Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge

I set up a new media PC and used Windows 11 because it works best with the chipset / graphics card. Wow was I surprised when modern Windows is like malware - just endless dark patterns, nags, pop ups, it’s like a Buzzfeed blog post in terms of stuff I ignore and ads in my face. Unbelievable!

Maybe someone should dig out the EU browser bundling anti-trust case Microsoft lost in the early 2000s and enforce it.

I can agree with this. Everywhere you look in windows you have Microsoft screaming EDGE. It's not enough to use their OS, Email client, Office apps, and gaming system. No we have to use their browser too.

&gt; <i>It even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome. [...] Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, there&#x27;s the recent rise of Bing Chat. There&#x27;s a reason why I use it every day on some of the best laptops I review</i><p>Then later,<p>&gt; <i>Microsoft needs to make Edge better instead</i>

Why does Microsoft even care about having a browser? I can see the need for a rendering engine within Windows for various tasks, but do we really need a Microsoft browser, especially yet another Chromium browser?<p>If they do feel like a browser needs to be bundled, why not just add a minimalist, privacy focused browser. The goal should be to have tech savvy people tell friends and family to &quot;Just use Edge and you&#x27;ll be fine&quot;.<p>It is just to drive people to Bing? If that&#x27;s the case, just promote Bing, it&#x27;s a good search engine.

Yes and with Bing too. I own some stock so have incentive to root for them, but the products are frankly just meh. Bing Chat is cool but worse than ChatGPT. Edge is cool but worse than Firefox. And Bing is cool but worse than Google.

I keep hearing &quot;Edge actually isn&#x27;t bad anymore&quot;, but as long as Microsoft continues to try and jam it down my throat at any conceivable opportunity, I will continue to refuse to even consider it.<p>Very few things piss me off more than the other Microsoft products that feel the need to override my default browser and open pages in Edge instead. And on top of that, last time something launched Edge instead of Firefox, I was greeted with an inescapable fullscreen page that hid away the other browser tabs (i.e. the page I was trying to view) until I clicked through their idiotic &quot;welcome to edge&quot; bs. Sometimes lately it really feels like Microsoft is taking classes on how to piss off their users as much as possible.

Maybe complain about the browser separately from complaining about the marketing techniques.<p>Edge has gotten better.<p>And<p>When they incorporated GPT, it was pretty cool. It already seems old now, just a few weeks later, but at the time, remember people were freaking out how great ChatGPT was, it seemed incredible. We&#x27;ve had a few weeks to cool off and start critiquing it. But when GPT was incorporated into Edge, edge adoption shot up, I think I saw stat that it was 100 million users. I even showed wife (non-tech) how to put in a few prompts and it would generate some letter she needed to write. It did seem incredible.<p>So just stepping back, Edge has incrementally improved, then they incorporated a big new feature &quot;GPT&quot;, and adoption took off. ---&gt; So the increased users was not just by marketing, and anti-trust practices, and splash screens.

As a macOS user was a fan of the initial version. Then Microsoft went into its Microsoft ways. Office toolbar, but you can hide it. Then more bing overrides on the new tab but you could adjust that. Finally came the bing icon. While I get I’m using a “free” tool, I wish there was more variation (particularly for work) in just getting a barebones browser. I was rooting for them as they implemented a couple of features that got them similar to Firefox DevTools, but them adding more and more bloat default, I moved to arc. Really wish safari would beef its dev tools by removing the App Store requirement, but alas. Seems devs don’t want to touch Firefox at the level to update their extensions comparable to chromium browsers.

Well I was tired of complaining about it again and again. If Windows refuses to respect me as a user, I refuse to use Windows. Very happy to be on ZorinOS and other Linux distros now.<p>They&#x27;re free and they don&#x27;t waste my time.

No matter how many lawsuits are brought against Microsoft, they will keep doing this kind of thing.<p>Stopping them permanently is going to take stronger action. Maybe breaking up the company.

Edge is my main browser, I like it. I use Chrome and Firefox for certain things, but Edge strikes a good balance between performance and insulation from Google spyware (and trading it for slightly lighter Microsoft spyware) for my needs. Although I think it has been getting gradually worse over time, especially small annoying UI changes and ever growing number of pop ups.

When Edge came out, I took like a lighter version of woolyss chromium with Ms integration&#x2F;tracking. While they added many nice features like tab grouping, collections, workspaces, sleeping tabs etc.. The last move of adding ads in these previous sub-menus make me nervous.

Yea, now when you open a new window it types in &#x27;Search or enter web address&#x27; like in ChatGPT...<p>And they added a whole bunch of features that are the responsibility of the OS:<p>* collections<p>* workspaces<p>* split screen<p>* browser essentials<p>* Web capture

The greatest feature of Chrome that made me use it initially always was how fast it was (Firefox with extensions is painfully slow on old computers while Chrome is perfectly fast everywhere although it can consume slightly more ram).<p>I expected the new Edge to be the same but to y surprise it has became very slow nowadays.

edge is just a front-end using the googel Big Tech web engine from google. If they customize the web engine, it&#x27;s only a posture to hide the fact that they were unable to code their own in spite of their billions.<p>That said, they are big tech, they are all and the same.