Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge(xda-developers.com)
xda-developers.com
Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge
https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-trying-too-hard-edge/
70 comments
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!
Maybe someone should dig out the EU browser bundling anti-trust case Microsoft lost in the early 2000s and enforce it.
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.
The probationary period they were under has now expired.
Someone will indeed need to sue them again to make them behave reasonably.
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.
Can we enforce it on all OS to allow changing default apps? Thinking of Safari on iOS…
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.
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.
It's merely changing the 'window dressing' or facade that is the 'chrome' around the iOS web rendering engine.
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.
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)
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.
> No we have to use their browser too.
I switched my mother-in-law (nearly 70 years old) to a Chromebook and I made my SO switch her little PME from Windows to Ubuntu more than a year ago and she has zero issue.
As for the rest of my family, they kept calling me on the phone over the years with Windows issue and... I made them all buy Mac computers.
Life is better without Microsoft.
I switched my mother-in-law (nearly 70 years old) to a Chromebook and I made my SO switch her little PME from Windows to Ubuntu more than a year ago and she has zero issue.
As for the rest of my family, they kept calling me on the phone over the years with Windows issue and... I made them all buy Mac computers.
Life is better without Microsoft.
PME?
Probably a French slip up, it mean 'Petites and Moyennes Entreprises' (small and medium companies) and in France is a colloquialism that doesn't really have an English translation? I'd say 'small business', but basically it mean it's a company with more than 2 millions and less than 50 millions revenue (I think you also have an upper and lower limit of workers like two or three hundreds, but the real limits are revenue, especially in our hardware/software fields)
"SME"? "Small to Medium Enterprise".
Seems almost as close as you could get.
Seems almost as close as you could get.
Don't forget "We ran into a problem so we changed your default PDF program to Microsoft Edge" that just happens to conveniently occur
as far as i can tell Teams will not open links in the default browser it's hard coded to edge://
The linux client is hard coded to whatever it's builting browser is (some chromium bit?)
It's a right pain as it means when I get an authentication popup I can't use my integrated password manager like I can with say Slack's authentication popups.
(yes I know that integrating browsers with pw managers are bad)
It's a right pain as it means when I get an authentication popup I can't use my integrated password manager like I can with say Slack's authentication popups.
(yes I know that integrating browsers with pw managers are bad)
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It's the worst software I've ever used, but it does open links in default browser - Firefox in my case, without any issues.
At this point, I think they're just doing it automatically. I only rarely use windows and didn't bother to install another browser, yet I still sometimes get the "welcome to edge / make it your default browser" crap.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
Ah, that could be it... But then I only used standby and shutdown under Windows as well anyway...
I'm not a regular windows user, so I may be wrong, but it's my understanding that, by default, windows will keep the computer in "sleep" mode if it's plugged in, and pretty quickly put it in hibernate if it's asleep and unplugged.
The way I found out is this one time I left work with my laptop under windows and asleep.When I arrived home an hour later, it had to go through the full bios setup (which you can't miss since it's ridiculously slow) and then it went and booted Linux (it's the default boot setup). When I rebooted back to windows, I found my previous stuff open. Since this happened again a few times, I figured it was normal behavior.
My default Linux install won't automatically hibernate while asleep as long as the battery is above some threshold, like 10%. And since the computer doesn't support S3, only "modern standby", it will chew through the battery like no tomorrow.
The way I found out is this one time I left work with my laptop under windows and asleep.When I arrived home an hour later, it had to go through the full bios setup (which you can't miss since it's ridiculously slow) and then it went and booted Linux (it's the default boot setup). When I rebooted back to windows, I found my previous stuff open. Since this happened again a few times, I figured it was normal behavior.
My default Linux install won't automatically hibernate while asleep as long as the battery is above some threshold, like 10%. And since the computer doesn't support S3, only "modern standby", it will chew through the battery like no tomorrow.
The system is not supposed to draw any power while hibernating (suspend-to-disk). Maybe you're thinking of suspend-to-ram (sleep)?
To diagnose hibernation issues, I'd double check the kernel command line (resume=<disk or inode>) argument. That it's still the right location.
To diagnose hibernation issues, I'd double check the kernel command line (resume=<disk or inode>) argument. That it's still the right location.
How is that great? I would rather run Mint in a full screen VM under windows and have hibernation on a laptop.
Throwing this out there, perhaps you've tried already, but maybe it'd help. Installing TLP?
> 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
Then later,
> Microsoft needs to make Edge better instead
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll be honest. I use bing. Found myself going to google less and less since ChatGPT filled most of the void.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a Microsoft special. A big, stupid splash page which requires you to wait for it to load, and then the only option to make it go away is to click. (You can’t hit escape, for instance.) Microsoft does this in so many of their products, it must be baked into the company somehow. Often, the screen will come up indefinitely, no matter how many times you click “don’t show me this again.” I can only imagine that their UI teams have little plaques on their walls which read “Let’s do a bad job on purpose."
i had this exact thing happen yesterday. the task manager refuses to kill edge
Oh wow. That's bad.
