When I quit at McDonalds to start a career in welding, the owner of the store happened to be visiting. He took me aside and told me "You know, those guys at... (Sorry, what was that place called again? Right...) You know, I've heard the people there aren't as nice as we are here. Are you sure you want to leave?"

I've never wanted to punch an old man so much in my life. In that moment, he was the personification of class warfare to me, trying to "trick" me into throwing away my future just so he could have more cheap labour. And the fact it was so blatantly obvious added insult to, well... insult.

Anyway, it's not the same, but the "wallpapers" thing definitely gives me the same vibes, lol.

They have me by the wallpapers!

NOOOOOO

Well, you have to admit they are by far the best feature of bing

The xiaomi wallpaper carousel is the worst piece of soft on my phone, I don't care and no you can't have all those accesses.

Had to install some freeware to just set the backgrounds wtf is this, the way they are getting people now??

It’s funny how chrome users are struggling with all those bullshit. Firefox for the win

It never went away, just the degree of desperation has changed

Well when the alternative is Bing quality search results, Google still has a slight edge.

That gap is closing by the day tho.

Nah, the way Microsoft and Edge work still enrages me. I just use both Chrome and Firefox atm, with Chrome behind my VPN and Firefox split tunneled. I'm still on 10, but when I have the freedom to do so I'm going to switch to Linux. I can't just up and do it at the moment because I work through my computer and also game through it, so I need to have a ton of things ensured workable before I switch. That requires time and testing, and in an ideal environment a second system to run in parallel, which I cannot do atm.

I've heard our work may be purchasing work laptops for us, so I might be able to do my switch then.

Microsoft is magnitudes worse than google.

Because most people are not anywhere near as computer literate as much of Lemmy would have you believe.

Bing (and therefore duckduckgo) was down a couple days ago. I could imagine people temporarily switching to google during the outage.

No, it looks like something Windows automatically added to their chrome to enforce Bing, unless something changed recently and I didn't know about it

You don't, but you can.

You don't have to use an extension to do it, but some find it easier to do than finding it in settings.

The same is true for Firefox.

Violations of privacy. Microsoft has that too though, so unless Google has wallpapers they need to step up their game.

Midlevel management does this, not developers

I was asking myself the same thing. This is a pathetic state of affairs... The only thing missing is that the google banner would now also acknowledge the Bing box and tell you specifically "don't listen to the other popup!".

But microsoft install that for you without consent, according to other comment on lemmy.

Federated?

You're just throwing together FOSS buzzwords at this point.

Searx is pretty great, although I wouldn't recommend self-hosting it. Just use one of the public instances like Searx Belgium because it is harder to fingerprint you off of your searches since a lot of people also do their searches on the same instance.

Bing is the default engine in Edge which is the default browser on Windows. There’s a huuuge demographic who doesn’t care enough to change either of those.

Also, Bing profits from other search engines using their results as a base. DuckDuckGo, for example, uses Bing as their primary source for search results. And in my experience is better at it than google, these days.