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Comment by bloblaw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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).

> 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.

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.

It has also builtin telemetry and running with elevated priviledges.

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

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