Is The Road To The Future Of Windows 10 Paved In Ads?

There’s a lot to love about Windows 10. It’s the most advanced version of Microsoft’s OS to date, and I dare say it’s the most attractive, as well. However, with the good comes quite a bit of bad – or, at least “annoyance”. Sure, the entire Windows Update mechanic is more annoying than ever, but I’m not even talking about that. I’m talking outright bloatware, or adware.

The Verge‘s Tom Warren penned a post that tackles this exact issue, and I admit that Windows 10 has been even naggier, and thus more annoying, than I even knew. Chances are good that if you’re using Windows 10, you’ve dealt with some of these issues.

For starters, one of Microsoft’s biggest wants is for us to all love its Edge browser. But as someone who uses Chrome and Firefox quite extensively, and Edge only on test PCs, I can say with absolute confidence Edge has a long road ahead of it if it’s going to capture a large audience. As was the case with Internet Explorer, it seems most people who use Edge don’t realize there are other options, or simply don’t care enough.

If Edge was as great a browser as Microsoft claims, it probably wouldn’t need to beg its users to give it an honest go. If you’re caught running Chrome, for example, you might just see a pop-up in the corner with Microsoft bragging about how much less battery Edge will use over the big G’s solution. Well, that might be the case, but I think it’s been proven that people care more about the experience than battery-life. You’ll encounter the same kind of nag if you dare change the default browser to anything other than Edge (as seen above).

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft began littering Explorer boxes with an ad for its OneDrive cloud service, nudging people to sign up for $7/mo. Interestingly, some who already have such a subscription were still seeing these ads, which is downright bizarre, to say the least. Personally, I encountered no such ad on my main PC as a OneDrive subscriber, but I did encounter it on a test PC, which is logged into a local account rather than my personal one.

If that doesn’t sound bad enough, remember the fact that Microsoft took it upon itself to bundle Candy Crush on people’s PCs, which for most sits there unused. Soon, Microsoft will also bundle in Sling TV, at least for those in the US.

This all begs the question: is this what we should expect from Windows now? Windows 10 hasn’t even been out for a full two years, yet we have many examples of inconveniences that exist in this latest OS that didn’t in the outgoing ones. That, coupled with the fact that Windows Update will reboot your PC regardless of what it’s doing if you’re not present at the time, just isn’t going to sit well with many people. There’s even word that the new Creators Update could be forced on those using metered connections. Ugh. Come on, Microsoft!