I've been trying Edge lately because I wanted to see if its "efficiency mode" would produce any noticeable difference in the battery life I experienced on my laptop.
They've really made it almost impossible to use as a privacy-respecting browser that lets you pick your search engine. There are a very large number of "on by default" settings that I had to change to turn of things like "Microsoft Rewards" and "creator recommendations."
The default search engine selection in buried in the settings under "address bar search." Even after you change that there is still an un-changeable page that comes up on new tabs that searches with Bing / Copilot, and other various ways to trigger a search that use Microsoft's search engine no matter what.
Also, whatever search engine you use, Edge will send your seaches to MS unless you turn off another "on by default" option.
And then, assuming you've managed to set everything up how you want it, MS will hit you with prompts after various updates to do things like return your default search to Bing.
I would genuinely hate to be an engineer working on the edge team. It feels like building a decent browser comes entirely secondary to moving the needle on marketing and growth targets.
Not the only situation where it seems your Windows-running computer is basically held hostage by MBAs wanting to boost Bing’s numbers.
I was going to push back on this, but on second thought I realized you are correct. Microsoft has a reputation, to put it mildly. A reputation that is well known to every software engineer on the planet, and indeed to many laymen.
Everyone who even applies there knows exactly what they are getting into. The application itself is an "ethics test", so to speak.
Xbox team has some good eggs at least. They didn’t need to make certain x360 titles forwards compatible, you can’t even get the disks new anymore, but they did it anyway.
Certain, as in those that are likely to sell, not all. These days the hardware is basically commodity and the time of innovating on CPU arch and hardware is over (remember the PS3 Cell CPU and the PS2 Emotion Engine?). You're getting commodity PCs in a unique form-factor and walled-garden support.
MS might be making a move to break the garden with GamePass, but only because they want people in GamePass's walled garden so they start renting games from MS instead of buying them from competitors. For over a decade they have failed to compete with Sony and Nintendo on quality first-party gaming.
I wonder if devs on the Edge team gets some kind of sadistic pleasure out of ruining Edge. It used to be good for a sweet, short few months, but it's beyond saving now. There's no way the devs behind the Edge UX still believe they're improving the browser.
I can imagine getting sort of a thrill out of suggesting something stupid like "let's steal ALL OF CHROME'S BROWSING HISTORY, then CLOSE CHROME, and OPEN EDGE and see if the user doesn't notice!" because _surely_ upper management would never sign off on that, but the day after you find out they still did. What other crazy shit can you think of? At work you roleplay as some kind of evil warlock, put all of your life's frustrations into the "switch to Edge or we'll murder your dog" screens, and go home with a big sack of cash to watch Netflix on your Macbook.
I don't work for microsoft, but I and everyone else knows that that is the kind of shit you'll be working on (who suggested it is irrelevant) long before you'd even do an interview with them.
Microsoft employees are certified assholes, and they know it.
He’s saying that developers are simply given a list of tasks to implement and their decision making authority stops after “how do i implement this ticket”
The role “product manager” is what makes the product decisions like we’re describing.
I know. I'm saying they already knew those kinds of decisions would be made long before they even got the job. Which is why I said it is irrelevant who makes the decision.
The devs are just as guilty as the assholes who made those decisions, because Microsoft has been making those kinds of decisions for decades.
These devs can't even hide behind the "just following orders" excuse, because as I've already said multiple times, they knew long before they got the job, that that is the kind of stuff they would be working on.
I got moved into a 'growth' department in one job and that was enough for me to put my feelers out and tender my resignation. All the work in the pipeline was about pulling the rug under from customers, increasing prices, and not adding value but removing it from general availability and paywalling it. It just felt wrong with me and what was important to me at the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the settings "accidentally" get reversed after the browser updates, since it's been known to happen with Windows settings...
I do think that happened to me at least once. I was happily using Kagi as my default search engine, and then after a restart suddenly I was using Bing.
I went through the same process you did and tried to make edge work for me and failed. I don't want to be constantly fighting my browser to respect my choices. That being said, the following is incorrect:
> Even after you change that there is still an un-changeable page that comes up on new tabs that searches with Bing / Copilot, and other various ways to trigger a search that use Microsoft's search engine no matter what.
If you change the search engine to something other than Bing, a second setting appears that controls the new tab search.
This is obviously a dark pattern to trick users (why would you want the new tab search engine to not respect your choice by default?), but the option exists.
Windows just keeps getting weirder. There's this regrettable dichotomy between (1) a rock solid OS core with great features like Hyper-V, PowerShell and exceptional back-compat, and (2) a crap, sluggish, inconsistent UI slapped on top, laden with ads, "Rewards" Points and tracking.
WSL2, power toys and hands down the best window management of any OS, I hate working on my MBP just due to the difficulty of managing different windows and aligning them on the same desktop.
Probably seems weird to you, but I've never got on with the Windows UI. There's too many things that steal focus. I've been XFCE for too many years now, but it doesn't change significantly that I find I have to invest time learning what's changed.
There used to be a 'tile windows' since windows 2.0 or something like that, but it did just that, splatted the windows to take up all the space.
One thing I like about X11 and Windows doesn't do it, is alt-dragging from anywhere in the window, last time I used Windows you couldn't move things around by holding alt and left clicking anywhere, you could only do that from the title bar, which means you can't slide the top of the window off the screen.
The other major thing for me is selection copy, if you highlight text, you can't middle mouse button to paste it, you have to ctrl-c first, which is just more steps.
I rarely get focus stolen on Windows 10. They now make it very difficult for applications to do this (see the allowed conditions here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... ). In contrast, focus stealing is a way of life on XFCE, and I just have to put up with it. The settings they recommend to fix it don't actually help.
Really? There's two programs I know of that will take focus and they're both authentication prompts. The sort of thing that cranks my handle on Windows were mostly from the browser and almost anything else.
With XFCE though, I'm quite happy with the level of focus stealing, things that seem to be justifiable are at the right level, like authentication prompts.
Out of interest, what are the things that take focus for you? Maybe we're running totally different sets of programs which might give me an impression that isn't warranted.
Long time XFCE user here. Steam will absolutely steal focus. I usually start Steam and then move over to something else like the terminal or web browser and multiple times during Steam's startup it will steal focus. I just want it to start up in the background. Aside from that, I agree focus stealing isn't a huge deal in XFCE. (XFCE 4.18, Debian trixie/testing)
Now you mention it, my kid has sometimes had problems with Steam where it has started a game and we can't easily leave the game. I presumed though that was a deliberate design so that your game has focus as that's the thing that's most interactive. Usually a pkill -f <game> is needed.
I've not noticed focus stealing outside of Steam. What is steam made from, it seems very browserish.
This topic is causing some self-reflection and wonder if I am the peculiar one who does different things and just not bumping into it, I mainly work from xterm, screen, mutt, vim and a lot of time in firefox. Perhaps this combination just doesn't start things that request focus, but when in MS Windows I noticed it a lot.
You're right about steam, but now I'm on a path of wondering...
This topic confirms that focus stealing is a thing in XFCE, I have some research to do!
