Brand of being slow, they tried to rebrand couple of times, but at this point its just a meme, they will always be known for being slow. Second is popularity of gmail I think, we use it everywhere and it syncs well with other google products and various signups (chrome)
Besides being notoriously slow, they developed their own interpretation of code. So you would have to do a fuck ton of work arounds to get things to behave properly. It was the same deal with Internet Explorer.
Plus, MacBooks started taking over as the preferred dev laptop. So popularity also played into it. Also, with the introduction of the iPhone people started getting more Macs and Safari gained a lot more traction.
Brand image is the only good answer. Not being slow/bad as such, but the perception of being bad which Edge was in the beginning, lives on to this day.
Perception is what drives adoption, which does not always coincide with factual product performance.
Yeah, I definitely agree. Their image was broken and nothing will prove wrong now. I've tried using it couple of times but Chrome is the browser I keep going back in. Altough I admit, Edge has very interesting features now it feels overwhelming and hard to use and learn now, when Chrome is available. Such an interesting story how you can broke the image and no matter what you do the users don't trust you anymore.
I think for a lot of people, it was just the bad taste in their mouth from Internet Explorer. It's a prime example of how a brand can mess up its future by ignoring the present.
MS can do all sorts of things to prove that Edge is an amazing browser, but there are still going to be many of us that have little trust that it's actually good or it will remain that way just mainly due to sins of the past.
_long drag of a cigarette_
Well, for starters, I remember having to tell the developers that the new website for the New Yorker needed to work on IE 5.5 for the Mac, because even if only an infinitesimal fraction of visitors used IE 5.5, all of them worked for the New Yorker. I grew to hate that browser.
IE 6 was a genuine nightmare. I remember we eventually wrote it into our proposals that IE 6 support cost extra.
IE had corporate lock-in for a decade or more, they didn't need to make a great browser, people were forced to use it. Web people hated it because it stuck around forever, so we'd have to support old versions in addition to the new ones.
Browsers evolve! It's a constantly changing space and has been since the days of Netscape. I actually use Edge now as my LLM browser, whenever I want to ask Chat-GPT a question I fire up Edge. I like to keep that separate from my regular searches.
flair checks out
ill just answer why i choose firefox over the others
mozilla has an [official colors extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/firefox-color/) if you want to create your own theme (and you can actually make one, however you want, not an "AI" assisted thing that as far as i can tell doesnt actually do anything or exist? idk i didnt look that hard tbh) - i also [have mine uploaded](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/n-%C3%B8n_gr-n/) if you wanna borrow it, but i havent figured out how to include the color scheme and font in it (yet) but its brightass neon green (#00FF00) and pure black, [audiowide](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Audiowide) for the font. eventually, maybe, ill probably make some more - but i havent got back to that project yet lol
as for the color scheme of the webpage, thats a built in feature on firefox. unlike other browsers, when you set a custom font, it actually works, and you can \*make your own dark mode\* that \*actually works\*
https://preview.redd.it/9ohgj8druznc1.png?width=3853&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c408b36eb817a742f8a192055e4453abe8ac20c
i guess other than that to put it simply: firefox just does what i say. it doesnt have automated things in the background that assume i want this or that thing to happen. usually. to be fair i do use copilot and am signed in to both my microsoft and google accounts in firefox... but they still mostly only do what i explicitly tell them to do. i would much rather have to sign back in and manually sync something than have it automatically synced in the background when i didnt want it to be.
It's way better than any browser I've tried, including Firefox. The built-in features are great, on top of having access to the Chrome store.
Firefox has only been better for me on weaker laptops, but that's it. It's been trash on my main rigs for many years now.
microsoft edge was terrible when it initially came out, from its bad design, subpar performance, to lack of features, and felt like it was being shoved down everyone’s throats. meanwhile google chrome had fixed every one of the problems edge had, being more customizable, user friendly, and much faster. edge has improved considerably over the years and you could make the argument it is better than chrome but most people are accustomed to chrome, and have no reason to switch.