"Don't show this again" is a thing of the past it seems. I installed Windows 11 fresh on a new machine not long ago and after refusing all the sign-ins and cloud this or that when installing, I log in and am greeted with "let's finish setting up Windows": a window full of all the OneDrive and other features I already declined and whose only options are "continue" and "remind me tomorrow".
And then, after finally figuring out the option buried deep in Windows settings to disable that window every time I turn the computer on, I subsequently discovered it had apparently ignored all my requests to not set up OneDrive and was syncing all my user folders to the cloud anyhow.
And then, after finally figuring out the option buried deep in Windows settings to disable that window every time I turn the computer on, I subsequently discovered it had apparently ignored all my requests to not set up OneDrive and was syncing all my user folders to the cloud anyhow.
I never made the switch from 10 to 11 and everything I've heard tells me that I made the absolutely correct decision. (I only have Windows at all for my video games.) If MS discontinues support for Windows 10 or tries to force me to go to 11, then I will simply switch to only using Linux, video games be damned.
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?
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)
> 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
because you have a choice :) I installed it on Fedora from flathub iirc
1. Makes things like the Teams PWA easy in linux.
2. Allows me to access browser tabs and searches from work logins etc.
2. Allows me to access browser tabs and searches from work logins etc.
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> Very few things piss me off more than the other Microsoft products that feel the need to override my default browser
Google is also very persistent about this--any time you use Gmail in a non-Chrome browser, they pop up alerts to try to convince you to use Chrome instead.
Google is also very persistent about this--any time you use Gmail in a non-Chrome browser, they pop up alerts to try to convince you to use Chrome instead.
> I keep hearing "Edge actually isn't bad anymore"
Whenever I said that in the past it was because it was a competent, nicely implemented alternative to Chrome. A real surprise.
Then they lost their fucking minds, same with Windows, and well... I don't say that anymore.
Whenever I said that in the past it was because it was a competent, nicely implemented alternative to Chrome. A real surprise.
Then they lost their fucking minds, same with Windows, and well... I don't say that anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're free and they don't waste my time.
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.
Stopping them permanently is going to take stronger action. Maybe breaking up the company.
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.
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.
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
And they added a whole bunch of features that are the responsibility of the OS:
* collections
* workspaces
* split screen
* browser essentials
* Web capture
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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.
I expected the new Edge to be the same but to y surprise it has became very slow nowadays.
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.
That said, they are big tech, they are all and the same.
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.
It doesn't matter who wrote the engine. If it did, they wouldn't replace it.
It's about control.
It's about control.
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/pho...
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/pho...
Not sure why original post was down-arrowed.
Here are Wiki pages to read up on the subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers
Here are Wiki pages to read up on the subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_web_browser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_browsers
> Safari also forked from Chrome.
No. Apple created Safari using WebKit (an Apple fork of KHTML). It was Chrome which was created based on WebKit (and eventually Google forked Webkit into Blink).
No. Apple created Safari using WebKit (an Apple fork of KHTML). It was Chrome which was created based on WebKit (and eventually Google forked Webkit into Blink).
Safari was not forked from Chrome. Safari's engine, WebKit is an open-source browser engine originally forked from KHTML/KJS. Chrome's current engine, Blink is a fork of this.
I just meant that they all worked on the same engine. Who forked who, or how's on first. Doesn't change the point, that all 3 big players were all working on same engine (fork of same), so it wasn't MS 'stealing' some small indie open source project.
At one point in time, Apple and Google were both working on this, and I had order wrong, Google was the one that forked first to go off and do their own thing that became Chromium, which then went on to be used by Edge. And Safari continued on with different fork, (or maybe trunk? it has split so many times, not really sure how is forking who).
"" On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it would produce a fork of WebKit's WebCore component, to be named Blink. Chrome's developers decided on the fork to allow greater freedom in implementing WebCore's features in the browser without causing conflicts upstream, and to allow simplifying its codebase by removing code for WebCore components unused by Chrome. In relation to Opera Software's announcement earlier in the year that it would switch to WebKit by means of the Chromium codebase, it was confirmed that the Opera web browser would also switch to Blink.[44] Following the announcement, WebKit developers began discussions on removing Chrome-specific code from the engine to streamline its codebase.[80] WebKit no longer has any Chrome specific code (e.g., buildsystem, V8 JavaScript engine hooks, platform code, etc.). ""
At one point in time, Apple and Google were both working on this, and I had order wrong, Google was the one that forked first to go off and do their own thing that became Chromium, which then went on to be used by Edge. And Safari continued on with different fork, (or maybe trunk? it has split so many times, not really sure how is forking who).
"" On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it would produce a fork of WebKit's WebCore component, to be named Blink. Chrome's developers decided on the fork to allow greater freedom in implementing WebCore's features in the browser without causing conflicts upstream, and to allow simplifying its codebase by removing code for WebCore components unused by Chrome. In relation to Opera Software's announcement earlier in the year that it would switch to WebKit by means of the Chromium codebase, it was confirmed that the Opera web browser would also switch to Blink.[44] Following the announcement, WebKit developers began discussions on removing Chrome-specific code from the engine to streamline its codebase.[80] WebKit no longer has any Chrome specific code (e.g., buildsystem, V8 JavaScript engine hooks, platform code, etc.). ""