The Office 365 message that it is unable to log into a resource (usually because your VPN has dropped, not unusual for home workers nowadays) doesn't even go into focus when it's supposed to be at this point.
I am baffled as to how that has been allowed to go on so long. It makes Office a trainwreck usability wise.
In case you hadn't come across it yet, there's a third-party piece of software called AltDrag [0] that lets you do it. It's kind of a must have for me whenever I have to use windows. Yes this should just be builtin
you can't slide the top of the window off the screen
You can use "move" in the system menu. Once activated, the arrow keys in the keyboard will move the window outside the desktop window, not sure if you can do it using the mouse somehow.
You can also use Win+Up arrow key to maximize the window, from there you can grab the title bar to drag it somewhere (preferably inside the desktop this time).
FYI -- on my MBP I use a program called Spectacle to snap windows around, and I now have no complaints relative to what you can do on Windows.
Development on Spectacle ceased[1] and it looks like the community may have rallied around an open-source program called Rectangle, which is open source. At least, judging from this single Reddit thread lol:
[1] Although when I search for it now, I see an update from 2023 on softonic? Although the original dev's github repo for it hasn't been updated in years. https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle
I use Rectangle and still have complaints about Mac window management. Rectangle itself is great, but it's discernably a patch over a bad window management paradigm, and the awkwardness underneath pretty regularly shows through.
As just one example—the dock is atrocious for a browser-centric workflow. I only ever have 2 "apps" open at a time, but I have 6 Firefox windows and 2 IDE windows, and remembering where I put a specific window (or even that I already have it open!) is a chronic problem. I know about right-click to show all, but the text that pops up is small (it's a context menu, not a first-class navigation element) and that doesn't help with the discoverability problem.
I'm sure that there are other apps to patch the other aspects of the system that irritate me, but if you have to install 4 third party tools to get something close to how good Windows is out of the box then I'd say OP has a good point.
I think this must be a matter of preference. I absolutely hate Windows’ window management. I waste endless time fussing around getting windows where I want them to be.
This happens every time I unplug my laptop from external monitors, or plug it in to external monitors (even if they’re the exact same model and configuration as other monitors I’ve previously used). It’s aggravating and distracts me from what I’m trying to do.
Whereas I never have any issues on OSX, always find my windows where I expect them to be, and spend a lot less time moving and rearranging them.
The two operating systems do have different approaches to window management and to me it sounds like you simply prefer Windows, whereas I prefer OSX.
At work I have a Windows laptop that I plug into a dock with two additional monitors. Windows correctly returns windows to the screen it was previously using if I unplug and then plug the laptop back into the dock. Is that not the desired behaviour?
*bad window management for you
Believe it or not, some people actually do like to have free moving windows and such.
Also you seem to be ignorant of a lot of features of macOS, like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth. Or swipe down from the trackpad on a Dock icon to show the windows of the app.
Anyway, YMMV as always.
Personally I find the window management atrocious not because of the way it was designed, which definitely works for me (and I hate the Windows’ one), but because of the bugs which they insist on never ever fixing…
> like cmd-tab, focus an app, cmd-up arrow to show the windows of the app, and so forth
It's not that I'm ignorant of these, it's that they're clunky for a browser centric workflow. The abstraction of an "app" is just plain wrong for the way that I and many others use computers these days, because one app (the browser) is home to most of the tasks I'm working on and already has its own second-level navigation in the form of tabs. The "app" layer means on Mac there are three levels of navigation to get to what I'm trying to do, which is too many.
What makes Windows (and most Linux DEs) better for the browser-centric world is that windows themselves are first class citizens—I don't have to pass through Firefox to get to GitHub.
Interesringly the default DE in MOST Linux distros is GNOME which does not do what you describe, instead it follows the MacOS approach of alt-tab going through apps and not windows. I agree it is frustrating though! Have recently moved back to Windows and their alt-tab going through windows was one of the things I liked. However Microsoft has sadly enhanced it to include groups of Windows if you have stacked them side by side. One step forward and one step backward. As is the norm for modern UX.
If you have it already, another alternative is to use BetterTouchTool and set it to override the behavior of the green corner button. For me it works just like Windows where there’s “minimize” on the yellow button and “maximize” on the green. I still use gestures like exposé but never have to worry about switching desktops or getting stuck in full screen.
On the opposite side, would you (or anybody) know of a program to show windows in a cascade/overview style, on windows? So for example have one or 2 “main” windows, and have some/all the other windows in a cascaded view in the background. I would think it would help productivity a lot.
(PowerToys doesn’t do this by itself, you have to select every window in place if I’m not mistaken.)
Out of curiosity, how many window managers have you used on Linux? I found some superior choices there but I do agree that Windows is generally ok with Mac being dead last.
Sorry for being off topic, but just tried powertoys based on your post, and holy cow! What an amazing piece of software. I particularly like the file unlocker feature, and the Windows implementation of Quick Look.
I have a question for you: If you make a Pie Chart with the time you send on each OS: Linux, Windows and Mac, what will be the percentages? Specially while you were young.
Of all the languages I speak, German is the more chaotic language by far. But most native Germans consider it the best/easiest.
For me the Windows management of Windows is horrible, but I spent like 90% of my time in Linux were I was young, even using things like "screen" that uses the command line and shortcuts to be the most efficient thing I have ever used (while requiring learning the shortcuts before becoming productive).
Today I use Mac like 95% of my time, control Linux machines with it and use Windows when the force of circumstance obliges me the 5%.
When I was young I was mostly using Windows. For the last 15 years or so it has been macOS. I made a number of attempts (sometimes lasting months) to use Linux but it never stuck.
My conclusion is that usability is mostly about getting used to how things work and a tiny bit of customisation. There are no significant usability differences between operating systems.
The _only_ thing that I have never gotten used to and that keeps slowing me down is that app switching (Cmd+Tab) in macOS is MRU while switching windows (Cmd+`, Cmd+Shift+`) within apps is circular.
I'm finding it impossible to remember whether I have to go forward or backward to get back to the window I'm looking for within an app.
I can really recommend yabai for window management. I have reached a nearly identical config between my work mac with yabai/xkhd and my i3wm-based linux workstation.
power toys is buggy. It has had this bug that shows on non-US keyboard layouts, and of course it will never be fixed because who cares about non-US keyboard layouts?
Meanwhile on KDE I have an easy option to swap caps lock and ctrl, without having to install some weird .exe file off github.
I have no experience with macOS, or trouble believing that it's even worse than Windows. That said:
I can't use WSL or PowerToys at work for (enforced) dumb policy reasons - this is possible because they're optional bolt-ons as opposed to integral parts of Windows.
PowerToys exists because the the base functionality is poor, and the contemporary PowerToys implementation leaves a lot to be desired.
And last but definitely not least, window management in Windows, with or without PowerToys, sucks donkey balls IMO, especially in heterogenous multi-monitor systems. Aggravated by the knee-capped taskbar. I mean, it's not like window management is great anywhere, but claiming that it's somehow good in Windows is rich.
Two anecdotes: starting Windows Terminal by clicking an icon in the taskbar (W10) creates a window that's not focused. W11 does away with the alt-space keyboard shortcut to open the window operations menu.
