Microsoft Edge, anyone?

cujo@sh.itjust.works to Linux@lemmy.ml – 106 points –

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. 😂

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Probably a godsend if you're a web dev. No more rebooting or running a second PC/VM for compatibility checking.

The only possible use case I can think of, but I'd still want to restrict the thing to its own VM out of paranoia.

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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. 🤷‍♀️

How is edge more efficient? It's literally chromium

Chrome is basically Chromium+bloat so this doesn't surprise me.

And Edge is chromium + Microsoft Bloat.

One could argue using it on Windows means only allowing M$ to spy on you, theoretically. Though I would not be surprised if M$ uses a custom version of Chromium including Google trackers, so the opposite of degoogled chromium.

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Brave has PWAs, but I'm not sure about the translation support

True. But brave is run by a crypto advertising company. Their business model is advertising and crypto tokens. I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.

I trust crypto bros less than I trust Microsoft.

Why trust either? #firefox

Because firefox’s PWA behavior is not as I wish..

What I wish is a firefox fork dedicated to PWA. It should be Privacy first and as intuitive to use as it can. Best would be, if it was designed like an app store.

Called PWApp-sore, I guess

Sadly I have no time to (learn) develop(ing)

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In my opinion no proprietary browser is worth using.

Chrome isn't better in any way than Edge, as both don't respect it's users privacy and decisions (dark patterns, etc).

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!

Same here. Work allows BYOD, so I use my Linux laptop for work stuff. I use Edge for accessing all work stuff and running M365 PWAs. I especially like how Teams in Edge runs so much better than the standalone Electron app, which is horrible.

Damn, this thread just got me to install Edge for a better Teams experience.

I really respect this strategy but I could never get past one personal obstacle: what do you do if you want to click a link, say from an email? Do you switch browsers and copy paste the link? Or do you delve into the link in Edge? What if you eventually reach a website you wish you were logged into on Edge, but are already in Firefox?

This is a very frustrating limitation of every PWA implementation I've seen. They need to respect the default browser setting for external links!

Yeah that is annoying. I just copy the link and paste in Firefox. I don't ever need to go back I find since I only use Edge for MS365 stuff.

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 use Edge on Linux as my user agent in Firefox on Windows just so I can give some engineers a laugh.

I always use edge whenever I'm making a public presentation with a computer I use. Simply because I never use it. Then autocomplete won't embarrass me if we look something up.

Why dont use any other browser, like vivaldi, brave, librewolf, ungoogled chromium, that are not made by data hungery big tech like Microsoft.

Those are all solid options, so you might be tempted to use them. I keep a windows partition on case I need it for something, but I'm never tempted to use it unless I absolutely have to.

I've got an SSD with windows 11 on it..

It's been sitting for about a year.

Or just launch second profile... Firefox / chrome(ium) supports it. No need to use different browser.

Many of those have shady Histories and CEOs. Many are seemingly made by normal companies, but those are owned by Chinese organizations. The only real alternatives would be Librewolf/FF and Degoogled Chromium. That would be a matter of preference, mostly. And you don't even have to use Librewolf, you could just use a seperate, clean profile in FF. Launch it with firefox -profilemanager or on about:profiles, @dukeofdummies@lemmy.world

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.

Similarly, when I'm on a contract that requires O365 and teams and doesn't supply a work device I use Edge strictly for work to quarantine Microsoft away from the rest of my usage on Firefox etc.

Wait, you want Microsoft office products on your Linux machine? You- you want Microsoft products??

@NegativeLookBehind @cujo @BitingChaos some people don’t have much choice. Their jobs demand it. At least in Linux you’d be able to really sandbox them and route them through filters to prevent spying if you know what you’re doing.

No, I get not having a choice. But he specifically used the word “hope” to describe his desire to have Office available for Linux.

Would I rather use outlook on a work linux machine, or Thunderbird on a work windows machine? The former. Every. Single. Time. MS Office suite availability on Linux would make it easier to do my job, potentially

I hope that Office will be available on Linux in addition to Adobe Acrobat. LibreOffice, OnlyOffice, etc. aren't good enough for documents that use advanced Office features. Same thing applies to Acrobat.

