Windows 11 users, beware: you’re in for an upgrade you can’t ignore thanks to mandatory advertising
Microsoft appears to be planning to make ads disguised as recommendations a fact of life in Windows 11, and the tech giant has apparently started testing promotional recommendation pages that take up your entire screen, urging users to install Edge and other services – similar to the page you see when you first set up your device or install Windows 11.
Thinking back, I remember a few times when this screen appeared on my own Windows 11 PC after an update, and it surprised me because my PC was already set up to my liking. Like me, some users were automatically greeted with “Let’s finish setting up your PC” after a Windows Update was installed. Previously, this type of notification could appear if you bought a PC and set it up for the first time, but now it seems that anyone who is already up and running can see it too.
An overview of the new notification in Windows 11
The new notification screens were spotted by Windows Latest after Microsoft’s monthly Patch Tuesday update in April 2024. As seen in a screenshot in The Windows Latest reportthe notification screen explains that the ‘setup’ process involves backing up your files using OneDrive, restoring Microsoft’s recommended settings (read: setting Edge as your default browser), creating a backing up your phone to your PC, setting up Windows Hello, as well as getting a Microsoft 365 subscription and enabling Phone Link between your phone and PC.
You will then be given two options, neither of which is to unsubscribe from the notification if you are not interested. You can choose ‘Continue’ or ‘Remind me in three days’. The pop-ups will return eventually. Windows Latest tried the “Continue” option, which led to a “Let’s customize your experience” page, asking users to customize the “Recommended” section of their Start menu. As shown in an included screenshot, users are given some control over the apps that appear in this section.
If you decide not to make any adjustments, you will be taken to a page with the heading “Use recommended browser settings.” The best option, not coincidentally, is Microsoft Edge – the default browser of Windows 11. This is accompanied by Bing as the default search engine, which again is no surprise. Enabling it will also pin the Edge icon to the taskbar and create a desktop icon (if you removed it). Fortunately, if you’re not interested in using Microsoft’s web browser and search engine, you can click “Don’t update your settings” (which sounds like you’re falling behind), and you can keep your previous settings.
This isn’t Microsoft’s first heavy-handed attempt to get people to use its software and services, and it isn’t the first to be met with user distaste. As Windows Latest points out, Edge is already pre-installed and is difficult to remove for users running Windows 11 outside Europe.
If you’ve gone through all these options screens and still have some patience left, you’ll come across more promotional pages for other Microsoft services, like the offer to try Microsoft 365 Family with a free trial. You can opt out of this and subscribe to Microsoft 365 Basic, which includes ad-free OneDrive and Outlook, along with 100 GB of cloud storage. In the screenshot that includes Windows Latest, no prices are listed, just a “Continue” button. After this page, users are urged to set up Microsoft’s Phone Link app, which works in a similar way to Apple’s AirDrop feature and allows you to access data on a linked Android phone on your PC.
Each page has at least an option to skip that specific step and complete the PC setup process, but this is strange wording because as I mentioned earlier when I saw the notification, and as Windows Latest stated while documenting During this process, our PCs were already configured to our taste.
This happened in parallel with adding ads disguised as recommendations in the Start menu and experimenting with adding Xbox Game Pass ads in the Settings page. I don’t like this direction for Microsoft, and if it’s not careful, it could end up annoying users instead of encouraging them to try out the software. We live in a time where people’s attention spans can be short, but frustrations and annoyance can linger in people’s minds for quite a long time.