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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> most common requests we hear from people who use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 PCs

Are there really people using Microsoft Edge out there? I mean, because they want to, not because they have to?

I've been using it almost exclusively on my laptop for the past few month as an experiment. And honestly it's a perfectly fine browser that basically just works as well as any other browser. That being said I cannot come up with any good argument why you should switch to using it instead of whatever you are currently using.

Yeah, I've been really impressed with Edge. If I had started using Edge instead of having all my stuff in Firefox, I probably never would have bothered switching.

The developer tools on Edge are not on par with Chrome or Firefox. That is one reason I stay away. I don't mind using the browser once in a while when I need more sessions than my Chrome profiles.

Typing on a surface pro/windows tablet is crap on chrome?

I switched for battery life. Chrome just crushed my laptop.

Yea, I've heard that, but I honestly have noticed a practical difference between Chrome and Edge.

My Windows dev friends seem to like it. If you're into the Microsoft ecosystem, it seems reasonable.

I tried it out as an alternative to IE 11 at work (where I run Windows to do CAD and industrial automation stuff), but I returned to IE out of habit. Either browser seems to work fine, though there are occasional issues with newly-designed sites and apps, I think because they tend to be designed and tested on Chrome/Mac.

Edge's user agent I believe is specifically chosen to look like Chrome to most websites. I believe they have said they had a lot of issues modernizing IE because people's "detect IE" hacks would assume IE still needed those hacks, and it would in fact end up breaking the website when IE improved.

Edge's user agent is almost a parody of how bad UA strings have become. Its basically claiming to be every major browser at once.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.

Except Internet Explorer.

http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php?nam...

IE version 6: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.1)

IE version 10: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)

IE versi--wait, what (?!): Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows 3.1)

That last one made me wonder if someone was trolling an auto-collection system or if a zero somehow got added by a Network™. Offtopic but had to add it.

The problem is that Google refuses to adopt modern Windows standards and integration with their Windows products such as Chrome, resulting in a sub-par Windows experience on modern touch & pen enabled Windows devices and many frustrated users, not to mention worse battery life than needed.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6hozrf/new_surface_...

https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6o8t9m/what_interne...

Google is notorious for their half-baked Windows support

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835776

Chrome has nothing that's on par with the Edge's built-in "Set Tabs Aside" session manager (even retaining tab history)

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/01/31/micro...

among a few other things https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge

and more coming in the Fall Creators Update

And since Edge is a modern UI UWP app, it has better fullscreen multi-tasking

https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65t3tg/so_edge_ha...

On my pc its performance is great. I’d use it if it had more extensions.

I did for a while, Chrome is a resource hog compared to Edge. iirc I stopped using it because of issues with passwords not auto filling consistently (it sounds like a small deal but it gets old having to open a password manager 10 times a day with a 20 something character password)

How about leaving it open, (auto) locking the screen every time you leave the pc? It should be as safe, if you trust the screen locker.

The main problem was the auto locking, I set my PC to go to sleep after 10 minutes (it's a really power hungry setup)

I'm not familiar with Windows nowadays. If it wakes up locked and asking for a password you are fine. That's the setup of my Ubuntu laptop.

Lock the PC, leave it on a desk, it goes to sleep. You come back, wake it up, type in the password to unlock. The weakest link is remembering to lock the pc. Auto lock after some minutes is ok only at home.

The password manager locks when the computer goes to sleep, I'm not sure that it's optional behavior (and if it was I'm not sure I'd want to disable it)

> Are there really people using Microsoft Edge out there? I mean, because they want to, not because they have to?

I have the exact sentiment with Safari. I'm on an Macbook Pro and iPhone and still use Chrome everywhere.

Safari on iPhone has better side-by-side tab viewer, reader mode, content blocker, and better thought out UI shortcuts than Chrome.

Also how is the battery life on OSX?

Yes, specially because it makes better use of my GPU.

So I usually use FF as main browser, Chrome for the developer tools when debugging some nasty issue and Edge when doing graphics intense work like watching videos.

I do. It is a great browser for the tablet. But in addition I just like it for regular usage as well. Only the developer tools are a bit unstable.

I use it from time to time because I have somehow acquired three or four different Microsoft IDs, all of which have access to different resources (somehow you're supposed to be able to link these, but I've never been able to get that to actually work), and I can't sign into all of them at the same time with Chrome.

Lots of our customers who were previously IE users have become Edge users. Its the new default on PCs

That's why I mentioned "because they want to", not just because it's installed by default.

I feel like it's a bit of an odd metric? It's like saying whether people want to use File Explorer. There's alternatives, but it doesn't enter the calculus of a lot of people.

It's not "do you want Edge on your phone", it's "do you want your desktop browser on your mobile" for a decent set of people, I think.

This article is from last year, but at the time Chrome had approximately 60% and Firefox at approximately 15% of the market[0]. It's not like people don't know that other browsers exist. Even non-technically savvy people know about Chrome. I'm sure a lot of that share comes from Android, but a large number of people go out of their way to install it on their desktops.

Sure,there are some people who will never consider installing another browser, but do you honestly believe that those people will go out of their way to install Edge on their phone over Android or Safari which are installed by default? I will concede that the app store does make it easier for someone to install a third party browsers, but how many of those people are going to know that Edge for mobile exist or go out of their way to install it?

If they are happy enough with Edge because it is the default on Windows, they'll most likely be happy enough with Chrome or Safari on their mobile. Yes, people who elect to use Edge because they like it and not because it is the default may choose to use it on mobile, but I can't imagine that number is very high.

I do not have data to prove this, but do you honestly believe that the number of people who can name a File Explorer alternative is anywhere close to the number of people that can name multiple web browsers? I find that incredibly hard to believe and a poor comparison.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/firef...

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