this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Maybe this will sound unrelated but have you seen a PC infected with tons of malware?
The web browsers tend to be the most affected apps by malware and if the user doesn't want to reinstall, forcing the web browser to change the default search engine helps a lot, because it is literally impossible to do that manually when the PC is full of shit.
Other than that, yeah, Microsoft doing anti-consumer things, as always.
How does changing your browser's default search engine (from another legitimate search engine) help get rid of malware?
Been a while since I experienced malware, but they typically forcibly change your browser's default search engine to a shady one with more malware, even after you try to change it to something else. Even for somewhat tech savvy users, this can be somewhat difficult to overcome.
Sounds like Microsoft is somehow overriding this with Bing.
I highly doubt that personally. I'd bet money it wouldn't do this with malware just with people who have a clean system and use a different search engine.
It doesn't. If a PC is so infected you can't change simple settings like search engine, it's time to reformat.