Microsoft is suppressing Bing’s pop-up ads in Chrome on Windows 10 and 11. Latest Windows and The Verge reported on Friday that the ad encourages Chrome users to use (in bold). Bing Instead of a Google search. “Chat with GPT-4 on Chrome for free! Get hundreds of daily conversations with Bing Al,” the ad says. If you click “Yes”, the pop-up will install the “Bing Search” Chrome extension and also default to Microsoft’s search engine.
If you click “Yes” on an ad to go to Bing, a Chrome a pop-up will appear asking you to confirm that you want to change the browser’s default search engine. “Want to change your search provider?” the pop-up asks. “The ‘Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome’ extension search has changed to use bing.com,” the Chrome alert says.
Directly below this warning, apparently waiting for Chrome to pop up, another Windows notification warns: “Wait, don’t change it back! If you do this, you will disable Microsoft Bing Search for Chrome and lose access to Bing Buy with GPT-4 and DALL-E 3. Select Save to stay in Microsoft Bing.”
In essence, users are caught in a pop-up war between a company trying to pressure you into using it AI assistant / search engine and the other tries to keep you in default mode (which you probably want if you installed Chrome in the first place). Big Tech’s battles for artificial intelligence and search supremacy are turning into nasty virtual shouting matches in front of users’ eyeballs as they try to surf the web.
There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to prevent the ad from appearing.
Microsoft has confirmed the authenticity of the pop-up in a statement Latest Windows and The Verge, coloring cringingly as an opportunity for the users of the movement. “This is a one-time notification that gives people the option to set Bing as their default search engine in Chrome,” a company representative wrote. “For those who choose to set Bing as their default search engine in Chrome when signed in with MSA [Microsoft account] they also get more chat turns in Copilot and chat history.”
Noting how its intrusive ads supposedly fit user freedom, it added: “We value giving our customers a choice, so they have the option to opt out of the notification.” Engadget emailed Microsoft for independent verification, but the company did not immediately respond. We will update this article.
Latest Windows described the ad as coming from a “server-side update” and said the ad was not part of a Windows update. Instead, the speech assumed that it was related to him BCILauncher.EXE or BingChatInstaller.EXEMicrosoft has reportedly added two processes to “some Windows systems” on March 13.
