35 ms·

Microsoft Edge GA on Linux

141 points by sendilkumarn 5y ago

littlestymaar 5y ago
With Office 365 in the browser, and now Internet Explorer-only apps now available on Linux, I wonder what remains to prevent most companies/administrations to use a Linux distribution as their main OS.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Office 365 in browser sucks. What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for? There really isn't a reason to switch for most people, its a lot of pain for not much benefit. A better question is what do they gain?
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > Office 365 in browser sucks. Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice. > What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for? Every internal corporate web app developed in the 2000s, all custom built, developed by external contractors and not actively maintained because “they work” (or at least their bugs are well known and worked around). In my wife's department alone, there's like a dozen of such apps (for holiday tracking, training scheduling, etc, etc.). It's also discussed in the article btw: “We had so many applications that still depend on Internet Explorer,” Ronny Intrau, Browser Product Manager at Bundesagentur für Arbeit > A better question is what do they gain? Companies and administrations have had enormous troubles migrating away from Windows XP when the support ended (and some haven't actually, because they just couldn't afford it). Windows 7 support ends in January 2023, and with Windows 11 we now know that the promise to have Windows 10 forever was a lie, and that they'll need to migrate yet again (while throwing away a good amount of PC, because of the system requirements, as it's always the case with such migrations). We're talking of migrations costing tens or hundreds of millions for public administrations. Never going through this all over again is a win. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      >Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice. I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO. I had no idea they decided that they should make apps for IE. They don't even seem hard to replace with a random app or a calendar. Why are they so unique or needed? They could easily just have a server and run Windows as VMs and never have issues. Lots of places still use XP or something on an intranet, and even on the internet a VM version won't pose any dangers.
      - littlestymaar 5y ago
        > I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO. I assume you haven't opened more than a handful of .doc documents then, because around 70% of the .doc documents I open are either broken when I open them (around 20% of the time), or when the other party open them after I edited them (around 50% of the time). In practice docx docs seems to work a little bit better, but not that much (I'd say 50 to 60% failure). And I say that as a Linux user for 14 years now. Until MS365 came, MS Word documents where constant frustration.
- sylens 5y ago
  any number of thick client legacy apps
  - vetinari 5y ago
    That's what Citrix is for... even if you are using Windows on the desktop.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    That's a good point. I wonder how many there are left. From what I've seen, most apps developed after say 2007 or something were web-based, but since I was a web developer when I was dealing with such things, my PoV is obviously biased. Which fraction would work flawlessly with Wine is also a question.
- flatiron 5y ago
  end user and IT familiarity. sure you know Linux, most end users and a lot of IT folks don't. that and corporate VPN security stuff. I know the company I work for uses FireEye (whatever that is) to make sure I'm up to no good or whatever it does. every time i bring up Linux I get the "VPN software" and "Security" as the biggest reasons why I need to just be happy with Win10 + WSL2 (which honestly isn't bad at all)
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > most end users These will complain loudly when the icon changes, but, really, don’t see the OS beyond the apps IT makes available. > and a lot of IT folks don't. that and corporate VPN security stuff. Here lies the problem. A lot of corporate IT departments have no idea of how to configure a fleet of Linux machines.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      > These will complain loudly when the icon changes, but, really, don’t see the OS beyond the apps IT makes available. And they're doomed to complain anyway because Windows seven EOL is in a bit more than 1 year!
    - flatiron 5y ago
      “I tried installing webex and double clicked and i saw a glass of wine configuring my home directory instead”
- samrolken 5y ago
  IE Mode is only available in Edge on Windows.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    Oh, is it? That would definitely make sense, because they really don't want their captive customers running away so easily when migrating away from Windows 7.
    - samrolken 5y ago
      I don’t think it’s very realistic that Microsoft would port the whole Trident engine along with all the involved technologies used by a lot of these legacy apps (activex, VBScript, ms office and active directory integration, etc.) to linux. Especially at the end of its life.
      - littlestymaar 5y ago
        Unless you think ESR[1] is right. [1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764
kburman 5y ago
Edge used to so good but recently it has turn into Microsoft adware and spyware software. I thought it was suppose to replace Chrome but it is becoming another Chrome or more evil.
