8 ms·

Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge

63 points by bundie 3y ago

cutler 3y ago
Maybe someone should dig out the EU browser bundling anti-trust case Microsoft lost in the early 2000s and enforce it.
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  There’s a reason why MS is doing this stuff now. The probationary period they were under has now expired. Someone will indeed need to sue them again to make them behave reasonably.
  - cutler 3y ago
    You know, every time I start-up VS Code something inside me bristles, having lived through web development in the late 90s when hole-ridden, M$-only IE ruled supreme and M$ deliberately flaunted web standards to enure all those company intranet apps built on IE would be incompatible with anything else. I never quite bought the Satya Nadella, Linux friendly revolution given how soon it followed a period when MS ruthlessly pursuded Linux companies such as Suse and Red Hat with their bogus patent racket. Then there was their thinly-veiled financing of SCO's gruelling UNIX patent lawsuit which, thankfully, failed. So I'm not surprised to see M$ reverting back to their original game from the Ballmer era. WSL - you all fell for it. It was just another round of good old M$ Embrace and Extend.
- wffurr 3y ago
  Can we enforce it on all OS to allow changing default apps? Thinking of Safari on iOS…
  - jamil7 3y ago
    You've been able to change the default browser on iOS for quite a while now. The underlying browser engine is the same, but non-technical users don't care and just want to sync bookmarks/passwords from Chrome/Firefox.
    - darksfall 3y ago
      Well then that's not changing the browser then is it? It's merely changing the 'window dressing' or facade that is the 'chrome' around the iOS web rendering engine.
      - jamil7 3y ago
        I think I addressed this in the comment. To clear, I'm not a fan of Apple's policy on this and think they should allow other engines. Having said that, I think for 99% of users, the underling web rendering engine is an implementation detail they aren't concerned with.
        Shawnj2 3y ago
        The funny thing is that this policy is one of the few things keeping WebKit alive, if not Chromium would become the only usable browser engine (and Firefox but people would probably stop supporting it if it was the only alternative browser)
Escapade5160 3y ago
I can agree with this. Everywhere you look in windows you have Microsoft screaming EDGE. It's not enough to use their OS, Email client, Office apps, and gaming system. No we have to use their browser too.
- bundie 3y ago
  That's true. I switched to Linux Mint on my Latitude E7450 and the experience so far has been great. The only downside is that I cannot hibernate the system, which means I have to shut down every damn time.
  - beardyw 3y ago
    It seems to be caused by inconsistencies in the power handling hardware. I now have a laptop which came with Linux installed and it's the first time it's worked!
    - hef19898 3y ago
      I run Ubuntu on Lenovo Extreme Gen 2, and hiberbation just works fine (I don't rember if I did some BIOS tweaking so). Battery consumption during hibernation seems to be higher than Windows, but that's about it.
      - vladvasiliu 3y ago
        > Battery consumption during hibernation seems to be higher than Windows, but that's about it. Are you actually hibernating it, or doing the "hybrid sleep" thing, which only sleeps and then hibernates? In my case (Arch) the default for hybrid sleep is to keep it in sleep state for quite a while, whereas windows shuts down fairly quickly when unplugged. Actual hibernation is shutting the computer completely off, so I'd be curious to know how one OS could have a different power consumption than another.
        hef19898 3y ago
LBTables 3y ago
I keep hearing "Edge actually isn't bad anymore", but as long as Microsoft continues to try and jam it down my throat at any conceivable opportunity, I will continue to refuse to even consider it. Very few things piss me off more than the other Microsoft products that feel the need to override my default browser and open pages in Edge instead. And on top of that, last time something launched Edge instead of Firefox, I was greeted with an inescapable fullscreen page that hid away the other browser tabs (i.e. the page I was trying to view) until I clicked through their idiotic "welcome to edge" bs. Sometimes lately it really feels like Microsoft is taking classes on how to piss off their users as much as possible.
- tentacleuno 3y ago
  I echo your concerns, and add that I find it slightly humorous Edge is also being offered on Linux. I've spent hours working to remove it from Windows; why would I willingly install it?
  - hhh 3y ago