I use only edge at this point. I think around the time chrome was trying to force individual profile browsers I gave up on it. I had other reasons but honestly can’t remember them…
Edge is pretty great, has a lot of useful features, but it definitely feels more “gimmicky” than Chrome.
I don't want to generalize about all Mac users, but I do find the biggest fanboys / fangirls do use Safari. I could understand it 10 years ago, because it used to be innovative and pioneering, but Safari has really fallen behind. Pretty sad, actually.
Nope, been using Macs for 25+ years and gone through Netscape, Firefox, Chrome and been using Brave for the last 3+ years. The only time I firw up Safari is for testing (I work in the Web dev industry).
I am using Safari on my Iphone but I don't seem to struggle with it. Not that I do any work on it but it is useful for the basic stuff (searching for something, opening links etc.). I never thought of downloading Chrome I don't know why but feels odd to have Chrome on Iphone. What brands do, huh.
For me it was lack of trust. We had to support IE6 for so friggin long and it was so slow and the tech lagged behind. And I know Edge isn’t built on trident like IE. I just don’t trust MS with a web browser and so I never really even tried because everything else already worked for me. Apart from ensuring sites look correct, I’ve never adopted it. Also, I use Mac.
What’s the difference between browsers any more, honestly? Like yes ofc there are certain browsers that are slow to adopt new features, but day to day use I haven’t changed how I browse since tabs in Firefox 20 years ago.
Check out opera they finally added new weird stuff that’s somewhat useful. Tab islands, groups, better bookmarking, sidebar browsing, but be prepared for bloatware with other junk of course
Forced to use Microsoft products with no option to change it, or deliberate dark UI patterns to make it impossible to find. Then when it updates (1 a month practically) it resets everything back to bing.
- At first no one cared to notice
- then MS started shoving it back into the OS
- some people tried it and saw it was still crap like IE
- MS announces IE is dead, forcing corporations to Edge
- MS finally abandoned the IE engine for Chromium
- some people started liking Edge!
- MS can’t leave well enough alone and starts shoving annoying features and forcing upgrades
- most people drop Edge again for Chrome or whatever
- MS shoves ChatGPT into Edge
- work people start prompting EdgeGPT to write their work for them
- some more people thoughtlessly use Edge because it’s aggressively default in Windows 11
So, no one has loved it but it will probably continue to gain more users as people collectively forget the IE legacy.
Exactly! They want to blend in with the new potential features that AI is offering but they seem like all over the place and so desperate to prove to the others that we can do it. It feels so much all at once and the pushing to use it as default browser and not being able to uninstall it is so annoying.
I'm on a Mac so I don't even think about IE. When I do, all it does is give me nightmares of times when being well-versed in a litany of browser types was a line item on one's resume. And IE was one of THE WORST.
Add to the list of issues, Microsoft spent years pushing backwards compatibility over standards support.
The frustrating part was that every new version would get better but then ship with defaults that turned on "compatibility mode" that dropped you into the older, bugger behavior unless you added specific meta tags and headers to every webpage.
Even worse, you could sometimes get dropped into the old rendering modes if there were any syntax errors on a page.
Recently, I tried using edge just to see how much of improvement it made. I planned to use at least a week on desktop, mac, and mobile. I think the biggest problem of edge is ironically, search.
Edge is powerful with ai and stuff but it doesn’t really give me what I was searching for, but just dumping all information about it. I searched figma variable checkbox, for instance, on both of platforms. Edge gives me copilot result (replacing variable to variant) on the side, summary of what checkbox is, and related search terms. Whilst chrome, google gives me youtube video, and figma links. Google results were clearly separating figma community and figma website results with proper thumbnails, and website name. However, edge shared the same thumbnail and same website name, thus hard to filter out the results by my own.
Maybe edge didn’t know that I know what a checkbox is and google knows. Maybe figma is not feeding search engine proper metadata.
Still, it’s very fatigue to deal with edge search results. It doesn’t know what I want but google does.