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  It is definitely more evil. I use Chromium, which to me is perfect. Not a lot of invasive features and a lot can be configured or disabled using a policy file with Linux. I am honestly pretty disappointed in Firefox as of late. I feel like I have to disable an equal amount of tracking with Firefox as I do Chromium.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  So, are you gonna tell us what you're talking about or just complain about Microsoft? Everyone complains about Microsoft at every opportunity; it's just meaningless noise at this point.
  - kburman 5y ago
    I have been using edge since it's release and on day 1 it was so good with all the google tracking removed or disabled. But now if you see it's like microsoft holding your computer hostage to use edge. Few months back with each windows update it would reset my browser to edge. It would reset my search engine preference. Force me to use MS account to sync. Show some false unread notification icon so that I open to see that they now have some XYZ feature.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > Everyone complains about Microsoft at every opportunity; it's just meaningless noise at this point. It still sucks, so yes, people continue complaining. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study-ranks-edges-default-privacy-settings-the-lowest-of-all-major-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study...
    - naikrovek 5y ago
marcodiego 5y ago
Hi Microsoft! Please show your love for linux by doing the same with Microsoft Office!
- imbnwa 5y ago
  Isn't that what Office365 is for or is that much of a downgrade from the desktop experience?
  - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    Its terrible and Teams on Linux is a trash fire on top of a dumpster fire on top of a landfill fire.
    - swasheck 5y ago
      to be fair, that's just the Teams experience in general. if i leave it open for more than 4 hours, somehow it's chewing ~4GB RAM. i use the web client but, if i'm honest, i miss the notifications from that and miss meeting reminders :D
    - hbn 5y ago
      That sounds pretty close to my Teams experience on Mac
    - vinceguidry 5y ago
      Try the unofficial client: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
    - flerchin 5y ago
      Teams on Linux is still Teams, but it works just fine for me. It can't do background blur, but is otherwise feature complete enough for me to attend stand-up on it daily.
      - NikolaeVarius 5y ago
bloblaw 5y ago
Edge has built in support for vertical tabs, tab groups, and chrome extensions. IMHO, Edge is the best chromium based browser out there, and for me is miles better than Chrome itself.
- adar 5y ago
  > Edge has built in support for vertical tabs, tab groups, and chrome extensions. IMO Vivaldi's implementations of vertical tabs and tab groups is superior, but Edge is definitely a close second.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  FWIW, Vivaldi has all of these also.
  - zamadatix 5y ago
    I love Vivaldi feature wise but something about its implementation absolutely wrecks performance and memory usage compared to traditional chromium based browsers. Even disabling most every option and interface doodad I could find with no extensions loaded results in noticeably slower browsing vs other browsers defaults and it carries over into the benchmark results as well, things like Speedometer 2.0 get significantly lower scores and total RAM usage during the test is much higher.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  That sounds good, but I don't want MS tracking on my linux box, I lived without those and I can wait a bit longer for ungoogled chromium to get them (maybe).
- hbn 5y ago
  You'll also be dealing with constant prompts and alerts from Microsoft to try Bing and redeem Bing Rewards and install smartphone apps to integrate with your Microsoft account, and them adding more spammy news articles and ads in the new tab page and Googling how to disable them, etc. It's gotten so bad the past few months that after a year of using Edge, it finally pushed me back to Chrome as of yesterday
xupybd 5y ago
I love that their marketing is, large companies use Edge to support legacy apps. That does sound like a good use for Edge. Another good use is downloading the browser you want to use.
unixhero 5y ago
Embrace
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
marcodiego 5y ago
Microsoft efforts to keep IE relevant were... respectable but ineffective: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+browser+you+loved+to+hate https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+browser+you...
szastamasta 5y ago
Oh boy! It seems that hell has frozen over. I thought it’s simply not possible that any Linux system will run Internet Explorer… ehm, sorry, Edge without exploding. Never thought I will live to see such a day
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Why did you want to run IE in Linux? This is just closed source google chrome with MS spyware and some UI changes and MS popups.
  - flatiron 5y ago
    I can't see why anyone would use it outside of their corporate day job. but if those enterprises can now support linux, because they only support edge (or IE mode on edge) this is pretty neat
  - kaixi 5y ago
    Google Chrome is closed source too.
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Yes and I don't use it either.
  - szastamasta 5y ago
    I would never want to use it, even on Windows. I just wonder why anyone would want to use anything from MS on Linux. It just looks like good old „ Embrace, extend, and extinguish” at work here. How did it happen that from the total evil MS is now a viable alternative for Firefox on Linux?
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Its not, its just being used for some people who apparantly decided that making apps for IE was a good idea years ago and stuck to it.
tlamponi 5y ago
Can I use it to actually watch 4k Netflix content like on Windows? FWIW, I have a modern Intel CPU, IIRC that's required too for their DRM..