    A work environment where you're mandated to use it, wanting to test against it, wanting to see if some of the things in it are good (AI sidebar for example)
  - miah_ 3y ago
    Internet Explorer 5 also had a few UNIX releases.
    - _thisdot 3y ago
      Internet Explorer was, for a brief time, the default browser in macOS as well
  - mcny 3y ago
    > I echo your concerns, and add that I find it slightly humorous Edge is also being offered on Linux. I've spent hours working to remove it from Windows; why would I willingly install it? because you have a choice :) I installed it on Fedora from flathub iirc
sylware 3y ago
edge is just a front-end using the googel Big Tech web engine from google. If they customize the web engine, it's only a posture to hide the fact that they were unable to code their own in spite of their billions. That said, they are big tech, they are all and the same.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  It doesn't matter who wrote the engine. If it did, they wouldn't replace it. It's about control.
- fifticon 3y ago
  To phrase what another said in a different way/take: They don't care about whether they themselves are the source of the source-code. What matters to them is the ability to inject their control and telemetry in the user's pipeline, on top of "chrome". This is particularly why I don't want to use Edge, and don't want them to force me to use edge. It is currently interesting, the level of violence you have to resort to, to 'uninstall' edge. It feels very win95-98-dejavu again, where the browser has been welded so thoroughly into the OS, that you need dynamite to dislodge it. As I understand it, the leverage we still have to disable it, is founded on the requirements for windows enterprise, since enterprise companies will not tolerate such bullshit.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Safari also forked from Chrome. Not just MS Edge. There was a joint collaboration between a lot of companies on 'chromium' (wasn't it webkit before?) and then that relationship soured and each forked it to their own browser. (I think Apple forked it first). It wasn't like the 'engine' was just some small open source project with beautiful code that MS stole. I also think you are little conflating the front end renderer, from 'web engine'. MS doesn't use the Google search engine. Edit>> Had order wrong. Apple and Google were working together on WebKit. But Google forked off first (blink). Safari continued on with WebKit. Google eventually re-branded Chromium, then MS Edge used Chromium. The point being, this was not a small indie open source project that MS stole as some anti-MS comments kind of hint at. All 3 big players were putting engineering time into these engines. This cartoon diagram might help. Wiki has a more detailed one. https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1492181669788356611/photo/1 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1492181669788356611/pho...
madeofpalk 3y ago
> It even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome. [...] Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, there's the recent rise of Bing Chat. There's a reason why I use it every day on some of the best laptops I review Then later, > Microsoft needs to make Edge better instead
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  That first quote... those are not the things I want from a browser. No, I don't want you to sell me stuff. No, I don't want to see your "collections". No, I don't want your chat. I want you to show me the pages I want to view. I'll tell you what they are; I don't want you to show me stuff that you think I want.
  - tomjen3 3y ago
    Collections are a feature were you can collect pages together (not sure how that is helpful, but I am sure somebodies workflow is helped by them). Chat is Bing chat, aka ChatGPT 4 with internet search. I can assure you that it will quite happily show you any sites you want, though Google will attempt to get you to install Chrome.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    That's fine - I probably agree with you. But the author wrote both parts. The author clearly likes those features in a browser, and already thinks Microsoft is doing a good job of making the browser better with more features.
bovermyer 3y ago
No matter how many lawsuits are brought against Microsoft, they will keep doing this kind of thing. Stopping them permanently is going to take stronger action. Maybe breaking up the company.
huijzer 3y ago
Yes and with Bing too. I own some stock so have incentive to root for them, but the products are frankly just meh. Bing Chat is cool but worse than ChatGPT. Edge is cool but worse than Firefox. And Bing is cool but worse than Google.
- tamrix 3y ago
  I'll be honest. I use bing. Found myself going to google less and less since ChatGPT filled most of the void.
  - huijzer 3y ago
