6 ms·

An even faster Microsoft Edge

sharpshadow 2y ago
I'm using Edge on one of the company's computers and it's decent. Not to compare to the ol' Explorer.
cebert 2y ago
It’s even faster if you avoid a product with Microsoft bloat. What they’re been doing to Windows 11 with widgets, celebrity news, and failing to respect user’s default preferences is atrocious.
- jmkni 2y ago
  Totally agree. Other aspects of Windows are so good, such as WSL, but they completely ruin it with all of this.
  - imjonse 2y ago
    So one of the main good aspects of Windows is that it can run Linux :) ?
    - moi2388 2y ago
      Linux and office. Other than that, what does it really offer?
    - SavageBeast 2y ago
      If edge is the browser you use for downloading Chrome, maybe Windows is the OS you use to get and install Linux? I feel sorry for people who's employers mandate Windows or are dependent on some Windows only critical software. I know its not everyones cup of tea but its really nice over here in MacBook land. If you're not somehow held hostage on Windows, maybe drop by a store sometime and give OSX a roll? I haven't been forced to run Windows in about 10 years and I haven't missed it one single time. Im not at all opposed to Linux either but I can run a real shell on OSX and all my scripts.sh run just the same locally as they do on my cloud Linux deployments - and thats enough for me personally.
      - nickserv 2y ago
        From one anti-consumer, anti-choice overlord to another? Yeah... I'll stick to open source, thanks.
      - imjonse 2y ago
        Use edge to download Firefox ;)
      - lodovic 2y ago
        To be fair, if you haven't used Windows at all in over a decade, you probably no longer have an informed view about it.
    - raxxorraxor 2y ago
      Indeed. Although to their defense Powershell is pretty decent as well, it just isn't as widely spread and not as universal as bash. Don't know if it conforms with posix, but that is doubtful. Still as solid tool. But all that doesn't help if the OS gets trashed by bad project leads and Microsoft seems to employ a lot of those. Their technical mistakes are dwarfed by their strategic ones. And companies being locked into their environment providing a record income probably don't help with Microsoft really trying to be competitive instead of milking users as much as possible.
  - pathartl 2y ago
    Good thing you can disable all the bad things.
- roywashere 2y ago
  The extreme clickbaityness of the msn homepage that is in the browser and the start menu makes me have a very bad feeling about windows. I do not like it at all. I would assume the Windows PMs would not like it either but I guess someone has some target that they need to reach? I feel like it underscores what a cheap/bad product windows feels like. Even though, technically it is fine (and I know you can turn it off, but defaults matter!!)
  - croes 2y ago
    >extreme clickbaityness of the msn homepage If clickbait was the only problem. The site is full of scam ads. It really shows how much MS cares about the users.
mdhb 2y ago
An interesting aside here about moving away from React to Web Components was a big part of their improvement it seems.
- 486sx33 2y ago
  The teams went the opposite direction for - a much worse result.
  - blackoil 2y ago
    Teams was/is an Angular app.
    - linkgoron 2y ago
      Teams is no longer using Angular, it has moved to React
      - jimbob45 2y ago
        If only Teams was developed by the largest stakeholder in the Windows native app ecosystem. It would be a perfect chance to show off native UI tooling that would make other companies want to develop for that platform. Oh well...
        linkgoron 2y ago
        While somewhat true, to its credit Teams is using basically the same UI stack for its web-based product (teams.microsoft.com) and its "native" desktop app, so there's a win there. Also, the Teams desktop app has moved from Electron to Edge WebView2 - which is a Microsoft product.
butz 2y ago
Did Microsoft invent their own XUL?
- StimDeck 2y ago
  There is no chrome, only XUL.
BizarroLand 2y ago
I don't care if you get a puppy with every Edge based Bing search, I'm not using the browser that you're shoving down my throat and up my hind end so hard they're meeting in the middle. If M$ didn't make it so that exchange email exports only worked in Edge, I would never use it at all.
- nolroz 2y ago
  IE6. Never forget.
- Incipient 2y ago
  Every month or so Google reminds me to turn on photo backup, and RCS chats. Can't get rid of it. Pretty sure all these big companies are equally awful. Unfortunately the masses don't care, so the big companies just get more core to life, and keep getting worse. If anyone knows the solution. Please run for president/prime minister/benevolent dictator.
Dwedit 2y ago
Is Edge still sending all URLs and images to Microsoft by default?
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  Oh my yes. Having just set up a new Windows PC, the amount of dark patterns involved in convincing me that my PC would be completely useless if I didn't send absolutely everything to Microsoft was kind of shocking. It also then started uploading literally my entire user folder to OneCloud - without asking. It just did it.
- xnx 2y ago
  With Recall, Windows will soon do this, regardless of browser.
  - LeoPanthera 2y ago
    I don't much like Microsoft's policies either but there is no reason to make stuff up. Recall is entirely local.
    - xnx 2y ago
      Absolutely correct for the current version of Recall. Hard for me to imagine that sharing of "anonymous" reporting of data to "select partners" for "quality and performance" reasons is not in the roadmap.
eviks 2y ago
> Edge monitors its UI responsiveness via telemetry collected from end users’ machines. We intentionally did this collection for all the parts of the Edge UI, not just for the web pages that we render. What did we learn from this data? Building a lot of spying is one option Another could be to simply get a "a device without an SSD or with less than 8GB RAM!", launch the app and observe all the slow glory yourself And yet another is doing a bit more architecture design work upfront and... not use React in the first place instead of doing rewrites
moshegramovsky 2y ago