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  No, Edge only includes the required PlayReady DRM module on Windows (in fact it's actually part of Windows that the browser calls). Edge on Mac or Linux only has Widevine Level 3, exactly the same as Chrome, and only gets a max of 720p from Netflix.
phendrenad2 5y ago
Edge is only free if you don't value avoiding targeted ads. Personally I don't care if my "data" is out there, but I don't know what I'd do if I did (Vivaldi? Brave? Firefox? Something more obscure? Are there any paid browsers yet?)
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > Edge is only free if you don't value avoiding targeted ads Really? uBlock origin seems to work flawlessly, it's available straight from the Microsoft store and since I synchronize my extensions, it's automatically installed as soon as I enter my microsoft login. Also, I don't fear such features may vanish in the future, since most of their revenue doesn't come from advertisement, unlike google.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  I've really been enjoying using nextdns to block ads. Brave is supposed to be good, and pays you in some kind of crypto if you enable some ads.
edelhans 5y ago
Unfortunately no mention of Playready DRM support.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  The Mac version didn't have it so there was zero chance the Linux one would.
encryptluks2 5y ago
Is this even open source? I don't see many package maintainers wanting to have a closed-source browser. I am using Chromium for now because it is included in the default repos. Will there be an open source "Chromium" for Edge, or is that what Chromium is already?
modderation 5y ago
GA? Edge for Linux (version 97) still can't sign in to a corporate Office 365 account for sync. Personal accounts only. I'm bewildered, as this functionality works on Mac and Windows, but somehow not on Linux. This is the one feature I actually need to start using Edge as my primary browser for work tasks. Until sync works with Azure AD, I'll have to continue using a separate instance of Chrome Beta/Dev that's tied to my corporate Google account.
titusjohnson 5y ago
Congratulations to Microsoft for finally shipping a fully-fledged Web Browser! It's been a long time since they made one that wasn't hamstrung to a single OS. Not that I'll use it for anything other than installing Firefox. I figure MS has about another 2 decades before I'll recommend any products, still a lot of debt to pay off since the IE6 debacle.
coolgoose 5y ago
I find it funny that for every person that complains about Microsoft 's bad practices there is 0 bitching about Google shoving Chrome your throat constantly when on Edge
- Gargyle 5y ago
  Because Chrome is already dominant as bad as it is. They are both equally detrimental to society.
- thow_away_soon 5y ago
  I think everyone dislikes that as a company practice, but I have the impression that most of the people who would complain are simply not using Edge, and thus don´t remember/bother to say anything about it.
- jhanschoo 5y ago
  Google shoving Chrome whenever it detects non-Chrome when you visit its properties is nowhere near as frustrating as Microsoft asking you to complete onboarding after every update and in the control panel, when the only step left in "onboarding" is to switch to their recommendations of Edge and Bing.
  - Beached 5y ago
    what is do you use? I'm on 10 professional and never have these problems.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      10 Home does this all the time, if you don't disable it in about three places - some of which are not what you would expect to be called in places you would not expect for them to be located. Source: Work in a repair shop. See this stuff first hand.
  - akoncius 5y ago
    for me it's super annoying when I click on link inside of gmail app on iOS and it suggests at the bottom to install google chrome instead of using default browser . selected "don't show this again" many times, still I see that popup. annoying as hell
CornCobs 5y ago
Vertical tabs on edge and sleeping tabs have ruined my tab discipline and that's a compliment. I keep so many more tabs open than before and they don't get in my way. Collections are also an actually useful feature for recording browsing "sessions". Just 2 things bother me a bit: 1. With vertical tabs on, quite a few sites switch to mobile layout for some reason. This is really annoying and makes me turn vtabs off sometimes. Is there a way to stop sites from doing this? My screen should be 16:9 so I don't understand how adding the little side bar should trigger the switch 2. Please give us a native tab search! Vscode has ctrl-p, windows terminal has ctrl-p, even GitHub now has ctrl-k. Inbuilt tab search will feed my habit of keeping 50 tabs open. I currently use vimium which works okayish but the main caveat is it doesn't work in pdf viewers, and half my tabs are pdfs
- bool3max 5y ago
  As for your first point: sites don't look at your screen resolution, they look at the resolution of the visible viewport, which shrinks when you switch to vertical tabs, triggering the layout change.
u-rate 5y ago
Never using that spyware again. Network monitor showed that the „helper“ program sent and received data pretty much all the time, even when Edge was closed. Also, on program startup, Edge sent quite a lot of data home to MS. Edge might be fast but if you value your privacy you should use a different browser.
greatgib 5y ago
I just imagine how defective should be your IT to ask your employees to use Edge as a default browser. And worse than that, not be ashamed and have your company publicly named in doing so... But I perfectly imagine the company with a "bullshit job" CIO that went to a "Microsoft" "cocktail and gift" even, and that is now thinking that he is a technological expert.

