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Just got a new laptop and didn't bother installing Chrome. Is it this new laptop or is Edge snappier? Also, we're all used to mocking Bing but it seems a lot better than the crappy 2025 version of Google.
You've got a new laptop and you're surprised that it's quicker than your old one?
Edge is - finally - decent these days. Like most browsers (aside from Safari and Firefox, and anything on iOS), it's just Chrome in different pants.
Can't say as I agree with you about Bing though. If I had to ditch Google I reckon I'd be looking at DuckDuckGo.
I use Edge on my work and home laptops, but with Google set as the default search engine/homepage.
Still use Chrome on my phone though.
DuckDuckGo largely uses Bing I thought?
Yes, I much prefer Edge over Chrome at the moment. Seems to use less resources and doesn't try as hard to get you to log in to a Google account. I do also use Chrome for the stuff where I need to log into one of several Microsoft/Google 'domains' so I can bundle that stuff together as I like the profile stuff in Chrome but generally I'm on Edge. Still not loving Bing so use Ecosia which largely picks up Google results but without the AI shit
I got a new pretty decent laptop last year for photo editing so loads of Ram, decent processor etc.
Chrome was so slow it was virtually unusable, constantly hanging and crashing. I assumed it was my rubbish Internet, but then I tried Edge and all the problems went away. Couldn't believe the difference so tried Chrome again and still unusably slow.
Now Chrome is uninstalled and I use Edge with Ecosia and like it very much.
I use Edge on my work and home laptops, but with Google set as the default search engine/homepage.
This
I use Edge on my work and home laptops, but with Google set as the default search engine/homepage.
Another who does this, can't stand Bing but Edge is good. Still use other browsers occasionally
Use Edge occassionally when i need to access my office365 subscription stuff, works well for that. Usually Firefox as that just works and has great provacy and ad-block plug-ins. Hate DuckDuckGo as the search is not really good enough and use google with max privacy as mush as possible. Sometimes use Chrome when i have different Office365 IDs running in parallel browsers, but it is a resource hog. I should probs use Edge for that scenario.
Edge at work because they the seem to insist it's the only browser that is supported for many of our web apps.
Edge at home is the very first application that gets removed. Don't even need it to download a replacement browser. Doing so stops some of the unwanted ads and intrusion in Windoze, cos Microsoft hard code it to Edge, and not you default browser.
Brave for me, or Firefox+Ublock for the time being, since Chrome/Chromium blocked the addons that are best not discussed here.
The second thing that goes is all the intrusive AI nonsense.
Can Edge host those extensions which do that action that shan't be mentioned to sections of websites which corporations have paid for to intrusively divert your attention to their products?
Brave for me, or Firefox+Ublock for the time being, since Chrome/Chromium blocked the addons that are best not discussed here.
Chrome scuttled uBlock Origin with good reason. There is a 'Lite' version now.
wasn't brave recently revealed to be a bit of a scam, as in not the secure privacy browser it claimed to be.
I am trying to ween myself away from google at the moment, been trying Firefox this week, and there are still flaws there.
google trying to log me onto everything with my google account is just too annoying, I can turn it off in chrrome but not in firefox, so I want an alternative search engine as well, duckduckgo was pretty poor when I tried it as a search engine 6 months ago.
Can Edge host those extensions which do that action that shan't be mentioned to sections of websites which corporations have paid for to intrusively divert your attention to their products?
Yes.
wasn't brave recently revealed to be a bit of a scam, as in not the secure privacy browser it claimed to be.
I quite like edge. It’s ok, for a Microsoft product. Biggest fly in the Microsoft ecosystem is MS Authenticator, which appears to be the work of the devil. MS have also recently removed its ability to sync passwords from desktop edge to IOS / safari seamlessly. Their workaround being to install edge on iOS. To which my response is the collapsed motto of the Sirius cybernetics complaints department.
^ huh. peter thiel aside, there's no compulsion to sign up to the brave rewards, and from my experience it seems like a quick browser that doesn't serve :cough: many ads. have been using it on desktop and android for a few months.
tbf peter thiel is a **** and i'm disappointed to learn he's involved.
I use Edge on my work and home laptops, but with Google set as the default search engine/homepage.
This, currently.. but Edge's propensity to reset your search engine back to Bing every time it updates is severely testing my allegiance.
This, currently.. but Edge's propensity to reset your search engine back to Bing every time it updates is severely testing my allegiance.
Interesting, can't say I've ever had that - been using Edge for a couple of years now. It may help that I disable the Edge update services in services.msc.
