Microsoft Edge GA on Linux | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Edge GA on Linux

blogs.windows.com

141 pointssendilkumarn191 comments

Edge has built in support for vertical tabs, tab groups, and chrome extensions.

IMHO, Edge is the best chromium based browser out there, and for me is miles better than Chrome itself.

FWIW, Vivaldi has all of these also.

I love Vivaldi feature wise but something about its implementation absolutely wrecks performance and memory usage compared to traditional chromium based browsers. Even disabling most every option and interface doodad I could find with no extensions loaded results in noticeably slower browsing vs other browsers defaults and it carries over into the benchmark results as well, things like Speedometer 2.0 get significantly lower scores and total RAM usage during the test is much higher.

That sounds good, but I don't want MS tracking on my linux box, I lived without those and I can wait a bit longer for ungoogled chromium to get them (maybe).

You'll also be dealing with constant prompts and alerts from Microsoft to try Bing and redeem Bing Rewards and install smartphone apps to integrate with your Microsoft account, and them adding more spammy news articles and ads in the new tab page and Googling how to disable them, etc.

It's gotten so bad the past few months that after a year of using Edge, it finally pushed me back to Chrome as of yesterday

I use Edge on Linux to run Teams 5-7 days per week, and use it for anything that won't render in Firefox. Have never experienced this.

https://github.com/Eloston/ungoogled-chromium interested? https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/index.html

I use Eloston's ungoogled-chromium installed from flatpak from time to time. Mostly for google while I navigate the internet with FF.

Don't know safe/clean it really is, but for now seems to be working as intended.

The problem with the Flatpak version is it's almost impossible to install the plugin ublock origin.

Ungoogled Chromium comes without web store support. Once you’ve installed this plugin you can install other plugins like you’re used to: https://github.com/NeverDecaf/chromium-web-store.

Thanks but are there any drawbacks privacy wise?

Why not Vivaldi?

Its not much different, closed source, has its own VPN, but I never saw a reason to choose it unless you want to use a public VPN (I don't want to).

Opera is the on with the VPN. Vivaldi handles groups and vertical tabs well, and isn’t constantly pushing Microsoft products.

Vivaldi is much more flexible with its UI customization options. It even has something like tree-style tab: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/window-panel/

You're not kidding, I just opened Edge to see if I would notice any prompts, and it immediately threw up a popup in the middle of my screen asking to set it as the default browser and change my search to Bing (with "yes" selected by default, obviously).

I use it rarely but I know that I've told it no before. It looks like it's configured to ask periodically.

It could be on launch if not run in x time as well...

I used chredge for work only and occaisonal validation on personal side. And if i dont launch edge for a while ill see the prompts, but if i use it daily...i dont.

The other thing that cemented my decision to switch from Edge was when I went to set my default browser from the Windows settings, and upon selecting Chrome it gave me some pathetic, last-ditch prompt that said something like (extreme paraphrasing, but it was the idea): "Are you sure? Edge is much better now!"

If I was having second thoughts before, I'm definitely not now.

I hate software that begs.

Don't all browsers do this? Even Firefox asks to be your default browser when you first open it... and then every time there's an update it conveniently "forgets" this preference so you get asked again.

Chrome does the EXACT SAME THING, periodically, just like Edge, and no one gives Google any crap for it. no one gives Google any grief for the things they're doing. they're just as bad, if not worse, than MS was in the 1990s, when MS was at their absolute worst.

it's amazing how blind people are.

I think the catch is that if you installed chrome and use it, you won't see those prompts, and if Microsoft changed teh default away from chrome against your wishes, you probably do want to be notified of the change.

I can opt out of googles nags by just not installing chrome, I can't say the same for edge on windows.

I expect the prompt is there to neg more than nag. I presume the only people who click “no” on the “Are you sure?” prompt are unsure as a result of the prompt itself. In other words, the role of the prompt is to make them second guess themselves and feel inferior to the OS. “I better just not mess with it, I guess.”

I dunno, I see plenty of anti-google sentiment around (e.g., arstechnica, every government around the world, just about). I think the dirty tricks campaign perpetrated by MS against open source and linux was worse (from my point of view, anyway) than anything google has done. Their recent 'we love open source and linux' rings pretty hollow, judging by what their actual contributions have been. As a marketing campaign, it's a stroke of genius.

to be fair, Google chrome does this too if you visit anything non google... i wish none of the browsers did this...

You'll also have to deal with every Google-branded site screaming at you for daring to use something other than Chrome.

Microsoft has a rich historic tradition of releasing seemingly well designed, well received tools and applications that are immediately clubbed to death by poor planning, toxic marketing, vague patch and maintenance priorities, and in many cases a near schizophrenic pursuit of niche or unrelated market dominance.

one wonders, for example, what Zune could have become had Microsoft just used that juggernaut dominance to focus on the customer and experience instead of drifting down a rabbit hole of byzantine industry pre-crime enforcement.