141 points by sendilkumarn 5y ago

With Office 365 in the browser, and now Internet Explorer-only apps now available on Linux, I wonder what remains to prevent most companies/administrations to use a Linux distribution as their main OS.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
Office 365 in browser sucks. What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for? There really isn't a reason to switch for most people, its a lot of pain for not much benefit. A better question is what do they gain?
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  > Office 365 in browser sucks. Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice. > What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for? Every internal corporate web app developed in the 2000s, all custom built, developed by external contractors and not actively maintained because “they work” (or at least their bugs are well known and worked around). In my wife's department alone, there's like a dozen of such apps (for holiday tracking, training scheduling, etc, etc.). It's also discussed in the article btw: “We had so many applications that still depend on Internet Explorer,” Ronny Intrau, Browser Product Manager at Bundesagentur für Arbeit > A better question is what do they gain? Companies and administrations have had enormous troubles migrating away from Windows XP when the support ended (and some haven't actually, because they just couldn't afford it). Windows 7 support ends in January 2023, and with Windows 11 we now know that the promise to have Windows 10 forever was a lie, and that they'll need to migrate yet again (while throwing away a good amount of PC, because of the system requirements, as it's always the case with such migrations). We're talking of migrations costing tens or hundreds of millions for public administrations. Never going through this all over again is a win. [1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-7 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    >Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice. I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO. I had no idea they decided that they should make apps for IE. They don't even seem hard to replace with a random app or a calendar. Why are they so unique or needed? They could easily just have a server and run Windows as VMs and never have issues. Lots of places still use XP or something on an intranet, and even on the internet a VM version won't pose any dangers.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      > I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO. I assume you haven't opened more than a handful of .doc documents then, because around 70% of the .doc documents I open are either broken when I open them (around 20% of the time), or when the other party open them after I edited them (around 50% of the time). In practice docx docs seems to work a little bit better, but not that much (I'd say 50 to 60% failure). And I say that as a Linux user for 14 years now. Until MS365 came, MS Word documents where constant frustration.
sylens 5y ago
any number of thick client legacy apps
- vetinari 5y ago
  That's what Citrix is for... even if you are using Windows on the desktop.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  That's a good point. I wonder how many there are left. From what I've seen, most apps developed after say 2007 or something were web-based, but since I was a web developer when I was dealing with such things, my PoV is obviously biased. Which fraction would work flawlessly with Wine is also a question.
flatiron 5y ago
end user and IT familiarity. sure you know Linux, most end users and a lot of IT folks don't. that and corporate VPN security stuff. I know the company I work for uses FireEye (whatever that is) to make sure I'm up to no good or whatever it does. every time i bring up Linux I get the "VPN software" and "Security" as the biggest reasons why I need to just be happy with Win10 + WSL2 (which honestly isn't bad at all)
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > most end users These will complain loudly when the icon changes, but, really, don’t see the OS beyond the apps IT makes available. > and a lot of IT folks don't. that and corporate VPN security stuff. Here lies the problem. A lot of corporate IT departments have no idea of how to configure a fleet of Linux machines.
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    > These will complain loudly when the icon changes, but, really, don’t see the OS beyond the apps IT makes available. And they're doomed to complain anyway because Windows seven EOL is in a bit more than 1 year!
  - flatiron 5y ago
    “I tried installing webex and double clicked and i saw a glass of wine configuring my home directory instead”
samrolken 5y ago
IE Mode is only available in Edge on Windows.
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  Oh, is it? That would definitely make sense, because they really don't want their captive customers running away so easily when migrating away from Windows 7.
  - samrolken 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s very realistic that Microsoft would port the whole Trident engine along with all the involved technologies used by a lot of these legacy apps (activex, VBScript, ms office and active directory integration, etc.) to linux. Especially at the end of its life.
    - littlestymaar 5y ago
      Unless you think ESR[1] is right. [1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764

