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I've never seen a person using Edge. Does anyone here use it? Do you work at Microsoft or have a big technical investment in their technology? Do you find the l

I've never seen a person using Edge. Does anyone here use it? Do you work at Microsoft or have a big technical investment in their technology? Do you find the lack of cross-platform support annoying, or do you primarily use a single OS? These changes all look like they apply to ChakraCore, which is open source and available outside of Windows. I'd be curious to hear what kinds of use-cases people have for using Node Chakra over Node V8.

buraksarica 8y ago
A webinar video was very popular, the MS guy tried to use Edge, the site wasn't working, and he shifted chrome in order to show what he need to show.
- ThePadawan 8y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall the presenter (a Microsoft employee) running a development/debug version of Edge which was misbehaving, and that was why he chose to use a stock browser instead.
  - buraksarica 8y ago
    I don't recall anything about a debug version. He was presenting on azure portal* by the way. edit: Not business product, azure portal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4rL_Lnt6kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4rL_Lnt6kA
sebazzz 8y ago
I use Edge as primary browser at home. I like it, and I like the synchronisation between devices. I also like gestures and therefore better touch support on my Surface tablet compared to Firefox. At work I use Firefox, primarily because it offers containers (useful for testing with different accounts), and the developer tools offer more features and are much more stable.
sgift 8y ago
I use it for Netflix, because for a while I had the problem that in FF/Chrome it would just hang on loading a video or stop in the middle and not being able to restart. That's the only use I have for it so far.
- ilarum 8y ago
  Yet another Edge use-case - the last time I checked, only Edge supports Netflix 4K on Windows.
  - hmexx 8y ago
    pun intended?
    - ilarum 8y ago
      No, really. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763
NiveaGeForce 8y ago
Edge is the most resource efficient and respects modern Windows conventions, therefore it has the best, pen, touchscreen, tablet (including share button and stuff) and precision trackpad support. And since it's WinRT/UWP, it can suspends its tab processes, and also itself when minimized or automatically during tablet mode in the background, and during fullscreen it also automatically unhides the taskbar when you hover over it, for better multi-tasking. It also has nice features such as the set tabs aside session manager that even retains history and session cookies, and it a nice PDF and ePub reader with support for notes and highlighting with the pen, and Cortana integration. Before Edge, I primarily used Firefox and dabbled with Chrome and Vivaldi. Edge is on both iOS and Android, and no I don't work for MS, I just value proper modern OS integration and battery efficiency, so that I can use my device as intended.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
  > Edge is on both iOS Well, not really. It exists on iOS the same way Chrome and Firefox exist on iOS: as frontends for iOS's WebKit engine.
  - NiveaGeForce 8y ago
    And?
    - laumars 8y ago
      ...and that's like slapping a custom badge on a Ford Fiesta and calling it a Ferrari. You're other points are much more interesting though. One of my biggest gripes with the other leading browsers is they often feel "foreign" on your host OS (which isn't Windows in my case, but that is just personal preference).
      - piva00 8y ago
        No, it's like slapping a custom badge over a Ford Fiesta platform's B3, re-do completely the interior, add some smart features around it. Hell, even do some kind of smart auto-assist while you are on it. You keep the engine and the architecture around it but add your own luxuries and niceties.
kevingadd 8y ago
I use it for watching videos, and if a site doesn't work in my browser of choice (Firefox) Edge is usually what I try it in first since I tend to have it open pointing at Twitch or Youtube. When I open stuff in it, it's usually pretty slick - it just has weird stability issues (randomly hanging, etc) that stop me from using it more often. I do value having my Firefox profile everywhere (mac, windows machines, android phone) and I can't get that out of Edge, but that's not really a factor in why I don't use it much.
ToFab123 8y ago
Yes, I use it as my primary daily driver. I use it because I have a 2-1 laptop and the touch support is superior to all other browsers when using Windows 10 in tablet mode. When doing any kind of web development I do switch to Chrome.
ancarda 8y ago
