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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

The only reason to use Edge is because your corporate policy forces you to. There is no other reason whatsoever.

If you must, use Chrome if you'd rather send all that data to an advertising company in exchange for a familiar UI. Otherwise, use Firefox.

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Edge has lots of great features and UX elements that set it apart. Eg proper vertical tab bar, profiles with great UX, “turn site into desktop app”, well-designed website translation, etc. Chrome has some of these and Firefox lets you piece it all together with lots of add-ons but it’s not the same.

Firefox is my daily driver, but for a long time, before all these user-hostile misfeatures were added, Edge was Pretty Great As Well in my opinion.

"Turn site into desktop app" is a Chrome feature, and has been for many years. Chrome calls it "Create shortcut - Open as window".

Website translations and the profiles UI is very similar to Chrome as well.

The collections feature is really useful as well.

Edge dev tools has "edit and resend" built in.

"Edge dev tools" are Chrome dev tools that were Firefox developer tools.

Brave has vertical tabs nowadays, though they're still behind a flag. But they've gotten pretty and stable enough that I don't miss Edge at all.

I use it because it does better than Chrome or Firefox for my laptop's battery life. It's an unwanted hassle to stay on top of these new privacy settings though, and I wouldn't recommend Edge to a non-technical family matter for that reason.

I use Firefox as my primary browser, and Edge as the secondary browser for things that don’t like Firefox or for when Firefox does weird things. I don’t have Chrome installed on my PCs (both work and personal), because I don’t need it.

Also, Microsoft is not primarily an advertising company. They make money by selling software to businesses, such as Windows Server, SQL Server, Microsoft Office (or Microsoft 365).

From 2020, "Web Browser Privacy: What Do Browsers Say When They Phone Home?" https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

> We find that the browsers split into three distinct groups from this privacy perspective. In the first (most private) group lies Brave, in the second Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in the third (least private) group lie Edge and Yandex.

Not corporate policy, but something is borked with the internal SSO. Only about half of my internal sites work with Chrome. So, I am frequently relegated to working with Edge because the Microsoft admins prioritize streamlining all of the account stuff. Everything else is an unsupported workflow.

Why use Chrome when you could use something like Ungoogled Chromium if you don't need backend services, or Brave if you want an end to end encrypted independent sync backend?

Vertical tabs

...are easily added to Firefox if desired.

not really, it keeps the horizontal one, so it still takes space.

Apparently Brave has it now though.

Are built in in Brave (still behind a flag, though, but already in perfectly usable shape)

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