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. 😂
Probably a godsend if you’re a web dev. No more rebooting or running a second PC/VM for compatibility checking.
Na, edge users don’t file bug reports 😂
Just two years ago I had someone complaining that my website didn’t work in Internet Explorer. By that point the library I was using didn’t support it anymore but the old bat (really bitchy lady) refused to switch.
So I ended up blocking the entire user-agent with a “this browser is not supported” page that explained you need to download Edge because IE is end of life. Really hated to do that (not a fan of UA sniffing) but that was the only thing I could really do.
Should have redirected to FF tho
Agreed, but as a big Safari fan I’m not keen on forcing my choice onto users. You’re right, Firefox is a huge win privacy-wise but since it was a business application and they’re clearly on Windows I decided to “respect” the OS and software she was currently running by linking to Microsoft’s support article on the matter.
Also, this was before Edge got super creepy. I think it was around the time it first came out.
Then that’s understandable, of course
But knowing users she probably went with Chrome 🤣
At least you can take comfort that you probably contributed to saving her from some ie malware in the future
They are the bugs!
The only possible use case I can think of, but I’d still want to restrict the thing to its own VM out of paranoia.
isn’t it just chromium though?
Yes it is, but with extra Microsoft!
It has a slightly better privacy policy compared to google chrome while fully supporting progressive web apps on Linux. Edge is also very much so more efficient in terms of system resource utilization. It also has high quality native built in translation which I need. All of this means I use Edge as my PWA browser.
Chromium lacks native translation support. Firefox PWA support is not good. Edge was the least bad option for me. 🤷♀️
How is edge more efficient? It’s literally chromium
Chrome is basically Chromium+bloat so this doesn’t surprise me.
And Edge is chromium + Microsoft Bloat.
One could argue using it on Windows means only allowing M$ to spy on you, theoretically. Though I would not be surprised if M$ uses a custom version of Chromium including Google trackers, so the opposite of degoogled chromium.
Based on.
With the same amount of tabs with the same sites Edge uses fewer resources. I think Microsoft did some fine tuning or something. It’s not just just me that sees this either.
This is a 2 year old link but it shows the difference. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-comparison
When it initially came out it actually seemed pretty great. I’m as anti-Microsoft as they come but I had to check it out.
But yeah, these days it’s pure trash. It was fun while it lasted.
The core browser is still good, but they keep changing and adding annoying things and doing questionable privacy things like sending images to their servers “for enhancement”. For a while they removed the ability to remove sync data, but I think it may have been added back again after backlash.
Brave has PWAs, but I’m not sure about the translation support
True. But brave is run by a crypto advertising company. Their business model is advertising and crypto tokens. I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.
I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.
Why trust either? #firefox
He literally explained why he doesn’t use Firefox.
Because firefox’s PWA behavior is not as I wish…
What I wish is a firefox fork dedicated to PWA. It should be Privacy first and as intuitive to use as it can. Best would be, if it was designed like an app store.
Called PWApp-sore, I guess
Sadly I have no time to (learn) develop(ing)
In my opinion no proprietary browser is worth using.
Chrome isn’t better in any way than Edge, as both don’t respect it’s users privacy and decisions (dark patterns, etc).
I agree.
If a browser ain’t open source, I ain’t gonna use it and neither should anyone else.
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!
I always use edge whenever I’m making a public presentation with a computer I use. Simply because I never use it. Then autocomplete won’t embarrass me if we look something up.
Why dont use any other browser, like vivaldi, brave, librewolf, ungoogled chromium, that are not made by data hungery big tech like Microsoft.
Those are all solid options, so you might be tempted to use them. I keep a windows partition on case I need it for something, but I’m never tempted to use it unless I absolutely have to.
I’ve got an SSD with windows 11 on it…
It’s been sitting for about a year.
Or just launch second profile… Firefox / chrome(ium) supports it. No need to use different browser.
Many of those have shady Histories and CEOs. Many are seemingly made by normal companies, but those are owned by Chinese organizations. The only real alternatives would be Librewolf/FF and Degoogled Chromium. That would be a matter of preference, mostly. And you don’t even have to use Librewolf, you could just use a seperate, clean profile in FF. Launch it with
firefox -profilemanageror on about:profiles, @dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
Incognito/Private mode?
I use Edge on Linux as my user agent in Firefox on Windows just so I can give some engineers a laugh.
I set it up with my work profile for Office 365 stuff.
I’ve given up the hope that Office will ever come to Linux, so instead I’m just trying to use the web version more.