Why doesn't Microsoft realize that Edge just isn't happening? I was a *huge* Microsoft fan boy for decades. Like, I eagerly awaited releases of the products I used like Windows and Visual Studio and Excel and on and on. It was thrilling to use NT with the Windows 95 skin when it was available in beta. Sorry to nerd out so hard, but I just loved their products. Now they're just making Windows worse and worse and worse. It's almost as if they want to harm Windows. The other day I had to help my 80 year old Dad with his Windows PC. Microsoft wanted him to "finish" setting up his PC that he has been using for 18 months. Okay, he accidentally clicked yes and then ended up somewhere that was trying to make him sign up for a Microsoft account. Yeah, my Dad doesn't even know how to do that! We had to turn off his PC to get out of it and then I had to look up how to make sure it never happens again. Why so many dark patterns MS? My Dad already paid you for Windows. Why do you need to collect more and more and more? HE'S 80 YEARS OLD! LEAVE HIM THE F** ALONE! As a result of all this, but especially the telemetry, my Dad's on Google docs, my Mom is on Google docs, my family is on Google docs. Never going to use 360. Nope nope nope. Sure, Google has dark patterns, but at least I know that about Google. Microsoft pretends that they aren't like that, or wants to have that brand image, and meanwhile, they're busy trying to suck up all your personal information and spy on you with telemetry and send your keystrokes to their servers. The funny thing is that my Dad only had a Windows PC so he can run one app: Chrome. His entire internet life is in Chrome. Everything syncs with his phone. It's just NICE. You can't even imagine how much easier this makes his life and ... mine :) So yeah, I don't want more Microsoft software in my life. I want less. Zero, would be ideal, but that's not the world I live in. Yet.
- Double_a_92 2y ago
  There wasn't even something wrong with Edge when it started. It was basically Chrome, but preinstalled. But now they had to fill it with bloat and spyware...
  - moshegramovsky 2y ago
    It's unfortunate that the entire world is headed this way. I've been bullish about tech for my ENTIRE life. Since I was a kid. But it's a weird feeling, all the data collection. Europe has the right ideas about this.
azinman2 2y ago
This blog highlights one of the reasons I’m so skeptical about AI replacing software engineers. All of the analysis, decision to put forth telemetry and build that system, then take the results and figure out how to redo the UI (and decide to make that a priority)… I don’t see any path towards this in the near term using AI.
- hfjtifkenf 2y ago
  Near term passes very quickly.
LunicLynx 2y ago
The fastest way to download Firefox yet!
qwerty456127 2y ago
I once switched from Firefox to Chrome on old PCs because Firefox felt intolerably slow. I still use some of these PCs, including semi-old ones on which Firefox feels tolerably slow so I use Firefox. I expected Edge to be at least as as fast as Chrome but no, it feels more slow than Firefox. It also asks many questions (no, I don't want to make it the default nor to sign-in, nor to let it itself cookie-track me, and this still is not everything it asks about) every time it updates.
- basil-rash 2y ago
  FWIW I've been using Edge for 4+ years now (since Chromium) and I've never had it ask me any questions on an update. The worst it did was restore my tabs after updates when I specifically configured it to never restore tabs, but that's been fixed for some time now.
- AnonCoward42 2y ago
  I wonder if the "new" Firefox is about as good on old PCs as Chrome as it improved quite a lot with Quantum/Photon. For me the switch to Chrome was also caused by the abysmal performance of Firefox at the time, but I immediately switched back when the performance was at least tolerable. Granted Chrome is still the faster browser from what I've seen in benchmarks and reviews.
  - qwerty456127 2y ago
    > I wonder if the "new" Firefox is about as good on old PCs as Chrome as it improved quite a lot with Quantum/Photon. On old PCs - not much, just slightly better. Perfect on modern PCs though so I se no reason (other than testing) to use Chrome on non-museum computers.
- albertopv 2y ago
  In a very old laptop I used Pale Moon [0] and it worked quite well. [0] https://www.palemoon.org https://www.palemoon.org
- tasty_freeze 2y ago
  I don't disbelieve that people have performance problems with Firefox, but I've been using it since before it was Firefox the entire time and I've never run into it being intolerably slow. Maybe it is because I never have more than a dozen tabs open at once, or maybe it is because I never use facebook or some of the other popular sites and maybe those are really heavy. And yes, I do sometimes use Edge and Chrome, mostly for my work machine, because sometimes the company internal web products are developed on and tested only Chrome and on occasion things don't work for FF. Those don't feel any zippier to me.
thiagoperes 2y ago
I started using Edge due to work being on the msft suite and I’ve been positively impressed with its performance. It handles way better than Chrome, especially with multiple tabs.
ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
Dev tools lags in Edge. That being said, I probably trust Google more than Microsoft with my personal data
aquir 2y ago
I was using it for a long time for enterprise stuff but the same happened with Edge what happened with Windows: it became bloated and annoying and it’s too much work to turn off all privacy intrusive features.
glimshe 2y ago
I've been an Edge user since release. As Google dominates the Internet commercial spyware business, Chrome isn't an option I'm comfortable with. I used Firefox for a couple of years, but unfortunately it really fell behind in performance, at least on Windows. So Edge it is - and to be honest, I'm pretty happy with its performance, stability and privacy customizations (including the private VPN I use for the Google Search, as using Google Search from a regular VPN service gives me annoying "bot" challenges).
- raxxorraxor 2y ago
  I have Chrome, Edge and Firefox installed and I never understood the performance complaints about Firefox. There is no difference in loading times between any site I frequent. I believe this is a wrong meme to be honest. Edge was a decent browser for a very short time when it was just a minimal browser. Around the time they switched the engine. Today is in no way better and in quite a few parts even worse than Chrome.