I use Linux so I can't use Edge, and even if it were available, I'd probably carry on using Firefox. I have a dedicated Windows gaming PC, but on that I probably use Steam Browser more than anything. My partner, however, does uses Edge as following a clean reinstall of Windows 10, we found it was honestly ... good enough. We didn't need to install another browser.
dagw 8y ago
I've been using it, on and off, for a bit over year as an experiment more than anything else. And honestly it's a perfectly fine browser. Admittedly not better than Chrome (my other 'main' browser) in any way I care about, but also not worse.
christogreeff 8y ago
I always have Chrome open, but Edge is still set as my default browser to open links from applications. It opens quickly and it works perfectly fine. Have never had issues with Edge. If I could use some of the same Chrome extensions on Edge, I'd probably even use it most of the time.
billysielu 8y ago
I've never considered Edge because it didn't have extensions at launch. The maximum time I could tolerate a browser without an ad blocker was just long enough to download another browser. It actually looks like there are extensions now, but I bet most people don't know that, I didn't.
- addicted 8y ago
  Extensions were highly promoted when they were released. Microsoft also offers to install some extensions for you under certain circumstances (e.g. if you search for a product on a search engine I believe it recommends installing the shopping comparison extension).
wernsey 8y ago
My manager insists on using Edge because "it is the default browser on Windows so everybody uses it". I'm working on an in-house Angular application, and he has discovered a lot of compatibility issues that none of our other users have.
- laumars 8y ago
  ...or possibly other users have discovered but not bothered to report it? Your manager is doing the right thing here - even if you don't agree with his rational. If you don't control the browsers your customers* use then you should be testing your application on as many unique platforms as you can. That is essentially UAT 101. * "customers" might be external to the company, or your own staff if you're developing an intranet application.
  - wernsey 8y ago
    To clarify, he's the only one that uses Edge in our company of about 20 people. I do appreciate him finding the compatibility issues, but I also find it _cute_ when he discovered issues that no one else ever encountered because of Edge. What I'm really trying to say is that I've seen a fair number edge cases where Edge is not behaving the same as Chrome or Firefox ;)
pjmlp 8y ago
Every day, my day is spent across Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Regarding OS, I am 90% of my time on Windows as development platform.
singularity2001 8y ago
Whenever I try Cortana I 'use' Edge because Microsoft completely ignores the default browser here. Then I quickly deactivate Cortana.
fetbaffe 8y ago
I have switched to Edge as my main browser for my laptop solely on that it does not drain my battery as fast as the others. Edge has become much better since the last major update this spring, however still missing some functionality compared to the other browsers. I think rendering performance Edge is already on par with it's competitors, I have no problems there. It is the application it self that has some annoyances, the "feeling" of the GUI. It can feel a bit laggy like when creating tabs, moving tabs etc. That needs more work. My biggest gripe with Edge is that I can't change spell checking language without changing the keyboard layout for the Edge window. I have no connection to Microsoft. I regularly use Edge, Firefox & Opera.
ringbugger 8y ago
It still has problems to scale images in a reasonable quality. A problem IE always had. It also forces Bing down your throat if you select text and open the context menu. It sometimes closes without any error message (to be fair, some crack-pipe UX-Designers call that a good thing.) It cannot be configured in detail at all (about:flags; is there anything else?) Dev-Tools are increadibly slow. It is basically IE12 with less features because it got a new UI. Although they removed a lot of legacy stuff which I consider a step in the right direction. Still, bottom line: Bad browser. The internet would be a better place if MS would stop to develop any browser. I actually think that JS engines are very close to each other and that most performance indicators are a bit lacking if it comes to applicability on real pages.
- vbezhenar 8y ago
