Now that Microsoft Edge is Chromium-based, is it any better as an alternative? Is the privacy any more respectable, or does it simply replace all the Google phone-homing with the same level of Microsoft phone-homing?
Chrome on the other hand can do end to end encryption by providing your own password.
Windows 10 has an advertising ID that is passed via Edge to Bing Ads. Chrome does the same thing with a low entropy ID passed to DoubleClick. In both cases this is used to track you. The difference is that Microsoft can potentially track your behavior in other apps as well.
Google is also very transparent about what they collect about you. You can also opt out of any collection or personalization. Do you know what Microsoft collects about you? They sure collect a ton of telemetry, with no way to opt out in some cases. The terms of Windows Insiders for example are ridiculous.
And Bing Ads is generating about $8 billion per year which isn't pocket change. If you think Microsoft isn't making a shitload of money from ads, you're wrong.
In other words they are very equivalent, but due to lacking end to end encryption for synchronized data, I can't touch Edge.
Note that I don't use Chrome either, only for testing like you. Firefox is better than both if concerned about privacy.
> NOTE: These binaries are provided by anyone who are willing to build and submit them. Because these binaries are not necessarily reproducible, authenticity cannot be guaranteed; In other words, there is always a non-zero probability that these binaries may have been tampered with. In the unlikely event that this has happened to you, please report it in a new issue.
Only when they get caught.
One example. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/12/28...
...Yes?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/privacy/required-wi... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/privacy/windows-dia... https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...
What's with this trend on HN to act like Microsoft's telemetry collection is some kind of mysterious black box?
Edge Chromium still has telemetry data sent to MS but it respects the privacy control and group policy in Windows, so if you have already set Windows telemetry to low, it sent almost nothing. I recommends usage of "O&O ShutUp10" to disable all Windows and Edge telemetry.
It doesn't have telemetry data sent to Google (no contact with Google owned domain).
It also has a third party tracking blocker included and enabled by default which makes it way better than Chrome on that point. On my installation, it even blocks Microsoft tracking...
I use Pi-Hole to keep track of the domains reached by Edge and so far, there are nothing really worrying me (I already use Windows so my expectations are relative).
Also, "almost nothing" is not nothing and I don't believe Microsoft getting all the data is a much better situation compared to Microsoft and Google getting some of the data.
True, but OPs question was “better or worse”.
(Edit) The settings are now called "off", "required" and "optional": https://www.computerworld.com/article/3532008/microsoft-elim...
update.googleapis.com for Chromium extension update if you use any.
edge.microsoft.com for updating some feature in the browser like dictionaries, trackers list, etc.
config.edge.skype.com for browser settings (not sure about this one, probably a feature to enable/disable feature on the fly like Firefox Normandy system).
There are other ones like the SmartScreen feature but it disabled on my system. Also I have search suggestion off.
The data sent are really low for my case.
Do you? The grandparent suggests that if you disable telemetry[1] it would be disabled in edge.
>Firefox also has network prediction and malware detection that sends your searches to a third-party, as well as telemetry.
Not sure why you're bringing up firefox here, when this comment chain was talking about chrome vs edge.
[1] presumably https://getadmx.com/?Category=Windows_10_2016&Policy=Microso...
But I'm assuming that if you are looking for some sort of privacy with Windows, you have already toggled off those or use ShutUp10 which happens to do this all automatically.
I respectfully carefully celebrate this information and hope to see more!
I do question the black and whiteness of the comment. Also, what do you mean by "friend"? An (also cynical) argument could be made that even your actual friends are out to advance their own interests first, and are using you to those ends.
A more realistic and useful statement might be that for-profit companies lie on a spectrum -- none are purely "good" and none are purely "evil."
I imagine that you can probably substitute "for-profit companies" with "humans and human run organizations" and it would still be true.
I just hope the trend continues and gives us more
They're spending billions of dollars to court developer good will, while at the same time undoing this effort through these practices. I for one refuse to use Windows, and do not trust Microsoft.
they got it that there is more to loose from being pushy - once they were no longer on top of the heap. Doing 'no evil' is a great reputation builder and good for the bottom line (if your business ends allow you to be nice and pleasant, that is). Also reputation becomes very important when you are into selling services (like cloud hosting)
Actually not many established companies of this size are able to make a transition like this one.
Google has decided to implement third party cookie blocking in Chrome recently... solely in incognito mode[2]. Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc. all do it all the time in normal mode too. This renders Chrome the least privacy-minded browser, primarily because Google heavily values ad tracking as a business practice.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/with-its-new-edge-browser-micr... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/19/google-chrome-83/
Generally, I'd argue the latter is better than the former, as it encourages websites and the ad industry to behave better: Stop invading my privacy and your ads stop getting blocked.
I'm perfectly fine with viewing an add that is not doing bad things.