You didn't own a Zune. They were FANTASTIC. They did focus on customer experience and usability... they were amazing.

I could put MP3s on there just as easily as I could an iPod, if not more easily.

The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in; bystanders took the almost toothless anti-ms culture shared among nerd communities as if it were something that had an appropriate amount of merit. it had merit, yes, but not anywhere nearly as much as you would think if you listened to Linux nerds talk to each other for more than a few minutes.

It sure was, I have the ZuneHD still, it's still a beautiful device with an intuitive UI and nice clean software. Pity MS never figured out how to compete in marketing against existing sentiment and Apple (with their horribly clunky UI/Hardware and software of the iPod (which I had to support at work too)). It's a pity my Zune is almost a brick now, there's nothing wrong with it (my daughter listens to music and plays games on it now).

If I could put an open source OS on it I'd still be using it (so long as I can sync it with Linux too..)

> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing

You can't mention that without context. Why did Microsoft have a bad rap? Because they'd done bad/ill-considered things and it came back to bite them. The browser wars, Balmer's "linux is cancer" rhetoric [0], trying to create a "Microsoft internet" instead of the Internet, "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" [1] more generally. To name but a few.

The Zune might well have been a good device (don't know), but the "Microsoft sux lol" (as you put it) of the time wasn't meaningless. It was entirely of Microsoft's own doing.

[0] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

That seems like child-play compared to the google or apple of today.

Don't use a chromium browser.

yes, they earned it. I think I said that. did they earn as much BS as they've gotten over the past two decades? no.

Google Amazon and Facebook are doing FAR WORSE things today, and no one says anything. Many readers of this comment likely WORK AT one of these places, and are complicit in the crap these companies do, yet they excuse the things they do in any one of a million ways, just like employees at Microsoft did at the time. many of those same people today still bash on Microsoft for lesser offenses than they themselves are part of, so don't act like there is logic behind any of the derision that gets thrown around.

Microsoft derisiveness today is nothing more than bird calls to help nerds find each other in the wild, but then non-nerds hear it and assume that the most common squawks they hear from the flock are true. this is what the Zune was victim to. Windows phone also, likely, which was another excellent product doomed before it hit the market because people like to tell and hear the same jokes over and over and over again. Windows Phone struggled for a while, but it too fell victim to the attitude of the commoner: "I've never once used or even laid eyes on this product, but Microsoft made it so I'm going to poke fun at it endlessly."

ever hear a joke about Bing on a non-technical TV show? that's how far this shit reaches. Bing is FAR better than anyone gives it credit for and it gets better all the time. anyone care? nope! "Bing lol"

The ingenuity of the Windows Phone was leveraging technology to do what it did best to make a very fluid, very interactive UI. The tiles and metro text were obviously not very resource heavy to draw, which made for a wonderful experience.

Windows Phone leaned into the idea that it was a digital device, and it leveraged the strengths of digital devices and didn't pretend to be anything else. zero skeumorphism. it was VASTLY underrated.

For me, Bing does, at least some of the time, a much better job surfacing GitHub issues. Identical searches on Google and Bing will return githubmemory and github results respectively (and neither service returns both).

I'm not sure Bing ever returns githubmemory results unless you go out of your way to ask for it.

I wonder if Bing has solved the clone problem generally.

> The whole meaningless, punchline-less joke "Microsoft sux lol" thing that's been happening since the Triassic period is what did the Zune in

I don't know if that was near as much of a factor as the fact that Apple had basically solved the digital music problem almost 6 years prior with iTunes and the iPod, and everyone already had their music libraries there.

No, Apple's clever marketing department 'solved' the digital music problem. The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes), but people didn't care because it was the 'thing to be seen with.' The market was told it was 'easy' so they pushed themselves to work it out.

>The iPod was a clunky, unintuitive and buggy product (not to mention the horrors of iTunes)

I'll give you that iTunes became fairly bloated and annoying to use but I don't think it's fair to describe the iPod as clunky and unintuitive, certainly not in comparison to many of the MP3 players that it competed with. The click wheel was a really good bit of design in my opinion.

A few years ago, I was using Windows 10 and a huge ad banner for OneDrive appeared in the file explorer. That was the final straw for me, and it's the reason I finally switched over to Linux 100% full time

To be fair, Ubuntu did that a couple of years ago with Ubuntu One, and iCloud and Google storage are also integrated with the respective OSes, and you can buy subscriptions with a couple of clicks.

Windows is basically freemium now, I haven't spent money for windows licenses in years, neither privately nor has the company I work at. We get 100 or so licenses as a MS Gold partner, but pay a lot for services around Office 365. It's strange, but this is the new industry status quo apparently.

Now what I find really offputting and weird is that MS Word had a banner the other day - something like "Looking for a new job? Download these templates to make a great impression!" after I opened my CV. I really really hope MS is not scanning the content of my files because that would be a big no go...

