This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'll be honest, there was a time when Edge was a really nice browser. Probably the best of the chromium browsers. It had an excellent reader mode, impeccable PDF viewer, and a few small quality of life tweaks that actually improved shopping, privacy, Etc. But then Microsoft did what Microsoft does and filled it with bloat, needless features, an unclosable assistant, and ever more aggressive tracking.
In a year, they'll abandon it and rebrand it the new Bing browser, and the cycle repeats
Yeah, I'm a browser nerd. I love seeing what's out there, testing different features, etc. So I'm usually jumping between two browsers in addition to my daily driver at any given time. I used Edge as a secondary browser for a few months when the MacOS beta became available and as far as performance is concerned it was a legitimately good browser. You're also right, it had some nice features of its own that made it worthwhile as a Chrome alternative (assuming the obvious privacy issues were not a concern for someone, it was at least a decent lateral option to consider.)
By the time I eventually got around to revisiting Edge recently I was disappointed to find they've made an absolute mess of it. It's the most bloated piece of crap on the market.
I only started using Edge because people were saying it was the only way to get true HD on Netflix. Now it's a secondary browser, and I can't say I like it much.
there was a time when Edge was a really nice browser. Probably the best of the chromium browsers.
Except the tracking bits. Like Chrome, but worse.
It's funny that a lot of this is people with bullshit jobs trying to justify their existence. A company this big gets bloated internally with staff - especially middle management - that will manipulate information to prevent themselves from becoming redundant, so they will insist that their specific project is super important and they absolutely need every engineer working for them, because their prestige and pay are connected to how many people they manage. So then your software fills up with useless junk until the problem gets so bad it can't be ignored. There's a big internal shake-up and products get rebranded but most of the organisational bloat remains, so the cycle starts again.
You want us to use Edge? Then stop sucking, and respect our privacy. Oh, wait...that's the antithesis of Microsoft's philosophy.
Do you consider Edge to be worse than Chrome?
/edit: I asked because they said "You want us to use Edge" when evidently many people do use Chrome, and I don't see Edge being noticeably worse than Chrome.
It was at least running its own engine until a couple years ago. But now, you may as well use chrome.
But don't use chrome. Use Firefox.
It is chrome with a different tracking system
It's chrome without Google's ad "privacy" bullshit.
It has Microsoft's one, tough. It isn't different
It is different. Chrome automatically opted US users into their new "topics" advertising feature which allows Google to use your browser history to assign topics of interest to you and use it to deliver targeted adverts at you.
And Google's, Apples, etc, etc.
Mind, I'm not saying that to excuse any of them.
At least at one time MS "produced" (that is to say, acquired) some really great software (Office 4.2 was a massive game changer). But they couldn't wait for everyone to be always connected to implement their telemetry game (which they were actively developing in the mid 90's).
Maybe someone should sue them for overly tight integration of their browser into their os...
Might work, I mean, it worked once before, lol
I can't believe Micro$oft is still trying to pull this shit after it was fined for this in the European Union.
Hopefully, they'll fine them again, because this is unacceptable.
No, I don't use Windows, but people who use it and are less tech savvy should not be jumping through so many hoops to make the switch
Apple is almost as bad with Safari on MacOs and you can't even really change the browser on IOS. But everyone shits on Microsoft.
Thank you! I don't like either approach but I hate that only one gets this much flack
Android is getting there too You have to jump through a lot of hoops not to use Chrome
Interestingly, if you install Chrome or Firefox, you won’t see them as choices. But if you install the Brave browser, you will see it as an option — and if you select that, then whenever you click on a news link in the Widget pane, it will come up in Brave.
Fick everything about this
Naggy advertising pop-ups and forced installs vastly increased resistance to Windows 10. So I don't get how Microsoft doesn't know it would scare users away from Edge.
Giving marketing the benefit of the doubt, I'd blame executive management for the aggressive push. They're the ones who push for draconian DRM and crunching based on their feelings.
Yeah, it's baffling that they don't learn these lessons, but these kinds of corporations already exist to exploit customers by witholding their products until money is exchanged - in fact they have whole departments dedicated to preventing piracy - so the general lesson of "don't enshittify your product to attempt to exploit customers" is sort of an existential threat to them.
So they must avoid the lesson, and they do that by replicating that same exploitation relationship internally with their employees, creating a low-information environment where the actual creators of the product cannot be honest with management about what the product needs, and customer service can't relay the feedback they get from customers. Any information that does get to management, they are free to ignore. Every command flows top down, just like the money flows bottom up.
Did you guys know you can run Edge on Linux natively? I installed it for shits and giggles once before throwing up and apt purging that shit as fast as I could.
Oh, you can run VS Code as well, but I think that IDE is actually kinda useful. At least for the embedded PlatformIO shit I do. If there's another IDE with that sort of integration as well as Github, then I'm willing to try it.
VSCodium- all of the perks, None of the telemetry tracking. Minimal tweaks to a config file lets you use the same plugins that “only” work in VSCode.
For a breif moment, you were the entire user base on Linux.
RIP antitrust laws
Their design philosophy is so bad. They've made probably the most bloated web browser in existence. No wonder people go to Chrome, it doesn't have 90% of the useless clutter.
I just set my default browser and install MSEdgeRedirect. It's like EdgeDeflector, except it's not been abandoned. Its latest version even "grounds CoPilot", as the dev so nicely put it.
The easiest way to get out of this Edge shit is to just replace Windows completely.
I couldn't find a complaint with a quick googling.... probably because Google is now a shitty place to find stuff. But check out the process for changing over to another browser. It's so fucking annoying.
My solution was changing over to another operating system. I've had it to here with Microsoft, and with Proton on Steam being great as it is I really had no more excuses to stick to Windows.
Yeah my laptop now runs Mint and my pc windows because of reasons (scanner soft, I know Photoshop really well, 3dsmax, I'm lazy, ...).
Every time I open up my windows pc it had rebooted and not stayed in deep sleep, and everything is more and more just complicated.
I spend more and more time on my laptop... where it doesn't feel line I'm on a browser without an adblocker. I also excuse any (rare) problems way easier as I think it's just a bug, not someones feature.
I was already using programs with native Linux versions, such as Blender 3D, Krita, Gimp, Libre Office. Blender 3D even renders a bit faster in Linux.
The only reason why I didn't switch over until Microsoft started forcing Windows 11 down everyone's throats was because of my games library. Valve eliminated that problem, hallowed be Gabe.
