If you don’t use Bing with Edge, Microsoft will tell you your computer needs repairing.
They are not wrong.
To mend your machine:
- Ditch Windows
- Install Plasma
- Your computer is ready.
t won’t do anything on its own, you need to accept the repair step
Do you know what else works like that? Pop-up tech support scams. The target doesn’t have to do anything, but it’s become a thriving business in many poor regions (Kolkata, India is notorious) and a problem for moderately tech-illiterate users.
I would even say that this anti-feature promotes bad personal security practices because the user may be more inclined to believe “your computer needs repair” pop-ups if the first one they encounter comes from a legitimate, trusted party.
Yes, it’s not a great security practice, and it probably should work more like "we’ve noticed you have randomly changed your search engine from google/ddg/bing/whatever to this ‘random search engine no-one heard about’’ instead of blindly reverting to edge and bing.
It seems to be a tool for tech illiterates. A power user will know how to avoid malware, and remove it if they catch it.
They should do a much better job than that, but helping people that don’t know what they’re doing is not itself a bad thing.