Well, it's for work stuff, so I don't have a lot of choice.

Several years ago some higher-ups chose Microsoft to provide all services. Exchange, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, etc.

I can use LibreOffice or whatever for documents, but everything else is Microsoft.

A native version of Outlook would be nice.

Look, I have a love / hate relationship with Outlook but it is the best email client by far and the web version works great on Linux ( especially on Edge ).

For me, Outlook is the difference between being able to use Linux for work and being forced to use Windows or MacOS.

[...] Outlook [...] it is the best email client by far [...]

You must be kidding. I get it that you might be required to use it for work (I've been in that boat more than once). But outlook is a terrible, buggy, and infuriating clusterfuck of an email client. There are so many better alternatives. It has piss-poor handling for different encodings, still not defaulting to utf8. Randomly showing garbled Chinese letters to some people sometimes for no obvious reason. Losing connection to Exchange for hours without telling you. Still not supporting quoting standards which have been around for three decades. The settings are a convoluted mess. Filtering can only be done via a super clunky and unintuitive GUI; no scripting support. I could go on and on and on ... The only thing where it is arguably better than other alternatives, is with the calender integration and for planning meetings. But that is only because that is not a common email client feature, hence why most email clients don't have it at all. But even for that there are alternatives which are on par if not better. Kontact from the KDE suite comes to mind. I mean, which demented mind at Microsoft thought it was a good idea, that an email equals a calendar entry for a meeting? The obvious way to implement it is that you have two things that are linked, that reference each other: one email, one calendar entry (like everybody else implements it). Microsoft: emails and calendar entries are the same thing - delete one, lose the other. I can not wrap my head around how anybody can have used outlook and comparable alternatives and come to the conclusion that the infuriatung dumpster fire of outlook is "the best thing". Either you haven't really worked with a meaningful number of alternatives, are trolling, or have some severe mental issues (Stockholm syndrome?) that you should seek help for.

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I always thought it was hilariously pointless, does that count?

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Nah it's proprietary garbage. If it weren't proprietary it would be an option (although in that case a "deMicrosofted" version would be better). there are free Chromium browsers and free browsers that aren't chromium, this one offers nothing of interest.

Yo I'll install this bs right now if it allows me to watch Netflix into such in 4k. Anyone tried that?

Edit: Nope that's not a thing

FUCK NETFLIX DISNEY AMAZON AND ALL THE OTHERS

Set sail, matey. The actors are on strike anyway. You can afford to hate a corporation or two.

No... I don't want to use a browser made by Microsoft. They will turn it to shit as soon as they can get away with it, and I'm happy with Firefox.

I have it on Steam Deck since it can be launched with a CLI argument to force a 1280x800 window.

Vivaldi pretends to be Edge when visiting Bing to unlock GPT-4, and prefer that to Edge on my other devices. (Secondary to Firefox, ofc)

Installed to use bingGpt. Never use it. But somethis it get some updates.

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).

Annoyingly this feature isn’t available in Edge on Linux

I did not know this was a thing. I might have to actually use Edge now.

I use it for my university email, which is an outlook account. Edge is the only browser that doesn't constantly log me out.

Sounds more like a dirty tactic by Microsoft. As suggested elsewhere for other purposes, try spoofing the user-agent header and see if it still keeps logging you out. The UA header shouldn't have any effect whatsoever, but if it "fixes" the problem, it's yet another case of Microsoft being Microsoft.

(Their excuse will be something like "oh, we don't support other browsers because we can't be sure the software will work properly in them", which skips the fact that 1: it lets you log in using a "bad" browser, which it shouldn't do if it's that dangerous and 2: they're a massive multinational corporation. If they can't put a bit of money towards making things work in the small handful of alien browsers, they're doing it wrong. Probably on purpose.)

