Gave Edge a shot

Brian_B

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So, in a rare spat of open-mindedness, I decided to give Edge a try. I'm a long time Chrome user - at first because Chrome was a lot cleaner and lighter than most other options, has a nice cross-platform integration with my Mac/Windows environment, but today it's mostly out of habit and the fact nothing really better has come along. Every couple of years I give Firefox another shot, but it hasn't hooked me yet.

So out of the blue I just decided to give Edge a shot. I didn't run any benchmarks, this is entirely an entire objective opinion.

In my normal use - I couldn't tell any significant performance difference between Edge and Chrome. I didn't find any pages or services I use that had any incompatibly issues, although a couple did throw up warnings saying they were best used on IE or Chrome - but no surprise they ran fine anyway. In short: it worked, at least as well as Chrome. The biggest difference I could tell just casually using it was that the download progress box pops up in the upper-right corner instead of as a banner across the bottom - that was the biggest difference from a casual eye.

All my bookmarks, and even extensions transitioned over with no problem - so kudos there to Microsoft. That did make it easy to migrate. Almost scarily so, as it also picked up passwords and even offered to pick up credit cards (I have none stored with Chrome).

After using it for a couple of days, it didn't feel as light or svelt as Chrome -- not that Chrome feels very light anymore, it's certainly gained a few pounds as it's aged, but Edge feels even moreso. The easiest example - just click the ... menu: Chrome's is still fairly concise. Microsoft's looks like a cluttered garage full of random options I won't ever use. Settings is another good example - MS has tried to integrate it in with your Microsoft online account, and it makes for a big mess. Chrome obviously also interates with your Google account, but they don't mirror or confuse a lot of things that you would set in your Google account also by making it pop up in the Chrome settings.

I didn't run any benchmarks, and I don't run dozens of tabs simultaneously or any apps that really stress a system, so I can't comment on processor usage, battery life (on a Desktop anyway), or memory usage -- but my usage is light enough I never had any issues with Chrome in the first place.

After a couple of days, I think I'm going back to Chrome. There wasn't really anything negative to Edge, it worked fine. The biggest criticism I could find was that it just felt a bit overweight and had the common Microsoft bloatedness to it. Both Chrome and Edge are going to mine out all my information for all they are worth, I trust neither to "Do the right thing". But they do what I need them to do, so long as I realize what I'm paying for it. And Edge worked fine. It's just that it doesn't do anything differently or better than Chrome, and if you didn't open a menu up it looks just like Chrome, and runs just like Chrome, so why would I switch permanently?
 
I switched to Waterfox from Chrome (Firefox off-shoot). All of my portals that I access work, and my Firefox extensions moved over without a hitch as well. I can deal with the sluggishness from time to time (vs. Chrome). The only time I whip out the Chrome browser is if I am doing something Google-related (their apps work best on their platform).
 
I switched to chrome-edge and its a huge improvement over both IE and edge, both of which had tons of compatibility issues even with MS sites like azure and office portals. I wouldn't say its better or worse than chrome, but it does feel somewhat faster on lesser machines IME.
The worst part of edge is bing integration, even after all these years bing sucks. I'm still keeping it over chrome.
 
The worst part of edge is bing integration, even after all these years bing sucks. I'm still keeping it over chrome.
I did find you can delete Bing as a search engine option - not sure how deep that goes or if it’s only when you search directly from the address bar
 
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