Can you clarify what you mean excatly. What you describe is possible in Windows out of the box. I think since Windows 7 or so. Or maybe your description is of a different feature I'm not familiar with.
It's the weekend so I can't confirm this with my work laptop but I'm pretty sure using arrow keys snaps windows in their predefined configurations (half the screen). And then the annoying UI asking what you want to do with the other half pops up. I could snap it to half the screen and then resize the window to it's original size but I shouldn't have to do that.
Many years ago, they used to charge a not inconsiderable amount for Windows. Given the trend towards making an OS cheap/free, I wonder is this some corporate response driven by a department somewhere that is charged with balancing the books.
That's the worst part (and I know that most people will never buy a license because they get it through their OEM or just crack it) but Microsoft are still happy to charge you £220 for a Windows 11 Pro licence [0] and shove ads in your face.
OEM licenses are not exactly free or cheap. I was perusing the local shops a couple of weeks ago and the same exact laptop without a Windows Home license is always $100 cheaper, no exceptions. More than that for Pro or whatever the fuck it's called. So most people will buy a license, they'll simply not be aware of it. How convenient for MS.
"OEM" licenses sold by retail is not at all representative of what actual PC makers pay, which is of course going to massively vary. I wouldn't be surprised if some manufacturers, especially those who have been flirting with Linux, have instead been paid to install Windows.
> The second all my games are fully compatible with Linux natively, I'm ditching
I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.
You will, whether you consciously realise it or not, switch to playing windows exclusive games the minute all your games run on Linux, hence you will never switch.
Yes it is. The Y axis is "Percentage of Steam users". The fact that the Linux percentage is increasing means that the the percentage of Windows users are decreasing. The graph shows a trend of migrating from Windows to Linux.
>I've been seeing this sentiment since 2001 at least. No one ever follows through; if they did we would have seen this already in the desktop stats.
There has been an inflection point crossed lately, because of Proton and the Steam Deck. Linux is at 1.95% market share on Steam today. A year ago it was 1.3%.
I think we are at an interesting reflection point. Desktop Linux is to the point where it does pass the grandma/cousin tests for usability/install. Games were one of the big items from a compatibility perspective. Combine that with Windows 11 not working on older, viable hardware... 2025 is going to be interesting.
Those of us who used it on desktop Linux helped drive the handheld, which is really accelerating compatibility. When Windows 10 hits EOL, folks got to go somewhere - and many are not going to toss out their hardware for new.
Microsoft are still happy to charge you £220 for a Windows 11 Pro licence...
You can buy Windows 10 Pro OEM licenses for less than 20€ online. I did just that for a familiar three months ago. The installation was validated and associated with the Microsoft account no problem.
Then you can "upgrade" to Windows 11 free of charge, if that's your thing.
NT was far more resource-demanding (i.e. "sluggish") than 9x due to all the abstractions - it's just the hardware that progressed so fast in a few years that it was kind of irrelevant.
That's true, NT was much more resource demanding but there were other mitigating factors too. Drivers were either inefficient and or badly written, the video driver imposed inflexible rules on software's access to the underlying hardware and its plug-and-play feature was brain-dead from the outset. Most of these problems weren't fixed until Windows 2000.
Incidentally, I've always thought W2K—taken all round—as the best version of Windows, it's the version with minimal dross and useless stuff and MS hadn't got into spying on users by that stage.
I feel like almost all software since roughly the advent of the CD-ROM, when distro size stopped being a major limit, has been in a race to outbloat Moore's Law.
The difference between NT and modern bloat (like electron) is that it was very much necessary bloat, the sort that makes computing safer and more reliable (running more things in user mode rather than with kernel authority, true multitasking), as opposed to abstractions that exist solely to boost productivity and make developers happy assembling their library lego blocks. But that 'bloat' made it too expensive in hardware requirements for the home user which is why the NT line had to exist separately from the 9x series until XP. And if anything, unfortunately, Microsoft kept making more compromises with NT that I wish they never did. NT 3.5 ran the graphic stack in user mode. They put it in the kernel for NT4 and only started backtracking on that sort of monolithic design with Vista. (Vista was a controversial OS but most of the architectural decisions they've made with it were the right ones and those decisions still live on in Windows 7, 8, 10 and 11).
IIRC in about 1989 NT 3.1 was a very solid an reliable system.
The problem was it did no do IP
It was mostly downhill from there.
I got my first Linux machine in about 1992 and lost touch
But keeping windows NT patched, and keeping it running IP reliably were incompatible for a while
Did not stop its wide introduction in my world as IP servers.
It was as if software managers did not know any other systems existed.
Linux was considered "a toy" because it was free, it was much more reliable than NT (as was BSD I hear)
Sun were the other option but I saw no one spending the money
It was buggy, unreliable, insecure NT servers all the way
Still is for some. Squeezing into a Windows instance on Azure, fifteen mouse clicks, three context switches, and you have emulated rsync... Still making money selling terrible software, but now as a service....
WinPE and other stripped-down unofficial "distros" of Windows do exist. Someone will try to run the Win2k shell on a Win11 kernel, if it hasn't already been done. Based on what MS has done with backwards-compatibility, I wouldn't be surprised if it almost "just works".
For compatibility mode, there's a bunch of old theming stuff. If you manage to crash a program in the right way, you can even get a Win2k-style grey-and-blue window to appear in some places, though it's hidden well.
This is the company that put the entire Windows 95 memory manager into later versions of Windows to keep compatibility, there are tons of old code paths still lying in wait for old software to reuse.
You can't use this stuff as your main UI well, it's no longer tested or optimised for that use case.
This is a great summary. Terminal and WSL2 were really nice additions to all of that other cool shit like hyper-v, sandbox, etc. But, I still rather just use Proxmox/Linux...
With five tabs open in Notepad, since they are placed in the titlebar, there remains only about 1 cm of titlebar by which I can grab the window to drag it around. This area is distinguished only by a short vertical pale grey line like a pipe character, because it's not cool to have a border around any interface element any more apparently. So I often drag a tab off the window by mistake and have to put it back and hunt for the small part that's actually the titlebar.
Then there's the way they put search into a fixed floating window, which when you search upward sits on top of the search result, obscuring it.
I sometimes think I’m the only person in the universe who doesn’t prefer tabs. I already have a way to manage multiple windows worth of content: my OS’s Window Manager. Why would I want every application I run to also implement its own custom window management—visually and functionally inconsistent from every other application’s custom window management?
I feel applications that do tabs are just like applications that do their own custom quirky File-Open dialog even though my OS provides a standard one.
They manage 2 entirely different contexts. When I want to check my mail, I know I just have to go to Firefox and hit the first tab; not cycle through 200 unorganized windows
Some window managers, such as Fluxbox, support "tabbed windows". You can group windows into one "superwindow" and then switch these in a titlebar. Maybe this is what the GP meant?
My number one grievance with Win11. Also, I think it's in the top 3 of all feature requests on Microsoft Feedback by votes. Yet, no movement. It feels so anachronistic to force the waste of space that is a horizontal task bar, in an age of wide (and still widening) screen aspect ratios. Microsoft's UX team is... not good at their job, to put it very mildly.
