Is it just me or is edge actually a decent browser? It’s not like the dark internet explorer times.
It’s better than chrome for sure. Depending on what your criteria for using a browser it, it might even be in the top 3 browser options.
But it’s still a Microsoft product filled with the usual Microsoft shenanigans. If you don’t care about your browser keeping track of what you do and that sort of privacy concerns, absolutely give it a try. You can even use it on Linux and Android and it works fine on those too.
One other negative aspect I can think of is that Microsoft is quite open to adhering to Google’s own shenanigans like that recent proposal they got ridiculed for. For that reason I’d rather recommend Vivaldi instead - there’s very little that edge does better than Vivaldi and there’s plenty that Vivaldi does better than it.
But also, please, consider using Firefox if you don’t have any problems with it. You’ll literally be helping make the internet a better place just by using it. So many people use chromium based browsers today that Google literally owns the way the internet works.
I’ve never really liked Firefox and I’ve tried it multiple times. As for big companies tracking data, I think that’s pretty much unavoidable at this stage and I don’t really care.
My only criteria for browsers is just stuff loading when it should and fast. Corporations are welcome to my shit data, the only thing that annoys me about that is they profit from it and I don’t.
I wasn’t a fan of Firefox either and personally lived using edge. When the whole web integrity thing started happening, I felt like I should switch to Firefox and haven’t looked back.
I still have some complaints, like you can’t install sites native app which I used a lot. I don’t think tab groups have been implemented yet, which isn’t a huge deal but very useful. And there were a few others I can’t remember off the top of my head. In the end I value my privacy a bit more so I’ve decided Firefox is worth it.
Plus mobile ad blocking is a god send.
There are several, possibly dozens, of tab group extensions for firefox.
Sure, and there’s also an extension to install a web page as an app similar to Chrome. The point is that, out of the box, it lacks some features that I enjoy. Extensions are great and I use plenty of them, but that doesn’t mean that Firefox has those features, it just has extensions that have them.
Firefox is great, don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely preferring it, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have all the features that I wanted up front.
you can’t install sites native app
There’s an extension that lets you do this. I use it and it works great.
I don’t think tab groups have been implemented yet
Funny thing is that forced group tabs on Chrome mobile is what made me ditch it.
The PWA app works decent, but, unless I did something wrong, it would open links in itself instead of my main Firefox window which wasn’t what I’d want normally.
I still use it, but it’s definitely not as nice as I’d want it to be.
Definitely one of those things that’s minor and I can look past though.
and I don’t really care.
This is why we can’t have nice things, like privacy.
Just being honest. It’s only the 0.5% of nerds that use Lemmy that actually care. It’s just one more thing I can’t bring myself to care about.
Better than Chrome for sure. Not better than Firefox
Yeah, I like it too
It’s because Edge is built on Chromium now.
It’s a decent browser, but half the reason people hate it is because MS tries to force it on you. They should let it stand on its own merits then maybe it wouldn’t have such a negative reception.
Meh, Chrome is a piece of shit as well. If you use gmail on another browser, they keep pestering you to try Chrome.
Ye I hate chrome too
I just opened my gmail in Firefox and I don’t see this Chrome notification right now. Maybe it pops up every now and then. I wouldn’t be bothered by it that much, since started using Thunderbird as mail client last month, and the interface is so much better and customizable than gmail ever was. I did use Thunderbird a long time ago, but stopped when I got gmail in 2004. And all this time I thought Thunderbird still had the old classic UI. Apparently it became a bit too messy with all different volunteer contributions and Mozilla didn’t have a project management to stay with a certain direction. In Feb 2023 they announced in this blog post to rebuild Thunderbird from the ground up and invest the resources to support the community again, although with more control. Then a few months ago this big update to 115 was released, which was featured in a computer tech website so I became curious again. One of the best decisions of this year (although I’m still using it to access gmail), together with joining Lemmy of course.
Solution, don’t use Gmail either
Next time edge is going to ask… what are you going to do? Install Google chrome? 😂
I’ve been using Edge for 2 years now. No problems whatsoever ever. You can stop begging MS.
The begging is considered a feature
Beg harder<3
Yes that’s the good stuff
Edge was a win when it first came out. It had its own rendering engine, was fast and svelte.
Now it’s just another bloated Chrome clone overstuffed with privacy-invading marketing features.
Same story every time. Something good turns into shit because they need to add marketing.
I’m shocked Microsoft hasnt fucked up VS Code yet. Someone much smarter than average is running that team at Microsoft.
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It turned bad because a bunch of users refused to use it because they remembered never updating past IE8 and made jokes about it lagging behind the competition
VS Code is the fucked up version of Code OSS
Oh now you’ve gone and jinxed it.
Nah the future for VS Code looks dark imo. They own VS Code, Github, NPM and Copilot and everything they touch turns into shit.
It’s because they make their devtool money off of enterprise licensing costs, and they get those costs by getting developers to be okay using their devtools.
