What's sad is that it's a good browser behind all of this. But it takes a fair amount of work getting all the settings right to turn it all off.
What makes Edge a good browser among the several other Chrome-based browsers out there?
Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
181–190 of 330 posts
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#182Dark patterns are certainly evil. I don't think they help the company in the long run. However, I just went on a sort of browser deep dive for the best browser on windows and came away, surprisingly, with edge. The requirements were vertical tabs, keep my chrome extensions, and got out of my way. Brave, firefox, chrome, and vivaldi all had issues that couldn't be resolved in the UI. For example, firefox's tree style…
Hiding title bar and tab bar were confugurable before. When you installed tree style tab it automatically made the tab bar hidden at that time. It was the most customizable dev browser.
Then they rewrote the the UI engine replacing XUL and made Firefox a more 'user friendly browser' copying all UI features of chrome sacrificing the customization options.
I am a heretic now who is running Windows 10 with WSL2 and edge as primary browser due the points you mentioned.
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#183Not exactly an impartial source coming from their competitor who is also almost fully funded by their other competitor.
Which specific idea(s) presented do you believe has its merits undermined by this lack of impartiality?
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
600 million ($)? They've got ~$6000 (?) million from Google over the years. In a total distortion of reality Edge is the downfall of Firefox, not the reason they spent $6000M for 3% market share because they made every mistake they could make. Everyone else would be belly up already, but $600M/year makes it hard to die. The fact that new browsers are popping up left and right (like Floorp) should tell Mozilla there s…
...there seems to be demand for something that isn't FF. There is a demand for something that is really privacy focused. In other words, something that isn't directly connected to Google with a blatantly obvious conflict of interest.
But all the other alternative browsers use Google's Blink rendering engine. How is that less associated with google?
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#185What's sad is that it's a good browser behind all of this. But it takes a fair amount of work getting all the settings right to turn it all off.
but it's not significantly better like the competition (like Chrome vs IE6)
so they're resorting to their usual dirty tricks
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#186I've been trying Edge lately because I wanted to see if its "efficiency mode" would produce any noticeable difference in the battery life I experienced on my laptop. They've really made it almost impossible to use as a privacy-respecting browser that lets you pick your search engine. There are a very large number of "on by default" settings that I had to change to turn of things like "Microsoft Rewards" and "creator…
I would genuinely hate to be an engineer working on the edge team. It feels like building a decent browser comes entirely secondary to moving the needle on marketing and growth targets.
Not the only situation where it seems your Windows-running computer is basically held hostage by MBAs wanting to boost Bing’s numbers.
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#187Mozilla receives money from Google, so I'd take whatever they say with a pinch of salt.
Right now, the only serious alternative to Google Chrome is Edge, and if Firefox became too good or threatened Google in any way, Mozilla may see the money flow stop.
I wish Google started innovating again, and that Firefox offered a good and competitive free software browser, but reality is what it is.
So I've moved from Windows to Linux, but I keep using Edge, because it's a good browser (vertical tabs etc)
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
And don’t forget Apple’s restriction on alternative browser engines in iOS and iPadOS is the only thing keeping most websites from becoming Chrome only.
If that would be true, the websites would only support Safari and Chrome. But it's not true and websites work just fine on Firefox - so stop peddling this crap to defend lockout of choice.
There are plenty of websites that have degraded performance or functionality in Safari and Firefox. The most obvious being many of Google's products.
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. One of the most egregious things is the insistence on using the Bing start page. You have to install an extension to have your own start page (in fairness most browsers are like this these days). However, lately Edge just magically stopped letting new tab redirect work. At least it loads a blank page, but it is annoying. Microsoft seems hell bent on preventing user control all over their client ecosystem. The…
Yea, and when the browser updates they often switch settings back, such as the default search engine. I still use it but am aggressive about tightening up the settings.
Why? What does it bring to the table over Chromium once you disable all the Microsoft nonsense?
Re: Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, yes, Google pays Mozilla. But also, Chromebooks are barely relevant compared to Windows.
If they were a non-biased actor they would commission a study across all systems, not just what's convenient for them and Google. They are more and more ridiculous by the day and deserve their tiny market share.
Why does it matter whether they're biased if they're correct? Plenty of short sellers are biased (massively so) yet that doesn't necessarily undermine their analysis.