It’s weird right? 1. keeps me firmly on the platform, I find it a delight how often things “just work”. Run a linux app? Just works. Hook up some niche 15yo printer? Just works. Run a game/demo made 20 years ago? Just works. Even MS Paint very much still just works.
It all just works and then the perfectly good Mail app is forcing my mom to switch to the new Outlook, which is Mail, but messier, with ads. What?
I wish Satya Nadella would pull a Steve and yell at some people for this shit. It’s eroding trust in the company that they maintained for so many decades, that can’t be a good long term game can it?
Nadella probably cheers for more ads revenue, more Azure lock-in, more o365 subscriptions, more edge market share and more silly AI usage because those must be the KPIs at this point, and it doesn't really matter nor shows in those KPIs whether they grew from inherently user-hostile patterns or based on merit and quality.
Game made 30 years ago needs dosbox, an open source project, to just work.
Game made with directx6 20 years ago will render in CPU and just work but be so slow to be unplayable. Then you need to replace the .dll and make it link with an open source library that reimplements dx and converts the calls to the new API, so that it can actually render in hardware.
Yes, solitaire.exe still works. 3d games less so.
I'm full of games like star wars jedi outcast or so that no longer work on windows.
Or my personal disappointment: Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Feels like that ought to work on Windows 10, but I couldn’t get it to. If I remember correctly it did work fine on Windows 8.1 strangely enough.
Having been yelled at repeatedly by an exec, please don't really do this. It is never constructive. Even yelling by Steve Jobs was unwarranted. If you have to yell at people there is a bigger problem which must be resolved first.
What comes to mind are the Office subscription prompts that come up frequently with updates and the OneDrive, basically, ad that is in the settings app.
I think there are others, but I believe I've figured out how to turn most of it off.
They push lots of MS when setting up Windows. My most recent install had them try to bribe me to sign up for a gaming service with a free month. That was only one example I saw during the install process alone. Doesn't include the shit I find actually using Windows itself. My first few days using Windows was spent working out how to uninstall or disable so much crap.
The hoops you have to jump through to use a local account are a prime example of user hostility. Sure it’s technically possible, but only if you are power user that searches online and figures out how. That’s the general feeling I have with Windows these days, it is technically possible to get it to work the way I want, but it generally feels like I’m fighting an adversary. Sure it’s currently possible to win, but it’s definitely not a good feeling, and not moving in the right direction.
Note if you installed with a local account and expect Bitlocker to work: make sure to actually enable it. With a local account.
Bitlocker may state that it's on, but by default, it doesn't encrypt the drive unless you log in to a Microsoft account or manually add a key protector.
This is documented on a Microsoft site somewhere, but it's shit like this that make me wary of the "bypass Microsoft's shit" approach; the bypass methods often lead to behaviour that Microsoft never bothered to test and has side effects they don't bother to warn you about.
PowerShell isn't bad. It's a paradigm shift, but the concept and execution are god (not great, but good). I recommend you seriously give it a chance, it's probably one of the only Microsoft things I miss on Linux (other commenters, i'm aware I can use PS as a Linux shell, but that requires trusting Microsoft to keep it good.)
An object oriented language that takes the piping concept and improves it so one can actually form pipelines that make sense and not waste limited resources in just parsing text. However at the same time add more powerful and efficient text parsing tools. So one can actually script on the go with ease.
An object oriented language that is not C which is the language which most stubborn Unix developers usually reach for when their shell is too inefficient or too unwieldy for certain tasks and create even more security holes.
MacOS allows you to "hard click" (long click) a text selection in any application, which pops up a bubble that lets you do a web search for that phrase. But the search only launches Safari. I wasted at least a couple hours scouring boards and kext files, screwing with automation macros, trying to find a way to make this potentially helpful shortcut not open Safari, but instead open Firefox. Eventually I just gave up. Apple buried the decision so deep in the OS that it's basically impossible to change the default browser for search.
I utilize the 'select/highlight`–'search web` flow numerous times throughout the day. I am on iOS and, like you, was unable to force the 'search web` highlight selection option to default to a non-Safari browser. However, I use the functionality you speak of through a different invocation: 'select/highlight`–'define`–'search web`. Interestingly enough, this procedure — once a non-Safari browser is set as the default web browser for the iOS device and/or the specification of preferred search engine — redirects towards the user's browser (as well as search engine) of choice. I shall investigate these functionalities' behavior on macOS — id est, desktop — tomorrow possibly and will get back to you noduerme.
{Edit: deletion: " . . . ~such~ redirects . . . "}
All three work flawlessly for me. It takes either luck or looking up known incompatibilities before purchasing a laptop, but it's no longer 2008. Not buying hardware from certain vendors (Nvidia) helps improve your chances.
The lack of hibernation with an encrypted system is an annoying problem, though. There's a good reason it doesn't work, and the explanation has made me doubt other hibernation implementations, but it's annoying that bypassing this restriction is so hard.
> The lack of hibernation with an encrypted system is an annoying problem, though.
I don't understand. Hibernation to an encrypted swap partition (and even to a swap file on an encrypted rootfs) works normally.
> Not buying hardware from certain vendors (Nvidia) helps improve your chances.
nVidia just works if you accept the proprietary driver. On the other hand, with AMD, you get fun like this: https://www.wezm.net/v2/posts/2020/linux-amdgpu-pixel-format.... Of course, if you don't need high GPU power, use Intel integrated GPU, which works the best.
Last time I checked (three months ago?) you needed to patch the kernel to enable hibernation in kernel lockdown mode. I think OpenSUSE enabled these kernel patches by default, but that caused issues with secure boot.
Nvidia "just working" is a matter of luck and patience. I'm on kernel 6.7 on my laptop with the latest Nvidia driver and I'm booting with special Nvidia command line flags and running with carious Nvidia specific tweaks to make the thing not drain my battery the moment it boots up. Wayland support remains spotty on multiple compositors.
It'll probably Just Work with a whole bunch of extra power consumption on desktop, as it does on mine, assuming you don't particularly care about Wayland support. Wayland support works in that there is content rendered to the screen, but hardware acceleration is spotty and has weird performance issues that aren't present on Intel iGPUs.
You can make all of this work, but out of the box it doesn't.
Lockdown mode is a feature of Linux that's automatically enabled if it detects some circumstances. IIRC, it's a requirement for getting your stuff signed to allow you to do secure boot (without loading a manual secure boot key, of course). I would say it's enabled on most first-time Linux users' computers.
As for Wayland, I learned the hard way that modern distributions have removed the Wayland block on Nvidia drivers, and many will go Wayland-first after install. It's easy to switch back, but only if you know what X11 and Wayland even are in the first place. Of course distros have to try to push people to Wayland, because Red Hat and desktop environments are moving towards Wayland-only for new releases in a couple of years, but that's not without its unfortunate consequences.