    Yes I have the same, but I’ve had a few times that Bing couldn’t find what Google could, so I switched mostly back. Also the fact that you can accidentally scroll too far and end up in the Bing Chat and the Bing homepage news (read: crap) don’t really help.
monero-xmr 3y ago
I set up a new media PC and used Windows 11 because it works best with the chipset / graphics card. Wow was I surprised when modern Windows is like malware - just endless dark patterns, nags, pop ups, it’s like a Buzzfeed blog post in terms of stuff I ignore and ads in my face. Unbelievable!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
NayamAmarshe 3y ago
Well I was tired of complaining about it again and again. If Windows refuses to respect me as a user, I refuse to use Windows. Very happy to be on ZorinOS and other Linux distros now. They're free and they don't waste my time.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Maybe complain about the browser separately from complaining about the marketing techniques. Edge has gotten better. And When they incorporated GPT, it was pretty cool. It already seems old now, just a few weeks later, but at the time, remember people were freaking out how great ChatGPT was, it seemed incredible. We've had a few weeks to cool off and start critiquing it. But when GPT was incorporated into Edge, edge adoption shot up, I think I saw stat that it was 100 million users. I even showed wife (non-tech) how to put in a few prompts and it would generate some letter she needed to write. It did seem incredible. So just stepping back, Edge has incrementally improved, then they incorporated a big new feature "GPT", and adoption took off. ---> So the increased users was not just by marketing, and anti-trust practices, and splash screens.
qwerty456127 3y ago
The greatest feature of Chrome that made me use it initially always was how fast it was (Firefox with extensions is painfully slow on old computers while Chrome is perfectly fast everywhere although it can consume slightly more ram). I expected the new Edge to be the same but to y surprise it has became very slow nowadays.
mrweasel 3y ago
Why does Microsoft even care about having a browser? I can see the need for a rendering engine within Windows for various tasks, but do we really need a Microsoft browser, especially yet another Chromium browser? If they do feel like a browser needs to be bundled, why not just add a minimalist, privacy focused browser. The goal should be to have tech savvy people tell friends and family to "Just use Edge and you'll be fine". It is just to drive people to Bing? If that's the case, just promote Bing, it's a good search engine.
- coldacid 3y ago
  Edge made a lot more sense when it had its own rendering engine instead of being yet another Chromium paint-job. The EdgeHTML engine was actually doing a good job of catching up with everything before Microsoft made the switch, too. The growing Chrome/Blink monoculture is one of the biggest threats to the web right now in a way worse than IE6 ever was, and by switching to Chromium from EdgeHTML, Microsoft only made the problem worse.
theklr 3y ago
As a macOS user was a fan of the initial version. Then Microsoft went into its Microsoft ways. Office toolbar, but you can hide it. Then more bing overrides on the new tab but you could adjust that. Finally came the bing icon. While I get I’m using a “free” tool, I wish there was more variation (particularly for work) in just getting a barebones browser. I was rooting for them as they implemented a couple of features that got them similar to Firefox DevTools, but them adding more and more bloat default, I moved to arc. Really wish safari would beef its dev tools by removing the App Store requirement, but alas. Seems devs don’t want to touch Firefox at the level to update their extensions comparable to chromium browsers.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Yea, now when you open a new window it types in 'Search or enter web address' like in ChatGPT... And they added a whole bunch of features that are the responsibility of the OS: * collections * workspaces * split screen * browser essentials * Web capture
glimshe 3y ago
Edge is my main browser, I like it. I use Chrome and Firefox for certain things, but Edge strikes a good balance between performance and insulation from Google spyware (and trading it for slightly lighter Microsoft spyware) for my needs. Although I think it has been getting gradually worse over time, especially small annoying UI changes and ever growing number of pop ups.
hervem 3y ago
When Edge came out, I took like a lighter version of woolyss chromium with Ms integration/tracking. While they added many nice features like tab grouping, collections, workspaces, sleeping tabs etc.. The last move of adding ads in these previous sub-menus make me nervous.