I run an awful lot of MS email for a lot of customers. My own company (literally mine) uses Exchange on prem and I pass all access through HA Proxy. My customers mostly use M365 but one is still on GroupWise (I have known GroupWise for roughly 25 years)

I've seen browsers come and go. My first one was telnet on a VAX through a X.25 PAD and a string of connections via the US (I'm UK) to CERN. First graphical browser was Mosaic on Win 95. I think Mosaic became Internet Explorer - MS don't really innovate - they buy it.

Edge is basically Chromium with knobs on. Chromium is Chrome with knobs removed (sort of!) I can exclusively reveal that Firefox works fine with all version of OWA and Exchange on-line, because that is what I personally use and so do many of my staff and customers.

If you have snags with your uni email then there is something specific there and not your browser choice. Edge doesn't do anything special for OWA it's just yet another Google browser.

Ironically NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical web browser ) became Netscape which became Mozilla which became Firefox. Internet Explorer was mostly written from scratch.

Around IE5 or so, Microsoft pulled way ahead of Netscape and they basically put Netscape out of business. There was almost no competition for them and they had massive market share which is way IE6 became the anchor weighing down web standards for a decade.

Firefox eventually brought competition back to the browser market and in fact dominated for a while ( with close to 70% market share ). Most of the rest was Microsoft and, until the end, IE was home grown tech from Microsoft.

Then Google introduced Chrome which began a long, slow slide in market share for everybody else. Today, IE is gone and Chrome not only dominates like IE used to. Most of the alternative browsers use the Chrome engine ( Blink ), including Microsoft Edge. Firefox is down to low single digit market share.

At this point, the only real Chrome alternative is Safari which remains popular on the Mac ( and iOS of course ).

Google pays Mozilla to keep Firefox going so they can avoid anti trust lawsuits

@LeFantome @gerdesj I've found a few alternatives to #chrome & #firefox over the years, but most of them weren't all that great....

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.

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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.

Strange. The other day I had a call on Teams with a customer and had no problems using Firefox 117.0 on NixOS, but I recall that some months ago some features (like microphone and screensharing) where unavailable.

Maybe Microsoft hasn't rolled out the update in your region/org?

My org is slow to get updates, that might be it

edit: tried call from M$ Teams today and got the popup saying :

Try a different browser This feature isn't available yet for your browser. Try the web app with Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome, or switch to the desktop app.

And then a download link

I'm on FF117 on Fedora (F38)

Second edit:

changing User-Agents worked to remove the popup, but crashed FF instead

Just wait until Microsoft releases a .deb of Windows Terminal.

Powershell is already available for Linux

Well I guess if you need scripts to work in a mixed Windows/Linux environment that makes sense. On the other hand the few times I have to touch powershell it's so verbose and cryptic at the same time, so I think I'll stick with bash personally.

As a PowerShell expert, I can confirm it is suuuper verbose and yet cryptic. It’s a real shell, much better than it’s predecessor, but still with plenty of bad decisions in its design and implementation. My theory is that they only watched a 1-hour presentation on Bash before spending a weekend designing PowerShell.

It also plays really well with .NET if you are using that.

In many ways, Linux is the premiere .NET environment now.

I use edge on Ubuntu via the snap.

It lets me use a very specific website that doesn't work in Firefox.

It also lets me play Xbox cloud games on Linux.

Otherwise it's Firefox soon the way.

I can't remember for sure but I think that I got Xbox cloud games working on Firefox before with thr user agent switcher back when I had it, it also works well for those sites that don't work in Firefox sometimes.

That's a YMMV thing though because sometimes the sites just genuinely don't work in Firefox rather than just being blocked because they haven't tested it

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.

I can't really blame people for using Edge since I using VSCode daily 😞

I just found out about VSCodium. Its a project that packages the MIT licensed VS Code source without all the M$ telemetry and crud. Be warned, there are apparently many plugins that don't work with Codium, so if you rely heavily on any specific plugin I'd see if it works properly before committing.

It's still relying on Microsoft code, but at least it's specifically the open source bits. Lol!

I use Edge daily--trying to use mostly non-proprietary software, but when I need to annotate a PDF, Edge just works. It's no drawboard PDF, but it's free and runs on Linux!

What's wrong evince?