In a few years, Wayland has gone from "doesn't even start" to "usable with a whole bunch of quirks and issues", I'm sure it'll work fine when the time comes to abandon X.org. But for now, the defaults are a bit weird. In practice, distros can pick between "some weird issues on Nvidia hardware" and "extremely limited touchpad gesture support" and it's tough to make a choice there.
Probably twice a day I accidentally bring up the emoji keyboard. Macos makes me grow wearier with each update. Eventually a straw will break this camels back.
I make that long click happen all the time by mistake trying to select text, all thanks to the phantom trackpad. I’m not sure why that was ever needed, the only time the trackpad would shatter on the old one from clicking it was when the battery was already swollen.
I kind of like the long click, but another thing I spent hours looking for was a way to increase the pressure needed for it. As well as to increase the haptic feedback for both kinds of clicks past the maximum setting in the system preferences. Couldn't find a way to do either. Some hacker I am.
Safari and Firefox does not allow other search engines also.
For Chrome/Edge I have added a lot of small shortcuts for IMDB, post tracking codes, geoip and many more "not search" things to search bar. Just keyword and %s in search url is needed.
Changing the search engine in Safari is limited to a very specific list though. Using Kagi as a search engine in Safari requires using an extension that intercept search engines queries and redirects through Kagi[1].
The resulting search shows up in the search UI, whether you have firefox configured for a seperate search bar or have their default of the address bar also being the search bar. This is the same as the extension method.
If your complaint is that they also show up in bookmarks, then ehh, whatever. Most people either don't use bookmarks or have a giant dumping pile. If you're one of the 1% that organizes them, just put all your search bookmarks in their own folder.
> you cannot add extra search engines in Safari without building your own extension
Safari automatically detects search fields on websites and adds to the smart address bar. E.g. if I type "discmaster myst" Safari will suggest to search discmaster.textfiles.com for "myst". And that's something it automatically picked up. No plugins or configuration needed, users don't need to learn how HTTP queries work.
On Firefox Android, you can also just go to into settings, search, manage search engines, + add search engine. So, basically, exactly where you would expect it.
I think on desktop it's just as easy? Can't you just right click on most submit forms?
> On Firefox Android, you can also just go to into settings, search, manage search engines, + add search engine. So, basically, exactly where you would expect it.
I would expect same in Desktop also. But in Desktop you have to add bookmarks to manage extra search settings.
If Mozilla is pissing other browsers all the time then why they do not fix it. Googles money does not allow easier search settings?
It's obvious you're not just seeking feature parity...you're being a contrarian for its own sake.
Keyword bookmarks have been a thing in Firefox since 1.0.x days and well before Chrome was officially released. It's an opinionated implementation that lives today as ~2 decades of deeply engrained tech debt. How do you even come off expecting Mozilla to operate at the same level as Google and its $1.7+ trillion market cap?? The level of entitlement in your remarks is simply beyond absurd.
Perhaps so. But they're too late the damage has been done. Unfortunately, they should have acted 30+ years ago. The need to regulate back then was just as obvious as it is now.
Classed and regulated operating systems differently to applications. For example, the rules and regulations for building highways are very different to those for building and regulating motor vehicles even though one depends on the other.
Microsoft would not have been able integrate Internet Explorer into Windows nor even the IP stack as these are actually applications. The whole world of security would have been different and more manageable not to mention much improved competition from other vendors.
It's not the same situation as back then.
1. They don't have the same browser market share at all.
2. They don't have the same operating system market share they used to either (specifically, they lost the mobile space - which is how majority of people in the world access the internet).
3. It's easier to use another browser now on Windows then back when it was at its worst in 00s (where IE was more or less part of explorer.exe / core of Windows).
Above can make a huge difference legally. Specifically your reference to the previous court case, which was built on point 1-2 above. Key word here being monopoly and how it's defined.
Apple lived (until a few weeks ago, still do outside EU) in a world where it's OK to have it basically impossible to install another (real) browser on it's biggest OS, or install any app of your choosing without their blessing (and a 10-30% cut on revenue!) for that matter.
It's complex for sure.
It's unfortunate imo that Mozilla/FF got squashed by Chrome, and also made some questionable strategic decisions in the last 10-15 years. Performance, simplicity, stability and keeping up with me web tech being key USPs of Chrome, compared to competition. Note that absent from that list is monopolistic abuse (even though Google has it's fair share of that as well). In other words, you don't win the browser war by simply using monopolistic abuse as a strategy, you need to primarily win on value to your end users. That's at least how it's been in the past.
"It's not the same situation as back then. 1. They don't have the same browser market share at all."
That's essentially irrelevant because (a) Microsoft complied with the Court's ruling and allowed other browsers to be installed without hindrance, that's not the situation now; (b) you're painting a picture as if Microsoft was disadvantaged by the situation now and thus it's unfair to impose such restrictions again this time. To that I'd add that in case you haven't noticed Microsoft has just passed three trillion in value, it's only second to Apple in achieving this milestone. Thus the changed situation hasn't disadvantaged it one iota.
I'd maintain that Microsoft has only managed this incredible feat because throughout its 48-year life it has consistently used unacceptable, bullyboy monopolistic practices at every opportunity.
Essentially, Microsoft's growth has been at the expence of competitors who haven't had the size and finacial power to stand up to its market dominance no matter how good their products were. Such bad behavior has screwed both the market and product development for everyone—small and medium-sized developers, hardware manufacturers and end users. Just about the only entity that hasn't been screwed by its unacceptable business practices is Microsoft itself.
The most significant reason for Microsoft's unfettered growth is that the regulators have been asleep at the wheel for decades—no doubt encouraged to 'sleep' by millions plowed into lobbying.
On the matter of Mozilla, I'm certainly not an apologist for the company, in fact over the years I've been very critical of Mozilla including here on HN. Yes, the dominance of Chrome from that other monopolist Google has had a lot to do with Firefox's downfall, but that said Mozilla has been shooting itself in the foot for decades. Why and how is pretty obvious and well known so I won't debate that here.
I'm not arguing whether Microsoft's behavior is good or bad (that's a long, subjective, discussion) - I'm arguing that from a legal point of view it's not clear cut that it's the same situation, as was suggested.
Company size is for example not considered (generally anyway) as relevant for whether a company has a monopoly/market dominance or not. This seems to be forgotten, and it seems few cares about why the definition is what it is (or even what it really is).
"I'm arguing that from a legal point of view it's not clear cut that it's the same situation, as was suggested"
Sorting out technicalities is the job of regulators and government. It shouldn't matter a damn if the situation is different. What's common and ongoing is that Microsoft's monopolistic practices are still in place and small and medium businesses are still being hurt, and users are still being taken advantage of.
We know what needs to be done to reign in Big Tech. If current laws aren't strong enough then it's Government's job to legislate to fix and strengthen them. It has yet to do that, and that it hasn't is the key problem.
What's needed is new law that makes employees just as responsible as the corporation would be, they, after all, are the ones who make the decisions.
If those who work for Big Tech knew their actions could easily land them in the slammer then we'd have a revolution in good behavior overnight.
> Sorting out technicalities is the job of regulators and government. It shouldn't matter a damn if the situation is different. What's common and ongoing is that Microsoft's monopolistic practices are still in place and small and medium businesses are still being hurt, and users are still being taken advantage of.