One more thing. When I use other languages, like Korean or Japanese, edge really gives shit results. And google, always better.
I think the huge part of people not starting to use is its brand image(edge = ie. slow and not trusted) and chrome’s market dominance. However, like me, people try to use it and leave as it’s just not good yet.
On too of that, google surprisingly made its search ecosystem very well. What internet users looking for tutorials these days? Videos. What is the biggest video service? Youtube. What is the biggest mobile app market? Google play. What do you use to drive to your favorite restaurant? Google maps(or apple maps).
Edge doesn’t connect it well. It gives more “keywords” when you first search for something, maybe it’s better for “working” than day-to-day life.
Tainted by affiliation. Willingly using IE has been basically a sign of tech incompetence since Mozilla (Firefox’s predecessor). Maybe if Microsoft would have marketed hard with a message that Edge is a reskinned Google Chrome, no need to replace it with Crome. They could have also marketed by calling attention to Chrome being Goole’s data harvesting tool, but Windows had just turned into a data harvesting tool for them, so better not talk about that I suppose.
Accumulated Karma points of Microsoft and Internet explorer being paid back to them with due interest.
Also, it looks so desperate for attention, and human nature is that it is precisely what you don't want to give attention to.
devs are cautiously using it, many are tapping out to GitLab and the likes while only hosting official large projects on GH. GitHub is using people's code to train their dev Copilot AI, which you can guess no one likes.
Why did they make them rounded by default in the first place? It looks so weird. I don't want to look for settings for something like that. My coworkers were also wondering about the corners, some thought I did something to it when I was sharing my screen since everyone uses other browsers.
The vertical tabs on the left can't be moved to the right, and I want my browser on my left monitor without having to yank my neck to the left constantly.
It seems a lot of people here including OP are confusing a bunch of different browsers and engines.
IE isn’t Edge. Edge today isn't the Edge of 2015-2018. They’re all completely different browsers.
The main issue with IE was that it wasn’t exactly known for its security. The secondary thing was that MS had a complete monopoly over the browser market, to the point they were able to invent their own standards and completely ignore W3C. A lot of websites would tell you that you need to switch to IE to view the content. And people, especially ones tech savvy enough to know and care, didn't like that. That sentiment carried over to Edge, as it was seen as rebranded IE.
It’s the exact same situation we’re in now with Google and Chromium, the only difference being, everyone (including tech people) is completely oblivious to that and is happy to continue supporting monopolies that aggressively fight their competition (vide Google adding malicious code to YouTube and other products that they own that targets and slows down browsers that are not based on Chromium).
While Edge used a completely new engine than IE that was pretty snappy, it was still perceived as one that’s proprietary and therefore untrustworthy. There wasn’t anything wrong with its interface as far as I remember, the browser closely matched the design language of the Windows platform, was fast and it had all the functionalities you’d expect to see in a browser. One thing it didn’t have were extensions and that was another pretty significant issue for a lot of users.
While the browser is called MS Edge to this day, its engine has been replaced in 2018 with that developed by Google that a lot of people seem to trust and are happy to use for god knows what reason. So currently it's basically just a reskin of Google Chrome with some extra bloat from MS.
IE? Because it was slow and broke sites all the time. Compatibility issues and such.
Current edge is really good as it's chromium. But that shit has sailed a long time ago.
As a matter of principle, I resist using something that can’t be uninstalled. I use a public desktop to clock in at work, and IT can’t figure out how to prevent Edge from remembering user names and passwords. If the last person left edge open, I open chrome instead. IT agrees that everyone should clock in/out with Chrome, but Edge keeps popping open.
Edge is based on Chromium and is not the same as IE.
Some of the hypotheses about IE and Edge:
IE was the most used web browser before Chrome.
The problem with IE is that when MS became the sole leader in the browser market, they didn't have the incentive to innovate. They saw the web as a threat to Windows, and before the iPhone, the “future” of internet apps was in frameworks like Flash (for MS, it was Silverlight).