The best thing I can say about it is it just works, well enough that I don't really think about which browser I'm using. Whereas Chrome seemed to require so much RAM and CPU to function that I thought my PC was taking off
We use Edge on work Windows laptop and no issues even on a 4+ year old HP EliteBook G6. Like others, Google is still my default search though.
Safari only on my personal MacBook though.
Fun fact to impress the ladies at parties: Microsoft earned 12 billion from Bing last year, 55 billion from Office, and 24 billion from Windows. Probably won't be long before Bing overtakes Windows.
that mentions changing the Group Policy
You'll need a Pro or Enterprise edition of Windows to change GPOs, it won't work on Home. (Also, I suspect that GPO hack only applies to the old Edge, before it changed to use Chrome's engine.)
Fun fact to impress the ladies at parties: Microsoft earned 12 billion from Bing last year, 55 billion from Office, and 24 billion from Windows. Probably won't be long before Bing overtakes Windows.
Windows desktop or Windows total including servers?
Windows desktop or Windows total including servers?
That's a good question. I suspect that it's not a simple thing to separate Windows itself from other parts of the business. Also, I misreported Windows as 24 billion, should be 23.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-microsoft-makes-its-billions/
Perhaps Mark could provide us with stats and correlations on browser used and number of posts complaining about the forum. 😋 The last time I used Edge for STW it was colourful. However Edge or Firefox is my choice for gov.uk that won't work without cookies.
Yeah, from that infographic, "servers etc" is that big blue 40% bar on the right. This is why I asked, it's what I expected to see.
It's been clear (to me at least) for a long time that MS doesn't consider the consumer desktop to be a primary revenue source. Enterprise is their cash cow.
Windows has been effectively free to the end user since at least Windows 10. I don't know what OEMs (resellers) pay to licence it on new hardware but I'd be surprised if it was little more than pocket change to larger vendors. The last (and indeed only) retail copy of Windows I bought for home use was Windows 7. I've just ordered a new laptop without an OS as the W7 key will activate a new W11 install just fine. MS could more aggressively police key reuse (OEM licences are non-transferrable but hey guess what, I've totally just installed a new motherboard in my 15-year old laptop!) but they don't bother even with licensing now mostly handled digitally.
Meanwhile over in the Office world MS finally worked out that no-one at home is going to spend several hundred quid on a full-blown Office suite in order to send a couple of emails and write their CV. Office must have been the second most pirated piece of software ever, right after Windows itself. But charging Netflix money for a monthly subscription with 'free' upgrades to the latest and greatest? A family discount for several legit installs? That's far more palatable.
What's important to MS in the consumer sphere isn't raw dollars, it's penetration. They want everyone using their stuff. There's a reason the likes of McDonalds and Coca-Cola still run massive advertising campaigns and it's not because they think no-one has ever heard of Coke. To your average punter the single biggest perceived downside to any number of cheap/free office alternatives is "it's not MS Office." Look at the browser wars of yore (which is arguably still playing out today), MS wanted Internet Explorer to be everyone's go-to web browser so badly that they made it part of the system core. Market Penetration => Market Domination => Monopoly. It doesn't have to be better, it just has to be what everyone else is using.
Where the actual money is coming from for MS is corporates with deep pockets. An organisation will buy licensing in bulk, larger ones usually running their own licensing activation servers to report usage back to MS. A Windows Server OS is expensive and scales exponentially into the realms of Stupid Money if you want it to handle bigger jobs, despite it being binary-identical aside from the licence key. Server applications such as SQL can be even more eyewatering. And then there's the madness of "client access licences"...
Today cloud services is quietly - well, not all that quietly TBF - displacing on-premises tin for the same reasons as Office above. You're replacing CapEx with OpEx which is an easier sell to whoever holds the company purse strings; it's an easier sell to your customers; and it's ongoing predictable 'free money' revenue to MS rather than the monolithic pricing model where a sale is one-and-done and then no-one upgrades for the next 15 years because "it just works."
Sorry, what was the question?
Used Edge for a couple of years on my laptop, phone and tablet. Things I like are the vertical, self-hiding tabs and workspaces, so whatever you are working on, the same tabs come up on any device, and you can share them with others, too. They seem to have removed the workspace feature from the phone and tablet versions, though 👎🏻 so I've switched back to Chrome and am trying out their sync'd tab groups. which is a similar idea.
I did find Edge froze now and again, sometimes locking up the whole laptop.
I'm curious: why Firefox has fallen from grace? I got into the habit of using Brave during the Youtube versus browser wars and found it also improved the STW experience. However recent use of Firefox has been faultless. ¿¿?????¿??
