Disabling Tenor GIF search in Windows Emoji Picker

[schnee]

The emoji picker dialog that Windows includes (use Windows + . to access it) not only allows you to insert emoji and smileys with relative ease, but also does GIFs. I find this distracting, and on top of that these are provided by an external service that the tool connects to automatically and without my consent.

There is no option to disable

Comments

[thewayne]

Very cool! I did not know that fed from an outside service, makes a firewall rule definitely the best choice.

[schnee]

Yeah - owned by Google apparently, ironically enough. I'd have expected Microsoft to run their own, but either way connecting to outside services without the user's knowledge or consent should be a no-no, and if such a feature exists in the OS it should be possible to disable it (actually it should be off by default).

[thewayne]

Quite a few web sites that I can't access because my ad blocker blocks Google's ad services. Very annoying, you'd think there would be a fall-back process built-in. But recently, I've had sites not loading because "an add-in in your browser has prevented the site from loading". BE NICE IF YOU'D TELL ME WHICH BLOCKER IT WAS! And these are sites that previously loaded just fine. Very strange. I suspect whatever the add-in is was misbehaving, but it's hard to know.

[schnee]

I don't think the site can know which extension blocked a resource from loading - just that it failed to load.

There are some extensions that will cause many headaches, such as NoScript. I used to use it, but found it's not worth the hassle anymore because basically everything breaks. (You can fix breakages, but that takes time, and time is a limited resource; I want to browse the WWW, not repair it.)

Getting back to blocked resources, there are also sites that will lie to you and claim that they will not work if you have an ad blocker enabled. In those cases, it sometimes helps to block the pop-ups they present. :)