I'm using Edge on one of the company's computers and it's decent. Not to compare to the ol' Explorer.

It’s even faster if you avoid a product with Microsoft bloat. What they’re been doing to Windows 11 with widgets, celebrity news, and failing to respect user’s default preferences is atrocious.

jmkni 2y ago
Totally agree. Other aspects of Windows are so good, such as WSL, but they completely ruin it with all of this.
- imjonse 2y ago
  So one of the main good aspects of Windows is that it can run Linux :) ?
  - moi2388 2y ago
    Linux and office. Other than that, what does it really offer?
  - SavageBeast 2y ago
    If edge is the browser you use for downloading Chrome, maybe Windows is the OS you use to get and install Linux? I feel sorry for people who's employers mandate Windows or are dependent on some Windows only critical software. I know its not everyones cup of tea but its really nice over here in MacBook land. If you're not somehow held hostage on Windows, maybe drop by a store sometime and give OSX a roll? I haven't been forced to run Windows in about 10 years and I haven't missed it one single time. Im not at all opposed to Linux either but I can run a real shell on OSX and all my scripts.sh run just the same locally as they do on my cloud Linux deployments - and thats enough for me personally.
    - nickserv 2y ago
      From one anti-consumer, anti-choice overlord to another? Yeah... I'll stick to open source, thanks.
    - imjonse 2y ago
      Use edge to download Firefox ;)
    - lodovic 2y ago
      To be fair, if you haven't used Windows at all in over a decade, you probably no longer have an informed view about it.
  - raxxorraxor 2y ago
    Indeed. Although to their defense Powershell is pretty decent as well, it just isn't as widely spread and not as universal as bash. Don't know if it conforms with posix, but that is doubtful. Still as solid tool. But all that doesn't help if the OS gets trashed by bad project leads and Microsoft seems to employ a lot of those. Their technical mistakes are dwarfed by their strategic ones. And companies being locked into their environment providing a record income probably don't help with Microsoft really trying to be competitive instead of milking users as much as possible.
- pathartl 2y ago
  Good thing you can disable all the bad things.
roywashere 2y ago
The extreme clickbaityness of the msn homepage that is in the browser and the start menu makes me have a very bad feeling about windows. I do not like it at all. I would assume the Windows PMs would not like it either but I guess someone has some target that they need to reach? I feel like it underscores what a cheap/bad product windows feels like. Even though, technically it is fine (and I know you can turn it off, but defaults matter!!)
- croes 2y ago
  >extreme clickbaityness of the msn homepage If clickbait was the only problem. The site is full of scam ads. It really shows how much MS cares about the users.

mdhb 2y ago

An interesting aside here about moving away from React to Web Components was a big part of their improvement it seems.

