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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

I hate that it tries to get you to use the MS browser. This is the same old shitty MS behavior that I hated back in the day.

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I'm not using new Bing until the Edge requirement is gone. I have no interest in Edge. It is unfortunate MS is playing that tacky game of requiring/pushing an unrelated product just so you can try another product. I highly doubt there is a technical reason Bing can only operate in Edge.

The edge requirement sits sour with me because of Microsoft's previous stewardship/monopoly of the web browsers with IE. As a web developer first trying to enable cross-browser consistency starting back with IE 5.5, the number of hours I wasted due to MS's anti-competitive choices really bothers me. Collectively how many dev hours were wasted trying to support IE? I will never use a Microsoft web browser again. That bridge is permanently burned for me.

It's not like the competition (Google) is in this stance any better. Business as usual.

What are you talking about? Google services work great in other browsers. They have Chrome nudges, but easily dismissed and don’t resurface. Not nearly as bad as Microsoft forcing Edge on every Windows user.

or forcing Chrome on Chromebook users

> Google services work great in other browsers

I see you haven't tried Gmail in Firefox. Or Google Meet.

Firefox is my main browser and I use Gmail daily. Can’t speak for Google Meet.

I use both services in librewolf and they both work ok. Gmail works just fine, meet sometimes doesn't turn on audio.

Admittedly I only use the gmail web client for viewing email and not much else, but I have never had issues with gmail on firefox. What problems are you experiencing?

The initial load takes forever, and opening emails is much slower than in a Chromium-based browser.

Google Docs Dictation is not enabled for firefox.

Google limits Firefox Android to a limited version of google.com [1], whereas Chrome Android gets the fancy one [2].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/kdFibt9.png

[2] https://i.imgur.com/aElJe7z.png

You can download an add-on to change the user-agent string and get the same google.com experience as Chrome: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/google-search...

Seems borderline anticompetitive. Short of a customized corporate version of internet explorer or chrome, why should the browser I use dictate what sites I can be served?

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