I recently discovered that you can get Microsoft Edge for Linux (🤢🤮) and am curious… does anyone here use Edge for Linux, or have you ever? What was your reasoning for using it?
EDIT: Well, you all have provided some interesting perspectives I hadn’t ever considered. Including one which means I’ll have to install Edge, so… thanks, I guess. 😂
I use Edge daily for work. Everything it Office 365 and there is of course no Outlook client or Word or whatever on Linux. So I use the web version for everything. So I might as well have Edge to do the Microsoft since surely MS must make sure their stuff works on their own browser, right? (right??).
I also use the PWA version of Teams since the native client doesn’t really work well and since somewhat recently is also “officially” unsupported.
Anyway, it keeps the MS stuff separate from my normal browsing with Firefox and I’ve disabled JavaScript in Edge for all non-MS stuff. It works pretty well. Took me some battles to get rid of the Bing sidebar but they finally made that an option you can set.
This is the reason I use it too.
I first installed it when the Teams web client stopped working properly in Firefox. I installed Edge, and it worked well. Also noticed Teams in Edge allows me to turn on background blur, where that was disabled on Firefox and Chrome in Linux. Then I tried PWAs, and found the Edge support for installing and running PWAs is second to none, so now I run Outlook 365 and Teams as PWAs.
Firefox is still my primary browser, but I don’t use Chrome anymore. Edge has become my chromium-based browser of choice. Somehow Microsoft has built a better Chrome than Google does.
Try installing a User Agent switcher into your browsers and then fake your browser ID. FF works fine with Teams, Exchange and M365 - I have been an IT consultant installing or using all of that lot for over two decades.
I too have a favourite browser. It used to be FF up to about 15 years ago (v2 or so) then Google were cool and I went all in on Chrome. I then went Chromium. I actually started out with telnet but that’s another story.
A couple of months ago I finally dumped Chromium and co and went back to FF. Biggest win for me was a slightly less opinionated SSL experience. That needs some explaining:
I run a lot of IT and that means a lot of SSL certs. Mostly I use Lets Encrypt if I can as well as the usual suspects. Sometimes a site does not need SSL at all. Googles browsers are very VERY opinionated about this: “Thou shall not use thy browser password manager with self signed SSL certs”. FF has a slightly less opinionated “Thou canst TOFU and thy password manager will work”. I spend a lot of time pissing around with uploading CA certs to group policy objects and copying them to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and getting the machines to trust them. On Arch we use /etc/ca-certifictes etc and so on and so forth. I also have to deal with Teams - FF works better now than Cr browsers
I’ve returned to FF after a very long time and I don’t regret it at all. I run Arch actually!
Same here. Work allows BYOD, so I use my Linux laptop for work stuff. I use Edge for accessing all work stuff and running M365 PWAs. I especially like how Teams in Edge runs so much better than the standalone Electron app, which is horrible.
Damn, this thread just got me to install Edge for a better Teams experience.
I really respect this strategy but I could never get past one personal obstacle: what do you do if you want to click a link, say from an email? Do you switch browsers and copy paste the link? Or do you delve into the link in Edge? What if you eventually reach a website you wish you were logged into on Edge, but are already in Firefox?
This is a very frustrating limitation of every PWA implementation I’ve seen. They need to respect the default browser setting for external links!
Yeah that is annoying. I just copy the link and paste in Firefox. I don’t ever need to go back I find since I only use Edge for MS365 stuff.
But wouldn’t Chromium be less telemetry then?
That’s how I use it too, but I was surprised to see that it doesn’t have syncing of bookmarks, history etc yet!