486sx33 2y ago
The teams went the opposite direction for - a much worse result.
- blackoil 2y ago
  Teams was/is an Angular app.
  - linkgoron 2y ago
    Teams is no longer using Angular, it has moved to React
    - jimbob45 2y ago
      If only Teams was developed by the largest stakeholder in the Windows native app ecosystem. It would be a perfect chance to show off native UI tooling that would make other companies want to develop for that platform. Oh well...
      - linkgoron 2y ago
        While somewhat true, to its credit Teams is using basically the same UI stack for its web-based product (teams.microsoft.com) and its "native" desktop app, so there's a win there. Also, the Teams desktop app has moved from Electron to Edge WebView2 - which is a Microsoft product.

butz 2y ago

Did Microsoft invent their own XUL?

StimDeck 2y ago
There is no chrome, only XUL.

BizarroLand 2y ago

I don't care if you get a puppy with every Edge based Bing search, I'm not using the browser that you're shoving down my throat and up my hind end so hard they're meeting in the middle. If M$ didn't make it so that exchange email exports only worked in Edge, I would never use it at all.

nolroz 2y ago
IE6. Never forget.
Incipient 2y ago
Every month or so Google reminds me to turn on photo backup, and RCS chats. Can't get rid of it. Pretty sure all these big companies are equally awful. Unfortunately the masses don't care, so the big companies just get more core to life, and keep getting worse. If anyone knows the solution. Please run for president/prime minister/benevolent dictator.

Dwedit 2y ago

Is Edge still sending all URLs and images to Microsoft by default?

LeoPanthera 2y ago
Oh my yes. Having just set up a new Windows PC, the amount of dark patterns involved in convincing me that my PC would be completely useless if I didn't send absolutely everything to Microsoft was kind of shocking. It also then started uploading literally my entire user folder to OneCloud - without asking. It just did it.
xnx 2y ago
With Recall, Windows will soon do this, regardless of browser.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  I don't much like Microsoft's policies either but there is no reason to make stuff up. Recall is entirely local.
  - xnx 2y ago
    Absolutely correct for the current version of Recall. Hard for me to imagine that sharing of "anonymous" reporting of data to "select partners" for "quality and performance" reasons is not in the roadmap.

eviks 2y ago

> Edge monitors its UI responsiveness via telemetry collected from end users’ machines. We intentionally did this collection for all the parts of the Edge UI, not just for the web pages that we render. What did we learn from this data? Building a lot of spying is one option Another could be to simply get a "a device without an SSD or with less than 8GB RAM!", launch the app and observe all the slow glory yourself And yet another is doing a bit more architecture design work upfront and... not use React in the first place instead of doing rewrites

moshegramovsky 2y ago

Why doesn't Microsoft realize that Edge just isn't happening? I was a *huge* Microsoft fan boy for decades. Like, I eagerly awaited releases of the products I used like Windows and Visual Studio and Excel and on and on. It was thrilling to use NT with the Windows 95 skin when it was available in beta. Sorry to nerd out so hard, but I just loved their products. Now they're just making Windows worse and worse and worse. It's almost as if they want to harm Windows. The other day I had to help my 80 year old Dad with his Windows PC. Microsoft wanted him to "finish" setting up his PC that he has been using for 18 months. Okay, he accidentally clicked yes and then ended up somewhere that was trying to make him sign up for a Microsoft account. Yeah, my Dad doesn't even know how to do that! We had to turn off his PC to get out of it and then I had to look up how to make sure it never happens again. Why so many dark patterns MS? My Dad already paid you for Windows. Why do you need to collect more and more and more? HE'S 80 YEARS OLD! LEAVE HIM THE F** ALONE! As a result of all this, but especially the telemetry, my Dad's on Google docs, my Mom is on Google docs, my family is on Google docs. Never going to use 360. Nope nope nope. Sure, Google has dark patterns, but at least I know that about Google. Microsoft pretends that they aren't like that, or wants to have that brand image, and meanwhile, they're busy trying to suck up all your personal information and spy on you with telemetry and send your keystrokes to their servers. The funny thing is that my Dad only had a Windows PC so he can run one app: Chrome. His entire internet life is in Chrome. Everything syncs with his phone. It's just NICE. You can't even imagine how much easier this makes his life and ... mine :) So yeah, I don't want more Microsoft software in my life. I want less. Zero, would be ideal, but that's not the world I live in. Yet.

