The software giant first introduced malware-like pop-up ads last year with a prompt that appeared over the top of other apps and windows. After pausing that notification to address “unintended behavior,” the pop-ups have returned again on Windows 10 and 11.
Windows users have reported seeing the new pop-up in recent days, advertising Bing AI and Microsoft’s Bing search engine inside Google Chrome. If you click yes to this prompt, then Microsoft will set Bing as the default search engine for Chrome. These latest prompts look like malware, and once again have Windows users asking if they are legit or nefarious. Microsoft has confirmed to The Verge that the pop-ups are genuine and should only appear once.
Every trick Microsoft pulled to make you browse Edge instead of Chrome
Ublock Origin does not block “malicious Javascript” reliably. You need NoScript for that, and a opt-in approach. Block everything, unblock what you need, hope its not malicious.
uBO can be set up to block all JS by default, allowing you to manually whitelist each script. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-hard-mode
I also run disabling addons for java script and flash as well as an overlay remover in Firefox
Flash should be possible to disable about:config as its legacy technology.
Could you explain the overlay remover?
Noscript is the only good addon for blocking javascript and allowing only some parts for specific origins.
Those pop up pages that prevent you from seeing the underlying page. It doesn’t happen as often anymore but it’s nice to have a way to remove them
That probably is a Ublock origin filterlist. Did you ever open UBOs settings? Try to not use too many, too many lists increase RAM and CPU usage and are all using badness enumeration so they will be 80% duplicates.
I dont know if UBO deduplicates them (removes duplicates), that would make sense.
While I actually do that, you cannot seriously recommend it to anyone. Hardly any site works without Javascript nowadays.
Yes thats why you have the button to click on. I also need to allowlist basically every site I visit.
There should be some way to share such a list, to reduce the manual work.
I highly recommend manually enabling Javascript.
Sometimes it’s great. If people complain about paywalls, for example, and you didn’t even see the pop-up.
And sometimes it prevents sites from working, because paywalls that are avoidable by blocking the cover are deprecated and nowadays real solutions are used. This means such size will just break.
Ublock can also remove overlays, and I am sure it you add more lists they will be blocked by default.
Having less code run in your browser is always recommended.