December 23, 2011

  • I Hate Bing

    Bing is the most annoying search engine I have ever encountered. The majority of its annoyance comes from how very aggressive it is. My homepage used to be MSN, and this was because my parents always set their homepages to MSN. The trouble was that MSN became affiliated with Bing. Every time I opened an internet window, it would go to MSN, and my cursor would be set to the address bar, but then the Bing search box would grab my cursor there. One extra click each time I opened an internet window, but the little bit of added annoyance several times a day builds up. It's the sum effort of starting to type, finding my typing happening in the wrong place, moving from keyboard to mouse or touchpad, and then clicking, and then moving back to keyboard, and typing over. Or when I'd type and hit enter without looking, necessitating a wait while the Bing search loads itself. Eventually I became cross, and changed my home page to WikiNews, and I've been happy ever since. I wasn't having any other problems with MSN. Bing, and only Bing, caused me to stop using MSN.

    Then, today, I was installing TDSSkiller in the hopes of stopping Firefox from opening random sites based on my Google searches. I simply selected the quick install option, which I assumed was all the standard options, and it changed my default search engine to Bing, and installed a Bing toolbar! Now, whenever I open a new tab, the stupid Bing search appears, and I never wanted it there. Seeing it makes a little ball of anger flame up in my stomach. I'm quite ready to stop using Firefox if I can't fix it. Being all aggressive and snatching my cursor and installing itself without my authorization? I'll never patronize Bing.

    Update: I uninstalled it. It was even more underhanded than I expected. I was searching for it and trying to uninstall it, and I couldn't find it on my list of programs. That's because it wasn't even named "Bing Toolbar" or anything else with "Bing" in it, it was named "StartNow". My goodness. Bing, fuck you.