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. 😂
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. 🤷♀️
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.
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!
That’s how I use it too, but I was surprised to see that it doesn’t have syncing of bookmarks, history etc yet!
I set it up with my work profile for Office 365 stuff.
I’ve given up the hope that Office will ever come to Linux, so instead I’m just trying to use the web version more.
I currently use Edge for mostly one thing, its “Read aloud” feature.
Because you can use some of the Azure neural voices its currently the best, free, easily accessible text-to-speech available.
It can even do PDFs quite well. Really helps when I’m too unable to focus for reading long texts but can still listen well enough (ADHD).
I did not know this was a thing. I might have to actually use Edge now.
I’ll say this, I never used edge before, but it’s comparable with a bunch of my work sites so I was kind of forced into using it. It’s actually pretty great. Better overall than stock chrome, though I prefer brave or Firefox for non work related stuff.
Once I started using Edge, I was surprised by how well it worked.
If your org uses any of the Microsoft suite apps Edge is just better. It sucks that Microsoft is allowed to do this
It’s basically the same thing google did with chrome in the beginning of Google docs. I haven’t noticed much difference between chrome and edge, but I rarely use them for the same things l.
I have to use edge in some of my work environments, my only complaint is the locked in ecosystem. As a browser it seems fine for now…
I actually trust Microsoft far more than I trust Google. I use Outlook as my main email provider and Edge for when I need something that rejects Firefox.
Besides trust, Edge just feels snappier on Linux than Chrome. Chrome is so bloaty theses days.
It has a really good implementation of vertical tabs. Vivaldi and Firefox are somewhat close, but they’re not nearly as polished.
Compared to sidebery plugin (ff)?
Dragging tabs around and to new windows is much less seamless, the having it contract and automatically expand on hover is much harder (userChrome.css hacks compared to a single button), and it requires a CSS hack to remove the horizontal tab bar. I use Tab Center Reborn myself, but Edge does it better than anything I’ve used.
Yes, because I am forced to use M$ Teams.
and it doesn’t work in firefox
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.
That’s very strange… Submit a big report then.
dies of cringe
Yep, I use for Xbox cloud gaming on steam deck.
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.
Yes, started using Edge on Linux few months ago exclusively for free GPT-4
The browser version of chatgpt is based on v4…
But its NOT at all capable of the same responses.
Usual MS garbage.
As long as Vivaldi is available on Linux I don’t see a need for it, same engine but better features.
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)
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.
