Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Win11 to get people to ditch Chrome
When I was in 8th grade, one of my teachers was out sick, and the principal took over the class for the day. He talked about frames of reference. To illustrate the point, he asked if we had seen the movie, E.T. Of course, we all had. It was the Star Wars-level blockbuster of the summer of 1982. He asked if we remembered the bus scene. None of us could. &quot;You know, &#x27;Uranus?&#x27;&quot; Oh, right. Yes, we all remembered that line. Then he asked us if we could remember what any of the other kids were doing. Nope. They were standing, yelling, throwing things, and generally being disruptive. He said, as a principal, this anarchy on a school bus horrified him. It never even registered with us.<p>This lesson continues to reverberate with me over 40 years later.<p>People on this site &quot;govern&quot; our computers and devices as much as we can, so when these things happen, they stick out like a sore thumb, and we set about stopping it from happening again. Even after 30 years of &quot;being on the internet,&quot; I am RUTHLESS about spam. When one shows up in my inbox, I deal with it, so that, by and large, every email that comes through is of interest and needs my attention.<p>The people who use Windows for any more than gaming (and a lot of them, too) are the kind of people that have 10,000 unread emails in their inbox, all of which are spam for services and offers they agreed to be spammed by, because they couldn&#x27;t be bothered to at least tick the opt-out box (which only works half the time anyway). When the vast majority of these users see a popup like this, they simply click the button to dismiss it, just like <i>hundreds</i> other digital annoyances they put up with all day long, which they do not understand, and which they do not know how to turn off.<p>It doesn&#x27;t matter that we get upset about this. It&#x27;s already been proven several times over that we cannot influence this situation. The economics just don&#x27;t matter to Microsoft. I have to conclude that the size of the &quot;power user&quot;&#x2F;developer community on Windows is dwarfed by the rest. The only surprise here is that The Verge wrote a piece that is overtly negative about Microsoft.