I recently discovered that you can get Microsoft Edge for Linux (🤢🤮) and am curious… does anyone here use Edge for Linux, or have you ever? What was your reasoning for using it?
EDIT: Well, you all have provided some interesting perspectives I hadn’t ever considered. Including one which means I’ll have to install Edge, so… thanks, I guess. 😂
I use Edge daily for work. Everything it Office 365 and there is of course no Outlook client or Word or whatever on Linux. So I use the web version for everything. So I might as well have Edge to do the Microsoft since surely MS must make sure their stuff works on their own browser, right? (right??).
I also use the PWA version of Teams since the native client doesn’t really work well and since somewhat recently is also “officially” unsupported.
Anyway, it keeps the MS stuff separate from my normal browsing with Firefox and I’ve disabled JavaScript in Edge for all non-MS stuff. It works pretty well. Took me some battles to get rid of the Bing sidebar but they finally made that an option you can set.
That’s how I use it too, but I was surprised to see that it doesn’t have syncing of bookmarks, history etc yet!
But wouldn’t Chromium be less telemetry then?
This is the reason I use it too.
I first installed it when the Teams web client stopped working properly in Firefox. I installed Edge, and it worked well. Also noticed Teams in Edge allows me to turn on background blur, where that was disabled on Firefox and Chrome in Linux. Then I tried PWAs, and found the Edge support for installing and running PWAs is second to none, so now I run Outlook 365 and Teams as PWAs.
Firefox is still my primary browser, but I don’t use Chrome anymore. Edge has become my chromium-based browser of choice. Somehow Microsoft has built a better Chrome than Google does.
Try installing a User Agent switcher into your browsers and then fake your browser ID. FF works fine with Teams, Exchange and M365 - I have been an IT consultant installing or using all of that lot for over two decades.
I too have a favourite browser. It used to be FF up to about 15 years ago (v2 or so) then Google were cool and I went all in on Chrome. I then went Chromium. I actually started out with telnet but that’s another story.
A couple of months ago I finally dumped Chromium and co and went back to FF. Biggest win for me was a slightly less opinionated SSL experience. That needs some explaining:
I run a lot of IT and that means a lot of SSL certs. Mostly I use Lets Encrypt if I can as well as the usual suspects. Sometimes a site does not need SSL at all. Googles browsers are very VERY opinionated about this: “Thou shall not use thy browser password manager with self signed SSL certs”. FF has a slightly less opinionated “Thou canst TOFU and thy password manager will work”. I spend a lot of time pissing around with uploading CA certs to group policy objects and copying them to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates and getting the machines to trust them. On Arch we use /etc/ca-certifictes etc and so on and so forth. I also have to deal with Teams - FF works better now than Cr browsers
I’ve returned to FF after a very long time and I don’t regret it at all. I run Arch actually!
Same here. Work allows BYOD, so I use my Linux laptop for work stuff. I use Edge for accessing all work stuff and running M365 PWAs. I especially like how Teams in Edge runs so much better than the standalone Electron app, which is horrible.
Damn, this thread just got me to install Edge for a better Teams experience.
I really respect this strategy but I could never get past one personal obstacle: what do you do if you want to click a link, say from an email? Do you switch browsers and copy paste the link? Or do you delve into the link in Edge? What if you eventually reach a website you wish you were logged into on Edge, but are already in Firefox?
This is a very frustrating limitation of every PWA implementation I’ve seen. They need to respect the default browser setting for external links!
Yeah that is annoying. I just copy the link and paste in Firefox. I don’t ever need to go back I find since I only use Edge for MS365 stuff.
In my opinion no proprietary browser is worth using.
Chrome isn’t better in any way than Edge, as both don’t respect it’s users privacy and decisions (dark patterns, etc).
I agree.
If a browser ain’t open source, I ain’t gonna use it and neither should anyone else.
I use Edge daily–trying to use mostly non-proprietary software, but when I need to annotate a PDF, Edge just works. It’s no drawboard PDF, but it’s free and runs on Linux!
What’s wrong evince?
I’ve love both Firefox and Okular (KDE’s evince), and both “technically” support PDF inking, but the experience is just subpar to what Edge offers now for notetaking and reviewing articles. Xournal++ is the gold standard and fully supports my Surface Pen, whereas Edge does not recognize pressure or the eraser. However, I work with a lot of embedded files (Logseq), and the fact that Xournal++ cannot bundle a PDF in a single file and instead needs a reference, plus the fact that PDF is a universal file format, makes Edge the most enticing option for now
Ahh I see, I hadn’t realised you meant note taking with a pen. Glad that it works for you. And thanks for ignoring my somewhat caveman-esque typo.
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But badly. If you write some text and reopen the file later, you can’t edit the text you just wrote
As a browser it’s fine, but Microsoft asking me to use it every 0.001 seconds really turns me off it.
It only asks you to use it on windows or MS platforms. I hope you can see the issue now. I don’t use arch btw.
I wouldn’t know, since MS’s incessant badgering has made me 0% likely to ever install it on any of my linux machines.
