The Microsoft Bing Wallpaper app pushes Bing so hard that some call it malware

The Microsoft Bing Wallpaper app pushes Bing so hard that some call it malware
Microsoft is still unable to take a significant bite out of Google’s market share in the field of browsers and search engines (although growth is still slow). Recently, in selected countries, it launched a competition for 1,000,000 USD for the active use of Microsoft technologies, now it has literally stuffed the pushing of its technologies into a free application Bing Wallpaper. While other applications for regularly changing wallpapers are often paid for, this one is free, but it comes with a lot of annoying steps that are met with a lot of criticism.

The application itself should set the daily background from the Bing application at the same time as the background for Windows 11. In addition, it also installs Bing Visual Search and code that tries to use cookies from browsers including its own Edge and alternative browsers such as Chrome or Firefox. It also installs the Microsoft Bing Search add-on in alternative browsers (e.g. Chrome), and when it is launched, a message pops up announcing this add-on, and at the same time, the BGAUpsell process also starts, which tries to get the user to start using the Bing search engine within Chrome and other browsers ( it attracts them, for example, to Microsoft Rewards, which the user can get for actively using Microsoft services).

Last but not least, they also try to entice users to set Microsoft Edge as the default browser and use various excuses to get them to (more or less consciously) change this setting of the operating system. Some users, including Rafael Rivera, who pointed this out, don’t like these practices so much that they’ve basically labeled the app as malware.

Source: www.svethardware.cz