Users have seen a popup appear on their Windows 11 PC asking them to set Bing as the default search engine. They believed in malware, but no, it was Microsoft that displayed the alert.
You are quietly playing random Starfield on your Windows 11 PC when suddenly a pop up bottom right of the screen. Is it the game that seeks to break the 4th wall? Not at all, it’s a message asking you to make Bing the default search engine in your browser. Your first instinct is to think of a malware impersonating Microsoft. A popup like this wouldn’t appear during a game session, would it?
This misadventure happened to one of our colleagues from The Verge and, no, it is not malware. The popup comes from an executable file located in c:windowstempmubstemp and bears the Microsoft digital signature. It even popped up for no reason while the journalist was on the desk of his machine. This behavior is not new. On the Reddit community site, users were already talking about it 3 months ago.
Microsoft shows a pop-up asking to switch to Bing even while you’re playing
When asked, Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, said: “We are aware of these reports and have suspended this notification while we investigate and take appropriate measures to remedy this unintended behavior”. So it would be a bug, either. Except that this is not the first time that the Redmond firm wants to encourage us to use its products. A Windows 10 update forced the Edge browser to be installed, before it was used by default to open certain types of links. A practice that Windows 11 will finally correct.
Difficult under these conditions to affirm with certainty that the display of the popup is a simple error. Especially when Edge was testing similar messages in Chrome. Fortunately, not everyone is affected by these somewhat dubious methods of convincing people to switch to Bing Or edge. Only a small number of users are (un)lucky to pay the price and often they are not generalized thereafter.