I was all over Edge when it was in beta. Since release though it’s just become bloated with Microsoft’s shit. Not to mention in Windows Microsoft has a fucking hard-on for making it the default browser. Even if you don’t, Outlook defaults to using it regardless.
I use edge on Ubuntu via the snap.
It lets me use a very specific website that doesn’t work in Firefox.
It also lets me play Xbox cloud games on Linux.
Otherwise it’s Firefox soon the way.
I can’t remember for sure but I think that I got Xbox cloud games working on Firefox before with thr user agent switcher back when I had it, it also works well for those sites that don’t work in Firefox sometimes.
That’s a YMMV thing though because sometimes the sites just genuinely don’t work in Firefox rather than just being blocked because they haven’t tested it
I don’t use it as its proprietary and spyware
I tested it out bc I thought I’d need it to get teams running for school, but it turns out we’re only using teams’ video calls so Vivaldi works too. Edge is fine I guess? I dislike that it’s chromium and I dislike microsoft but it’s good to know edge works fine, in case I need it for some reason at some point. I still uninstalled it when I realized I didn’t need it.
Normally, I use firefox for normal personal browsing and vivaldi for school (since some sites we use work much better on chromum, and it’s nice to have that separation anyways).
Probably a godsend if you’re a web dev. No more rebooting or running a second PC/VM for compatibility checking.
isn’t it just chromium though?
Yes it is, but with extra Microsoft!
Na, edge users don’t file bug reports 😂
Just two years ago I had someone complaining that my website didn’t work in Internet Explorer. By that point the library I was using didn’t support it anymore but the old bat (really bitchy lady) refused to switch.
So I ended up blocking the entire user-agent with a “this browser is not supported” page that explained you need to download Edge because IE is end of life. Really hated to do that (not a fan of UA sniffing) but that was the only thing I could really do.
At least you can take comfort that you probably contributed to saving her from some ie malware in the future
Should have redirected to FF tho
Agreed, but as a big Safari fan I’m not keen on forcing my choice onto users. You’re right, Firefox is a huge win privacy-wise but since it was a business application and they’re clearly on Windows I decided to “respect” the OS and software she was currently running by linking to Microsoft’s support article on the matter.
Also, this was before Edge got super creepy. I think it was around the time it first came out.
Then that’s understandable, of course
But knowing users she probably went with Chrome 🤣
They are the bugs!
The only possible use case I can think of, but I’d still want to restrict the thing to its own VM out of paranoia.
It has a slightly better privacy policy compared to google chrome while fully supporting progressive web apps on Linux. Edge is also very much so more efficient in terms of system resource utilization. It also has high quality native built in translation which I need. All of this means I use Edge as my PWA browser.
Chromium lacks native translation support. Firefox PWA support is not good. Edge was the least bad option for me. 🤷♀️
Brave has PWAs, but I’m not sure about the translation support
True. But brave is run by a crypto advertising company. Their business model is advertising and crypto tokens. I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.
I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.
Why trust either? #firefox
He literally explained why he doesn’t use Firefox.
Because firefox’s PWA behavior is not as I wish…
What I wish is a firefox fork dedicated to PWA. It should be Privacy first and as intuitive to use as it can. Best would be, if it was designed like an app store.
Called PWApp-sore, I guess
Sadly I have no time to (learn) develop(ing)
How is edge more efficient? It’s literally chromium
When it initially came out it actually seemed pretty great. I’m as anti-Microsoft as they come but I had to check it out.
But yeah, these days it’s pure trash. It was fun while it lasted.
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Chrome is basically Chromium+bloat so this doesn’t surprise me.
And Edge is chromium + Microsoft Bloat.
One could argue using it on Windows means only allowing M$ to spy on you, theoretically. Though I would not be surprised if M$ uses a custom version of Chromium including Google trackers, so the opposite of degoogled chromium.
With the same amount of tabs with the same sites Edge uses fewer resources. I think Microsoft did some fine tuning or something. It’s not just just me that sees this either.
This is a 2 year old link but it shows the difference. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-comparison
Based on.
I use firefox and used email and most of my things on google, but after 2023, I had an abandoned outlook and start to use for Sync on Edge and etc
IDK, seems a decent browser, a lot need some corporate browser and microsoft going to cloud, at least it’s better than going to windows entirely for a lot of people kekw
Installed to use bingGpt. Never use it. But somethis it get some updates.
But the only reason for Edge ever to exist was to download Firefox.
So do I need to download edge to download Firefox? O.o
flatpak install firefox -yNot anymore. Not with Winget.
Ooh, thanks for pointing that out! I haven’t used it, but now I will start installing it for every colleague’s Linux user when I get the chance, just to mess with them. Might even change their bash’s prompt to the DOS one.
(These edge installs of mine will probably account for half of all edge on Linux installs ever, btw)
No… I don’t want to use a browser made by Microsoft. They will turn it to shit as soon as they can get away with it, and I’m happy with Firefox.
I use Edge on Linux as my user agent in Firefox on Windows just so I can give some engineers a laugh.
