4 ms·

Question about MS strategy: why would someone use this over Chromium or Firefox?

• SentientNo4 7y ago
  I assume they bet on people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff and corporate people who use macs but work with MS infrastructure (like Exchange and Sharepoint).
  • ernesth 7y ago
    > people who want to use the Chromium engine without all the Google stuff Why would those people not use the chromium browser?
• DHPersonal 7y ago
  If Microsoft integrates all the functionality of the original Edge into Chromium Edge, then it will be a great browser to use on their Surface line of tablet computers. Without those features, it’s a non-Google Chrome with a large company backing its feature updates and contributing to the codebase’s continued improvement, along with syncing features and potential better integration with Windows. Firefox has a lot of good features still, but its small usage amount has made some development budgets ignore it or drop support of it on some sites I have visited.
  • butteroverflow 7y ago
    Yeah. Our postal service's website has a small badge on every page. It translates to something like 'developed for and in Chrome'. They must be bragging about it, or something. It reminds me of all those 'best viewed in Internet Explorer at 800x600' from the beginning of the century.
• nailer 7y ago
  It's much faster. Microsoft ripped out about 30 different Google-specific components, I think @ericlaw tweeted the list a little while ago. Additionally Microsoft pay attention to developers. Chrome Devtools has has a Headers tab, with response headers and then request headers. There's a seperate tab called 'Response' which only contains the response body. I fed this back to Google (suggesting a request and response tab with headers and body) and (per Google) the response was from an engineer saying they personally liked it so therefore there was no reason to change it. Microsoft's feedback was they're actually looking at more logical layouts.
• nicoburns 7y ago
  Well if it comes pre-installed with windows then that's one big reason. As a power user, I'd probably install another browser. But given that this is basically Chrome, there's not a lot of reason for an average user to switch.
• sorrowfulgeek 7y ago
  This is Chromium. Maybe you mean Chrome. Someone would use this over Chrome if someone doesn’t want to be surveilled by Google. Of course now you’ll be surveilled by MS. It is better when your surveillance dossier is split among multiple entities.
  • adgasf 7y ago
    Chromium _is_ Chrome minus the Google stuff IIRC
• jpalomaki 7y ago
  On Windows (and corporate environment) one reason is that it is easier to manage. Comes with Windows, updates via Windows update and Microsoft provides support (for those with agreements).
  • MikusR 7y ago
    Chrome based Edge has nothing to do with Windows update
  • hibbelig 7y ago
    I don't quite see that I should be using Edge on Mac because Edge on Windows is easier to manage.
    • cicero 7y ago
      If you are using Windows and Mac, you might want the same browser on both.
    • sys_64738 7y ago
      Chrome based Edge will make Chrome based Chrome redundant in Windows, imo. I'd hazard a guess that Microsoft sees an opportunity in macOS to spread their influence. Workers using Windows with Edge want the same browser on their Mac.
• aardshark 7y ago
  Well speaking for me personally, Firefox runs terribly on my Macbook and it would be nice to have an alternative to Chrome.
  • tshanmu 7y ago
    this is not my experience, firefox quantum has been always faster and reliable than Chrome on MBP.
    • aardshark 7y ago
      Do you have a newer MBP? I'm running Sierra on a 2013 MBP. I suspect part of my experience is due to Firefox relying more on the GPU than Chrome, and the GPU in this laptop sucks. I haven't experimented with turning off hardware acceleration in FF though.
      • tshanmu 7y ago
        yes, late 2017 MBP - ff Quantum does not use GPU on my MBP (when being on battery as well - pretty same performance) - that said, I dont use FF for any graphics heavy workloads - just normal stuff (jira, a few cloud consoles, gerrit etc)
  • chapium 7y ago
    I have similar problems, Firefox is noticeably slow.
  • Angostura 7y ago
    Nothing wrong with Safari, in my experience.
• chapium 7y ago
  Firefox runs rather poorly on Mac.
  • jfk13 7y ago
    That's a terribly sweeping generalization, and is clearly not everyone's experience (see for example tshanmu's comment a few minutes before yours). Have you filed a bug report with specifics of the poor behavior you experience, so that Mozilla engineers can potentially investigate the issue?
  • darkpuma 7y ago
    That's not been my experience.
• jaabe 7y ago
  I think you can ask yourself that question with a lot of Microsoft products these days, and we use (and like) a lot of them at my place if business. I mean Microsoft has the upper hand compared to Google or AWS because they are better at GDPR and privacy shield stuff. Microsoft is also miles better in terms of enterprise support, but it’s those reasons and not their solutions that sell.
• night815 7y ago
  I think MS is making money elsewhere so they don't need browser market share but they do need to provide a browser.