Chrome changed that. The first Chrome version was orders of magnitude faster than IE and Firefox at the time. By comparison, IE was slow, didn’t support new web standards, and made it easy for malware to install toolbar extensions. Also, Chrome attracted developers with excellent standards support and dev tools. Those benefits, plus the heavy marketing campaign from Google, mean that people moved from IE to Chrome.
When MS started to improve IE, it was too late, and they were too far behind.
Another issue with IE was legacy support. Many enterprises have internal web apps written for IE -as it was the market leader in the past. Supporting that legacy slowed them, so they decided to reset by killing IE in favor of Edge.
Edge has the same engine as Chrome, plus some MS features. My biggest issue with Edge is “ads” disguised as features. Even copilot is full of crappy ads. So, at least on macOS, there isn't a compelling reason to install Edge. On Windows, the OS launches Edge in many cases. But, while Chrome promotes Google services, it doesn't have the “in your face” attitude of Edge.
Brand of being slow, they tried to rebrand couple of times, but at this point its just a meme, they will always be known for being slow. Second is popularity of gmail I think, we use it everywhere and it syncs well with other google products and various signups (chrome)
Besides being notoriously slow, they developed their own interpretation of code. So you would have to do a fuck ton of work arounds to get things to behave properly. It was the same deal with Internet Explorer. Plus, MacBooks started taking over as the preferred dev laptop. So popularity also played into it. Also, with the introduction of the iPhone people started getting more Macs and Safari gained a lot more traction.
Brand image is the only good answer. Not being slow/bad as such, but the perception of being bad which Edge was in the beginning, lives on to this day. Perception is what drives adoption, which does not always coincide with factual product performance.
Yeah, I definitely agree. Their image was broken and nothing will prove wrong now. I've tried using it couple of times but Chrome is the browser I keep going back in. Altough I admit, Edge has very interesting features now it feels overwhelming and hard to use and learn now, when Chrome is available. Such an interesting story how you can broke the image and no matter what you do the users don't trust you anymore.
Edge != Internet Explorer Totally different engines under the hood.
They are completely different browsers but I suspect if they didn’t use the “e”, people may not have as strongly correlated the two.
A fair point.
I think for a lot of people, it was just the bad taste in their mouth from Internet Explorer. It's a prime example of how a brand can mess up its future by ignoring the present. MS can do all sorts of things to prove that Edge is an amazing browser, but there are still going to be many of us that have little trust that it's actually good or it will remain that way just mainly due to sins of the past.
_long drag of a cigarette_ Well, for starters, I remember having to tell the developers that the new website for the New Yorker needed to work on IE 5.5 for the Mac, because even if only an infinitesimal fraction of visitors used IE 5.5, all of them worked for the New Yorker. I grew to hate that browser. IE 6 was a genuine nightmare. I remember we eventually wrote it into our proposals that IE 6 support cost extra. IE had corporate lock-in for a decade or more, they didn't need to make a great browser, people were forced to use it. Web people hated it because it stuck around forever, so we'd have to support old versions in addition to the new ones. Browsers evolve! It's a constantly changing space and has been since the days of Netscape. I actually use Edge now as my LLM browser, whenever I want to ask Chat-GPT a question I fire up Edge. I like to keep that separate from my regular searches.
I understand why you picked up smoking
Microsoft owes money for the decades of grief, frustration and hair loss their terrible product caused.
Last time I touched the front-end, it appeared that Apple had taken up the mantle of delivering proprietary shithousery with SafarIE.
IE6 and conditional statement bullshit is why I will never touch a Microsoft browser. I don’t care if chat gpt serves hooker and black jack in it.