kburman 5y ago

Edge used to so good but recently it has turn into Microsoft adware and spyware software. I thought it was suppose to replace Chrome but it is becoming another Chrome or more evil.

encryptluks2 5y ago
It is definitely more evil. I use Chromium, which to me is perfect. Not a lot of invasive features and a lot can be configured or disabled using a policy file with Linux. I am honestly pretty disappointed in Firefox as of late. I feel like I have to disable an equal amount of tracking with Firefox as I do Chromium.
naikrovek 5y ago
So, are you gonna tell us what you're talking about or just complain about Microsoft? Everyone complains about Microsoft at every opportunity; it's just meaningless noise at this point.
- kburman 5y ago
  I have been using edge since it's release and on day 1 it was so good with all the google tracking removed or disabled. But now if you see it's like microsoft holding your computer hostage to use edge. Few months back with each windows update it would reset my browser to edge. It would reset my search engine preference. Force me to use MS account to sync. Show some false unread notification icon so that I open to see that they now have some XYZ feature.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Everyone complains about Microsoft at every opportunity; it's just meaningless noise at this point. It still sucks, so yes, people continue complaining. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study-ranks-edges-default-privacy-settings-the-lowest-of-all-major-browsers/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study...
  - naikrovek 5y ago

marcodiego 5y ago

Hi Microsoft! Please show your love for linux by doing the same with Microsoft Office!

imbnwa 5y ago
Isn't that what Office365 is for or is that much of a downgrade from the desktop experience?
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  Its terrible and Teams on Linux is a trash fire on top of a dumpster fire on top of a landfill fire.
  - swasheck 5y ago
    to be fair, that's just the Teams experience in general. if i leave it open for more than 4 hours, somehow it's chewing ~4GB RAM. i use the web client but, if i'm honest, i miss the notifications from that and miss meeting reminders :D
  - hbn 5y ago
    That sounds pretty close to my Teams experience on Mac
  - vinceguidry 5y ago
    Try the unofficial client: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux
  - flerchin 5y ago
    Teams on Linux is still Teams, but it works just fine for me. It can't do background blur, but is otherwise feature complete enough for me to attend stand-up on it daily.
    - NikolaeVarius 5y ago

bloblaw 5y ago

Edge has built in support for vertical tabs, tab groups, and chrome extensions. IMHO, Edge is the best chromium based browser out there, and for me is miles better than Chrome itself.