It should matter in this context because this entire thread chain was started with a reference to the 90s era monopoly challenges against MS. If the situation isn't the same then the old monopoly challenge really doesn't matter, sure it was the same corporation but it was different leadership with different employees working in entirely different industry and time.
We won't fix big tech with regulations and laws. That's hard enough when you're going after large corporations with massive legal and lobbying teams, see the cigarette and oil industries for example. When its a tech industry that changes on the order or months or years rather than decades, regulators have no chance of predicting what coning innovations they need to plan for or closing loopholes in regulation written for a fairly unique industry.
Sometimes it doesn't work for us to go crawling to big governments to drop the hammer and save us with yet more regulation that no one has time to read or comprehend. Big tech only has the power it does because we all choose to use their products. If we really cared, consumers could make real change without regulators by simply telling big tech to screw off and opting our of using their products.
Perhaps the monopoly law should be changed to adapt to multiple scales.
E.g. you shouldn't be able to use product 1 that has 100Y market in A to create any advantage for product 2 in market B if you know user uses competitor in B who's market in B is < 10Y (e.g. 10x less than market of product 1).
For example if you have 2B market in OS you should not be allowed to use OS to advertise your own browser to user who uses another browser with under 200M users.
That would also cover Apple exerting power over 50,000 installation apps.
And by "know" here I mean that if you know user is not using your product yet, you must check the condition or not be allowed to use the advantage (e.g. either you should see Chrome ads in Chrome, or Google cant advertise Chrome to Edge users).
How would a regulation like that actually be enforced?
Whenever a regulation compares against what you "know" it is usually pretty easy to just not look, or claim that you numbers were inaccurate, or that team A knew but team B which implemented feature didn't (potentially even claiming that's a privacy feature by protecting user data).
Even more difficult, the stats needed would be owned by the same party. I.e. Microsoft would be the one collecting and owning data of what apps a user already installed, and Google would be doing the same for any pertinent data related to Chrome use and advertising. Its effectively a black box to regulators, they would be asking MS for their own internal data that both sides already know must fit a very specifically defined legal requirement. This is exactly how VW got away with fudging the numbers on diesel regulations for so long.
That's why the knowing caveat. E.g. either you HAVE to advertise to your own users (so if your browser is already the default, you still have to show the notification to suggest to change), or you are treated as if you know, and then you can't advertise based on the 10x rule.
To put it differently you can't hide ad for Chrome users and then pretend you did not know others used FF.
How would the regulator know when you break the rules though?
I may very well be misunderstanding the idea here, but it still seems like it would come down to (for example) Microsoft being required to limit how they send user notifications/recommendations based on Microsoft's own internal analytics for user metrics.
For the Chrome example, the regulator would have to know how Google's proprietary ad targeting algorithm works to confirm that it doesn't target based on user agent or browser manufacturer. I'm not sure how the regulators would really be able to pull that off any better than regulators asking VW software for VW diesel emissions measurements.
That might be possible, I'd be really curious how. For something like data on what apps a user has installed, what hardware they're on, etc those data really would be first-party analytics.
Some things can be collected through third party sources, though that depends on those third party tools being used, not being blocked by a user, and on API access for those third party tools to collect the necessary data. I would hope such regulations wouldn't depend on regulating specific API design, but that could be necessary.
Well done to Mozilla for commissioning this report.
An interesting read that confirms what we always thought was happening.
We should encourage similar kind of reporting.
I really wish they'd go after Apple and Safari. Safari is basically the modern day IE. Whenever I do anything slightly weird, I'm fairly confident it works in chrome/Firefox and almost sure that it's broken in safari.
The fact that you can't test on Safari without osx is insane. Some bugs can be reproduced in other WebKit browsers (I test with epiphany) but some are safari only. Not to mention the fact that Safari is the only choice on Apple mobile devices.
I believe Apple is significantly worse than Microsoft in regards to browsers. I wish Mozilla would focus on them.
Once Chrome is allowed on iOS, then Firefox is dead. When they're no longer forced to test in a second browser by management, all the web devs will just check for a recent Chrome user agent and if it's not there they just say "install chrome to use this site", and we're back in the IE days. And then Google can stop paying Mozilla for search field defaults and then all of Mozilla's income is gone.
They won't. They already have given both Apple and Google pass when chrome was launched or when smartphones took of. Mozilla sees Microsoft as devil's incarnation while Google and Apple are the ally in their holy war.
I am saying this as a developer who was using Firefox since firebug v0.8 era.
I hope so. But a lot has changed, notably the financial power and sheer size of their counterparts.
We're talking about three of the most valuable companies in the world.
If someone has to use Windows, I recommend using a version like LTSC. I use this version of Windows 10 for video games and it lacks anti-features like taskbar search talking to the internet, the nagging to use Edge. Even then I discovered Edge to be running in the background recently.
If you leave Edge installed it will start automatically and run in the background by default. But that can be disabled in the settings.
If you don't intend to use Edge, I suggest you uninstall it before you give Windows internet access. Because after Edge receives some updates, it becomes harder to remove.
There's a great talk by Evan Czaplicki [0] that outlines the financial significance of browsers. It helps make sense of why Microsoft (and Apple) act(s) in this way.
> For example, Apple’s decision to allow alternative browser engines is only effective in the EU.
And don't forget it's been done in the most painful way possible. Yet, I've not seen any reports from Mozilla about ios' practices over the past decades, or the after.
And don’t forget Apple’s restriction on alternative browser engines in iOS and iPadOS is the only thing keeping most websites from becoming Chrome only.
If that would be true, the websites would only support Safari and Chrome. But it's not true and websites work just fine on Firefox - so stop peddling this crap to defend lockout of choice.
Mozilla probably cares more about the Chrome/Blink hegemony than Safari. If not for iOS requirements inflating Safari market share the browser market would be at least 90% Chrome or a Chrome derivative.
User hostile design patterns are everywhere these days... I wish that there were inspectors who were as powerful as health inspectors, empowered to make companies to fix their dark patterns.
I had to install Google Chrome on my (Mac) work laptop recently in order for the expo/react native debugger to work. Every time I open it I get a nag prompt to use it as the default (instead of Firefox)
I tried editing the raw config files with some values stack overflow suggested would disable it but it hasn't worked. Not a huge deal because I don't need to open it too often, but still annoying that there isn't a "don't ask me again" button
That's how chrome got their market share from firefox and internet explore shoving prompts across all google based services: search, gmail maps etc. Using strong dominance of other domain to gain foothold on another domain and later dominate over it. Sound familiar?
That's pretty interesting, because I don't ever get that popup when I open Chrome on Linux (usually for DRM reasons).
Edit: crap, I tried to see what happens when I do set Chrome as a default and now that I've switched the default back to Firefox, I get the popup on startup too. At least Firefox has a setting to disable the check, now I need to figure out how to make Chrome shut up again.
They've got ~$6000 (?) million from Google over the years. In a total distortion of reality Edge is the downfall of Firefox, not the reason they spent $6000M for 3% market share because they made every mistake they could make. Everyone else would be belly up already, but $600M/year makes it hard to die.