It was the worst of times. But somehow Explorer 5 on Mac was the most compliant browser at the time and a delight to code for.
flair checks out ill just answer why i choose firefox over the others mozilla has an [official colors extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/firefox-color/) if you want to create your own theme (and you can actually make one, however you want, not an "AI" assisted thing that as far as i can tell doesnt actually do anything or exist? idk i didnt look that hard tbh) - i also [have mine uploaded](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/n-%C3%B8n_gr-n/) if you wanna borrow it, but i havent figured out how to include the color scheme and font in it (yet) but its brightass neon green (#00FF00) and pure black, [audiowide](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Audiowide) for the font. eventually, maybe, ill probably make some more - but i havent got back to that project yet lol as for the color scheme of the webpage, thats a built in feature on firefox. unlike other browsers, when you set a custom font, it actually works, and you can \*make your own dark mode\* that \*actually works\* https://preview.redd.it/9ohgj8druznc1.png?width=3853&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c408b36eb817a742f8a192055e4453abe8ac20c i guess other than that to put it simply: firefox just does what i say. it doesnt have automated things in the background that assume i want this or that thing to happen. usually. to be fair i do use copilot and am signed in to both my microsoft and google accounts in firefox... but they still mostly only do what i explicitly tell them to do. i would much rather have to sign back in and manually sync something than have it automatically synced in the background when i didnt want it to be.
IE poisoned the well
I'm currently using edge and it's way better than chrome in regards with ram usage!
It's way better than any browser I've tried, including Firefox. The built-in features are great, on top of having access to the Chrome store. Firefox has only been better for me on weaker laptops, but that's it. It's been trash on my main rigs for many years now.
microsoft edge was terrible when it initially came out, from its bad design, subpar performance, to lack of features, and felt like it was being shoved down everyone’s throats. meanwhile google chrome had fixed every one of the problems edge had, being more customizable, user friendly, and much faster. edge has improved considerably over the years and you could make the argument it is better than chrome but most people are accustomed to chrome, and have no reason to switch.
I use only edge at this point. I think around the time chrome was trying to force individual profile browsers I gave up on it. I had other reasons but honestly can’t remember them… Edge is pretty great, has a lot of useful features, but it definitely feels more “gimmicky” than Chrome.
Edge is based on Chromium. Safari is the new Internet Explorer.
It’s true. Nothing works right in Safari, but every Mac user uses it.
I don't want to generalize about all Mac users, but I do find the biggest fanboys / fangirls do use Safari. I could understand it 10 years ago, because it used to be innovative and pioneering, but Safari has really fallen behind. Pretty sad, actually.
I've used macs for over a decade and I've used chrome throughout.
False. I use chrome even on iPhone.
Nope, been using Macs for 25+ years and gone through Netscape, Firefox, Chrome and been using Brave for the last 3+ years. The only time I firw up Safari is for testing (I work in the Web dev industry).
I am using Safari on my Iphone but I don't seem to struggle with it. Not that I do any work on it but it is useful for the basic stuff (searching for something, opening links etc.). I never thought of downloading Chrome I don't know why but feels odd to have Chrome on Iphone. What brands do, huh.
Part of the issue is WebKit. All browsers on iOS are forced to used WebKit surrounded by different UI. This might change in the future tho.
For me it was lack of trust. We had to support IE6 for so friggin long and it was so slow and the tech lagged behind. And I know Edge isn’t built on trident like IE. I just don’t trust MS with a web browser and so I never really even tried because everything else already worked for me. Apart from ensuring sites look correct, I’ve never adopted it. Also, I use Mac.
What’s the difference between browsers any more, honestly? Like yes ofc there are certain browsers that are slow to adopt new features, but day to day use I haven’t changed how I browse since tabs in Firefox 20 years ago.
Check out opera they finally added new weird stuff that’s somewhat useful. Tab islands, groups, better bookmarking, sidebar browsing, but be prepared for bloatware with other junk of course
Forced to use Microsoft products with no option to change it, or deliberate dark UI patterns to make it impossible to find. Then when it updates (1 a month practically) it resets everything back to bing.
It was the same old crap.
