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. 😂
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You mean the browser that literally states in their privacy policy that they assign an id to your device and send a ping every 24 hours containing this id and some other metadata including a part of your IP address with which they perform a geoip lookup to approximate your location?
Yes, btw, you know that any site can do this right?
Which they’re planning to remove
I’m not sure if I understand this article correctly but as far as I can tell, they kinda contradict themselves. While they talk about not collecting anything (which I understand as “we disable phoning home in its entirety”) they later talk about removing the id and still wanting to get the same information as before minus the id. While I appreciate the move, I have two problems with it:
- The headline is imo misleading because while they technically won’t track you, they’ll still force you to send some telemetry data, leading directly to problem two,
- You’ll still not be able to opt-out entirely like, for example, on Firefox
Certainly not ideal, but most browsers do similar or worse (though apparently not Brave): https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9374407. I do think it’s worth it in spite of that. Certainly better than Edge.
I always thought it was hilariously pointless, does that count?
The tab is kinda cool, but I think I’d favor softened (not hardened, lmao) Librewolf, because I love the logo and the skin.
Probably a godsend if you’re a web dev. No more rebooting or running a second PC/VM for compatibility checking.
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.
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!
isn’t it just chromium though?
Yes it is, but with extra Microsoft!
As long as Vivaldi is available on Linux I don’t see a need for it, same engine but better features.
As a browser it’s fine, but Microsoft asking me to use it every 0.001 seconds really turns me off it.
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.
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.
Yep, I use for Xbox cloud gaming on steam deck.
Just wait until Microsoft releases a .deb of Windows Terminal.
Powershell is already available for Linux
Shell != Terminal
Well I guess if you need scripts to work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment that makes sense. On the other hand the few times I have to touch powershell it’s so verbose and cryptic at the same time, so I think I’ll stick with bash personally.
As a PowerShell expert, I can confirm it is suuuper verbose and yet cryptic. It’s a real shell, much better than it’s predecessor, but still with plenty of bad decisions in its design and implementation. My theory is that they only watched a 1-hour presentation on Bash before spending a weekend designing PowerShell.
It also plays really well with .NET if you are using that.
In many ways, Linux is the premiere .NET environment now.
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.
Bullshit. Even the flatpak is not sandboxed very much. If you sandbox it totally then maybe. But I dont know.
Does Flatseal not allow to micromanage any Flatpak’s sandboxing and permissions?
I’ve used it just to access Bing Chat, which has become my go to AI chatbot for a couple of reasons: 1) you theoretically get access to gpt 4 without paying 20 dollars a month, 2) it cites it’s sources, and 3) it can create images via DALLE from within the chat (which is handy, you can chat with the AI to help you think of an image prompt, the just say “ok make an image based on that description”). Other then that, i use Firefox at home. At work our choices are chrome or edge, so I use edge because of bing chat and I kind of like the layout better. It feels like choosing between buying something from Amazon or Walmart, which terrible corporation do I hate more in a given moment.
FYI you can use Bing AI in Firefox by spoofing the user-agent header
I don’t know why this is funny to me but the fact it’s AI being accessed and it can be spoofed with the UA header 🤣
if they wanted to employ full browser fingerprinting they could
There’s a Bing chat extension for Firefox and Chrome. I haven’t tried the image stuff but I assume it would work just the same. I think it’s a 100% artificial antifeature that it “requires” Edge.
MS Edge Has a superior PDF editor with very good workflow for textboxes, pen input support. I use it just for editing/annotating PDFs.
How most comments are either “I use X anyways” or “Edge seems to be a decent browser”
It is not. Has no tracking protection at all and itself tracks you a hell lot.
Its just a browser, no need to be tracked, for what in reverse? The same with Chrome, I dont get it?
Here is some actual MITM traffic analysis. Use Firefox Translate to translate.
https://www.kuketz-blog.de/microsoft-edge-datensendeverhalten-desktop-version-browser-check-teil4/
Yes, started using Edge on Linux few months ago exclusively for free GPT-4
Vivaldi can acess the bing chat by pretending to be Edge.
The browser version of chatgpt is based on v4…
But its NOT at all capable of the same responses.
This. And MS rewards.
Also, running the flatpak version.
Yes. I’m mostly developing a website, and testing on another browser is necessary every now and then. But that is my only use reason.
My main browser used to be firefox till tw9 weeks qgo, but it started to be buggy so it’s LibreWolf now.
Yes, because I am forced to use M$ Teams.
and it doesn’t work in firefox
dies of cringe
MS Teams work in Firefox over here.
Joining calls doesn’t work for me, tried it again a couple of days ago.
Discord, Jitsi, Google Meet, Nextcloud Talk and everything else works fine in Firefox, only teams refuses to work.
Strange. The other day I had a call on Teams with a customer and had no problems using Firefox 117.0 on NixOS, but I recall that some months ago some features (like microphone and screensharing) where unavailable.
Maybe Microsoft hasn’t rolled out the update in your region/org?
My org is slow to get updates, that might be it
edit: tried call from M$ Teams today and got the popup saying :
Try a different browser This feature isn’t available yet for your browser. Try the web app with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or switch to the desktop app.
And then a download link
I’m on FF117 on Fedora (F38)
Second edit:
changing User-Agents worked to remove the popup, but crashed FF instead
That’s very strange… Submit a big report then.
You could use the msteams flatpak
