Microsoft Edge, anyone?
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.
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
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
Brave has PWAs, but I'm not sure about the translation support
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!
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 use Edge on Linux as my user agent in Firefox on Windows just so I can give some engineers a laugh.
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.
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 -profilemanager or on about:profiles, @dukeofdummies@lemmy.world
Or just launch second profile... Firefox / chrome(ium) supports it. No need to use different browser.
Incognito/Private mode?
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.
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.
I don't use it as its proprietary and spyware
I always thought it was hilariously pointless, does that count?
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.
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.
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)
I use it on snap!
(J/k, I don't)
I'll say this, I never used edge before, but it's comparable with a bunch of my work sites so I was kind of forced into using it. It's actually pretty great. Better overall than stock chrome, though I prefer brave or Firefox for non work related stuff.
Once I started using Edge, I was surprised by how well it worked.
If your org uses any of the Microsoft suite apps Edge is just better. It sucks that Microsoft is allowed to do this
It's basically the same thing google did with chrome in the beginning of Google docs. I haven't noticed much difference between chrome and edge, but I rarely use them for the same things l.
I have to use edge in some of my work environments, my only complaint is the locked in ecosystem. As a browser it seems fine for now...
I actually trust Microsoft far more than I trust Google. I use Outlook as my main email provider and Edge for when I need something that rejects Firefox.
Besides trust, Edge just feels snappier on Linux than Chrome. Chrome is so bloaty theses days.
I use it for my university email, which is an outlook account. Edge is the only browser that doesn't constantly log me out.
Sounds more like a dirty tactic by Microsoft. As suggested elsewhere for other purposes, try spoofing the user-agent header and see if it still keeps logging you out. The UA header shouldn't have any effect whatsoever, but if it "fixes" the problem, it's yet another case of Microsoft being Microsoft.
(Their excuse will be something like "oh, we don't support other browsers because we can't be sure the software will work properly in them", which skips the fact that 1: it lets you log in using a "bad" browser, which it shouldn't do if it's that dangerous and 2: they're a massive multinational corporation. If they can't put a bit of money towards making things work in the small handful of alien browsers, they're doing it wrong. Probably on purpose.)
Oh actually I will try that, thanks
I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)
I've seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I'm UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don't really innovate - they buy it.
Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.
If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn't do anything special for OWA it's just yet another Google browser.
Ironically NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical web browser ) became Netscape which became Mozilla which became Firefox. Internet Explorer was mostly written from scratch.
Around IE5 or so, Microsoft pulled way ahead of Netscape and they basically put Netscape out of business. There was almost no competition for them and they had massive market share which is way IE6 became the anchor weighing down web standards for a decade.
Firefox eventually brought competition back to the browser market and in fact dominated for a while ( with close to 70% market share ). Most of the rest was Microsoft and, until the end, IE was home grown tech from Microsoft.
Then Google introduced Chrome which began a long, slow slide in market share for everybody else. Today, IE is gone and Chrome not only dominates like IE used to. Most of the alternative browsers use the Chrome engine ( Blink ), including Microsoft Edge. Firefox is down to low single digit market share.
At this point, the only real Chrome alternative is Safari which remains popular on the Mac ( and iOS of course ).
Yes, because I am forced to use M$ Teams.
and it doesn't work in firefox
How most comments are either "I use X anyways" or "Edge seems to be a decent browser"
It is not. Has no tracking protection at all and itself tracks you a hell lot.
Its just a browser, no need to be tracked, for what in reverse? The same with Chrome, I dont get it?
Here is some actual MITM traffic analysis. Use Firefox Translate to translate.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/microsoft-edge-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil4/
Just wait until Microsoft releases a .deb of Windows Terminal.
Powershell is already available for Linux
I use Edge daily--trying to use mostly non-proprietary software, but when I need to annotate a PDF, Edge just works. It's no drawboard PDF, but it's free and runs on Linux!
What's wrong evince?
I've love both Firefox and Okular (KDE's evince), and both "technically" support PDF inking, but the experience is just subpar to what Edge offers now for notetaking and reviewing articles. Xournal++ is the gold standard and fully supports my Surface Pen, whereas Edge does not recognize pressure or the eraser. However, I work with a lot of embedded files (Logseq), and the fact that Xournal++ cannot bundle a PDF in a single file and instead needs a reference, plus the fact that PDF is a universal file format, makes Edge the most enticing option for now
I use edge on Ubuntu via the snap.
It lets me use a very specific website that doesn't work in Firefox.
It also lets me play Xbox cloud games on Linux.
Otherwise it's Firefox soon the way.
It has a really good implementation of vertical tabs. Vivaldi and Firefox are somewhat close, but they're not nearly as polished.
Compared to sidebery plugin (ff)?
It doesn’t do as many extra features that I don’t use, but for tabs and tab groups I prefer the Edge ones and grudgingly use Sidebery.
I hate the Firefox sidebar for most things anyway.
Dragging tabs around and to new windows is much less seamless, the having it contract and automatically expand on hover is much harder (userChrome.css hacks compared to a single button), and it requires a CSS hack to remove the horizontal tab bar. I use Tab Center Reborn myself, but Edge does it better than anything I've used.
Brave has the closest comparison I’ve seen, they just don’t do auto hiding.
I think of myself as a Firefox user but I probably use Edge on Linux more than any other browser.
It runs the video conferencing apps I need to use better than anything else. Firefox does not work at all with some of them.
Obviously, it works well with Outlook and Office 365. I use a number of LMS systems and they all work well with it as well.