The tool is the advertisement for building software for Windows. If it gets too miserable to use the tools or build for the ecosystem, then some companies won’t prioritize windows software, and developers will prefer jobs doing something else. It’s got to be good enough so that decision makers at software companies don’t start hearing that windows software takes three quarters longer to develop.
Web developers are already targeting their browser as an afterthought, and mobile developers are pretty pulled into to apple ecosystem, since you can develop android apps on a Mac, but you can only use a Mac to make iPhone apps.Without developers, applications lag, and they lose business and consumer market share, which costs them more developers.
Hence: visual studio is fine, and they keep adding azure features to GitHub and tying it all to visual studio.
I use Edge whenever something needs to stream on a Windows PC, unlike other Chromium builds it is capable of hardware acceleration and therefor 4k streaming. Whenever you watch 4k on Google Chrome it isn’t really that high quality.
Its not hardware acceleration, it’s DRM.
You can add as much context and nuance as you want but at the end of the day the hardware usage is locked behind a door that Edge has the key to and Chrome doesn’t.
Except that you are literally saying that Chrome/Firefox doesn’t have the ability to stream HD when, in fact, they are. It’s just the shitty antics of one of the sleaziest companies in existence.
They are on higher end machines, but they don’t have the same capabilities of Edge on Windows. If it were Chromium on some other OS then they would probably be functionally equivalent.
As much as I hate Edge and Chrome, ,my 5.1 surround sound doesn’t work in Firefox. So if I want to watch something in surround on Youtube I have to switch to Edge. Then the nagging starts.
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Use an ad-filled browser controlled by a megacorp, with an engine built by another megacorp?
Hmmm, I dunno
Even better. After you’ve explicitly triggered the default change MS is like “have you tried the all new megacorp spyware? It’s not actually new, but identical to the spyware we already installed and absolutely nothing has changed in the last 10 seconds since you made the decision, but we figured we’d throw another churn barrier at you because fuck you; we own your OS. You’re our product now bitch, and that’s all you’ll ever be”
Sad but true
Well, on the other hand, said megacorp finances the only other engine (Gecko, Blink being a fork of Apples Webkit), so they don’t have to bother with monopoly restrictions.
Current web is broken.
I realize this, but technically Mozilla is still an independent entity. They also fight some Google attempts at Web DRM, so it’s still healthy competition
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who needs a standard when you are the standard /s
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Nice 😎
aren’t they the same megacorp
I think they’re referring to the fact that Edge runs on the Chromium engine which, as the name implies, is a Google product.
Don’t forget the OS built by a megacorp snorkeling up all your data anyways
…that they ask you to actually pay for the privilege. Because remember, windows isn’t actually free (and you pay for it if you buy a pre-built).
I feel it’s important to point out that you can simply not activate Windows and use it indefinitely
Does make you wonder though where Microsoft is getting that money from
Corporate Users. My guess is, that almost any office job where you work on a Computer has Windows as OS. You have a license for your job. The license for home usage is bonus money to Microsoft.
At least I can mostly opt out there. Or use Linux
Sure if you trust that the opt-out switches actually work.
and don’t get reset the next update.
They must do something, or Windows wouldn’t constantly turn them back on with every other update.
Maybe that’s just what they want you to think.
For all we know, Windows forgot to actually implement the settings /s
Do you think Microsoft wants to get sued by the EU?
Those opt-out work. Or at least in the EU they do.
Sorry Gil, it’s still chromium ;c
Honestly have been using edge on my work computer for a while now and see no reason to change. I use Firefox on my personal computer but for now Edge is just fine.
What does “built for Windows 10” even mean? It’s just a browser. It’s even cross platform.
That unlike teams, which they didn’t bother to build for windows and instead used a webapp, they actually bothered to use their own ui tools on their own operating system for a change? (But I guess they only did that so that teams could be a webapp, based on edge…)
You’re right, clicked it away so many times over the years and never stopped to think what a silly statement that was. I feel like it was for a time when 10 was a new shiny ‘mysterious’ thing, that it might convince people into thinking it needed something special, but has just aged like milk.
NO WONDER I CANT GET IT TO RUN ON SOLARIS!!
It’s integrated into the OS
In what way is it “integrated”? Please, I’d love to know.
Microsoft Edge is integrated with File Explorer in Windows 10 through a feature called “Pick up where you left off”. This feature allows users to resume their browsing session from Microsoft Edge directly within File Explorer.
Their other apps use it or part of it in the background.
Kind of like old Windows apps always used Explorer when they needed a browser
I wouldn’t be surprised if the start menu was using Edge for their search/ads
You’re telling me, that Windows now shows ads in the start menu?
Sorry, it’s probably a stupid question, but i haven’t used windows since XP.
Most are in your system notifications but you’ll have “suggested apps” in the start menu for easy one-click installs
When you try to log out you’ll see ads for OneDrive and Office 365 apparently
There’s this
Wow - that’s really something.
It could almost be compared to Google’s feed, included in the pixel launcher…
For some time now, every 5th or 6th card is an ad … And over time they slowly look just like the normal news cards.