> MS Word had a banner the other day - something like "Looking for a new job? Download these templates to make a great impression!" after I opened my CV. I really really hope MS is not scanning the content of my files because that would be a big no go...

Isn't that classic Clippy/Clippit behaviour that Word has been famous for for years?

> Windows is basically freemium now,

"Windows is a service" as all the naggy "if you could update, say now, that would be terrific" banners say. And as we on Hackernews say, if you're not paying for a service you are not the customer.

my problem is I did pay for it

and now they shove ads in my face and reboot my machine without asking

I wouldn't mind so much if it was free... but it isn't

On the other hand, Chrome doesn't ask, it just does it.

Logged in youtube ? You probably meant to sign in the browser too, sync all your life with google, and link your android phone. There, fixed it for you.

> IMHO, Edge is the best chromium based browser out there

Closed source web browser? Not really all that interested tbh.

Sure, but, while presumably very similar, isn’t the source for chrome slightly different from the open-source chromium, and not public?

(Does chrome have a setting to disable all DRM plugins like firefox does?)

This is (one reason) why I run chromium, not chrome.

Opera at least used to have a (fast, standards compliant) unique render engine and a snappy email client. Beyond IE-mode, I don't se why I would prefer Edge to Chromium.

That said, I'm happy to see first party support for Linux. But for me, being able to run SQL Server is much more useful than Edge.

Closed source with MS tracking and spying from the network logs. There seems to be an army of MS fanbois that angrily downvote any comments critical of crappy MS products in the thread.

I freaking love the new Edge browser, but I only use it on my work machine where I could care less about spying and tracking. I really hope that MS will open source the edge browser at some point. I would love a "Edgium" or "UnMicrosofted" version of Edge that I can use on personal machines. Vertical tabs are awesome.

Probably not as good but https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/verticaltabs/imimo...

Sadly, they aren't even close to what Edge offers.

My main browser is Firefox with Sidebery. That's what Chrome should copy. Edge's vertical tabs are the next best thing...especially when you need a chromium based browser.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

Thanks! I’ve been using tree style tabs forever, but sidebery looks nice, I’ll give it a try!

That probably will not happen. Edge is not open source.

I feel this is necessary here:

https://youtu.be/om7O0MFkmpw

For me it's a trade-off between Google and Microsoft.

Nobody would ever confuse me for a Microsoft fan-boy, but I personally feel more comfortable with sharing telemetry data (which both Google and Microsoft collect) with a software and services company than an advertising company.

More than 80% of Google's revenue comes from advertising (source cited below).

The majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from cloud services, Office, and Windows.

But I understand Microsoft has a trust gap with many folks, based on their anti-OSS activity of the late 90's and early 00's, and I'm glad we are all free to choose.

The only major browser (by market share) that is truly open-source is still Mozilla Firefox.

source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/how-does-google-make-money-a...

source: https://www.geekwire.com/2020/filing-shows-microsoft-really-...

Why not skip trading off completely and just use Firefox?

Says whom? It also tracks you. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/firefox.html

it tracks you less, and the tracking can be disabled. You could always go for librewolf ungoogled chromium, maybe brave, or whatever else you desire

But still tracks and gives me a headache setting it up when I could use ungoogled chromium instead which with no effort doesn't track me. Why do you think Brave doesn't track you? Who or what told you that, and why do you believe it doesn't?

i dont know whether brave tracks you, which is why i said "maybe"

That neocities site isn't exactly an authoritative source. They consider a company holding any kind of information about you (even for legitimate business purposes) as "spyware". It's the tech version of paranoia and should be taken with a grain of salt.

>They consider a company holding any kind of information about you (even for legitimate business purposes) as "spyware".

What is that if not spyware? Do I consent to them taking that data? When is it ever non legitimate by that ridiculous metric? I don't want any company to have my data for "legitimate business purposes". What benefit is it to me? How is taking data I didn't want them to not spyware? Is it paranoid to not want to be tracked by your brower? If you want to be tracked by your brower, why do you care about privacy or think privacy is?

All of them want your browsing data for their advertising for totally legit reasons you say. So why bother with privacy if you want them to take your data?

They’re being aggregated and sold the same to advertisers. Just because you don’t think MS sells you anything (they do btw, why do they have a store?) doesn’t mean it’s not going to be used for advertising.

OpenBSD maintains a chromium fork that is outfitted with pledge() and unveil(), and Edge belongs in that package repository with similar safety features.

Edge should do what is necessary to get there, and this means opening the source.

You do realize Google Chrome is closed source, right?

> Unlike Chromium, Chrome is not open-source, so its binaries are licensed as freeware under the Google Chrome Terms of Service.

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Brandin...

I greatly prefer Firefox to Edge or Chrome, but unfortunately the world we live in is where some websites only work in Chrome, or corporate functionality requires plugins that only work in Chrome.