  > It also forces Bing down your throat if you select text and open the context menu. I have google as default search engine and it shows me google in context menu, I don't have any mentions of bing. > It sometimes closes without any error message (to be fair, some crack-pipe UX-Designers call that a good thing.) It cannot be configured in detail at all (about:flags; is there anything else?) Never closed for me, probably happens not so often. Even JavaScript can't do that without my confirmation. Actually I saw the opposite behavior, some tab hanged and even if I closed all tabs, window still remained opened with zero tabs. "Fixed" by pressing "X" on window itself, so not a real problem. I didn't upgrade to Windows 2018 yet, may be they fixed that already. > Still, bottom line: Bad browser. The internet would be a better place if MS would stop to develop any browser. I actually think that JS engines are very close to each other and that most performance indicators are a bit lacking if it comes to applicability on real pages. I don't agree. I'm not sure about internals, but UI of Edge is awesome while UI of Internet Explorer is horrible. I like this browser and I would be sad if MS would stop its development. Web needs more different implementations of standards and more competition.
  - ringbugger 8y ago
    > I have google as default search engine and it shows me google in context menu, I don't have any mentions of bing. Must be new then. That behaviour is definitely different at least on the semi-annual channel. That is the default for corporate environments I believe. I don't use Edge in private. And with closing, I meant the browser just crashing. That is the behaviour of many other UWP apps as well. The idea allegedly was to show error information on the next start. Never saw that in action an even MS seems to ignore that. True, maybe more competition is better but as of yet I don't see Edge as a serious competitor to webkit, chrome or ff. As for the UI... debatable. Of course a UI is touch-friendly if there are about 3 buttons to configure your browser. The win8 UI was also considered modern. It still wasn't good in most cases.
vbezhenar 8y ago
I use it. I just like it. It's like old Google Chrome, minimalistic and fast. I've yet to find anything that didn't work. Currently I'm using Windows so cross-platform support is not necessary. Actually I wouldn't use Edge at all if it would be cross-platform, I like native specialized applications.
jannes 8y ago
I use it as my cookie browser (where cookies are allowed). In Firefox I have cookies disabled and selectively whitelist.
megaman22 8y ago
I run LTSB, for a number of reasons, so I don't have Edge anywhere. When I did, though, there was one bug with the address bar where clicking into it would make it shift all around and show and hide the protocol prefix. It was irritating as hell if you were trying to copy/paste part of a url, because everything would move under your cursor as you're dragging. Hundreds of people reported it, Edge team closed the bug as wontfix, working as designed. If that's the design, it's hot garbage.
- kylealden 8y ago
  This was fixed more than a year ago, FWIW.
ljm 8y ago
I used it when I last had a windows machine at work. We essentially got extensive QA testing in a less common browser for ‘free’, without sinking productivity into debugging through a testing pipeline, because it was my default browser and so everything was built using the feedback from it. You can safely assume most of what you do to get things working there will pretty much be fine in the big browsers too, and it saves a huge headache when you’ve developed solely for Chrome and realise your app is totally broken in other browsers that, let’s be honest, many designers and devs will be too snooty to care about even if their analytics present a valid reason for supporting.
pavlov 8y ago
I use Edge 95% of the time on two Windows machines. Its page rendering feels equivalent to Chrome and Firefox, but it's got better touch support, it launches faster, switching tabs feels more responsive, and it has a nice "set aside" view for tabs. Even though I have the two other browsers installed, I see increasingly little reason to use them. (The most annoying thing about using Edge is Google's search engine. It displays naggy pop-ups about Chrome, and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn those off. It's not bad enough to make me use Bing, though.) On Macs, I use Safari. On Linux, I use Firefox. Sticking to OS defaults makes life a bit easier for me, apparently.
bovermyer 8y ago
I use Edge for some things. It's definitely the fastest of the browsers for me. I've had a handful of sites work strangely in it, though, which is why I don't use it as my primary browser.
Can_Not 8y ago
I've heard good things and I would like to use it, but the biggest drawback is that you have to use Windows 10 and all of that associated baggage. It's just not worth it.
watersb 8y ago
I been using Windows 10 on a ThinkPad x230 as a daily driver for the past three weeks, and only use Edge. As of this week, I want to see how far I can get before I replace it with Linux. (I am most comfortable with macOS on a laptop or desktop machine, mostly Bash, actually. Been a long time since a Linux laptop, where I used iwm.) I wish Bash/WSL were better integrated. PowerShell can be amazing but I am not used to it. Legacy weirdness everywhere. Edge seems pretty good, with some odd omissions like “Save As...”. You can’t drag files into the browser window to view them — something I wasn’t aware that I cared about until the feature was gone.

