Named & shamed

SOFTWARE WARNING!

Microsoft’s full-screen Bing pop-ups

Which search engine do you use? If the answer isn’t Bing, you might be as worn out as I am batting away Microsoft’s desperate attempts to get me to use it.

The last thing I expected to encounter while watching a full-screen YouTube video was a pop-up in Windows asking me to switch my default search engine to Bing in exchange for some “Microsoft Rewards points” (see screenshot right). My first thought was that it’s a scam and my PC had been infected, but an antivirus scan found nothing amiss.

I then searched for clues online, and found out that Microsoft was to blame. Turns out it had been testing this pop-up all summer. It appears in the notification centre, where you’d expect to see vital alerts about security or system updates, not intrusive adverts for Microsoft products.

Microsoft eventually ditched the pop-up following numerous complaints from users, promising it will investigate this “unintended behaviour”. By “unintended”, we think it means the pop-up was never meant to appear while you were watching videos in full screen.

But this type of pop-up would be intrusive no matter what you were doing on your PC. The advert was appearing even if users had turned on Focus sessions in Windows, which are meant to help you concentrate by blocking notifications and system messages for set periods of time (up to four hours).

If Microsoft brings the pop-up back, try activating the more powerful ‘Do not disturb’ setting instead. This blocks pop-ups for good.

In Windows 11, press Windows key+I to open Settings, then click ‘Notifications & actions’ and open the settings page. Next, change the Notifications slider to Off ( 1 in our screenshot left) and the ‘Do not disturb’ slider to On 2 .

Windows 10 users should click ‘Focus assist’ in Settings and change the ‘Focus assist’ mode to ‘Alarms only’ – then, in ‘Notifications & actions’, change the Notifications slider to Off. Here’s hoping Microsoft takes the hint.