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Comment by partiallypro | Hacker News Reader

Edge is genuinely very very good. It does have some dev tool problems that I've run into, but for browser it's top notch.

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Does it nag you constantly and do everything it can to steal data from you? I think lots of Microsoft products are now technically very good, but I don't like using them because they can't stop annoying me about stuff, and every time I turn my back are committing industrial espionage.

I haven't seen any nags at all. Chrome is notoriously the most anti-privacy browser in the top-flight; Edge generally has better privacy controls than Chrome. But, if you're comparing it to Brave or some others, you'll be disappointed if that is your main concern.

Edge does occasionally nag you about "using the recommended defaults" (i.e. Bing) after updating.

Edge is continually adding new invasive features. I've had the same policies set for Chrome for some time to remove any telemetry but Edge has a habit of turning things back on that were disabled and trying to push more junk. Chrome has not does this to me and I really don't think your point is accurate, at least not based on my experience and if you compare the two you'll definitely find Edge opting in to much more by default.

"Habit" is such euphemism.

I get nagged more by google to use chrome whnvever you go to their sites in another browser.

This is what led me to slowly abandon my use of Google.

1/2 of the time I search google while not logged in, it asks me about logging in or creating an account.

About the same rate I get bothered logging into gmail using a non-chrome browser and they need to tell me I should experience Gmail with chrome.

> Does it nag you constantly and do everything it can to steal data from you?

I remember having to spend a little while de-shittifying it, they push the Shopping/Rewards stuff pretty hard and clutter up the UI. You can't get rid of Bing on the new tab page without extensions / other hoops.

> I remember having to spend a little while de-shittifying it, they push the Shopping/Rewards stuff pretty hard and clutter up the UI. You can't get rid of Bing on the new tab page without extensions / other hoops.

so... yes. yes it does.

Knowing Microsoft they will keep re-shitting it all back with random Windows Updates and then some. 100%. They don't give a damn if people don't like what they are forcing their throats, they just keep at it until it's there.

It seems to have inherited Chrome's amnesiac address bar search. Firefox never has any trouble showing appropriate search results from my local history, whereas on the occasional occasion that I need to test something with Edge, it's always a crapshoot whether the address bar search will return anything at all, or (with live search suggestions disabled) stay maddeningly empty, even when the page in question is definitively still in my history and I'm verbatim entering the page title into the address bar.

>It seems to have inherited Chrome's amnesiac address bar search.

On the other hand, I'm surprised to see that on MacOS Edge properly shows the search/URL bar in full screen if I move the cursor to the top of the screen or push Command-L, something Chrome *still* can't do without enabling "Always Show Toolbar in Full Screen", which I don't want. This alone, plus Edge being compatible with all Chrome extensions, might cause me to switch.

Hmm. This annoyed me about chrome too. As well as the constant default nags and the battery hit on macOS.

I like safari, always have done. But for those sites that are ~~IE6~~ Chrome debugged only I think I’ll start dropping into Edge instead of Chrome.

Also genuinely very good at being the worst privacy browser, it's as worse as Yandex: https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

I like Edge and I want to like Bing but my problem is that the new tab page on Edge and the landing page on (current) Bing are so bad. They're full of random junk and articles I don't want to see. I'll switch to Bing full time if they just make the landing page clean.

There are settings that will hide all of it, at least until you scroll, but it would be nice to have it just be the search and Bing image of the day (or no image if that's your jam.)

Aside from telling you about the new GPT functionality I don't see anything else on the landing page at bing.com:

https://i.imgur.com/2f1D53L.png

You appear to have gotten the new version. The old (GPT-less) one is a horribly noisy mess, with a high-contrast background image to boot.

I don't know about Bing, but in Edge you can disable all of that random junk content and get a nice clean default page with just a single search text entry box (similar to the Chrome default).

The settings for modifying your layout and turning off all the content you don't want is available through the gear icon settings from the top right of the page. Would be nice if the default were clean, but you can opt out of all of that stuff.

I just set up edge on Mac today. If you go through the 3 or 4 quick setup choices, the last one is which layout you'd prefer. The last (I think it's called focused) is the one you're describing. So anyone experiencing this cluttered new tab page just didn't finish the exceptionally short setup process.

Check out the Bing start page settings. You can disable the articles, and more. I basically have the text box and weather in the top left corner. I even disabled the daily wallpaper.

I actually got in trouble at work because I submitted - what I thought was a polite - service ticket to set an Edge enterprise policy to make the new tab page blank. For 6 months every day all I saw was Trump this, Trump that. I stay away from politics; I've lost too many friends and family members. The problem was that for a while Edge was updating in a way that broke the preference you could set to blank the new tab page. I'd set it, it'd go blank for a week, then an Edge update would roll out and I'd see orange man again. I work in IT, so I'm always opening new tabs to our ServiceNow instance. I'd see ridiculous, inflammatory political articles while conferencing with other staff and outside customers and it was a huge distraction. I submitted a ticket to ask that our Edge policy be updated to blank this page always, and then I was reamed for being too sensitive. Also - same as the other poster - Edge is constantly nagging me to let Microsoft anonymously submit more data.

I'd love to love Edge because it's a big improvement over Chrome just by having vertical tabs, but both companies are too greedy to provide a good browser.

I simply use the "Blank New Tab Page" extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/blank-new-tab-page...

This gives me back the good old about:blank new tab page. I use the URL bar to search for stuff.

Make your own customized landing page that is better/cleaner. There are many home/start page projects on GitHub you can use almost immediately:

https://github.com/perfect-things/perfect-home

https://github.com/anic17/homepage

https://github.com/Lissy93/dashy

https://github.com/benphelps/homepage

https://github.com/jeroenpardon/sui

https://github.com/pawelmalak/flame

https://github.com/migueravila/Bento

Edge was good when it was a lightweight alternative to bloated Chrome, but in the last 2 years they've added so many unnecessary features that it's now noticeably slower.

Is there a way to use it without Bing being your new tab page? I tried edge once and that’s what kept me from sticking around.

It lets you change your default search provider, but even after doing that, the new tab page is still a big customized Bing landing page with a huge Bing search box.

If you've got specific feedback they have a GitHub repo - https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/DevTools/issues/

I want to use Edge but for some reason, on my 3 monitor display - it lags when crossing into another display. Firefox does not do this at all.

Not sure if anyone's still reading this and experiencing the same issues as I am, but I'll put my solution down. NOt sure how stable it is, or whatever, since I just enabled it, but going to edge://flags and enabling Vulkan eliminated this hiccup I would get with Edge when moving the window between monitors.

Edit: nevermind.. weird UI glitches abound

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