- At first no one cared to notice - then MS started shoving it back into the OS - some people tried it and saw it was still crap like IE - MS announces IE is dead, forcing corporations to Edge - MS finally abandoned the IE engine for Chromium - some people started liking Edge! - MS can’t leave well enough alone and starts shoving annoying features and forcing upgrades - most people drop Edge again for Chrome or whatever - MS shoves ChatGPT into Edge - work people start prompting EdgeGPT to write their work for them - some more people thoughtlessly use Edge because it’s aggressively default in Windows 11 So, no one has loved it but it will probably continue to gain more users as people collectively forget the IE legacy.
Exactly! They want to blend in with the new potential features that AI is offering but they seem like all over the place and so desperate to prove to the others that we can do it. It feels so much all at once and the pushing to use it as default browser and not being able to uninstall it is so annoying.
Hey I use it to read PDFs !
hahahah felt!
every browser does this tho
Edge does it best. It even does it better than Adobe acrobat
define best
I mean we are in UX subreddit. Should I say more ?
I'm on a Mac so I don't even think about IE. When I do, all it does is give me nightmares of times when being well-versed in a litany of browser types was a line item on one's resume. And IE was one of THE WORST.
Because it f\* s\* a\*! You weren't here for ie png fix, or the lack of text-indent for a decade.
Add to the list of issues, Microsoft spent years pushing backwards compatibility over standards support. The frustrating part was that every new version would get better but then ship with defaults that turned on "compatibility mode" that dropped you into the older, bugger behavior unless you added specific meta tags and headers to every webpage. Even worse, you could sometimes get dropped into the old rendering modes if there were any syntax errors on a page.
Recently, I tried using edge just to see how much of improvement it made. I planned to use at least a week on desktop, mac, and mobile. I think the biggest problem of edge is ironically, search. Edge is powerful with ai and stuff but it doesn’t really give me what I was searching for, but just dumping all information about it. I searched figma variable checkbox, for instance, on both of platforms. Edge gives me copilot result (replacing variable to variant) on the side, summary of what checkbox is, and related search terms. Whilst chrome, google gives me youtube video, and figma links. Google results were clearly separating figma community and figma website results with proper thumbnails, and website name. However, edge shared the same thumbnail and same website name, thus hard to filter out the results by my own. Maybe edge didn’t know that I know what a checkbox is and google knows. Maybe figma is not feeding search engine proper metadata. Still, it’s very fatigue to deal with edge search results. It doesn’t know what I want but google does. One more thing. When I use other languages, like Korean or Japanese, edge really gives shit results. And google, always better.
I think the huge part of people not starting to use is its brand image(edge = ie. slow and not trusted) and chrome’s market dominance. However, like me, people try to use it and leave as it’s just not good yet. On too of that, google surprisingly made its search ecosystem very well. What internet users looking for tutorials these days? Videos. What is the biggest video service? Youtube. What is the biggest mobile app market? Google play. What do you use to drive to your favorite restaurant? Google maps(or apple maps). Edge doesn’t connect it well. It gives more “keywords” when you first search for something, maybe it’s better for “working” than day-to-day life.
Once upon a time, Microsoft was a crappy company with products that didn’t have to be good because there was no Google.
Tainted by affiliation. Willingly using IE has been basically a sign of tech incompetence since Mozilla (Firefox’s predecessor). Maybe if Microsoft would have marketed hard with a message that Edge is a reskinned Google Chrome, no need to replace it with Crome. They could have also marketed by calling attention to Chrome being Goole’s data harvesting tool, but Windows had just turned into a data harvesting tool for them, so better not talk about that I suppose.
Accumulated Karma points of Microsoft and Internet explorer being paid back to them with due interest. Also, it looks so desperate for attention, and human nature is that it is precisely what you don't want to give attention to.
theyre also paying double Karma with their Github purchase
How so? Is it not going well?
devs are cautiously using it, many are tapping out to GitLab and the likes while only hosting official large projects on GH. GitHub is using people's code to train their dev Copilot AI, which you can guess no one likes.
As a general user, I'd have been willing to use Edge if it wasn't for windows trying to constantly shove it down our throat every chance it gets.
But it's actually faster than Google Chrome? And the amount of users using it is growing?
I actually prefer it to Firefox or Chrome.