adar 5y ago
> Edge has built in support for vertical tabs, tab groups, and chrome extensions. IMO Vivaldi's implementations of vertical tabs and tab groups is superior, but Edge is definitely a close second.
5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
FWIW, Vivaldi has all of these also.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  I love Vivaldi feature wise but something about its implementation absolutely wrecks performance and memory usage compared to traditional chromium based browsers. Even disabling most every option and interface doodad I could find with no extensions loaded results in noticeably slower browsing vs other browsers defaults and it carries over into the benchmark results as well, things like Speedometer 2.0 get significantly lower scores and total RAM usage during the test is much higher.
GhettoComputers 5y ago
That sounds good, but I don't want MS tracking on my linux box, I lived without those and I can wait a bit longer for ungoogled chromium to get them (maybe).
hbn 5y ago
You'll also be dealing with constant prompts and alerts from Microsoft to try Bing and redeem Bing Rewards and install smartphone apps to integrate with your Microsoft account, and them adding more spammy news articles and ads in the new tab page and Googling how to disable them, etc. It's gotten so bad the past few months that after a year of using Edge, it finally pushed me back to Chrome as of yesterday

xupybd 5y ago

I love that their marketing is, large companies use Edge to support legacy apps. That does sound like a good use for Edge. Another good use is downloading the browser you want to use.

unixhero 5y ago

Embrace

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

marcodiego 5y ago

Microsoft efforts to keep IE relevant were... respectable but ineffective: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+browser+you+loved+to+hate https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+browser+you...

szastamasta 5y ago

Oh boy! It seems that hell has frozen over. I thought it’s simply not possible that any Linux system will run Internet Explorer… ehm, sorry, Edge without exploding. Never thought I will live to see such a day

GhettoComputers 5y ago
Why did you want to run IE in Linux? This is just closed source google chrome with MS spyware and some UI changes and MS popups.
- flatiron 5y ago
  I can't see why anyone would use it outside of their corporate day job. but if those enterprises can now support linux, because they only support edge (or IE mode on edge) this is pretty neat
- kaixi 5y ago
  Google Chrome is closed source too.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Yes and I don't use it either.
- szastamasta 5y ago
  I would never want to use it, even on Windows. I just wonder why anyone would want to use anything from MS on Linux. It just looks like good old „ Embrace, extend, and extinguish” at work here. How did it happen that from the total evil MS is now a viable alternative for Firefox on Linux?
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Its not, its just being used for some people who apparantly decided that making apps for IE was a good idea years ago and stuck to it.

tlamponi 5y ago

Can I use it to actually watch 4k Netflix content like on Windows? FWIW, I have a modern Intel CPU, IIRC that's required too for their DRM..

Mindwipe 5y ago
No, Edge only includes the required PlayReady DRM module on Windows (in fact it's actually part of Windows that the browser calls). Edge on Mac or Linux only has Widevine Level 3, exactly the same as Chrome, and only gets a max of 720p from Netflix.

phendrenad2 5y ago

Edge is only free if you don't value avoiding targeted ads. Personally I don't care if my "data" is out there, but I don't know what I'd do if I did (Vivaldi? Brave? Firefox? Something more obscure? Are there any paid browsers yet?)

csdvrx 5y ago
> Edge is only free if you don't value avoiding targeted ads Really? uBlock origin seems to work flawlessly, it's available straight from the Microsoft store and since I synchronize my extensions, it's automatically installed as soon as I enter my microsoft login. Also, I don't fear such features may vanish in the future, since most of their revenue doesn't come from advertisement, unlike google.
wombat-man 5y ago
I've really been enjoying using nextdns to block ads. Brave is supposed to be good, and pays you in some kind of crypto if you enable some ads.

edelhans 5y ago

Unfortunately no mention of Playready DRM support.

