A couple of weeks ago, I ran out of screen on the one external monitor my work-issued MacBook Air can run. So I switched to my five-year-old Windows desktop and plugged in another monitor. Love it. Productivity through the roof. But it means that I’m finally spending significant time in Windows 11, and gosh, is it janky.
Technology
Why is Windows 11 so got dang annoying?
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24038602/acastro_STK109_microsoft.jpg?ssl=1 "Why is Windows 11 so got dang annoying?")
There are some things that Windows does very well compared to macOS and Linux. All the games are there, for one thing, and Windows runs on all sorts of hardware without a lot of fiddling. You do not have to spend a thousand dollars minimum on a non-upgradable machine to use it. You also generally do not have to download a bunch of drivers or spend six hours in the command line hand-assembling the goddamn operating system.
But for every headline like “Notepad in Windows 11 is finally getting a spellcheck feature,” there’s a “Microsoft is stuffing pop-up ads into Google Chrome on Windows again.” For every Windows Subsystem for Linux, which rules, there’s a ”Microsoft starts testing ads in the Windows 11 Start menu.” Microsoft seems dead set on stuffing Windows 11 full of “features” that steal your attention or try to convince or trick you into using some Microsoft product instead of the thing you were going to use. I am 30 or 40 years old, and I do not need this.
I grew up on Windows 3.1, NT, and 95. I got through college on a Dell desktop. I worked for MaximumPC magazine for five years, for god’s sake. I have built scores of PCs. I am typing this on my main personal computer, a mini-ITX gaming rig I lovingly hand-assembled in 2019. I stay using Windows.
But for the past few years, I had been spending 40-plus hours a week using the relatively sedate macOS for work and my off-work hours spending as little time as possible at a computer. So, even though I upgraded my desktop to Windows 11 about a year ago, I hadn’t spent that much time with it. When I did use my PC, it was mostly for household admin or (rarely) playing a game and, therefore, not interacting much with the OS itself. I am a frog who’s been out of the pot; I just jumped back in and got scalded.
I am a frog who’s been out of the pot; I just jumped back in and got scalded
At some point, a button appeared next to my Start menu. Clicking it or even hovering over it covers a full third of my monitor with stuff I never asked for and am not interested in. A firehose of news glurge. Stock prices. The weather. (That one is useful, but I can get that plenty of places.) There is also now a button in the system tray for Copilot, my everyday AI companion, which is present now across Microsoft products in inverse proportion to its utility.
The Start menu has been mostly garbage since Windows 8, but it’s now almost entirely useless in its default state. Half of it is pinned apps that I did not pin or even install. And I don’t blame the OEM. I am the OEM, and I did not put these here.
Somewhere in the last few versions, Windows seems to have forgotten how to index the files on my computer. So if I try to pull up a program, a file, or a setting in the usual fashion — by hitting Windows and starting to type — it mostly shows me results from the web, which are useless because it’s using Bing to find them.
Microsoft has done something truly remarkable with support documents, too. That info used to be baked into the OS. Now if you are in the display settings window (for example) and you go to the support section and click “Setting up multiple monitors,” it opens up Microsoft Edge — even if it’s not your default browser — bings the phrase “how to add multiple monitors to your windows 11 pc site:microsoft.com,” and displays a page with a single result: an info box excerpting the relevant support page on Microsoft’s website, plus a link to open the exact Settings screen you just arrived from.
This is a) bonkers and b) still a significant improvement over the last time I tried this when a similar link returned zero results. This is Microsoft’s corporate synergy at work. Why keep all those Windows users to yourself when, with a single click, you can make sure the Bing and Edge teams eat, too?
Edge used to be a slightly improved version of Chrome. Now it’s jammed full of sidebars and bloatware. (It is arguably still an improved version of Chrome.) It keeps asking to change my default search engine back to Bing (I shan’t), and its default homescreen is, yep, full of garbage.
Why would one of the world’s biggest tech companies put out an operating system that’s so… janky? Well, part of it is surely the 30-plus years of building each new version of the operating system on top of the old one. That doesn’t really explain why stuff that used to work fine seems to be replaced with new systems that don’t, but something else might.
Windows is tremendously successful. It makes money. It has over 70 percent of the desktop market worldwide. Edge, which is still a pretty decent browser, and Bing, which is a search engine, have much smaller slices of their respective markets. Every Windows user Microsoft can pester, harangue, or trick into switching to Edge or Bing or Copilot over the competition is great for Microsoft, so it makes some kind of spreadsheet sense to jam in as many opportunities for synergy as possible.
It’s not just Windows, obviously. Every damn app wants to steal your attention a million times a day. And many budget phones and Windows computers come bloated with preinstalled adware and bloatware that companies pay OEMs to jam in there. Ritually banishing bloatware is a time-honored tradition among Windows users.
But used to be, that junk was separate from the OS itself. Samsung’s version of Android has plenty of bloat, but that’s Samsung’s version, not Android itself — there’s a reason the phrase “a clean version of Android” is stock among many phone reviewers and why Pixel phones get praised by reviewers at a much higher rate than they get bought by customers.