The fact that new browsers are popping up left and right (like Floorp) should tell Mozilla there seems to be demand for something that isn't FF.
(Written from FF with Tab Center Reborn as a vertical tab)
This allows alternative browsers to fork Blink/Chromium and strip out and remove any and all tracking, telemetry and data collection and produce a product that is privacy respecting by default.
Mozilla could easily do the same with FF --- but they simply refuse to.
Instead, every install of FF downloaded directly from Mozilla is unique. It comes with a unique identifier embedded along with lots of telemetry and data collection enabled by default --- including allowing Mozilla to install and run "studies" on your computer with no further consent required.
Edge has the unique position of being the first browser you have access to on a fresh Windows PC, so if it stands in the way of changing browsers, it's uniquely problematic.
The fact that 95% of people are trying to change to Chrome doesn't deny the merits of Mozilla's complaints. Remember, anything they put in the way of switching to Chrome will also be deployed against any other browser they consider a threat.
Dark patterns are certainly evil. I don't think they help the company in the long run.
However, I just went on a sort of browser deep dive for the best browser on windows and came away, surprisingly, with edge.
The requirements were vertical tabs, keep my chrome extensions, and got out of my way.
Brave, firefox, chrome, and vivaldi all had issues that couldn't be resolved in the UI. For example, firefox's tree style tabs still kinda requires that you keep the top tabs for some uses.
I didn't even consider edge at first. The rewards/shopping/bingwhatever integrations were disqualifiers. But apparently, you can disable all of them fairly quickly.
The pdf viewer is also better than chrome's with extended options.
I guess I also must admit the benefit of not fighting windows because I'm doing what they want.
We'll see if their next forced update reverts to their awful defaults but for now, I'm happy with it. At least until arc browser is available.
It's a real shame that Microsoft is so schizophrenia here. If they were to respect their customers, they would gain far more than they would lose.
The dev-focused arm seems to understand long term customer goodwill but the OS/browser team does not.
Same here. There have been one or two occasions when I've had to temporarily remove a few lines from my Firefox profile's userChrome.css file, but never the ones that hide the top tab bar. I've been using Tree Style Tabs continuously through two extension mass extinctions, since back when you didn't have to edit userChrome.css to get rid of the top tab bar.
Hiding title bar and tab bar were confugurable before. When you installed tree style tab it automatically made the tab bar hidden at that time. It was the most customizable dev browser.
Then they rewrote the the UI engine replacing XUL and made Firefox a more 'user friendly browser' copying all UI features of chrome sacrificing the customization options.
I am a heretic now who is running Windows 10 with WSL2 and edge as primary browser due the points you mentioned.
I’m also in a similar position, trying to choose a good browser after a fresh windows install. While edge is nice, the lack of containers alone is making me want to switch to Firefox. Not dealing with Google’s new cookie bs and not having a restricted ad blocker is just a bonus.
The most annoying attempt to foist Edge as a browser is the (new?) setting of a separate default browser for opening links in Outlook 365. Took me 10 minutes to understand why Edge opens. WTF.
Outlook has been a nightmare lately regarding this. It could be that it is my organization that pushed this, but links never open in the default browser, and get routed through a Microsoft link, which for some reason does not work on Edge. The only way to open links is to right-click them, copy, open browser, paste in address bar.
Nope this is intentional by Microsoft and the group policy settings to change this only work on the most expensive Office 365 subscriptions. You can change it manually in the settings though to open with the system default browser.
I used to despise Microsoft for exactly this behavior. I’ve been more impressed with them lately for their investment in AI and willingness to take risks bringing new products to market.
Unfortunately I’ve had the same problem with Edge after refusing to use any M$ browser for decades, I gave it a try to get early access to “Sydney” which was worth it all until they lobotomized it.
Microsoft at its best, gave us the Xbox by abandoning Windows and focusing on making a good product regardless of ecosystem ties (and using its enormous money/muscle).
Microsoft at it’s worst uses deceptive lock-in tactics on its own users and is still not above force-feeding: “if you want to use this product, you HAVE to use these other crappy products you don’t want.”
This is so strange to me for a company that has worked so hard to transform.
Transforming PR is different than transforming. I don't think Microsoft is any less scummy than it was in the past, it's just gotten better at recognizing that its audience includes both "normal users we can trick with dark patterns" and "gaming/dev enthusiasts who will lose it if we try to pull anything shady".
Edge is really nice. Power users can use enterprise policy management to disable the data exfiltration. Certainly would be nice for regular users not to get their data stolen to be mined for commercial purposes, too. But if you use Windows, there really cannot be an argument against Edge (with telemetry turned off), since you already trust Windows, the OS. Trusting the browser is not a leap of trust that one should scrutunize.
They're actually doing some pretty nice things with Edge despite these evil anti-competitive UIs/ad injections. I'd add telemetry to the list too, but since Mozilla does a lot of that they probably won't write up a nice doc like this on it.
It is possible to get a clean Edge build running via containerization + disabling some Windows background services + blocking outbound/inbound requests to various Microsoft + partner IP addresses. Big hassle though.
Are Mozilla going to fund the same study into Chrome’s anti-competitive practices or are the only going to do it for the browser makers that don’t fund them?
LTSC is cleaner out of the box and has much longer support, but otherwise it's not that different. And Edge on LTSC still does annoying things, such as adding a Bing search box on the desktop, for example.
Checking with MS, unless you’re a registered developer or enterprise customer, you can’t purchase it. LTSC keys aren’t supposed to be sold by the single, so any reseller doing that is breaking MS’s terms.
We need at least three parties with different browser engines with all of them at least having double digits percentage user share to prevent another IE5/IE6 mess. It doesn't even have to be on the same platform, one platform with one engine also works, as long as there are other platforms with other engines.
Point being: these researchers were chosen by, and paid by Mozilla to do this. The researchers have a strong incentive to be biased; to leave out details; to p-hack. Though they claim to be neutral, no human is capable of being unbiased, especially when his paycheck depends on it.
I have nothing but utmost respect for Mozilla and these researchers, but the paper needs to be read not as facts, but merely conjectures, to be verified by other more neutral parties.
I use Firefox as my daily driver though the browser has an increasing amount of annoying stuff. It's added a VPN, some sort of email relay, and other random popups I never asked for.
One of the most egregious things is the insistence on using the Bing start page. You have to install an extension to have your own start page (in fairness most browsers are like this these days).
However, lately Edge just magically stopped letting new tab redirect work. At least it loads a blank page, but it is annoying. Microsoft seems hell bent on preventing user control all over their client ecosystem. The same extension works fine in Brave and Chrome - so it is definitely something they did.
Because I don't like Firefox and dislike anything to do with Google. Google also plays all sorts of dirty tricks to try and get you to download Chrome. I primarily use Windows because I get Windows plus Linux. For example, I have Ubuntu and Nix running through WSL. Apple also plays dirty tricks and has all sorts of nonsense, they're just better at getting away with it.