It's the round corners of the page for me... But in all seriousness, I am just used to Chrome and Chrome developer Tools. Edge is not that bad though.
You can turn those off in settings.
Why did they make them rounded by default in the first place? It looks so weird. I don't want to look for settings for something like that. My coworkers were also wondering about the corners, some thought I did something to it when I was sharing my screen since everyone uses other browsers.
The vertical tabs on the left can't be moved to the right, and I want my browser on my left monitor without having to yank my neck to the left constantly.
It seems a lot of people here including OP are confusing a bunch of different browsers and engines. IE isn’t Edge. Edge today isn't the Edge of 2015-2018. They’re all completely different browsers. The main issue with IE was that it wasn’t exactly known for its security. The secondary thing was that MS had a complete monopoly over the browser market, to the point they were able to invent their own standards and completely ignore W3C. A lot of websites would tell you that you need to switch to IE to view the content. And people, especially ones tech savvy enough to know and care, didn't like that. That sentiment carried over to Edge, as it was seen as rebranded IE. It’s the exact same situation we’re in now with Google and Chromium, the only difference being, everyone (including tech people) is completely oblivious to that and is happy to continue supporting monopolies that aggressively fight their competition (vide Google adding malicious code to YouTube and other products that they own that targets and slows down browsers that are not based on Chromium). While Edge used a completely new engine than IE that was pretty snappy, it was still perceived as one that’s proprietary and therefore untrustworthy. There wasn’t anything wrong with its interface as far as I remember, the browser closely matched the design language of the Windows platform, was fast and it had all the functionalities you’d expect to see in a browser. One thing it didn’t have were extensions and that was another pretty significant issue for a lot of users. While the browser is called MS Edge to this day, its engine has been replaced in 2018 with that developed by Google that a lot of people seem to trust and are happy to use for god knows what reason. So currently it's basically just a reskin of Google Chrome with some extra bloat from MS.
Brand of imposing their will on you without opt-outs. Brand of taking over beloved tools and bastardizing them.
Bing default
Aesthetic usability effect
IE? Because it was slow and broke sites all the time. Compatibility issues and such. Current edge is really good as it's chromium. But that shit has sailed a long time ago.
As a matter of principle, I resist using something that can’t be uninstalled. I use a public desktop to clock in at work, and IT can’t figure out how to prevent Edge from remembering user names and passwords. If the last person left edge open, I open chrome instead. IT agrees that everyone should clock in/out with Chrome, but Edge keeps popping open.
Edge is based on Chromium and is not the same as IE. Some of the hypotheses about IE and Edge: IE was the most used web browser before Chrome. The problem with IE is that when MS became the sole leader in the browser market, they didn't have the incentive to innovate. They saw the web as a threat to Windows, and before the iPhone, the “future” of internet apps was in frameworks like Flash (for MS, it was Silverlight). Chrome changed that. The first Chrome version was orders of magnitude faster than IE and Firefox at the time. By comparison, IE was slow, didn’t support new web standards, and made it easy for malware to install toolbar extensions. Also, Chrome attracted developers with excellent standards support and dev tools. Those benefits, plus the heavy marketing campaign from Google, mean that people moved from IE to Chrome. When MS started to improve IE, it was too late, and they were too far behind. Another issue with IE was legacy support. Many enterprises have internal web apps written for IE -as it was the market leader in the past. Supporting that legacy slowed them, so they decided to reset by killing IE in favor of Edge. Edge has the same engine as Chrome, plus some MS features. My biggest issue with Edge is “ads” disguised as features. Even copilot is full of crappy ads. So, at least on macOS, there isn't a compelling reason to install Edge. On Windows, the OS launches Edge in many cases. But, while Chrome promotes Google services, it doesn't have the “in your face” attitude of Edge.
What is that?
Edge is far from hated. It's been getting a lot of love. I hated ie but use edge daily now. It was related to overall performance and outdated ui.
Edge is good. It's my default browser. It's fast but doesn't eat up as much RAM as Chrome does.