Like some kind of ungodly STD.
Doom approaches, and we ain’t talking Victor or MF, bud. Rather, your Start menu in Windows 11 is about to get a whole lot junkier. Because Microsoft has identified an area of your Windows experience that isn’t clogged with ads, and they seek to remedy that issue.
The plan is simple, per this Windows Insider blog post: stick a bunch of ads for “recommended apps” on the Windows store in your previously pristine Start menu.
Building on top of recent improvements like grouping recently installed apps and showing your frequently used apps, we are now trying out recommendations to help you discover great apps from the Microsoft Store under Recommended on the Start menu.
Now you might think this is odd, considering the fact that you’re pretty sure the start menu was already infected with the advertising virus. And you’d be wrong, because that’s actually the search bar you’re thinking of, which instead of helping you find things on your computer’s drives, gives you a bunch of links to Microsoft Edge search strings that you may or may not want. And also ads and articles. And maybe if you’re lucky, what you’re looking for on your hard drive, assuming you know exactly what that file was named.
Prior to this fresh hell, the Recommended tab on your Start menu was filled with files or programs you used regularly or recently. Reasonable, but not terribly useful, and you could go in to the Start settings and turn it off. But now, you’ll be able to see what useless crap people are using on Windows 11, even if it’s worthless dreck like the worst zip archive program you’ve ever seen.
The good news is, much like the old Recommended tab, you can opt out of this. The even better news is that Beta channel users may very well veto the feature if they hate it. On the other hand, if they like it for some reason, we may all very well be stuck with it. At least, until some magnificent ad-busting son-of-a-gun comes up with a solution to remove it, kicking off an arms race between Microsoft and people that hate ads.
Let’s just hope this dies a thousand deaths before it sullies our Start menus.
Source: PC Gamer
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