Hence, I run chromium, not chrome. (ed: and Firefox).

Using Chromium is a bit like buying chicken meat from a farmer because it gives you that nice feeling of "local fare" and "doing good"; meanwhile, the farmer sources that meat from the same gigantic poultry business that supplies all supermarkets, with chickens kept in squalid conditions.

I don't think that analogy is very good because your can't open source chickens..

Either way, I recommend librewolf, it's an amazing up to date Firefox fork with all the telemetry stripped out.

Yeah, it's just about the fact that the overall negative system continues to be enabled by supposedly-virtuous actions. Google working in the open doesn't change the fact that in practice they can (and do) steer wherever they want, and promoting the monoculture enables their dominance and abuse of user-data.

Though I think I kind of agree, I tried out Edge, and it's actually not bad, too bad it isn't open sourced or I would honestly not mind using it when I'm already using Windows.

I still prefer Firefox.

Edge's implementation of vertical tabs is probably the best I've seen yet. You can get something similar in Firefox with extensions and userchrome edits, but custom userchrome can't be relied on since they're removing it at some point, and vertical tab extensions without the userchrome edits are very awkward (redundant tab bar, stupid sidebar header that can't be hidden).

I really wish some FOSS browser would clone Edge's setup. Preferably something built with Gecko or WebKit to help oppose Chromium hegemony.

I was arguing that WebKit was not a Monopoly but he grouped WebKit and Blink together, interesting you see them separately. You can just download a config for firefox, pretty sure Chrome still can't do rows of tabs.

WebKit and Blink have diverged quite substantially at this point and have several large differences. One is that WebKit is more geared toward embedding in applications using whatever UI framework and language whereas Blink is more married to Chromium.

Firefox configs like you mention are possible only because of custom userchrome, which Mozilla has indicated intent to remove sooner than later.

Suprised that WebKit is better, wonder why Blink is being used in VScode.

Its not better, its different. Anyway vscode just uses electron, and electron wants the modern Google web.

i literally use edge daily because of the vertical tabs.

i don't know where i can submit feedback or if the edge team will ever read them. but when the vertical tabs are minimized the auto-expand on hovering is very distracting and almost never needed.

Switching from Google to Microsoft - what a choice! :)

It has also builtin telemetry and running with elevated priviledges.

> Edge has built in support for vertical tabs, tab groups, and chrome extensions.

IMO Vivaldi's implementations of vertical tabs and tab groups is superior, but Edge is definitely a close second.

I find it funny that for every person that complains about Microsoft 's bad practices there is 0 bitching about Google shoving Chrome your throat constantly when on Edge

Because Chrome is already dominant as bad as it is. They are both equally detrimental to society.

I think everyone dislikes that as a company practice, but I have the impression that most of the people who would complain are simply not using Edge, and thus don´t remember/bother to say anything about it.

Google shoving Chrome whenever it detects non-Chrome when you visit its properties is nowhere near as frustrating as Microsoft asking you to complete onboarding after every update and in the control panel, when the only step left in "onboarding" is to switch to their recommendations of Edge and Bing.

what is do you use? I'm on 10 professional and never have these problems.

10 Home does this all the time, if you don't disable it in about three places - some of which are not what you would expect to be called in places you would not expect for them to be located.

Source: Work in a repair shop. See this stuff first hand.

for me it's super annoying when I click on link inside of gmail app on iOS and it suggests at the bottom to install google chrome instead of using default browser . selected "don't show this again" many times, still I see that popup. annoying as hell

If 95% of people use Chrome then you’d expect 19x more complaints about Microsoft than Google, if the complainability factor is equal.

Hi Microsoft!

Please show your love for linux by doing the same with Microsoft Office!

Isn't that what Office365 is for or is that much of a downgrade from the desktop experience?

Its terrible and Teams on Linux is a trash fire on top of a dumpster fire on top of a landfill fire.

That sounds pretty close to my Teams experience on Mac

Try the unofficial client: https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux

Teams on Linux is still Teams, but it works just fine for me. It can't do background blur, but is otherwise feature complete enough for me to attend stand-up on it daily.

Currently Teams will not work with my Mic. Half the time it doesn't recognize its there, the other half its there but not picking up anything. Every other app I tested worked fine with the mic except for Teams.

I've had to switch to using CHIME of all apps because that actually worked 95%+ time.

to be fair, that's just the Teams experience in general. if i leave it open for more than 4 hours, somehow it's chewing ~4GB RAM. i use the web client but, if i'm honest, i miss the notifications from that and miss meeting reminders :D

If only ヾ(≧▽≦*)o

They'll just point you to Office Online

tbh i think i prefer the web based versions

Who still honestly uses Office in their personal lives? Some people use excel for work but you don't buy that for yourself. Most young people I know just use google docs and never used MS Office so it doesn't even have the name branding for them to call the others bootleg versions. The ribbon was so disgusting and annoying that I never used it again and only used 2003 after trying 2007.

