Microsoft-signed “BGAUpsell.exe” pushes Bing on Windows and Chrome users

Enlarge / A new kind of Bing pop-up appears for some Windows 11 users, apparently generated by a Microsoft-signed executable separate from the OS's notification system. (credit: The Verge)

In July, Microsoft began to let web browsers other than Microsoft Edge access and use its AI-powered Bing Chat service.

This is unsurprising and not a big deal in and of itself. Microsoft has been pushing its “new Bing” preview relentlessly all year, and the potential user base gets a whole lot bigger if you don’t restrict the service to a browser that fights with Firefox and Safari for Google Chrome’s scraps.

Now, multiple users and The Verge have all noticed a new notification that's being shown to users of Windows 10 and Windows 11, prompting them to use the Bing search engine with Chrome, their default browser. Microsoft semi-regularly pushes Bing on Edge users who have already gone out of their way to select a different search engine. Windows 10 and 11 periodically encourage you to use Edge, and some of Microsoft’s sites will also recommend Bing to non-Edge users, something that many of Google’s sites also do to encourage Chrome use. But this is, to my memory, the first example of an operating-system-level notification trying to get you to use Bing in a third-party browser.