Ridiculous. Talk about preaching to the choir! It seems that Microsoft has learned nothing yet from its questionable tactics of promoting its new Edge web browser.
Much has been made about the company’s tactics to convince users to try Microsoft Edge.
But weird as it sounds, Microsoft Edge download prompts are now scattered across Microsoft products and services across the operating system, across the web, even across competing browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
More specifically, Microsoft Edge ads now litter Bing search.
And the worst bit is that Redmond is yet to find a way to determine that the new web browser is already installed on the system, and still serves up these promoted affairs.
Like so:
Multiple popups are shown, with download prompts everywhere, when searching on the Bing search engine. There is even a large, questionable banner that shows up at the bottom of the screen, interfering with whatever it is that you are doing.
Things escalated recently, when a long-time Insider complained about this promotion technique, which has been described as harassment.
A community manager was honest with his reply:
“We’re really sorry to hear that these notifications are compromising your browsing, especially while using Microsoft Edge! This is certainly not the experience that we’re aiming to provide, and we take reports like this seriously, especially when coming from one of our long-time Insiders. We do work closely with the Marketing team, so I will pass this along to them.”
Feedback received!
Fingers firmly crossed.
While the software titan has been adequately criticized for its aggressive push, the Edge team is yet to embrace a friendlier approach. Automatic downloads of the browser on Windows 10 are one thing, but there is no room for the strategy of annoying popups when users are working.
Doubly not so when these users are actually already running the Edge browser on their PCs.