People who need a level of compatibility with MSO that LibreOffice and OnlyOffice still can't offer.

Is that docx or did they make something worst? I never swapped to docx and just used .doc, although it supports docx as well. Not much use for me anyway, most people I know just use google docs.

It is somewhat common to see commits on LO git that says things like: "OOXML specify X, but MSO does Y."

Good compatibility with OOXML is extremely difficult. The specification is enormous, hard to understand and, even if you implement the specification, you have no guarantee that you'll get good compatibility with MSO documents.

I honestly just saved LO in .doc and never had an issue when I needed office docs, is this something end users have an issue with or is it more backend?

The issue most people have are formatting problems when opening OOXML docs in LO.

Considering that .doc is an older, simpler and had been frozen for a long time, maybe its compatibility is better. I'll try asking people that send me OOXML to convert it .doc the next time to see how better it is compatibility-wise.

Yeah I saw no reason to switch to docx, it was just slightly smaller, at the core its a lock in that zipped document files (I don't care about being a few kb smaller) and caused more problems (some people didn't have office 2007 even years after it had been out) when sharing so I never saw a point to using it. It benefitted nobody and caused more pain.

It did benefit microsoft. Once the format became an ISO standard, many governments were free to use it. Also, by being "open", they had less chance of being threatened of abusing their monopoly position.

This whole problem is irritating to me because I feel like:

1. Half of the time people use a word processor, they don't actually need one (plain text would be find)

2. When people really need to format something for print, word processors do a shitty job anyway

I was forced back into it after years of using GSuite and....it's just as clunky as I remember. You get a different feature-set depending on whether you're using the native app or browser version (but it's not obvious at first). There is some locking and checking-out required to modify shared files with the native apps - also not always obvious when this is required.

It was really annoying since office's database was also a required dependency and I couldn't use an older office I had even though I never used this feature another program insisted was essential. The only good part of office is onenote. Its very nice.

People like me who live in Excel and use the many things the web apps can’t do (or gotta go fast). I still have a mixed relationship with the Ribbon but use it mainly to crib all the keyboard shortcuts or just type commands in the search box.

You never had enough issues to abandon it? I always see and hear people with frozen laptops while using excel to edit their database.

It's magical to get a handle on things, if it's something huge or for production I can port it to not-Excel. I can do some stats on a table and get my answer by time I could've set up a new poetry env and started Jupyter.

Oh yeah for querying it’s great and more so with power query now built in.

I finally caved and got myself a copy, because the spreadsheet capabilities of Excel are still unrivaled compared to free alternatives. If you watch the classic "You suck at Excel" video, you'll see that there are numerous actions the presenter does that do not have analogs in LibreOffice nor Google Sheets. The table feature is probably the one I miss the most; in fact, I really like how in the Mac program Numbers, all sheets are multi-table by default. It makes it much easier to group parts of the sheet into logical sections, and to extend one table without affecting the others.

Thats interesting, many people I know hate excel since its so slow, its clunky and switched to python for data since their computers overheat, freeze and crash when they work with large data sets on excel.

Maybe that's it, I'm not working with large data sets. My use case is more like "track all of my salary, dividend, and capital gains, and estimate how much extra I need to pay in taxes." :)

You might be better suited with jupiter notebook.

It's often much easier to do grouping and charts in Excel with a few clicks, even for someone who already knows Python in a data science context.

Excel is incredibly powerful. Watch an accountant or financial expert in a mid to large company use it. They'll use functions you've never heard of...and don't require writing Python.

Or watch this video and level-up your Excel! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNuC6ayrNKQ

Note: Joel Spolsky (co-founder of Stack Overflow, Trello, FogBugz, more) was a program manager for Excel in 90's.

For most things, Google Docs suffices for me. I rarely do complex formatting, and the most advanced thing I do in Sheets/Excel is vlookups, and even that I haven't done in months.

However, for my writing (fanfiction), desktop Office is a necessity. I used to think the "web layout" in Word was weird, but I live by it now. It's a much more efficient use of screen real estate than "print layout" (I have a 4k monitor and like to maximize the window), and Google Docs has no equivalent.

But ignoring the page layout, let's consider something more concrete: loading times.

I loaded a 106 page document in Google Docs on my desktop (AMD R7-1700, 64 GB RAM, NVME SSD, symmetric gigabit internet - a pretty good system overall). It took 27.72 seconds to load, and a couple more after that until I could type without it hitching. According to Chrome's task manager, the tab is already consuming 418 MB of RAM.

On my laptop (Intel i5-6300U, 8 GB RAM, SSD, same internet, Office 365 build 2109), I loaded two Word documents at the same time. Combined, they total 764 pages in print layout. It took 9.71 seconds to load both and for me to be able to type in the 527 page document without any noticeable lag. Word is currently sipping just 250 MB of RAM (and I have never seen it go >500 MB before except when exiting...meanwhile, a single Chrome tab hitting >1 GB is not exactly unusual if my desktop has been running for more than a week).

