Edit: Folks, I keep telling you it’s VERY unlikely to be malware.
I’ll update you and apologize to each if my credit card gets wiped or something but I’m quite sure I’m safe, don’t worry.
Also sorry for blaming Microsoft for what is apparently my fault.
I accidentally clicked Microsoft Edge on my work computer with Windows 10 and couldn’t close it — it just keeps reopening. It takes File Shredder to stop it from opening again, at least until the computer restarts.
Notice the ads, most are extremely sketchy (my frequent reload in previous takes caused the ad server + my work VPN to rate limit me):
- China warns:
%user.currency%
is dead! (Yeah, sure. Obvious propaganda. Generic pictures or faked images of a worthless banknote giveaway.) - 63-year-old figured out! (Does not say what but a pic of obviously young-looking feet.)
- Make boatloads of money with AI! (aka auto-trade very uncompetitive options, no guarantees on withdrawals of any wins)
- Save money using solar! (The company is legitimate but the deal on panels is probably not great)
- Buy yourself a great new FPCEILPTBSP! (You can’t tell what it is and neither can we! (Apparently TV wall mount))
- Losing hair?
- Millionaire has genius method you can try (but give us money first, making his pic transparent so we can put him in front of
%user.country.flag%
was difficult) - Game! Yay! (Microtransactions galore!)
- Get EVERYTHING in your car fixed (by a stock photo mechanic!)
Along with my personal ones I have a few windows 10/11 machines at work I manage and haven’t seen this happen, where the window just instantly re-opens like that.
Have you tried clearing the edge appdata folders to fully reset all the settings? Maybe some setting got screwed up.
Also maybe AV going haywire as a cause, lots of third party AV likes to do all kinds of weird stuff with your browsers. Windows defender is the go-to best option for windows these days, so if it turns out to be your third party AV you can pretty safely just get rid of it and switch back to defender.
I haven’t seen this behavior either but companies do partial “feature” rollouts all the time so I assume this is something like that.