For me the answer is no.
It's Internet Explorer time all over again.
Isn't modern Edge chromium based? I'd understand using Edge back when it was using it's own technology, as much as I hate Microsoft internet browsers, it allowed for optimisations such as better battery life on laptops. But using chromium based Edge, I don't understand it at all. Who wants to use Microsoft flavoured chrome? Yuck.
They had to switch to chromium because web devs like myself just didn't take the extra time to make a second set of style definitions to work with their stupid engine. Firefox still has some issues here and there with inconsistent styles but it's not that bad. Edge used to just be a nightmare for style compatibility. So I would just put up a notice saying edge wasn't supported and save myself the trouble.
Internet Explorer is still the best at messing up style definitions and CSS. Never seen anything like it.
Opera browser is the worst of the chromium based browsers in that regard I find.
I think the "upsell" (Lord help me for calling it this) is that it integrates with Office365, or in a corporate environment, AD. So by provisioning it once you have every component interconnected. If you're used to Edge at home you will not be hesitant to want to use it at work. To say nothing about getting non-corporate home users into Bing and, ideally, Microsoft's OpenAI-ified Bing.
It's all very nasty work.
When does it stop being "malware-like" and end up being just malware?
Slack successfully made Microsoft stop bundling Teams in Microsoft Office through an anti-competition complaint. I'm surprised Google lets them get away with abusing the Windows product as a platform for promoting a search engine. My best guess for why they don't is that the promotion isn't working.
I need to move my system to linux , however there is data on my system i need to backup, any way I can do that ?.
If you have a desktop, buy a second drive. You might even can use your Windows installation for apps with no (good) Linux alternatives.
Ok yeah external hard drive makes sense ! I used windows only for my univ work , they needed Ms office for their reports etc , office 365 basically but since its over now ,I can use the apps I want
External hard drive is probably the cheapest/easiest solution. You can also try a cloud service like dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
External, cloud storage, install Linux on a separate drive and move everything over.
The world is your oyster, man.
Use FreeFileSync to make your backups easily without having to copy everything by yourself, thank me later!
@jungekatz @MazonnaCara89 External hard drive.
i know at some point i'm going to have to switch to linux but i'm lazy and really, really don't want to
i give it like 3 years before i switch
Windows is a malware !
At the moment I use Windows 10, in the past Windows 7 also along with Kubuntu and others. I think that W10 is the last usable OS from M$, because of this I am not going to update it to W11, the following W12 and the online version for monthly subscription, are going to gradually take over the user's sovereignty over their own PC, with absolute control over it. I am going to continue W10, the gutted version that I use, until support ends in 2025 (probably 2026-27 due to the large number of users), then we will see what there is then as an alternative. Maybe I'll install some distro in dual boot in the meantime, but being online 99% of the time, where the OS used is irrelevant, it doesn't bother me that much at the moment. Anyway I don't use Google or Bing for obvious reasons and none of their services.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications, in a statement to The Verge.
I wasn’t alone in thinking it was malware, with posts dating back three months showing Reddit users trying to figure out why they were seeing the pop-up.
Microsoft even had to backtrack on plans to force the Chrome default search to Bing for businesses installing its Office apps.
After all, Google runs similar notifications on its webpages to get people to use Chrome or it’s annoying YouTube premium spam.
That could be in the form of the price of a laptop that has a Windows OEM license baked in, or a product key if you built your own PC.
Windows is an important productivity tool for many people, and shouldn’t be treated like a cheap streaming box loaded with ads.
The original article contains 654 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Does the same behavior appear with DuckDuckGo, or other alternatives?
Never metioned in the article, and it's a "feature" only spread to a close number of people.
I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I'm thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.
It's always "unintended behavior" isn't it?
Chaotic good?
Chaotic bad!
Yeah but Chrome bad too!
But I already ditched google. For Firefox.
The article talk about google the search engine not the browser
![[HN] Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Win11 to get people to ditch Chrome](https://lemmy.uhhoh.com/pictrs/image/3b1f0d62-61b8-4f90-ab3c-637d7c8720fa.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)
![[VERGE] Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google](https://radiation.party/pictrs/image/1b8174a1-4f8a-4155-b7ed-2c8cd615f536.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=196)