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MS Edge browser wants really hard to stay
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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I'll be honest, there was a time when Edge was a really nice browser. Probably the best of the chromium browsers. It had an excellent reader mode, impeccable PDF viewer, and a few small quality of life tweaks that actually improved shopping, privacy, Etc. But then Microsoft did what Microsoft does and filled it with bloat, needless features, an unclosable assistant, and ever more aggressive tracking.
In a year, they'll abandon it and rebrand it the new Bing browser, and the cycle repeats
Firefox has a really nice reader mode, it will soon get a much better PDF viewer and it doesn't come with much bloat. You can also use LibreWolf to fully minimize bloat in Firefox and enjoy the additional privacy benefits.
That's why I switched back to Firefox. In the end, I always switch back to Firefox.
I love your combos in Melee
PDFs in web browsers shouldn't be a thing.
Why not?
If windows had a half decent PDF viewer like every other platform we wouldn't need PDF.js
Security and Resources.
they are yet another attack surface for vulnerabilities. Modern browsers are super heavy on resources. I don't want to open a bloated browser to view a PDF, thanks.
Yeah, I'm a browser nerd. I love seeing what's out there, testing different features, etc. So I'm usually jumping between two browsers in addition to my daily driver at any given time. I used Edge as a secondary browser for a few months when the MacOS beta became available and as far as performance is concerned it was a legitimately good browser. You're also right, it had some nice features of its own that made it worthwhile as a Chrome alternative (assuming the obvious privacy issues were not a concern for someone, it was at least a decent lateral option to consider.)
By the time I eventually got around to revisiting Edge recently I was disappointed to find they've made an absolute mess of it. It's the most bloated piece of crap on the market.
I only started using Edge because people were saying it was the only way to get true HD on Netflix. Now it's a secondary browser, and I can't say I like it much.
Have you tried Thorium? I've heard about it but not tried it.
Not the guy you're replying to, but I have been using Thorium for the past couple of weeks. It's pretty nice, kinda like what Edge was before going to shit for the past year or so. But being a Chromium browser, it eventually will be hit with the ManifestV2-no-more hammer. The maintainer said the best he'll be able to do is use some patches to keep ManifestV2 active through enterprise group policies, but it's expected google will eventually remove the ManifestV2 code entirely, at which point he said he's not going to be able to maintain a fork to keep ManifestV2 in.
I dislike Brave for some of its sketchyness in the past, and the other Chromium forks haven't made clear guidelines on what they're going to do when ManifestV3 is made the default, so I'm bracing because I think I'm going to be forced to go back to Firefox because of AdBlock shenanigans.
uBlock Origins should still be fine for me because I barely allow sites on a permanent basis (temp usually). And it just means more frequent extension updates rather than background filter list updates happening daily. I only really use Chrome Portable for one laptop. My main home desktop PC is running Firefox with Chrome and Edge as fallbacks if some sites struggle.
Except the tracking bits. Like Chrome, but worse.
It's funny that a lot of this is people with bullshit jobs trying to justify their existence. A company this big gets bloated internally with staff - especially middle management - that will manipulate information to prevent themselves from becoming redundant, so they will insist that their specific project is super important and they absolutely need every engineer working for them, because their prestige and pay are connected to how many people they manage. So then your software fills up with useless junk until the problem gets so bad it can't be ignored. There's a big internal shake-up and products get rebranded but most of the organisational bloat remains, so the cycle starts again.
You know, there was a time when people used to go to sears for the good stuff and to Kmart too. Then they screwed up big enough among their competition and now there may be like one or two of those places still open somewhere behind a MacDonalds on a refurbished MatCo truck that used to be a Taco truck too.
I can't wait for the day Microsoft is finally just some shitty ass UPS truck painted over with their logo still showing a little and three guys in it repairing the last known laptops to ever run windows. I'd adopt a dog just to walk him by and let him pee on the tires.
Microsoft, you've done everyone wrong too many times one last time.