Double_a_92 2y ago
There wasn't even something wrong with Edge when it started. It was basically Chrome, but preinstalled. But now they had to fill it with bloat and spyware...
- moshegramovsky 2y ago
  It's unfortunate that the entire world is headed this way. I've been bullish about tech for my ENTIRE life. Since I was a kid. But it's a weird feeling, all the data collection. Europe has the right ideas about this.

azinman2 2y ago

This blog highlights one of the reasons I’m so skeptical about AI replacing software engineers. All of the analysis, decision to put forth telemetry and build that system, then take the results and figure out how to redo the UI (and decide to make that a priority)… I don’t see any path towards this in the near term using AI.

hfjtifkenf 2y ago
Near term passes very quickly.

LunicLynx 2y ago

The fastest way to download Firefox yet!

qwerty456127 2y ago

I once switched from Firefox to Chrome on old PCs because Firefox felt intolerably slow. I still use some of these PCs, including semi-old ones on which Firefox feels tolerably slow so I use Firefox. I expected Edge to be at least as as fast as Chrome but no, it feels more slow than Firefox. It also asks many questions (no, I don't want to make it the default nor to sign-in, nor to let it itself cookie-track me, and this still is not everything it asks about) every time it updates.

basil-rash 2y ago
FWIW I've been using Edge for 4+ years now (since Chromium) and I've never had it ask me any questions on an update. The worst it did was restore my tabs after updates when I specifically configured it to never restore tabs, but that's been fixed for some time now.
AnonCoward42 2y ago
I wonder if the "new" Firefox is about as good on old PCs as Chrome as it improved quite a lot with Quantum/Photon. For me the switch to Chrome was also caused by the abysmal performance of Firefox at the time, but I immediately switched back when the performance was at least tolerable. Granted Chrome is still the faster browser from what I've seen in benchmarks and reviews.
- qwerty456127 2y ago
  > I wonder if the "new" Firefox is about as good on old PCs as Chrome as it improved quite a lot with Quantum/Photon. On old PCs - not much, just slightly better. Perfect on modern PCs though so I se no reason (other than testing) to use Chrome on non-museum computers.
albertopv 2y ago
In a very old laptop I used Pale Moon [0] and it worked quite well. [0] https://www.palemoon.org https://www.palemoon.org
tasty_freeze 2y ago
I don't disbelieve that people have performance problems with Firefox, but I've been using it since before it was Firefox the entire time and I've never run into it being intolerably slow. Maybe it is because I never have more than a dozen tabs open at once, or maybe it is because I never use facebook or some of the other popular sites and maybe those are really heavy. And yes, I do sometimes use Edge and Chrome, mostly for my work machine, because sometimes the company internal web products are developed on and tested only Chrome and on occasion things don't work for FF. Those don't feel any zippier to me.

thiagoperes 2y ago

I started using Edge due to work being on the msft suite and I’ve been positively impressed with its performance. It handles way better than Chrome, especially with multiple tabs.

ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago

Dev tools lags in Edge. That being said, I probably trust Google more than Microsoft with my personal data

aquir 2y ago

I was using it for a long time for enterprise stuff but the same happened with Edge what happened with Windows: it became bloated and annoying and it’s too much work to turn off all privacy intrusive features.

glimshe 2y ago

I've been an Edge user since release. As Google dominates the Internet commercial spyware business, Chrome isn't an option I'm comfortable with. I used Firefox for a couple of years, but unfortunately it really fell behind in performance, at least on Windows. So Edge it is - and to be honest, I'm pretty happy with its performance, stability and privacy customizations (including the private VPN I use for the Google Search, as using Google Search from a regular VPN service gives me annoying "bot" challenges).

raxxorraxor 2y ago
I have Chrome, Edge and Firefox installed and I never understood the performance complaints about Firefox. There is no difference in loading times between any site I frequent. I believe this is a wrong meme to be honest. Edge was a decent browser for a very short time when it was just a minimal browser. Around the time they switched the engine. Today is in no way better and in quite a few parts even worse than Chrome.