buraksarica 8y ago

A webinar video was very popular, the MS guy tried to use Edge, the site wasn't working, and he shifted chrome in order to show what he need to show.

ThePadawan 8y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall the presenter (a Microsoft employee) running a development/debug version of Edge which was misbehaving, and that was why he chose to use a stock browser instead.
- buraksarica 8y ago
  I don't recall anything about a debug version. He was presenting on azure portal* by the way. edit: Not business product, azure portal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4rL_Lnt6kA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4rL_Lnt6kA

sebazzz 8y ago

I use Edge as primary browser at home. I like it, and I like the synchronisation between devices. I also like gestures and therefore better touch support on my Surface tablet compared to Firefox. At work I use Firefox, primarily because it offers containers (useful for testing with different accounts), and the developer tools offer more features and are much more stable.

sgift 8y ago

I use it for Netflix, because for a while I had the problem that in FF/Chrome it would just hang on loading a video or stop in the middle and not being able to restart. That's the only use I have for it so far.

ilarum 8y ago
Yet another Edge use-case - the last time I checked, only Edge supports Netflix 4K on Windows.
- hmexx 8y ago
  pun intended?
  - ilarum 8y ago
    No, really. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763

NiveaGeForce 8y ago

Edge is the most resource efficient and respects modern Windows conventions, therefore it has the best, pen, touchscreen, tablet (including share button and stuff) and precision trackpad support. And since it's WinRT/UWP, it can suspends its tab processes, and also itself when minimized or automatically during tablet mode in the background, and during fullscreen it also automatically unhides the taskbar when you hover over it, for better multi-tasking. It also has nice features such as the set tabs aside session manager that even retains history and session cookies, and it a nice PDF and ePub reader with support for notes and highlighting with the pen, and Cortana integration. Before Edge, I primarily used Firefox and dabbled with Chrome and Vivaldi. Edge is on both iOS and Android, and no I don't work for MS, I just value proper modern OS integration and battery efficiency, so that I can use my device as intended.

MaxBarraclough 8y ago
> Edge is on both iOS Well, not really. It exists on iOS the same way Chrome and Firefox exist on iOS: as frontends for iOS's WebKit engine.
- NiveaGeForce 8y ago
  And?
  - laumars 8y ago
    ...and that's like slapping a custom badge on a Ford Fiesta and calling it a Ferrari. You're other points are much more interesting though. One of my biggest gripes with the other leading browsers is they often feel "foreign" on your host OS (which isn't Windows in my case, but that is just personal preference).
    - piva00 8y ago
      No, it's like slapping a custom badge over a Ford Fiesta platform's B3, re-do completely the interior, add some smart features around it. Hell, even do some kind of smart auto-assist while you are on it. You keep the engine and the architecture around it but add your own luxuries and niceties.

kevingadd 8y ago

I use it for watching videos, and if a site doesn't work in my browser of choice (Firefox) Edge is usually what I try it in first since I tend to have it open pointing at Twitch or Youtube. When I open stuff in it, it's usually pretty slick - it just has weird stability issues (randomly hanging, etc) that stop me from using it more often. I do value having my Firefox profile everywhere (mac, windows machines, android phone) and I can't get that out of Edge, but that's not really a factor in why I don't use it much.