Once you start using it, it is just a great browser though honestly. Before I know it, I have opened a bunch of tabs in Edge and there is no reason to open anything else.
Yes. I'm mostly developing a website, and testing on another browser is necessary every now and then. But that is my only use reason.
My main browser used to be firefox till tw9 weeks qgo, but it started to be buggy so it's LibreWolf now.
I can't really blame people for using Edge since I using VSCode daily 😞
I just found out about VSCodium. Its a project that packages the MIT licensed VS Code source without all the M$ telemetry and crud. Be warned, there are apparently many plugins that don't work with Codium, so if you rely heavily on any specific plugin I'd see if it works properly before committing.
It's still relying on Microsoft code, but at least it's specifically the open source bits. Lol!
I use it as the only browser for work. I don't have choices, because Teams and Outlook with all its' functionality works well only in their own browser, edge...
I even write some userscript to improve it because it's broken.. :/
Yep, I use for Xbox cloud gaming on steam deck.
As a browser it’s fine, but Microsoft asking me to use it every 0.001 seconds really turns me off it.
I was all over Edge when it was in beta. Since release though it's just become bloated with Microsoft's shit. Not to mention in Windows Microsoft has a fucking hard-on for making it the default browser. Even if you don't, Outlook defaults to using it regardless.
It only asks you to use it on windows or MS platforms. I hope you can see the issue now. I don't use arch btw.
I wouldn’t know, since MS’s incessant badgering has made me 0% likely to ever install it on any of my linux machines.
I used it once to use the in browser bug report thing to request that they support immersive WebXR on linux.
But the only reason for Edge ever to exist was to download Firefox.
So do I need to download edge to download Firefox? O.o
Not anymore. Not with Winget.
flatpak install firefox -y
I've used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it's sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say "ok make an image based on that description"). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.
I am not judging anyone who uses Edge here, I can understnad the appeal of it. I just am sad that Linux doesn't have Microsoft like feature that there isn't a great alternative for Google + Bard, Microsoft GPT.
I want everything FOSS, but yeah, I will sleep now. I am too old for the new gen.
The only appeal Edge has is the ability to download other browsers
This was the case before they rebased. Sure, if you like Firefox, Brave, or Vivaldi or something. There is little reason to download Chrome, which is traditionally what most normal people were doing.
I tested it out bc I thought I'd need it to get teams running for school, but it turns out we're only using teams' video calls so Vivaldi works too. Edge is fine I guess? I dislike that it's chromium and I dislike microsoft but it's good to know edge works fine, in case I need it for some reason at some point. I still uninstalled it when I realized I didn't need it.
Normally, I use firefox for normal personal browsing and vivaldi for school (since some sites we use work much better on chromum, and it's nice to have that separation anyways).
I don’t use it for browsing but only for two use cases :
Ooh, thanks for pointing that out! I haven't used it, but now I will start installing it for every colleague's Linux user when I get the chance, just to mess with them. Might even change their bash's prompt to the DOS one.
(These edge installs of mine will probably account for half of all edge on Linux installs ever, btw)
Although I am required to use windows machines for work normally and, since we dont have access to firefox, i normally use edge there, there are occasions on which I find it convenient to hop into a similar setup on my home linux machine to get to my work account. I will use edge for that - as well as outlook online etc.
For a work browser, I find it pretty useful. There is no way that I would want to use if for general purposes though.
@cujo
Hi,
no, Edge will be never use on my laptop
Bullshit. Even the flatpak is not sandboxed very much. If you sandbox it totally then maybe. But I dont know.
I use firefox and used email and most of my things on google, but after 2023, I had an abandoned outlook and start to use for Sync on Edge and etc
IDK, seems a decent browser, a lot need some corporate browser and microsoft going to cloud, at least it's better than going to windows entirely for a lot of people kekw
As long as Vivaldi is available on Linux I don't see a need for it, same engine but better features.
You mean the browser that literally states in their privacy policy that they assign an id to your device and send a ping every 24 hours containing this id and some other metadata including a part of your IP address with which they perform a geoip lookup to approximate your location?
Which they're planning to remove
Certainly not ideal, but most browsers do similar or worse (though apparently not Brave): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9374407. I do think it's worth it in spite of that. Certainly better than Edge.
Yes, started using Edge on Linux few months ago exclusively for free GPT-4
The browser version of chatgpt is based on v4..
But its NOT at all capable of the same responses.
Vivaldi can acess the bing chat by pretending to be Edge.
This. And MS rewards.
Also, running the flatpak version.
Usual MS garbage.
MS Edge Has a superior PDF editor with very good workflow for textboxes, pen input support. I use it just for editing/annotating PDFs.
I used to because they gave out free coupons for various things (like Amazon). The issue I had with it is that the right-click menu for Edge on Linux overrides the OS and that of a browser. It was annoying enough to go back to Firefox.
I use edge on linux every now and then. I keep two browsers to separate work and personal stuff and I use edge as my secondary browser (for personal stuff on the work OS, for work stuff on the personal OS). My main browser is Vivaldi.
My reasoning is that it has very good tab management features and I'd still rather use a Microsoft browser than an Opera browser. With just those two requirements there's not much else to use out there.
I collect Microsoft points so Edge gives bonus every day & integrates with bing. It's also good for reading pdfs and epubs cause it has nice tts which does not sound like a retarded robot played through a tin can like the linux native one.
I hate Microsoft but I have to agree it has some really nice products. Personally for me, I just don't like edge because it's somewhat bloat. I mean, look, if you have a high powered machine, you will probably love it. But yeah, I like firefox best, I can't imagine leaving it. Just too addicted to the features, can't live without them.