"From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are much more worrisome than the other browsers studied. Both send identifiers that are linked to the device hardware and so persist across fresh browser installs and can also be used to link different apps running on the same device. Edge sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft, a strong and enduring identifier than cannot be easily changed or deleted. Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality (which can be disabled by users) that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete."
https://bgr.com/2020/03/11/microsoft-edge-browser-privacy-is...
Chrome has E2EE history/password sync, which allows you to specify a sync encryption password that is different from your Google password.
> Is Edge any better or worse than Chrome on privacy?
From GP:
> It should be better, but [...]
Your comment to GP:
> Did you answer the question?
Did you add any value to the conversation, like GP did?
Is there a compelling reason to use one over the other, such as the organizations behind them or power user features?
The Thiel boycott seems futile, because I doubt you’re also opposing facebook, paypal, spacex, stripe, spotify, and dozens of other SaaS that is powering services you use.
However, they've been caught a couple of times doing naughty things:
https://decrypt.co/31522/crypto-brave-browser-redirect
Combine that with a CEO who had a my way or die reputation for not admitting something's wrong and you've got a browser I removed from my system. Trust is huge and makes me wonder what else is happening in the background nobody has caught.
Vivaldi's got all kinds of tweaks exposed you'd need to dig into flags for. I like that. I think my biggest gripe is dragging and dropping links out doesn't work. Pretty small potatoes.
Daily driver is still Firefox + uMatrix + uBlock Origin and hoping for Mozilla email + calendaring at some point soon (take my money!).
So Thunderbird with Lightning?
Vivaldi reminds me of Opera (which was my main browser for a while); Brave seems more vanilla somehow (to me, coming from FF).
https://github.com/CHEF-KOCH/Chromium-hardening#chrome-vs-ms...
If you're skeptical of their legal terms, then you're better off with Chromium as it remains open-source. Edge unfortunately is a closed-source product.
However, on my machines I just main firefox with edge as a backup. Mainly because edge is already pre-installed on my Windows machines so there isn't really much point downloading and installing an alternative which does the exact same thing. Especially if it's only for use on chromium specific websites.
It's not like you can remove edge from Windows 10. Why would I install Vivaldi, Google Chrome or Brave?
Thumper is a simple game but it requires you to basically turn left, turn right, or shields up very quickly. It is basically a reaction time test so very susceptible to latency.
I had earlier played assassin's creed in the private beta thing on an older laptop on Verizon FiOS. I did reach for the Ethernet cable most of the time but iirc it was serviceable even on WiFi because assassin's creed is less affected by the occasional latency spike. That or maybe Verizon FiOS where I was before in the city area has fewer connection problems than Comcast further out of a town.
I do worry about how fast it would eat up bandwidth though...
Sometimes I get forced to use a chromium based browser for specific sites. In those cases I use edge for Windows because it's built-in and can't be removed anyway.
If I was just commenting that I would prefer to use chromium for privacy reasons but it's not worthy of installing separately for the few chromium specific sites I need to visit.
I don't see how having a preference over this is downvote worthy. Isn't that the entire purpose of these kinds of threads?
Anyway that's why I'm here.
I have plenty of space on my SSD. Lots of free ram. I uninstalled and reinstalled.
Seems ridiculous that every program has to include its own update manager—on MacOS too but it at least has brew-cask.
Privacy is not as important as security, because without security you potentially lose both.
Linking your browser login to online services is incredibly invasive.
The features is no used enought, people don't know about it, and because of that, there is no pressure to improve it.
E.G: the "forget this site" button will remove all cookies, local storage, cache, etc. for one site. Very handy, because I don't want to bust my entire cache every time. But it will remove them for all containers, which sometimes is not what you need.
your privacy really depends on how many "sweeties" do you use. If you let all those "helper services" enabled by default, your privacy is more compromised that if you take 3 minutes to go through the settings and enable only what you want.
If you're concerned about your privacy, just read their privacy policy. In general terms, it comes down to Google wanting to get as much information about you as possible, and Microsoft is rather interested in how you interact with their services. In either case, you have access in your account dashboard to what information has been collected, and check how in Google's case it's up to the minimum detail, whereas in Microsoft is like "yesterday you used Outlook, Edge and OneDrive...". Also, in either case, which is something many people fail to understand, the collected information is actually anonymous. They don't care if you are John Doe or Alice, Bob's wife... they care that UUID likes this and that, and do this and that.
- https://twitter.com/konarkmodi/status/1258163915319640071
- https://twitter.com/konarkmodi/status/1258185278168223746
I have maybe one website that I like to use brave for and the rest all work with Firefox 100%
My impression was they we're trying to survive all uninstall attempts by using two dozen different methods to autostart various services and updaters?
Sadly, tracking doesn't seem to worry most people as much as it does me and you.
The browser never went away, though!
Sad, that that is the situation.
Though the OP's question is a little odd to me - if you know enough to ask, why would you use either?