Ars Technica already wrote a good, practical guide to turning off most of the crap that Windows 11 includes. And this is not my first rodeo. I can turn off most of this junk. Most people will never bother or won’t know how or won’t realize that it’s optional. They’ll just learn to tune it out, mostly. Once in a while, they might click something, and then some part of Microsoft gets some money.
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When Oregon resident Isabelle Reksopuro heard Google was gobbling up public land to fuel its data centers in her home state, she didn’t initially know what to believe. “There’s a lot of misinformation about data centers,” she said. “Google has denied taking that land.”
Technically, she explains, The Dalles, a city near the Washington state border, sought to reclaim that land, “and Google is just a big, unnamed power user.” The city had in fact asked for ownership of a 150-acre portion of Mount Hood National Forest, claiming it needs access to Mount Hood’s watershed to meet municipal needs as its population — 16,010 as of the 2020 census — grows. But critics, including environmentalists, say the city is trying to secure more water for Google, which has a sprawling data center campus in The Dalles that already consumes about one-third of the city’s water supply.
This controversy made Reksopuro curious about the backlash to data centers being built in other communities. So Reksopuro, a student at the University of Washington who studies the connections between tech and public policy, decided to map it out. Using information collected by Epoch AI and data scraped from legislation on data centers, she built an interactive map tracking AI policy around the world. She designed it to be simple enough for anyone to use. “I wanted it to be something that my younger sisters could play through and explore to understand what are the data centers in the area and what’s actually being done about it,” Reksopuro said. She hoped to shift their opinions that way, “instead of like, through TikTok.”
Four times a day, the map searches for new sources and checks them against the existing database Reksopuro built out. “Once it does that, it will write a new summary, add it to the news feed, and populate it on the sidebar,” she said. “I wanted it to be self-updating, since I’m also a student.”
Reksopuro isn’t against data centers, but she thinks tech giants benefit from a lack of transparency around data center policies. “Right now, it’s this really opaque thing — and all of a sudden, there’s a facility,” she said. “I think that if people knew about data centers beforehand, it would give them leverage. They would be able to negotiate: ask for job training programs, tax revenue, environmental monitoring, things to improve their community.”
UCF commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield (University of Central Florida via Storyful)
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– UCF graduates clobber commencement speaker with boos after she says AI is the ‘next Industrial Revolution’
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TOUGH CROWD: During a recent commencement ceremony at the University of Central Florida, a speaker was met with loud boos from the graduating class after declaring that artificial intelligence represents the next industrial revolution. Fox News Digital reporting captures this tense cultural moment, illustrating the mixed public sentiment and skepticism surrounding AI’s growing footprint in daily life.
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TECH DIPLOMACY: OpenAI is throwing its support behind the establishment of a new global artificial intelligence governance organization that would be led by the United States while notably including China as a member. Fox News Digital reporting examines the geopolitical dynamics and regulatory implications of this proposed framework as global powers race to set the standards for AI development.
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FBI Director Kash Patel listened as Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spoke during a press conference at the Department of Justice on April 28, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
STRATEGY RESET: Tech giant Cisco is planning to eliminate thousands of jobs as the company shifts its primary focus to accelerate its artificial intelligence initiatives, a move that comes despite the company beating earnings expectations. Fox News Digital reporting details the corporate restructuring and broader economic trends pushing legacy tech firms to aggressively pivot toward AI.
ROAD HAZARD: Waymo is issuing a sweeping recall of its autonomous vehicle fleet following a concerning incident that highlighted significant safety issues with the self-driving technology. Fox News Digital reporting outlines the specifics of the recall, the nature of the safety flaw, and what this setback means for the future of fully autonomous transportation on public roads.
BOTS IN THE BAY: A newly developed, artificial intelligence-powered robot has been engineered to seamlessly change and balance vehicle tires without human intervention. Fox News Digital reporting showcases this latest innovation, exploring how automation and AI mechanics could soon revolutionize the automotive service and repair industry.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the 2026 Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C., on March 11, 2026. (Kylie Cooper/Reuters)
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Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what’s in your tabs, compare the products you’re looking at, summarize your open articles, and more.
In its announcement, Microsoft says you can “select which experiences you want or leave off the ones you don’t.” The company is retiring Copilot Mode as well, which could similarly draw information from your tabs but offered some agentic features, like the ability to book a reservation on your behalf. Microsoft has since folded these agentic capabilities into its “Browse with Copilot” tool.
Several other AI features are coming to Edge, including an AI-powered “Study and Learn” mode that can turn the article you’re looking at into a study session or interactive quiz. There’s a new tool that turns your tabs into AI-powered podcasts as well, similar to what you’d find on NotebookLM, and an AI writing assistant that will pop up when you start entering text on a webpage.
You can also give Copilot permission to access your browsing history to provide more “relevant, high-quality answers,” according to Microsoft. Copilot in Edge on desktop and mobile will come with “long-term memory” as well, which can tailor its responses based on your previous conversations. And, when you open up a new tab, you’ll see a redesigned page that combines chat, search, and web navigation, along with the Journeys feature, which uses AI to organize your browsing history into categories that you can revisit.
Meanwhile, an update to Edge’s mobile app will allow you to share your screen with Copilot and talk through the questions about what you’re seeing. Microsoft says you’ll see “clear visual cues” when Copilot is active, “so you know when it’s taking an action, helping, listening, or viewing.”
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