I'm curious: why Firefox has fallen from grace? I got into the habit of using Brave during the Youtube versus browser wars and found it also improved the STW experience. However recent use of Firefox has been faultless. ¿¿?????¿??
No idea... Firefox has been my go to browser for as long as I care to remember. Although I use Opera on mobile though as it does text reflow a billion times better than all the other main browsers in mobile including Firefox. It got a bad rep for being slow quite a few years ago but I can't say I've ever really noticed or cared.
Any time I use chrome or edge I just end up getting pissed off, and professionally I use all of them as I used to work as technical suport for a company that builds websites, so I kinda had to use 'all of them' for diagnostics and trouble shooting etc.
I do come across the occasional website that doesn't play nice with firefox, but they are usually older, crappy, poorly designed websites.
So in personal use I do have to fire chrome or edge up on rare occasions, but it's a pretty rare occurence.
I tend to swap between the two.
Used to mostly use Chromium+Ublock, then defected to Brave which seemed more reliable in the Youtube adblocker whack-a-mole. Now switch back and forth between Brave and Firefox+Ublock, often because of Youtube AB testing, when one would work and not the other. Currently using Firefox+Ublock for most things, but Brave+Youtube-row-fixer, cos they were effing around again and made thumbnails so immensely massive that only 2 rows of 3 would fit on my 32inch monitor, and that extension only worked in Chromium derivatives, not Firefox.
Been meaning to try Librewolf properly, but it didn't play nicely with Keepass when I tried before.
I'm curious: why Firefox has fallen from grace?
For me personally, I stopped using Firefox years ago because I found its rendering to be unpredictable. This very site (I know, I know) used to look very different in Firefox. That's probably no longer the case but, well, inertia.
With a Chromium-based browser, which these days is pretty much everything that isn't Firefox, you're pretty much guaranteed a consistent experience. Even Safari's rendering engine shares DNA with Chrome (it's complicated but they're effectively forks of the same core from about ten years ago, with Apple and Google both subsequently adding their own stuff and removing each others' code).
Thanks for the technical explanation, Cougar. Sites I use regularly work well in Brave/Firefox and if a site doesn't I just try another browser. Edge I leave on original settings for those rare occasions when a site won't work with the settings I have on the other two, for example a UK passport application. It's easier to swap browser than to figure out which box to untick to unblock a feature.
I use Edge and Chrome side-by-side on my work laptop, for logistical reasons (and I have a LOT of tabs open).
No noticeable difference in performance.
The "news" function on Edge is terrible though, they want to point you towards re-skinned MSN pieces for everything.
Sites I use regularly work well in Brave/Firefox and if a site doesn't I just try another browser.
Exactly why I have (at least) four browsers installed on this machine. That and,
I use Edge and Chrome side-by-side on my work laptop, for logistical reasons (and I have a LOT of tabs open).
Aside from "it doesn't work properly, I'll try a different browser" (which really shouldn't be a thing server-side in 2025, but I have Chrome locked down so tightly that I've now forgotten how half of it works so sometimes it can be... unpredictable), it can be handy to have a second isolated environment which still has persistence.
As a random example, I have a Microsoft account for everything MS-related in the PC world and a second MS account purely for the Xboxen (because Reasons). Opening an Xbox-related page in Chrome it uses my regular saved credentials which can't see my Xbox account, so opens in the context of some profile it randomly generated years ago (named something ridonculous like SoftSplash69) and then goes into Welcome To Xbox Can We Interest You In A Subscription mode. I could log out and back in with my Xbox account (which is a pain in the arse as it logs me out of everything else); I could open an Incognito window which works until I close it and then I'm back where I started, not the end of the world but is slightly irritating; or I could leave Chrome signed into my PC account and Edge into my Xbox account and not have to fanny about with any of it.
(The fact that I can't even associate the two accounts with each other, let alone merge them into one, is a whole other embuggerance in itself.)
Do use Edge and Chrome in parallel on the work lappy, but that's cos when you have to log in to 2 enterprises with MS logins it gets all confused if you do it all in Edge. I think it works if you do one in incognito, but it's easier to just do it in 2 browsers.
I try to keep my tabs to a minimum, unlike some in my team who insist on having 420 tabs in parallel, and can never find the right ones. 15 for me today across 3 windows.
Dunno what this "news" feature is, but if I saw it, the first thing I'd do is disable it. It's a browser, for browsing or interacting with web services. If I want news, I browse to a news site. Same with weather, which I really don't want or need to see in task bar, when I am sat next to a real window, through which I can see the weather.
If I could use Chrome and Firefox as the 2 default browsers on the work lappy, I would. But I think we're heading in to an IE5.5 remake.