This doesn't even consider the experience of writing a document this long. Google Docs is already noticeably slower than Word with just a 106 page document, and it gets worse with longer ones. And the grammar checking in Word is miles ahead of what Google has.

Word certainly isn't perfect (I have plenty of complaints about it, and have found bugs which only turn up in long documents), but it remains my tool of choice because Google Docs really can't compete for this use-case. And I know I'm not the only writer in this situation.

Is there a reason you use office to write in? It’s not good writing software. Ever tried writing software like this? http://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

I've never looked into it except some paid application which I didn't feel was worth what they wanted at the time. I might try that when I finish my current story.

https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview was it this one? Its the gold standard for me I love it.

Yeah, that was it. Back when I heard about it, I was writing one-offs and couldn't see the potential usefulness (much less justify spending money).

It is a very nice app if it fits your workflow, give it a try, it changes the way you write. You can make tons of short stories, but I am going to try manuskript instead since I have linux, its got a very nice interface.

Interesting, I've always thought that I will work on Linux, because I love Linux tools, but I will miss some Windows specific tools. And this is how I was rolling last 4 years.

But what I really needed was Windows system with WSL and good integration of GUI apps (Still on W10 tho) where I can use my beloved tools for programming, and still have access to games, apps like Office (here only Excel that I care about) and some other Windows/macOS only.

With Edge I switched a few months ago for testing. It's great to be honest. Especially because of support Chrome extensions - and here I need WASM development plugin. Firefox does not offer such ability yet. I decided to opt out from Google as much as I can. The only missing part in Edge is the tabs and history management. It's hard to name, but Firefox is somehow smarter in searching in my history of visited pages when I type on the search bar. OK, there is another one. If I type a page that I have already opened, then in Firefox, It automatically switches to that already opened page. In Edge the default choice is to open duplicated page.

Sssh, you’re saying the quiet part loud!

>The only missing part in Edge is the tabs and history management

What's missing for tabs? Vertical tabs with tab groups are just great: https://www.houkconsulting.com/2021/09/tab-groups-vertical-t...

I recently bought my wife a new laptop. After 10 minutes of arguing with a fresh install of Windows 10 I had to rage quit for my own mental health:

0. There were a thousand different prompts nagging me to allow their tracking and ads (and some options amounted to either “yes to everything” or “yes to most things” with no “don’t fucking track me” option in sight.

1. Followed by Microsoft forcing my to tie my local user account to my Microsoft account. Then forcing me to enter the 30 character password that I usually just paste from my password manager for online accounts.

2. Then being greater by spamware that had an X button which literally did Jack shit.

3. And a chaotic task menu with 13 different control panels.

I handed the machine to my wife and told her I can’t be her desktop support guy for this thing because there was a high risk of me throwing the laptop out the window in a rage (maybe that’s why it’s called “Windows”?)

I honestly think the only reason people think they like Windows is down to Stockholm syndrome.

I don't think most people like windows. It is simply the only thing they are used to.

> 30 character password

Why didn't you set up a Windows Hello PIN?

You still need to login once before you can do that. By which time I was already completely fed up with the Windows on boarding process.

I'd be happy if they put forth some development into WINE or some kind of compatibility layer. Bundle it into a container/pak

Hell no. At least on Linux machines we are not forced to use Outlook by our corporate handlers.

Yeah, we're forced to use Outlook 365...

It’s a bit less bad. At least it’s not a locally installed executable.

How is that better?

It doesn’t soil the filesystem with its binaries.

I still don't see how that makes up for all the drawbacks.

Web-apps are terrible. You can't find them in your task bar, you often close them by mistake with your browser, they're a factor 10 slower and more resource hungry than they could be, they have terrible response times and they often lack major features of the native version.

The discomfort of having to have some binary outside of the package manager in /opt/bin is pretty low in my list of priorities compared to that.

An I think outlook is the best email client I have used.

Mail in 10.6 was the best mail client, period. No cruft, not ugly and a few customization options. There is nothing that comes close even now.

Evolution with its EWS plug-in works reasonably well with O365. I sometimes still use the web version but only for operations that aren't exposed through Evolution.

Wine runs MS Office great and if you're going to pay for Office, might want to pay Codeweavers to get commercial support for running it as well.

Not shilling, but found WPS Office to be the best Linux office, followed by OnlyOffice. WPS Office even gets the look of MS Office pretty close, which makes the switch much easier.

Yuck! They copied the ribbon!

IME OnlyOffice has better compatibility with OOXML than LibreOffice. On the other hand, LibreOffice is faster for bigger docs and has more features.

Edge used to so good but recently it has turn into Microsoft adware and spyware software. I thought it was suppose to replace Chrome but it is becoming another Chrome or more evil.

