{"id":437520,"date":"2022-03-16T06:13:48","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T04:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=437520"},"modified":"2022-03-16T06:16:00","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T04:16:00","slug":"microsoft-testing-ads-in-windows-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/437520-microsoft-testing-ads-in-windows-11.html","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft testing ads in Windows 11"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microsoft has started testing advertisements for its products within the Windows 11 file explorer, BleepingComputer reports<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The publication spotted a post from a Windows user and Insider MVP who had uncovered one such ad<\/a><\/strong> in a recent test build of Windows 11 promoting spelling and grammar checking tool Microsoft Editor.<\/p>\n

“Some people will go mad if Microsoft starts adding ads in explorer,” he tweeted alongside a screenshot showing the ad above the listing of files and folders.<\/p>\n

Many users on Twitter responded with scathing criticism of the move.<\/p>\n

One contributor said the file explorer was “one of the worst places to show ads”, while another said they were “very disappointed” with this decision.<\/p>\n

A third threatened to “immediately uninstall Windows 11” if Microsoft went through with the change.<\/p>\n

Several also said they hoped there would be an option to turn the ads off and that this should be the default setting.<\/p>\n

But one user said that people should not be surprised given that Microsoft had offered Windows 11 as a free upgrade.<\/p>\n

“What did you expect from something that’s ‘free’ from a for-profit business?” he stated.<\/p>\n

Below is a screenshot of the ad as shared by Twitter user @Florian<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

BleepingComputer could not replicate the ad when running the newest Windows Insider build, suggesting that Microsoft might have been running an A\/B experiment that would see it disable the ad if the response were negative.<\/p>\n

This is not the software giant’s first attempt at pushing commercials to users in its widely-used desktop operating system.<\/p>\n

In 2016, it showed an ad for its cloud storage service OneDrive within the Windows 10 file explorer.<\/p>\n

Later, it tested ads for its free Office web apps in the Wordpad menubar and prompted users to download Microsoft Edge in the Start Menu each time they searched for rival browsers.<\/p>\n

In one infamous test, the company managed to break the Start Menu with a Microsoft Teams ad.<\/p>\n

Now read: Windows 11 will get new features in small regular updates<\/a><\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Microsoft has started testing advertisements for its products within the Windows 11 file explorer, BleepingComputer reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":403409,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[123,807,70233,77240],"class_list":["post-437520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-microsoft","tag-windows","tag-windows-11","tag-windows-ads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437520"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":437552,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437520\/revisions\/437552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}