Mindwipe 5y ago
The Mac version didn't have it so there was zero chance the Linux one would.

encryptluks2 5y ago

Is this even open source? I don't see many package maintainers wanting to have a closed-source browser. I am using Chromium for now because it is included in the default repos. Will there be an open source "Chromium" for Edge, or is that what Chromium is already?

modderation 5y ago

GA? Edge for Linux (version 97) still can't sign in to a corporate Office 365 account for sync. Personal accounts only. I'm bewildered, as this functionality works on Mac and Windows, but somehow not on Linux. This is the one feature I actually need to start using Edge as my primary browser for work tasks. Until sync works with Azure AD, I'll have to continue using a separate instance of Chrome Beta/Dev that's tied to my corporate Google account.

titusjohnson 5y ago

Congratulations to Microsoft for finally shipping a fully-fledged Web Browser! It's been a long time since they made one that wasn't hamstrung to a single OS. Not that I'll use it for anything other than installing Firefox. I figure MS has about another 2 decades before I'll recommend any products, still a lot of debt to pay off since the IE6 debacle.

coolgoose 5y ago

I find it funny that for every person that complains about Microsoft 's bad practices there is 0 bitching about Google shoving Chrome your throat constantly when on Edge

Gargyle 5y ago
Because Chrome is already dominant as bad as it is. They are both equally detrimental to society.
thow_away_soon 5y ago
I think everyone dislikes that as a company practice, but I have the impression that most of the people who would complain are simply not using Edge, and thus don´t remember/bother to say anything about it.
jhanschoo 5y ago
Google shoving Chrome whenever it detects non-Chrome when you visit its properties is nowhere near as frustrating as Microsoft asking you to complete onboarding after every update and in the control panel, when the only step left in "onboarding" is to switch to their recommendations of Edge and Bing.
- Beached 5y ago
  what is do you use? I'm on 10 professional and never have these problems.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    10 Home does this all the time, if you don't disable it in about three places - some of which are not what you would expect to be called in places you would not expect for them to be located. Source: Work in a repair shop. See this stuff first hand.
- akoncius 5y ago
  for me it's super annoying when I click on link inside of gmail app on iOS and it suggests at the bottom to install google chrome instead of using default browser . selected "don't show this again" many times, still I see that popup. annoying as hell

CornCobs 5y ago

Vertical tabs on edge and sleeping tabs have ruined my tab discipline and that's a compliment. I keep so many more tabs open than before and they don't get in my way. Collections are also an actually useful feature for recording browsing "sessions". Just 2 things bother me a bit: 1. With vertical tabs on, quite a few sites switch to mobile layout for some reason. This is really annoying and makes me turn vtabs off sometimes. Is there a way to stop sites from doing this? My screen should be 16:9 so I don't understand how adding the little side bar should trigger the switch 2. Please give us a native tab search! Vscode has ctrl-p, windows terminal has ctrl-p, even GitHub now has ctrl-k. Inbuilt tab search will feed my habit of keeping 50 tabs open. I currently use vimium which works okayish but the main caveat is it doesn't work in pdf viewers, and half my tabs are pdfs

bool3max 5y ago
As for your first point: sites don't look at your screen resolution, they look at the resolution of the visible viewport, which shrinks when you switch to vertical tabs, triggering the layout change.

u-rate 5y ago

Never using that spyware again. Network monitor showed that the „helper“ program sent and received data pretty much all the time, even when Edge was closed. Also, on program startup, Edge sent quite a lot of data home to MS. Edge might be fast but if you value your privacy you should use a different browser.

greatgib 5y ago

I just imagine how defective should be your IT to ask your employees to use Edge as a default browser. And worse than that, not be ashamed and have your company publicly named in doing so... But I perfectly imagine the company with a "bullshit job" CIO that went to a "Microsoft" "cocktail and gift" even, and that is now thinking that he is a technological expert.