It is definitely more evil. I use Chromium, which to me is perfect. Not a lot of invasive features and a lot can be configured or disabled using a policy file with Linux. I am honestly pretty disappointed in Firefox as of late. I feel like I have to disable an equal amount of tracking with Firefox as I do Chromium.

So, are you gonna tell us what you're talking about or just complain about Microsoft? Everyone complains about Microsoft at every opportunity; it's just meaningless noise at this point.

I have been using edge since it's release and on day 1 it was so good with all the google tracking removed or disabled. But now if you see it's like microsoft holding your computer hostage to use edge.

Few months back with each windows update it would reset my browser to edge. It would reset my search engine preference. Force me to use MS account to sync. Show some false unread notification icon so that I open to see that they now have some XYZ feature.

> Everyone complains about Microsoft at every opportunity; it's just meaningless noise at this point.

It still sucks, so yes, people continue complaining.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/03/study...

that's from almost two years ago and is about pre-chromium Edge.

I'm not saying that the story has changed, just that it likely has since this was published.

Why would it have changed? It's the successor product from the same company, and I've seen no evidence that they've changed their approach to... anything... in the time since then.

I just imagine how defective should be your IT to ask your employees to use Edge as a default browser.

And worse than that, not be ashamed and have your company publicly named in doing so...

But I perfectly imagine the company with a "bullshit job" CIO that went to a "Microsoft" "cocktail and gift" even, and that is now thinking that he is a technological expert.

Oh boy! It seems that hell has frozen over. I thought it’s simply not possible that any Linux system will run Internet Explorer… ehm, sorry, Edge without exploding.

Never thought I will live to see such a day

Why did you want to run IE in Linux? This is just closed source google chrome with MS spyware and some UI changes and MS popups.

I can't see why anyone would use it outside of their corporate day job. but if those enterprises can now support linux, because they only support edge (or IE mode on edge) this is pretty neat

Google Chrome is closed source too.

Yes and I don't use it either.

I would never want to use it, even on Windows. I just wonder why anyone would want to use anything from MS on Linux.

It just looks like good old „ Embrace, extend, and extinguish” at work here. How did it happen that from the total evil MS is now a viable alternative for Firefox on Linux?

Its not, its just being used for some people who apparantly decided that making apps for IE was a good idea years ago and stuck to it.

Vertical tabs on edge and sleeping tabs have ruined my tab discipline and that's a compliment. I keep so many more tabs open than before and they don't get in my way. Collections are also an actually useful feature for recording browsing "sessions".

Just 2 things bother me a bit:

1. With vertical tabs on, quite a few sites switch to mobile layout for some reason. This is really annoying and makes me turn vtabs off sometimes. Is there a way to stop sites from doing this? My screen should be 16:9 so I don't understand how adding the little side bar should trigger the switch

2. Please give us a native tab search! Vscode has ctrl-p, windows terminal has ctrl-p, even GitHub now has ctrl-k. Inbuilt tab search will feed my habit of keeping 50 tabs open. I currently use vimium which works okayish but the main caveat is it doesn't work in pdf viewers, and half my tabs are pdfs

As for your first point: sites don't look at your screen resolution, they look at the resolution of the visible viewport, which shrinks when you switch to vertical tabs, triggering the layout change.

Microsoft efforts to keep IE relevant were... respectable but ineffective: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=the+browser+you...

With Office 365 in the browser, and now Internet Explorer-only apps now available on Linux, I wonder what remains to prevent most companies/administrations to use a Linux distribution as their main OS.

any number of thick client legacy apps

That's what Citrix is for... even if you are using Windows on the desktop.

That's a good point. I wonder how many there are left. From what I've seen, most apps developed after say 2007 or something were web-based, but since I was a web developer when I was dealing with such things, my PoV is obviously biased.

Which fraction would work flawlessly with Wine is also a question.

end user and IT familiarity. sure you know Linux, most end users and a lot of IT folks don't. that and corporate VPN security stuff. I know the company I work for uses FireEye (whatever that is) to make sure I'm up to no good or whatever it does. every time i bring up Linux I get the "VPN software" and "Security" as the biggest reasons why I need to just be happy with Win10 + WSL2 (which honestly isn't bad at all)

> most end users

These will complain loudly when the icon changes, but, really, don’t see the OS beyond the apps IT makes available.

> and a lot of IT folks don't. that and corporate VPN security stuff.

Here lies the problem. A lot of corporate IT departments have no idea of how to configure a fleet of Linux machines.

> These will complain loudly when the icon changes, but, really, don’t see the OS beyond the apps IT makes available.

And they're doomed to complain anyway because Windows seven EOL is in a bit more than 1 year!

“I tried installing webex and double clicked and i saw a glass of wine configuring my home directory instead”

IE Mode is only available in Edge on Windows.