ToFab123 8y ago

Yes, I use it as my primary daily driver. I use it because I have a 2-1 laptop and the touch support is superior to all other browsers when using Windows 10 in tablet mode. When doing any kind of web development I do switch to Chrome.

ancarda 8y ago

I use Linux so I can't use Edge, and even if it were available, I'd probably carry on using Firefox. I have a dedicated Windows gaming PC, but on that I probably use Steam Browser more than anything. My partner, however, does uses Edge as following a clean reinstall of Windows 10, we found it was honestly ... good enough. We didn't need to install another browser.

dagw 8y ago

I've been using it, on and off, for a bit over year as an experiment more than anything else. And honestly it's a perfectly fine browser. Admittedly not better than Chrome (my other 'main' browser) in any way I care about, but also not worse.

christogreeff 8y ago

I always have Chrome open, but Edge is still set as my default browser to open links from applications. It opens quickly and it works perfectly fine. Have never had issues with Edge. If I could use some of the same Chrome extensions on Edge, I'd probably even use it most of the time.

billysielu 8y ago

I've never considered Edge because it didn't have extensions at launch. The maximum time I could tolerate a browser without an ad blocker was just long enough to download another browser. It actually looks like there are extensions now, but I bet most people don't know that, I didn't.

addicted 8y ago
Extensions were highly promoted when they were released. Microsoft also offers to install some extensions for you under certain circumstances (e.g. if you search for a product on a search engine I believe it recommends installing the shopping comparison extension).

wernsey 8y ago

My manager insists on using Edge because "it is the default browser on Windows so everybody uses it". I'm working on an in-house Angular application, and he has discovered a lot of compatibility issues that none of our other users have.

laumars 8y ago
...or possibly other users have discovered but not bothered to report it? Your manager is doing the right thing here - even if you don't agree with his rational. If you don't control the browsers your customers* use then you should be testing your application on as many unique platforms as you can. That is essentially UAT 101. * "customers" might be external to the company, or your own staff if you're developing an intranet application.
- wernsey 8y ago
  To clarify, he's the only one that uses Edge in our company of about 20 people. I do appreciate him finding the compatibility issues, but I also find it _cute_ when he discovered issues that no one else ever encountered because of Edge. What I'm really trying to say is that I've seen a fair number edge cases where Edge is not behaving the same as Chrome or Firefox ;)

pjmlp 8y ago

Every day, my day is spent across Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Regarding OS, I am 90% of my time on Windows as development platform.

singularity2001 8y ago

Whenever I try Cortana I 'use' Edge because Microsoft completely ignores the default browser here. Then I quickly deactivate Cortana.

fetbaffe 8y ago

I have switched to Edge as my main browser for my laptop solely on that it does not drain my battery as fast as the others. Edge has become much better since the last major update this spring, however still missing some functionality compared to the other browsers. I think rendering performance Edge is already on par with it's competitors, I have no problems there. It is the application it self that has some annoyances, the "feeling" of the GUI. It can feel a bit laggy like when creating tabs, moving tabs etc. That needs more work. My biggest gripe with Edge is that I can't change spell checking language without changing the keyboard layout for the Edge window. I have no connection to Microsoft. I regularly use Edge, Firefox & Opera.

ringbugger 8y ago

It still has problems to scale images in a reasonable quality. A problem IE always had. It also forces Bing down your throat if you select text and open the context menu. It sometimes closes without any error message (to be fair, some crack-pipe UX-Designers call that a good thing.) It cannot be configured in detail at all (about:flags; is there anything else?) Dev-Tools are increadibly slow. It is basically IE12 with less features because it got a new UI. Although they removed a lot of legacy stuff which I consider a step in the right direction. Still, bottom line: Bad browser. The internet would be a better place if MS would stop to develop any browser. I actually think that JS engines are very close to each other and that most performance indicators are a bit lacking if it comes to applicability on real pages.