63 points by bundie 3y ago

cutler 3y ago

Maybe someone should dig out the EU browser bundling anti-trust case Microsoft lost in the early 2000s and enforce it.

rhaway84773 3y ago
There’s a reason why MS is doing this stuff now. The probationary period they were under has now expired. Someone will indeed need to sue them again to make them behave reasonably.
- cutler 3y ago
  You know, every time I start-up VS Code something inside me bristles, having lived through web development in the late 90s when hole-ridden, M$-only IE ruled supreme and M$ deliberately flaunted web standards to enure all those company intranet apps built on IE would be incompatible with anything else. I never quite bought the Satya Nadella, Linux friendly revolution given how soon it followed a period when MS ruthlessly pursuded Linux companies such as Suse and Red Hat with their bogus patent racket. Then there was their thinly-veiled financing of SCO's gruelling UNIX patent lawsuit which, thankfully, failed. So I'm not surprised to see M$ reverting back to their original game from the Ballmer era. WSL - you all fell for it. It was just another round of good old M$ Embrace and Extend.
wffurr 3y ago
Can we enforce it on all OS to allow changing default apps? Thinking of Safari on iOS…
- jamil7 3y ago
  You've been able to change the default browser on iOS for quite a while now. The underlying browser engine is the same, but non-technical users don't care and just want to sync bookmarks/passwords from Chrome/Firefox.
  - darksfall 3y ago
    Well then that's not changing the browser then is it? It's merely changing the 'window dressing' or facade that is the 'chrome' around the iOS web rendering engine.
    - jamil7 3y ago
      I think I addressed this in the comment. To clear, I'm not a fan of Apple's policy on this and think they should allow other engines. Having said that, I think for 99% of users, the underling web rendering engine is an implementation detail they aren't concerned with.
      - Shawnj2 3y ago
        The funny thing is that this policy is one of the few things keeping WebKit alive, if not Chromium would become the only usable browser engine (and Firefox but people would probably stop supporting it if it was the only alternative browser)

Escapade5160 3y ago

I can agree with this. Everywhere you look in windows you have Microsoft screaming EDGE. It's not enough to use their OS, Email client, Office apps, and gaming system. No we have to use their browser too.

bundie 3y ago
That's true. I switched to Linux Mint on my Latitude E7450 and the experience so far has been great. The only downside is that I cannot hibernate the system, which means I have to shut down every damn time.
- beardyw 3y ago
  It seems to be caused by inconsistencies in the power handling hardware. I now have a laptop which came with Linux installed and it's the first time it's worked!
  - hef19898 3y ago
    I run Ubuntu on Lenovo Extreme Gen 2, and hiberbation just works fine (I don't rember if I did some BIOS tweaking so). Battery consumption during hibernation seems to be higher than Windows, but that's about it.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      > Battery consumption during hibernation seems to be higher than Windows, but that's about it. Are you actually hibernating it, or doing the "hybrid sleep" thing, which only sleeps and then hibernates? In my case (Arch) the default for hybrid sleep is to keep it in sleep state for quite a while, whereas windows shuts down fairly quickly when unplugged. Actual hibernation is shutting the computer completely off, so I'd be curious to know how one OS could have a different power consumption than another.
      - hef19898 3y ago

LBTables 3y ago

I keep hearing "Edge actually isn't bad anymore", but as long as Microsoft continues to try and jam it down my throat at any conceivable opportunity, I will continue to refuse to even consider it. Very few things piss me off more than the other Microsoft products that feel the need to override my default browser and open pages in Edge instead. And on top of that, last time something launched Edge instead of Firefox, I was greeted with an inescapable fullscreen page that hid away the other browser tabs (i.e. the page I was trying to view) until I clicked through their idiotic "welcome to edge" bs. Sometimes lately it really feels like Microsoft is taking classes on how to piss off their users as much as possible.

