The program is available to promote other Microsoft products

A few days ago, Microsoft released the Bing Wallpaper app on the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 and 11. Reviewers and researchers later called it malware disguised as a small customization application, 24 Channel reported, citing programmer Rafael Rivera of Redmond, Washington. Someone who researched the Bing Wallpaper code and found a lot of interesting things there.

The app’s description on the Microsoft Store is brief. It only promises “a collection of beautiful images from around the world” that will update your wallpaper daily. That sounds good. But there are many hidden applications hidden under the hood.

• In addition to “listening” to your browser’s cookies (Chrome, Firefox, and of course Microsoft’s own Edge browser) and geolocation trackers, the program also installs Bing’s image search and advertises Microsoft’s search engine quite aggressively from the very beginning .
• Bing Wallpaper will also attempt to change your browser settings and suggest “time- and money-saving” searches for those using Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and, somewhat surprisingly, Internet Explorer.
• And it wouldn’t be a Microsoft product if Microsoft didn’t try to set Edge as the default browser.
• If your default browser isn’t Microsoft Edge, the new wallpaper app will at some point launch the browser you set as your default browser and open a new tab saying “You’ve already installed the Microsoft Bing Search extension” and that’s it. What you need to do is enable it in the extension settings. In this way, the program automatically downloads and installs the extension into your browser.

The company has yet to comment on the issue, but this app is reminiscent of the aggressive marketing of the mid-2000s, when you got a bunch of hidden apps, browser add-ons, and a bunch of other junk along with a program. It takes longer to uninstall than to install. This is a very strange and embarrassing practice for a company like Microsoft.