Windows 11 Settings App To Have More Ads: Microsoft’s Plan

(CTN News) – Test builds of Windows 11 have advertisements in the Settings panel. This has become a common theme for operating system preview builds in recent times.

As uncovered by digging through a Windows 11 Canary preview snapshot, Albacore, a respected source for leaks from Microsoft, has shared screenshots of what appears to be the new home page for the Settings app within Windows 11.

As you can see in the first screen grab, there is an ad for Microsoft 365 at the top of the panel, telling users what they will be able to access as part of the service, and that they can try it out for free.

You will then see a prompt for you to complete the setup of your Microsoft Account under that prompt.

This refers to the process of completing the setup of your Microsoft Account. In addition to this, most of the other screenshots show prompts related to the Microsoft Account, urging users to sign into their accounts with the group.

However, this trend of Windows 11 being filled with ads has been met with a great deal of criticism as well. In Microsoft’s view, this is known as ‘badging,’ but it’s just another form of advertising.

This is particularly true when it comes to the efforts to try and encourage people who are currently using Windows 11 with a local account to sign up for a Microsoft Account, and to tie that account to their OS installation.

Upon implementation of the Settings panel, it may look very different from what we see here in the current state, but as of right now, a good chunk of the Home page is devoted to these banner ads, which of course is a bit of a disadvantage.

Basically, we do not like the design of the Home page at all, and we think that there’s much too much going on there.

The important thing to note is that, as Deskmodder points out, it is possible to turn off these ads, which is a good thing to know.

There is little we can do about this at this point but we will have to wait and see what happens and we have to hope that testers are letting Microsoft know if they are not keen on what seems to be a persistent angle for Microsoft at the moment with sneaking more advertisements into Windows 11.

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