tentacleuno 3y ago
I echo your concerns, and add that I find it slightly humorous Edge is also being offered on Linux. I've spent hours working to remove it from Windows; why would I willingly install it?
- hhh 3y ago
  A work environment where you're mandated to use it, wanting to test against it, wanting to see if some of the things in it are good (AI sidebar for example)
- miah_ 3y ago
  Internet Explorer 5 also had a few UNIX releases.
  - _thisdot 3y ago
    Internet Explorer was, for a brief time, the default browser in macOS as well
- mcny 3y ago
  > I echo your concerns, and add that I find it slightly humorous Edge is also being offered on Linux. I've spent hours working to remove it from Windows; why would I willingly install it? because you have a choice :) I installed it on Fedora from flathub iirc

sylware 3y ago

edge is just a front-end using the googel Big Tech web engine from google. If they customize the web engine, it's only a posture to hide the fact that they were unable to code their own in spite of their billions. That said, they are big tech, they are all and the same.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
It doesn't matter who wrote the engine. If it did, they wouldn't replace it. It's about control.
fifticon 3y ago
To phrase what another said in a different way/take: They don't care about whether they themselves are the source of the source-code. What matters to them is the ability to inject their control and telemetry in the user's pipeline, on top of "chrome". This is particularly why I don't want to use Edge, and don't want them to force me to use edge. It is currently interesting, the level of violence you have to resort to, to 'uninstall' edge. It feels very win95-98-dejavu again, where the browser has been welded so thoroughly into the OS, that you need dynamite to dislodge it. As I understand it, the leverage we still have to disable it, is founded on the requirements for windows enterprise, since enterprise companies will not tolerate such bullshit.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Safari also forked from Chrome. Not just MS Edge. There was a joint collaboration between a lot of companies on 'chromium' (wasn't it webkit before?) and then that relationship soured and each forked it to their own browser. (I think Apple forked it first). It wasn't like the 'engine' was just some small open source project with beautiful code that MS stole. I also think you are little conflating the front end renderer, from 'web engine'. MS doesn't use the Google search engine. Edit>> Had order wrong. Apple and Google were working together on WebKit. But Google forked off first (blink). Safari continued on with WebKit. Google eventually re-branded Chromium, then MS Edge used Chromium. The point being, this was not a small indie open source project that MS stole as some anti-MS comments kind of hint at. All 3 big players were putting engineering time into these engines. This cartoon diagram might help. Wiki has a more detailed one. https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1492181669788356611/photo/1 https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1492181669788356611/pho...

madeofpalk 3y ago

> It even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome. [...] Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, there's the recent rise of Bing Chat. There's a reason why I use it every day on some of the best laptops I review Then later, > Microsoft needs to make Edge better instead

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
That first quote... those are not the things I want from a browser. No, I don't want you to sell me stuff. No, I don't want to see your "collections". No, I don't want your chat. I want you to show me the pages I want to view. I'll tell you what they are; I don't want you to show me stuff that you think I want.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Collections are a feature were you can collect pages together (not sure how that is helpful, but I am sure somebodies workflow is helped by them). Chat is Bing chat, aka ChatGPT 4 with internet search. I can assure you that it will quite happily show you any sites you want, though Google will attempt to get you to install Chrome.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  That's fine - I probably agree with you. But the author wrote both parts. The author clearly likes those features in a browser, and already thinks Microsoft is doing a good job of making the browser better with more features.

bovermyer 3y ago

No matter how many lawsuits are brought against Microsoft, they will keep doing this kind of thing. Stopping them permanently is going to take stronger action. Maybe breaking up the company.

huijzer 3y ago

Yes and with Bing too. I own some stock so have incentive to root for them, but the products are frankly just meh. Bing Chat is cool but worse than ChatGPT. Edge is cool but worse than Firefox. And Bing is cool but worse than Google.

