Earlier this month, Microsoft began testing a feature to show ads for third-party products in the Start menu in Windows 11. This week, the software giant began rolling out update KB5036980, which, among other things, enables the feature to show ads in the recommendations section of the Start menu in stable operating system builds.
Image Source: Microsoft
“The Featured section of the Start menu will showcase some apps from the Microsoft Store. These apps are created by a small group of select developers.”says the note for the previously mentioned update package.
The ads in the Start menu are supposed to help Windows 11 users find more apps. It will also be useful to developers, who Microsoft is trying to encourage to create more software solutions for Windows. Interestingly, it only took the software giant two weeks to move the Start Menu advertising feature from beta versions of Windows 11 to stable builds of the OS. Most likely, in such a short period the company did not receive so many negative user reviews about the innovation that could force Microsoft to stop displaying advertising in the Start menu.
At this stage, users can turn off advertising or “recommendations”, as Microsoft calls the innovation. After installing the KB5036980 package, you need to go to the personalization settings and disable the “Show recommendations” option. While the update is currently optional, that will change in the next few weeks and Microsoft will roll it out to all compatible devices.
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