A years-long battle has been waged between Microsoft and Google over Google Search, Bing, Chrome, and Edge. Microsoft is now pushing Bing heavily through pop-ups in Windows for Google Chrome users.
Microsoft has started showing pop-up ads to people using Google Chrome on their Windows computers. These pop-ups look like the annoying ads you see on bad websites. The pop-up says you can chat with an AI for free if you switch your default search engine to Bing.
If you click “Yes” it will instantly change your browser’s default search to Bing without asking you first. Chrome will then pop up another message asking you to switch back, but Microsoft does not want you to! You can also click “No Thanks” to make the pop-up go away.
A tech website captured these pop-ups on video so people can see what they look and act like. Microsoft confirmed to the website that the pop-ups should only show once, but they want people to pick Bing so those same people get more free chat features if they sign in with their Microsoft account.
This isn’t the first sneaky pop-up from Microsoft either. A few months ago there was a similar pop-up trying to get Chrome users to switch to Bing. Microsoft also got in trouble recently for transferring data from Chrome to Edge without properly asking Chrome users first.
It seems Microsoft will try many techniques to get more people using Bing as their search engine instead of Google. But these surprise pop-ups may annoy Chrome fans more than convince them to switch. Only time will tell if this aggressive pop-up strategy works long-term for Microsoft!