In general, I just use the browser that's "native" to the platform. On Windows I use Edge, on macOS and iOS I use Safari, and on Linux I use whatever I feel like at the time (Edge, Firefox, or Chrome). At the end of the day, features are effectively in parity, so I just don't care that much, and right now I use Edge on Windows and Android. Edge does have some nice features though. It doesn't keep me wanting.
You can go read the Edge feature list if you're bothered by it. For one, I don't tolerate the nonsense. It can all be disabled, so I disable it. Secondly, I don't think Edge is the "best" browser. I don't think there is such a thing, and I didn't compare it to others.
Things that I like are the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen for checking downloads and websites (which has caught me, e.g., because Imgur packaged malware when I downloaded an image I had uploaded to my own profile) in addition to the built-in Microsoft Defender, collections, the web capture feature which makes it nice to be able to capture a screenshot of an entire page, the tab grouping, browser casting to another device, workspaces, and the syncing that actually works. My password manager also integrates quite nicely. Now, before people respond with "but Chrome/Firefox does this" or god forbid "you can do all that in Emacs", I never made a comparison. They probably have similar and also features that separate themselves. I just said Edge is a good browser, which it is, underneath all the marketing and advertising shenanigans that Microsoft is idiotically throwing around within Edge. The default Edge is indeed a very annoying browser. But, like I already said, underneath all that is a quite good, professional browser that makes it easy to do real work., and it's not all that much work to disable all of that.
It has specific security mitigations that apply on Windows. It has Super Duper Secure Mode (JIT disabler per-website). It has better battery life than Chrome. It looks nicer than Chrome and it has much better vertical tabs than Brave or Firefox.
I generally like the Microsoft stack but I cannot wait for them to be hauled back in front of congress over these shenanigans. They will have earned it.
Yeah, my problem is on my devices I set a custom start page to something hosted on my NAS device's internal web server. Nothing fancy, just a simple HTML page with some links and a little javascript.
It's surprising how much time such a little thing saves me, compared to trying to wrangle the default browser start pages into something usable.
Workspaces is the first instance of synced tabs in a browser that actually works for me.
A lot of nice features are included in the browser, that maybe they are in other browsers now, but that hasn't always been the case. I was a Vivaldi user prior to switching to Edge, but here are some things I like:
- Tab groups. Vivaldi has this also, and has better tools for collapsing tabs by host
- Some of the built-in features are nice. QR code, send to other devices, split view, capture & markup, easier profiles.
- Bookmark bar has a per-bookmark option to hide title. Doesn't delete the title, so you can still use it for search. But this makes a really handy app bar.
- Probably not true, but I expect it to be better optimized for Windows vs other browsers
- Cross-platform w/ workspaces is great. I use a mac for personal and windows for work. Can't use Safari on Windows, and Vivaldi wouldn't sync tabs (at the time)
- I expect Microsoft to integrate AI features in early and well, and I want to be on the cutting-edge to see what AI has to offer.
I agree, I hate all the tracking BS also, but I turned a bunch of things off and the rest is probably a wash with everything else tracking me anyways.
I really recommend you fire it up and give it a try. You're sure to be surprised, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
Edit: Feature that I'm missing most from Vivaldi - the speed dial page was just amazing, running through bookmarks. I've mostly supplanted by using the bookmarks bar, but it's still not a perfect replacement for me.
Native Vertical tabs. Google Chrome doesn’t even have viable extensions for this (and yet brave and edge have it native).
(My oft spoken rant)
Horizontal tabs are useless if you have more than 8 tabs open at once. Or if you are one of the very few that has a monitor with more vertical pixels than horizontal.
Also, Safari’s vertical tabs implementation is weak whereas Orion’s is workable.
How about for people where having to log in to search is a nonstarter? Has a method to be able to take payments without the ability to track the users been invented yet?
If you are not comfortable with trusting their claims of not saving search history(which is very reasonable not to belive so imo), you don't have to use it. They also take Cryoto so if you think crypto is .. a thing, you can do that.
Anecdotally, I haven't seen any notable difference between the enterprise edition I have at work and the pro I have at home. I don't use Windows that much, actually, so I'm fine with Edge. Even so, I get the feeling that every other day it's trying to get me to "improve my experience by using Edge" or some such.
The best part is the "let's get you connected" or whatever crap it says when you first start it. I often connect to fresh VMs over RDP, so it's always a joy to get to sit through the crappy stuttering animations just so I can tell it to leave me alone.
There's something worse: only the enterprise edition respects certain group policies which it doesn't in the pro, all related to default application settings and such. Same with Office 365 subscriptions, you need some higher level than for example business standard to have it honor the "open links with system default browser" group policy. Unfortunately not covered in the Mozilla report.
If they were a non-biased actor they would commission a study across all systems, not just what's convenient for them and Google. They are more and more ridiculous by the day and deserve their tiny market share.
Why does it matter whether they're biased if they're correct? Plenty of short sellers are biased (massively so) yet that doesn't necessarily undermine their analysis.
Well, of course we use Pocket if the native browser bookmarking function doesn't save the full text of the page for search. Why can't we have the tiniest improvement for bookmarking in browsers in 25 years? It's like they took an oath to never improve it.
Mozilla receives money from Google, so I'd take whatever they say with a pinch of salt.
Right now, the only serious alternative to Google Chrome is Edge, and if Firefox became too good or threatened Google in any way, Mozilla may see the money flow stop.
I wish Google started innovating again, and that Firefox offered a good and competitive free software browser, but reality is what it is.
So I've moved from Windows to Linux, but I keep using Edge, because it's a good browser (vertical tabs etc)
I can't reproach to Firefox that it's refusing to bite the hand that feeds, but the last time I tried it, there were other issues:
- it was prefilled with icons for facebook and twitter (bit let's say people who switch may be lost without these icons)
- it keeps trying to push pocket to me (no excuse for that)
- if had the feature for antitracking multi-account-containers, but didn't push them
- it lacked advanced anti tracking (ex: fixing the canvas size, the fonts etc)
I'd prefer Firefox with a focus on privacy and antitracking to Edge cool new features, but I think Microsoft has both a financial interest and the technical capacity to protect me from google panopticon while also delivering cool new things.
I don't like Firefox interface including its lack of innovation (edge has tab groups, split screens), and how the only redeeming point that could make me consider Firefox (privacy) is not put front and center.
I will keep checking Firefox now and then, but I don't see much chance of improvement as Google money keeps Mozilla warm, comfortable, and also totally disconnected for what its potential users would like.
They've really made it almost impossible to use as a privacy-respecting browser that lets you pick your search engine. There are a very large number of "on by default" settings that I had to change to turn of things like "Microsoft Rewards" and "creator recommendations."
The default search engine selection in buried in the settings under "address bar search." Even after you change that there is still an un-changeable page that comes up on new tabs that searches with Bing / Copilot, and other various ways to trigger a search that use Microsoft's search engine no matter what.
Also, whatever search engine you use, Edge will send your seaches to MS unless you turn off another "on by default" option.
And then, assuming you've managed to set everything up how you want it, MS will hit you with prompts after various updates to do things like return your default search to Bing.
Together, it all really feels egregious.