I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently Microsoft offers a Windows tune-up application in the vein of things like CCleaner and similar tools. One of the things it does is protect users from applications that try and change default settings, and it seems the application takes this matter very seriously.
Microsoft may be taking a bit of liberty with that last bit. It looks like the PC Manager feels your PC is broken and needs repair if you changed your default search engine from Bing.
Sayan Sen at Neowin
Setting aside just how defeatist it feels that the creator of Windows needs to make an application to keep Windows from falling over, I find it almost endearing just how hard Microsoft is trying to get users to choose Bing.
If you’ve ever seen the Swedish film Fucking Amal, it’s also very likely you remember the gut-wrenching, maximally cringe-inducing birthday party for main character Agnes where nobody shows up, while her mother, oblivious to just how deeply disliked Agnes is by her classmates, tries desperately to assure her daughter that people will show up. Director Lukas Moodysson takes no prisoners and drags out the scene to really maximise just how uncomfortably sad the whole thing is.
It’s incredibly hard to watch.
Well, Agnes is Bing, Microsoft is its mother, and nobody shows up to Bing’s birthday party either.
Hostile software is hostile.
I’ve been using Microsoft PC Manager since early access and it’s great! Claiming back Memory when I had 24GB was a huge bonus for gaming from web browsers ( 1 8GB died ) but now at 64GB I don’t notice the memory cleans so much. It’s now good at finding files you don’t need and for general PC tidiness. Of course Edge is going to be favoured… but it’s all their own products, it’s natural to favour your own over third party, and no other company behaves differently… It doesn’t FORCE you to change from it – it just notes it’s not Windows Default ( Brave is my default )
HIGHLY recommend people try this if they have not!
Isn’t Brave some sort of scam where native ads are replaced by someone else’s ads?
Brave does that, and they also got caught claiming they forwarded donations from users to content creators who signed up to receive them, when in fact they were keeping the money. Said donations were made in “BAT”, a cryptocurrency at the heart of a ponzi scheme engineered by the team who created Brave. Interestingly, most of the information about their scams and illegal activity have been purged from the Wikipedia entry for Brave, and any attempt to restore factual information gets immediately reverted and the person restoring the factual information gets banned from Wikipedia. They obviously have complete control over their own Wiki article, which goes against Wikipedia rules, but I guess nothing can be done about that?
Hm, the headline seems pretty clickbaity – if you look at The F*cking Screenshot you’ll see it just says that the homepage on Edge was changed, not that anything is broken or dangerous. That’s a fine thing to point out IMHO, although an option to permanently archive certain things, or checkboxes next to the items with a button to “Reset all selected” might be nice.
On another note, I tried to install this app, but it was nowhere to be found in the Microsft Store, and the website says “Coming Soon”. Maybe it’s region-restricted only to not EU-users?
So, I just followed a tip I found to change Region in Settings to United States, which allowed me to install PC Manager after all – easy peasy. However, a quick perusal showed me that it does nothing except basically offer a kind of launchpad to tools that are already built into Windows – screenshot, disk cleanup (albeit with a more modern UI), updates, etc. It is true that if you accept all default settings, it will indeed reset Edge to use Bing – but it’s easily de-selectable if you’re paying attention, and at least the notification badge goes away once you ignore it once. Still, the app doesn’t really *do* enough beyond what’s built in to Windows to convince me to keep it around.
Lol what? Bing has a ~10% market share despite not doing anything to earn it (compared to Google). Also, the only reason Bing plays nice with non-Windows OSes is that it doesn’t have a majority market share. If anything, I’d like to see Bing’s market share back into the single digits just to be sure it will never become the dominant search engine.
Some people used to make fun of mandatory browser choice windows in EU, on how that has zero effect. But it’s this exact measure and legislation behind it that forbids Microsoft to now force Edge as a “standard” and this exact window will force Apple to allow other browser engines on iOS.