Oh, is it? That would definitely make sense, because they really don't want their captive customers running away so easily when migrating away from Windows 7.

I don’t think it’s very realistic that Microsoft would port the whole Trident engine along with all the involved technologies used by a lot of these legacy apps (activex, VBScript, ms office and active directory integration, etc.) to linux. Especially at the end of its life.

Unless you think ESR[1] is right.

[1]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764

Office 365 in browser sucks. What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for? There really isn't a reason to switch for most people, its a lot of pain for not much benefit. A better question is what do they gain?

> Office 365 in browser sucks.

Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice.

> What IE only apps were people desperately waiting for?

Every internal corporate web app developed in the 2000s, all custom built, developed by external contractors and not actively maintained because “they work” (or at least their bugs are well known and worked around). In my wife's department alone, there's like a dozen of such apps (for holiday tracking, training scheduling, etc, etc.). It's also discussed in the article btw:

“We had so many applications that still depend on Internet Explorer,” Ronny Intrau, Browser Product Manager at Bundesagentur für Arbeit

> A better question is what do they gain?

Companies and administrations have had enormous troubles migrating away from Windows XP when the support ended (and some haven't actually, because they just couldn't afford it). Windows 7 support ends in January 2023, and with Windows 11 we now know that the promise to have Windows 10 forever was a lie, and that they'll need to migrate yet again (while throwing away a good amount of PC, because of the system requirements, as it's always the case with such migrations). We're talking of migrations costing tens or hundreds of millions for public administrations. Never going through this all over again is a win.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/products/windows-...

>Kind of, but at least it works and is compatible with everybody's Office document which is a big barrier to people migrating to LibreOffice.

I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO.

I had no idea they decided that they should make apps for IE. They don't even seem hard to replace with a random app or a calendar. Why are they so unique or needed?

They could easily just have a server and run Windows as VMs and never have issues. Lots of places still use XP or something on an intranet, and even on the internet a VM version won't pose any dangers.

> I still use .doc rather than .docx and its never once given me a problem. The barrier is just unwillingness to change rather than any real problems with LO.

I assume you haven't opened more than a handful of .doc documents then, because around 70% of the .doc documents I open are either broken when I open them (around 20% of the time), or when the other party open them after I edited them (around 50% of the time). In practice docx docs seems to work a little bit better, but not that much (I'd say 50 to 60% failure). And I say that as a Linux user for 14 years now. Until MS365 came, MS Word documents where constant frustration.

GA? Edge for Linux (version 97) still can't sign in to a corporate Office 365 account for sync. Personal accounts only.

I'm bewildered, as this functionality works on Mac and Windows, but somehow not on Linux. This is the one feature I actually need to start using Edge as my primary browser for work tasks. Until sync works with Azure AD, I'll have to continue using a separate instance of Chrome Beta/Dev that's tied to my corporate Google account.

Congratulations to Microsoft for finally shipping a fully-fledged Web Browser! It's been a long time since they made one that wasn't hamstrung to a single OS.

Not that I'll use it for anything other than installing Firefox. I figure MS has about another 2 decades before I'll recommend any products, still a lot of debt to pay off since the IE6 debacle.

Is this even open source? I don't see many package maintainers wanting to have a closed-source browser. I am using Chromium for now because it is included in the default repos. Will there be an open source "Chromium" for Edge, or is that what Chromium is already?

Never using that spyware again. Network monitor showed that the „helper“ program sent and received data pretty much all the time, even when Edge was closed. Also, on program startup, Edge sent quite a lot of data home to MS. Edge might be fast but if you value your privacy you should use a different browser.

Edge is only free if you don't value avoiding targeted ads. Personally I don't care if my "data" is out there, but I don't know what I'd do if I did (Vivaldi? Brave? Firefox? Something more obscure? Are there any paid browsers yet?)

> Edge is only free if you don't value avoiding targeted ads

Really?

uBlock origin seems to work flawlessly, it's available straight from the Microsoft store and since I synchronize my extensions, it's automatically installed as soon as I enter my microsoft login.

Also, I don't fear such features may vanish in the future, since most of their revenue doesn't come from advertisement, unlike google.

I've really been enjoying using nextdns to block ads.

Brave is supposed to be good, and pays you in some kind of crypto if you enable some ads.

I love that their marketing is, large companies use Edge to support legacy apps. That does sound like a good use for Edge. Another good use is downloading the browser you want to use.

Can I use it to actually watch 4k Netflix content like on Windows? FWIW, I have a modern Intel CPU, IIRC that's required too for their DRM..

No, Edge only includes the required PlayReady DRM module on Windows (in fact it's actually part of Windows that the browser calls).

Edge on Mac or Linux only has Widevine Level 3, exactly the same as Chrome, and only gets a max of 720p from Netflix.

Unfortunately no mention of Playready DRM support.

The Mac version didn't have it so there was zero chance the Linux one would.

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