Similarly, when I’m on a contract that requires O365 and teams and doesn’t supply a work device I use Edge strictly for work to quarantine Microsoft away from the rest of my usage on Firefox etc.
Wait, you want Microsoft office products on your Linux machine? You- you want Microsoft products??
@NegativeLookBehind @cujo @BitingChaos some people don’t have much choice. Their jobs demand it. At least in Linux you’d be able to really sandbox them and route them through filters to prevent spying if you know what you’re doing.
No, I get not having a choice. But he specifically used the word “hope” to describe his desire to have Office available for Linux.
Would I rather use outlook on a work linux machine, or Thunderbird on a work windows machine? The former. Every. Single. Time. MS Office suite availability on Linux would make it easier to do my job, potentially
I hope that Office will be available on Linux in addition to Adobe Acrobat. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, etc. aren’t good enough for documents that use advanced Office features. Same thing applies to Acrobat.
Well, it’s for work stuff, so I don’t have a lot of choice.
Several years ago some higher-ups chose Microsoft to provide all services. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, etc.
I can use LibreOffice or whatever for documents, but everything else is Microsoft.
A native version of Outlook would be nice.
Look, I have a love / hate relationship with Outlook but it is the best email client by far and the web version works great on Linux ( especially on Edge ).
For me, Outlook is the difference between being able to use Linux for work and being forced to use Windows or MacOS.
[…] Outlook […] it is the best email client by far […]
You must be kidding. I get it that you might be required to use it for work (I’ve been in that boat more than once). But outlook is a terrible, buggy, and infuriating clusterfuck of an email client. There are so many better alternatives. It has piss-poor handling for different encodings, still not defaulting to utf8. Randomly showing garbled Chinese letters to some people sometimes for no obvious reason. Losing connection to Exchange for hours without telling you. Still not supporting quoting standards which have been around for three decades. The settings are a convoluted mess. Filtering can only be done via a super clunky and unintuitive GUI; no scripting support. I could go on and on and on … The only thing where it is arguably better than other alternatives, is with the calender integration and for planning meetings. But that is only because that is not a common email client feature, hence why most email clients don’t have it at all. But even for that there are alternatives which are on par if not better. Kontact from the KDE suite comes to mind. I mean, which demented mind at Microsoft thought it was a good idea, that an email equals a calendar entry for a meeting? The obvious way to implement it is that you have two things that are linked, that reference each other: one email, one calendar entry (like everybody else implements it). Microsoft: emails and calendar entries are the same thing - delete one, lose the other. I can not wrap my head around how anybody can have used outlook and comparable alternatives and come to the conclusion that the infuriatung dumpster fire of outlook is “the best thing”. Either you haven’t really worked with a meaningful number of alternatives, are trolling, or have some severe mental issues (Stockholm syndrome?) that you should seek help for.
deleted by creator
Learn to read. That was an exclusive or list with mental issues as one option. Nowhere did I say anything about a handicap.
Many people have mental issues: I get the thousand-yard stare when I see the outlook interface.
I don’t use it as its proprietary and spyware
I always thought it was hilariously pointless, does that count?
deleted by creator
Nah it’s proprietary garbage. If it weren’t proprietary it would be an option (although in that case a “deMicrosofted” version would be better). there are free Chromium browsers and free browsers that aren’t chromium, this one offers nothing of interest.
Yo I’ll install this bs right now if it allows me to watch Netflix into such in 4k. Anyone tried that?
Edit: Nope that’s not a thing
FUCK NETFLIX DISNEY AMAZON AND ALL THE OTHERS
Set sail, matey. The actors are on strike anyway. You can afford to hate a corporation or two.
I currently use Edge for mostly one thing, its “Read aloud” feature.
Because you can use some of the Azure neural voices its currently the best, free, easily accessible text-to-speech available.
It can even do PDFs quite well. Really helps when I’m too unable to focus for reading long texts but can still listen well enough (ADHD).
Annoyingly this feature isn’t available in Edge on Linux
I did not know this was a thing. I might have to actually use Edge now.
Installed to use bingGpt. Never use it. But somethis it get some updates.
I have it on Steam Deck since it can be launched with a CLI argument to force a 1280x800 window.
Vivaldi pretends to be Edge when visiting Bing to unlock GPT-4, and prefer that to Edge on my other devices. (Secondary to Firefox, ofc)
No… I don’t want to use a browser made by Microsoft. They will turn it to shit as soon as they can get away with it, and I’m happy with Firefox.