tamrix 3y ago
I'll be honest. I use bing. Found myself going to google less and less since ChatGPT filled most of the void.
- huijzer 3y ago
  Yes I have the same, but I’ve had a few times that Bing couldn’t find what Google could, so I switched mostly back. Also the fact that you can accidentally scroll too far and end up in the Bing Chat and the Bing homepage news (read: crap) don’t really help.

monero-xmr 3y ago

I set up a new media PC and used Windows 11 because it works best with the chipset / graphics card. Wow was I surprised when modern Windows is like malware - just endless dark patterns, nags, pop ups, it’s like a Buzzfeed blog post in terms of stuff I ignore and ads in my face. Unbelievable!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

NayamAmarshe 3y ago

Well I was tired of complaining about it again and again. If Windows refuses to respect me as a user, I refuse to use Windows. Very happy to be on ZorinOS and other Linux distros now. They're free and they don't waste my time.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Maybe complain about the browser separately from complaining about the marketing techniques. Edge has gotten better. And When they incorporated GPT, it was pretty cool. It already seems old now, just a few weeks later, but at the time, remember people were freaking out how great ChatGPT was, it seemed incredible. We've had a few weeks to cool off and start critiquing it. But when GPT was incorporated into Edge, edge adoption shot up, I think I saw stat that it was 100 million users. I even showed wife (non-tech) how to put in a few prompts and it would generate some letter she needed to write. It did seem incredible. So just stepping back, Edge has incrementally improved, then they incorporated a big new feature "GPT", and adoption took off. ---> So the increased users was not just by marketing, and anti-trust practices, and splash screens.

qwerty456127 3y ago

The greatest feature of Chrome that made me use it initially always was how fast it was (Firefox with extensions is painfully slow on old computers while Chrome is perfectly fast everywhere although it can consume slightly more ram). I expected the new Edge to be the same but to y surprise it has became very slow nowadays.

mrweasel 3y ago

Why does Microsoft even care about having a browser? I can see the need for a rendering engine within Windows for various tasks, but do we really need a Microsoft browser, especially yet another Chromium browser? If they do feel like a browser needs to be bundled, why not just add a minimalist, privacy focused browser. The goal should be to have tech savvy people tell friends and family to "Just use Edge and you'll be fine". It is just to drive people to Bing? If that's the case, just promote Bing, it's a good search engine.

coldacid 3y ago
Edge made a lot more sense when it had its own rendering engine instead of being yet another Chromium paint-job. The EdgeHTML engine was actually doing a good job of catching up with everything before Microsoft made the switch, too. The growing Chrome/Blink monoculture is one of the biggest threats to the web right now in a way worse than IE6 ever was, and by switching to Chromium from EdgeHTML, Microsoft only made the problem worse.

theklr 3y ago

As a macOS user was a fan of the initial version. Then Microsoft went into its Microsoft ways. Office toolbar, but you can hide it. Then more bing overrides on the new tab but you could adjust that. Finally came the bing icon. While I get I’m using a “free” tool, I wish there was more variation (particularly for work) in just getting a barebones browser. I was rooting for them as they implemented a couple of features that got them similar to Firefox DevTools, but them adding more and more bloat default, I moved to arc. Really wish safari would beef its dev tools by removing the App Store requirement, but alas. Seems devs don’t want to touch Firefox at the level to update their extensions comparable to chromium browsers.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

Yea, now when you open a new window it types in 'Search or enter web address' like in ChatGPT... And they added a whole bunch of features that are the responsibility of the OS: * collections * workspaces * split screen * browser essentials * Web capture

glimshe 3y ago

Edge is my main browser, I like it. I use Chrome and Firefox for certain things, but Edge strikes a good balance between performance and insulation from Google spyware (and trading it for slightly lighter Microsoft spyware) for my needs. Although I think it has been getting gradually worse over time, especially small annoying UI changes and ever growing number of pop ups.

hervem 3y ago

When Edge came out, I took like a lighter version of woolyss chromium with Ms integration/tracking. While they added many nice features like tab grouping, collections, workspaces, sleeping tabs etc.. The last move of adding ads in these previous sub-menus make me nervous.