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Comment by cuuupid | Hacker News Reader

I switched from Chrome to Edge 4ish years ago. It was honestly faster, didn’t rev up my laptop fan, and over time they added things like the automatic privacy tooling that I enjoyed.

Now they’re messing up where it matters. The endless promotion of Bing, making it hard to completely remove it from the browser, adding a huge fucking B button. All while ignoring glaring bugs that were making it impossible to use certain sites with Edge while working fine in its sister browsers. Now I’m swapping back to Chrome because this is purely intolerable.

Sometimes software doesn’t need iteration or more features. Sometimes it just needs to work!

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Edge has been passable, Edge gained users, someone at MS suggested they should exploit those users more -- 'they're enjoying it, we can make it shit and exploit them for money instead, go us' is how I imagine that thought went.

If MS stay true to form then give it a year and Edge will be a fetid turd, but they'll add some lock-in from the OS; maybe Office online breaks in all the other browsers. The World will be worse, some middle-manager will get a promotion, shareholders will get a few more cents, so it goes...

At least Edge is consumer software; your boss can't shove it down your throat.

Oh man, you must be too young to remember when companies had intranet sites that only worked on IE6 long after it was supported. That was pure hell as a young IT support drone. Good god.

I am familiar with the "This site is best viewed on X" and Netscape vs IE era but I thankfully entered the workforce later.

My condolences to everyone who has to suffer stereotypical enterprise software.

IE6 and a Java 5 web applet. Woo!

The Flash UI of VMware vSphere.

Why was everything Silverlight for a few months?

Web Applets were pretty cool in theory at least, but a disaster in practice.

Also never fails to amaze me that if Adobe hadn’t been so lazy with making Flash performant on Mac, Steve Jobs wouldn’t have delivered the death blow. ActionScript was not a bad language!

>'they're enjoying it, we can make it shit and exploit them for money instead, go us' is how I imagine that thought went.

That's exactly how it went. And since users keep allowing themselves to be exploited, that's how it'll continue to go.

Luckily, these days users seem to prefer being exploited by Google instead of Microsoft, so MS isn't able to force their shitty browser on everyone the way they did in the IE6 days.

This is what Cory Doctorow has described as the enshittification of companies and platforms. It's not a fluke - it was the plan all along. First you treat your customers well to build up a user base. Then you make things crappy for the users in order to bring in business partners (advertisers), which is what they're doing now. And later they will screw their business partners as well and redistribute all profits for their shareholders. And then the platform will die.

Don’t forget that “news” keeps getting added back to your customized “new tab” page. That was there last straw for me on desktop. I switched to Firefox. It’s slower but still fast enough for my purposes.

On mobile, they broke the address bar somehow, so now I’m using Firefox everywhere, even though I never really planned to do so…

It’s a shame. It was a great browser for a while.

Edit to add: Firefox has the best “reader mode” of any browser I’ve tried. I’m actually really happy about that.

Genuinely interested, why do you think Edge was faster than Chrome? What technical reason would be behind that?

I cannot imagine Microsoft improved Chrome's speed by a noticeable degree without Google noticing and applying the same improvements.

Microsoft has made some Windows-based optimizations to things like memory management. But, as far as I know, they've been upstreaming those optimizations back to the Chromium codebase. There are some things that aren't upstreamed like Startup Boost and Game Mode (or whatever they're called) where Edge runs as a minimal background process on login to reduce startup lag when first opening Edge or reduces resource usage when Windows detects that you're playing a game, respectively.

Edge is using some new APIs of task management introduced in Windows 11.

The tl;dr is: It can now suspend tabs without killing the tabs.

I literally can run like 50 tabs on a 4gb RAM device with no problem on Edge. And no need to reload any tabs.

These tabs stay as "Efficiency mode".

what has stopped you from using chromium or brave instead of browsers infected with spyware?

Isn't Brave the browser with "acceptable ads"?

Which are disabled by default and when you enable them you actually get paid.

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