Yeah, nowadays we’re getting ads forced upon us - one way or the other ads have to be seen, preferably clicked on, by us.
That’s not really ads though.
Almost everything that runs on Windows was built for Windows. So it’s a true statement, but pointless. That’s like BF Goodrich advertising their tires as “built for cars”.
😂
“Designed for Windows Me Millennium Edition”
Maybe they meant it integrates well with other windows 10 apps?
Integrates how?
Idk, I really like Edge. It just has bad reputation due to Internet Explorer… It is actually very good imo.
It depends on what circles you’re in I suppose. But I suspect you’re right for most people that dislike it. For some of us it’s the Chromium engine it runs on, and/or the company it comes from.
Edit: So more ideological reasons. I imagine the browser itself works fine.
Yeah you’re right. I can see and I respect people’s reasons for not wanting to use windows / Microsoft products.
I just wanted to point out this as I think many people still consider edge as a bad browser. At least in my experience it works really well and I personally like the style it has and overall the “windows 11 aesthetic” Microsoft is choosing for their products.
tried it up to when it asked to remember CC #s. not stupid
Ff has that feature too. It’s if anything more secure than remembering passwords because at least you still need the expiration date and cvc (unless edge saves that too).
already using chrome for that. nothing but random passwords for about 300 sites. edge: import? no thanks dis chrome if you like. G has been good to me so far. was ff for a spell, got bloated
Well, I switched to Edge for work with the latest Chrome update (since internal apps were Chromium only), and was pleasantly surprised. It actually let me turn off almost all the junk, and is responsive in a way I haven’t seen in a Chromium browser in years.
Safari and Firefox for personal use though, and nothing compelling to make me change that.
The performance is pretty on-par with other major browsers now, but it is the obscene amount of popups built into the browser that irritates me.
I use edge for work every day, what popups?
Same I’m a developer who uses edge as my daily driver and once setup right I love it
I use arc on my mac and it’s nowhere near as nice as that, but I like the side tabs, the way it gets out of the way when I’m searching, and bing isn’t too bad; I’ve actually used it a few times. Once I found a customizable start page I haven’t looked back. Again, for work
Once you set it up it’s fine, but on first opening you have to click through a bunch of menus (no, I don’t want to share data, no I don’t want to sync my account, and so on). In other browsers it’s a small popup in the corner which you can ignore, and just google what you wanted to google. In edge they’re fullscreen and you have to click no on each one.
Probably a rather unique problem because I regularly set up new machines, most people just go through it once and never see it again.
You hit the nail right on its head! It’s pretty bad that there is no skip all option, and for some of them you have to manually uncheck before continuing.
I’m in the same situation as you where I often work on fresh virtual machines, and so I see this a lot too.
May be worth building a default config to “install” for those setups; that’s saved me quite some time when configuring new/spare machines at work.
There’s the shopping popup that tries to find better deals or vouchers for products you’re looking at. It’s easy to turn off though.
Searching the settings for “notification” does show others - a feature called Discover and sidebar apps seem to be able to send notifications but I’ve never seen either.
If you need to use Chromium, just use Ungoogled-Chromium or Brave. But Firefox/LibreWolf will always be superior.
Maybe look at
BromiteCromite? Open Source Chromium browser where you don’t need to disable anythingMulch to
Bromite has not been updated since January.
One of the old Bromite contributors forked it: https://github.com/uazo/cromite
Yes, that one. Thanks for pointing it out
Same, I’m only allowed to use either Chrome or Edge on my work laptop, so I chose Edge.
Librewolf on my personal laptop and Firefox on mobile tho.
Bonus for Librewolf!
I love Firefox… But the listicle ads are seriously tacky and annoying. I do not want Pocket. And I do not want Pocket randomly re-enabled after a set of updates.
its based off of chromium, so one would expect it to be as fast as most modern browsers.
its the annoyances built on top of them, and user privacy that matters in a browser nowadays
I do use Edge as my main browser, for now.
But why?
Because my university is very Microsoft-centric when it comes to software and infrastructure. So using Edge allows me to keep myself logged in and not having to introduce my credentials every time i need to do something.
Maybe they haven’t installed Firefox yet
You need something to download Firefox from right?
I switched from Chrome to Edge and initially was really impressed. But then Microsoft had to go and Bing it all up. So now it’s back to Firefox after a 15 year hiatus.
You want something even better? Check out LibreWolf. It’s Firefox with all the privacy features preconfigured, uBlock Origin preinstalled and all the crap like Pocket and sponsored websites removed. And of course it uses DuckDuckGo instead of Google by default.
That duckduckgo default is the thing that aggravates me the most. Sometimes those results just don’t cut it but I don’t even have the option to chance my default browser. I had to bookmark google
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Use Startpage or an instance of Whoogle. They are both meta search engines for Google, they allow you to search on Google without exposing your data to Google. If you are a user of Mullvad VPN, you can also use Leta, their own Google meta search engine.