vbezhenar 8y ago
> It also forces Bing down your throat if you select text and open the context menu. I have google as default search engine and it shows me google in context menu, I don't have any mentions of bing. > It sometimes closes without any error message (to be fair, some crack-pipe UX-Designers call that a good thing.) It cannot be configured in detail at all (about:flags; is there anything else?) Never closed for me, probably happens not so often. Even JavaScript can't do that without my confirmation. Actually I saw the opposite behavior, some tab hanged and even if I closed all tabs, window still remained opened with zero tabs. "Fixed" by pressing "X" on window itself, so not a real problem. I didn't upgrade to Windows 2018 yet, may be they fixed that already. > Still, bottom line: Bad browser. The internet would be a better place if MS would stop to develop any browser. I actually think that JS engines are very close to each other and that most performance indicators are a bit lacking if it comes to applicability on real pages. I don't agree. I'm not sure about internals, but UI of Edge is awesome while UI of Internet Explorer is horrible. I like this browser and I would be sad if MS would stop its development. Web needs more different implementations of standards and more competition.
- ringbugger 8y ago
  > I have google as default search engine and it shows me google in context menu, I don't have any mentions of bing. Must be new then. That behaviour is definitely different at least on the semi-annual channel. That is the default for corporate environments I believe. I don't use Edge in private. And with closing, I meant the browser just crashing. That is the behaviour of many other UWP apps as well. The idea allegedly was to show error information on the next start. Never saw that in action an even MS seems to ignore that. True, maybe more competition is better but as of yet I don't see Edge as a serious competitor to webkit, chrome or ff. As for the UI... debatable. Of course a UI is touch-friendly if there are about 3 buttons to configure your browser. The win8 UI was also considered modern. It still wasn't good in most cases.

vbezhenar 8y ago

I use it. I just like it. It's like old Google Chrome, minimalistic and fast. I've yet to find anything that didn't work. Currently I'm using Windows so cross-platform support is not necessary. Actually I wouldn't use Edge at all if it would be cross-platform, I like native specialized applications.

jannes 8y ago

I use it as my cookie browser (where cookies are allowed). In Firefox I have cookies disabled and selectively whitelist.

megaman22 8y ago

I run LTSB, for a number of reasons, so I don't have Edge anywhere. When I did, though, there was one bug with the address bar where clicking into it would make it shift all around and show and hide the protocol prefix. It was irritating as hell if you were trying to copy/paste part of a url, because everything would move under your cursor as you're dragging. Hundreds of people reported it, Edge team closed the bug as wontfix, working as designed. If that's the design, it's hot garbage.

kylealden 8y ago
This was fixed more than a year ago, FWIW.

ljm 8y ago

I used it when I last had a windows machine at work. We essentially got extensive QA testing in a less common browser for ‘free’, without sinking productivity into debugging through a testing pipeline, because it was my default browser and so everything was built using the feedback from it. You can safely assume most of what you do to get things working there will pretty much be fine in the big browsers too, and it saves a huge headache when you’ve developed solely for Chrome and realise your app is totally broken in other browsers that, let’s be honest, many designers and devs will be too snooty to care about even if their analytics present a valid reason for supporting.

pavlov 8y ago

I use Edge 95% of the time on two Windows machines. Its page rendering feels equivalent to Chrome and Firefox, but it's got better touch support, it launches faster, switching tabs feels more responsive, and it has a nice "set aside" view for tabs. Even though I have the two other browsers installed, I see increasingly little reason to use them. (The most annoying thing about using Edge is Google's search engine. It displays naggy pop-ups about Chrome, and there doesn't seem to be a way to turn those off. It's not bad enough to make me use Bing, though.) On Macs, I use Safari. On Linux, I use Firefox. Sticking to OS defaults makes life a bit easier for me, apparently.

bovermyer 8y ago

I use Edge for some things. It's definitely the fastest of the browsers for me. I've had a handful of sites work strangely in it, though, which is why I don't use it as my primary browser.

Can_Not 8y ago

I've heard good things and I would like to use it, but the biggest drawback is that you have to use Windows 10 and all of that associated baggage. It's just not worth it.

watersb 8y ago

I been using Windows 10 on a ThinkPad x230 as a daily driver for the past three weeks, and only use Edge. As of this week, I want to see how far I can get before I replace it with Linux. (I am most comfortable with macOS on a laptop or desktop machine, mostly Bash, actually. Been a long time since a Linux laptop, where I used iwm.) I wish Bash/WSL were better integrated. PowerShell can be amazing but I am not used to it. Legacy weirdness everywhere. Edge seems pretty good, with some odd omissions like “Save As...”. You can’t drag files into the browser window to view them — something I wasn’t aware that I cared about until the feature was gone.