I recently discovered that you can get Microsoft Edge for Linux (🤢🤮) and am curious… does anyone here use Edge for Linux, or have you ever? What was your reasoning for using it?
EDIT: Well, you all have provided some interesting perspectives I hadn’t ever considered. Including one which means I’ll have to install Edge, so… thanks, I guess. 😂
Probably a godsend if you’re a web dev. No more rebooting or running a second PC/VM for compatibility checking.
Na, edge users don’t file bug reports 😂
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Should have redirected to FF tho
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Then that’s understandable, of course
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At least you can take comfort that you probably contributed to saving her from some ie malware in the future
They are the bugs!
The only possible use case I can think of, but I’d still want to restrict the thing to its own VM out of paranoia.
isn’t it just chromium though?
Yes it is, but with extra Microsoft!
It has a slightly better privacy policy compared to google chrome while fully supporting progressive web apps on Linux. Edge is also very much so more efficient in terms of system resource utilization. It also has high quality native built in translation which I need. All of this means I use Edge as my PWA browser.
Chromium lacks native translation support. Firefox PWA support is not good. Edge was the least bad option for me. 🤷♀️
How is edge more efficient? It’s literally chromium
Chrome is basically Chromium+bloat so this doesn’t surprise me.
And Edge is chromium + Microsoft Bloat.
One could argue using it on Windows means only allowing M$ to spy on you, theoretically. Though I would not be surprised if M$ uses a custom version of Chromium including Google trackers, so the opposite of degoogled chromium.
With the same amount of tabs with the same sites Edge uses fewer resources. I think Microsoft did some fine tuning or something. It’s not just just me that sees this either.
This is a 2 year old link but it shows the difference. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-comparison
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The core browser is still good, but they keep changing and adding annoying things and doing questionable privacy things like sending images to their servers “for enhancement”. For a while they removed the ability to remove sync data, but I think it may have been added back again after backlash.
Brave has PWAs, but I’m not sure about the translation support
True. But brave is run by a crypto advertising company. Their business model is advertising and crypto tokens. I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.
In my opinion no proprietary browser is worth using.
Chrome isn’t better in any way than Edge, as both don’t respect it’s users privacy and decisions (dark patterns, etc).
I agree.
If a browser ain’t open source, I ain’t gonna use it and neither should anyone else.
I use Edge on Linux as my user agent in Firefox on Windows just so I can give some engineers a laugh.
I set it up with my work profile for Office 365 stuff.
I’ve given up the hope that Office will ever come to Linux, so instead I’m just trying to use the web version more.
Similarly, when I’m on a contract that requires O365 and teams and doesn’t supply a work device I use Edge strictly for work to quarantine Microsoft away from the rest of my usage on Firefox etc.
I don’t use it as its proprietary and spyware
I always thought it was hilariously pointless, does that count?
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Nah it’s proprietary garbage. If it weren’t proprietary it would be an option (although in that case a “deMicrosofted” version would be better). there are free Chromium browsers and free browsers that aren’t chromium, this one offers nothing of interest.
Yo I’ll install this bs right now if it allows me to watch Netflix into such in 4k. Anyone tried that?
Edit: Nope that’s not a thing
FUCK NETFLIX DISNEY AMAZON AND ALL THE OTHERS
Set sail, matey. The actors are on strike anyway. You can afford to hate a corporation or two.
No… I don’t want to use a browser made by Microsoft. They will turn it to shit as soon as they can get away with it, and I’m happy with Firefox.
Installed to use bingGpt. Never use it. But somethis it get some updates.
I have it on Steam Deck since it can be launched with a CLI argument to force a 1280x800 window.
Vivaldi pretends to be Edge when visiting Bing to unlock GPT-4, and prefer that to Edge on my other devices. (Secondary to Firefox, ofc)
I currently use Edge for mostly one thing, its “Read aloud” feature.
Because you can use some of the Azure neural voices its currently the best, free, easily accessible text-to-speech available.
It can even do PDFs quite well. Really helps when I’m too unable to focus for reading long texts but can still listen well enough (ADHD).
Annoyingly this feature isn’t available in Edge on Linux
I did not know this was a thing. I might have to actually use Edge now.
I use it on snap!
(J/k, I don’t)
I use it for my university email, which is an outlook account. Edge is the only browser that doesn’t constantly log me out.
I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)
I’ve seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I’m UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don’t really innovate - they buy it.
Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.
If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn’t do anything special for OWA it’s just yet another Google browser.
Ironically NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical web browser ) became Netscape which became Mozilla which became Firefox. Internet Explorer was mostly written from scratch.
Around IE5 or so, Microsoft pulled way ahead of Netscape and they basically put Netscape out of business. There was almost no competition for them and they had massive market share which is way IE6 became the anchor weighing down web standards for a decade.
Firefox eventually brought competition back to the browser market and in fact dominated for a while ( with close to 70% market share ). Most of the rest was Microsoft and, until the end, IE was home grown tech from Microsoft.
Then Google introduced Chrome which began a long, slow slide in market share for everybody else. Today, IE is gone and Chrome not only dominates like IE used to. Most of the alternative browsers use the Chrome engine ( Blink ), including Microsoft Edge. Firefox is down to low single digit market share.
At this point, the only real Chrome alternative is Safari which remains popular on the Mac ( and iOS of course ).
Google pays Mozilla to keep Firefox going so they can avoid anti trust lawsuits
@LeFantome @gerdesj I’ve found a few alternatives to #chrome & #firefox over the years, but most of them weren’t all that great…
@Furycd001 @LeFantome @gerdesj I’ve used Vivaldi and Firefox lately, both are very good alts to Chrome. Haven’t used Chrome or google search in years.
@johnglass @LeFantome @gerdesj #Vivaldi looks like a great browser, but I’ve yet to try it out & probably never will…