I've love both Firefox and Okular (KDE's evince), and both "technically" support PDF inking, but the experience is just subpar to what Edge offers now for notetaking and reviewing articles. Xournal++ is the gold standard and fully supports my Surface Pen, whereas Edge does not recognize pressure or the eraser. However, I work with a lot of embedded files (Logseq), and the fact that Xournal++ cannot bundle a PDF in a single file and instead needs a reference, plus the fact that PDF is a universal file format, makes Edge the most enticing option for now

Ahh I see, I hadn't realised you meant note taking with a pen. Glad that it works for you. And thanks for ignoring my somewhat caveman-esque typo.

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I think of myself as a Firefox user but I probably use Edge on Linux more than any other browser.

It runs the video conferencing apps I need to use better than anything else. Firefox does not work at all with some of them.

Obviously, it works well with Outlook and Office 365. I use a number of LMS systems and they all work well with it as well.

Once you start using it, it is just a great browser though honestly. Before I know it, I have opened a bunch of tabs in Edge and there is no reason to open anything else.

I use it as the only browser for work. I don't have choices, because Teams and Outlook with all its' functionality works well only in their own browser, edge...

I even write some userscript to improve it because it's broken.. :/

As a browser it’s fine, but Microsoft asking me to use it every 0.001 seconds really turns me off it.

I was all over Edge when it was in beta. Since release though it's just become bloated with Microsoft's shit. Not to mention in Windows Microsoft has a fucking hard-on for making it the default browser. Even if you don't, Outlook defaults to using it regardless.

It only asks you to use it on windows or MS platforms. I hope you can see the issue now. I don't use arch btw.

I wouldn’t know, since MS’s incessant badgering has made me 0% likely to ever install it on any of my linux machines.

But the only reason for Edge ever to exist was to download Firefox.

So do I need to download edge to download Firefox? O.o

Not anymore. Not with Winget.

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.

There's a Bing chat extension for Firefox and Chrome. I haven't tried the image stuff but I assume it would work just the same. I think it's a 100% artificial antifeature that it "requires" Edge.

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I am not judging anyone who uses Edge here, I can understnad the appeal of it. I just am sad that Linux doesn't have Microsoft like feature that there isn't a great alternative for Google + Bard, Microsoft GPT.

I want everything FOSS, but yeah, I will sleep now. I am too old for the new gen.

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I used it once to use the in browser bug report thing to request that they support immersive WebXR on linux.

Although I am required to use windows machines for work normally and, since we dont have access to firefox, i normally use edge there, there are occasions on which I find it convenient to hop into a similar setup on my home linux machine to get to my work account. I will use edge for that - as well as outlook online etc.

For a work browser, I find it pretty useful. There is no way that I would want to use if for general purposes though.

I tested it out bc I thought I'd need it to get teams running for school, but it turns out we're only using teams' video calls so Vivaldi works too. Edge is fine I guess? I dislike that it's chromium and I dislike microsoft but it's good to know edge works fine, in case I need it for some reason at some point. I still uninstalled it when I realized I didn't need it.

Normally, I use firefox for normal personal browsing and vivaldi for school (since some sites we use work much better on chromum, and it's nice to have that separation anyways).

Bullshit. Even the flatpak is not sandboxed very much. If you sandbox it totally then maybe. But I dont know.

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As long as Vivaldi is available on Linux I don't see a need for it, same engine but better features.

I use firefox and used email and most of my things on google, but after 2023, I had an abandoned outlook and start to use for Sync on Edge and etc

IDK, seems a decent browser, a lot need some corporate browser and microsoft going to cloud, at least it's better than going to windows entirely for a lot of people kekw

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)

I don’t use it for browsing but only for two use cases :

  • Editing PDFs. Firefox does it, but stupidly if you reopen the file you can’t edit previous edits. Like you write something on the pdf, turn off your computer, a day later you want to edit the text, you can’t. But Edge remembers text blocks and you can edit even after you reopen the file. That’s why I use it
  • Bing Chat

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.

In my opinion, the only proprietary browner (and remember that it is partially proprietary) worth even though it is proprietary is Vivaldi

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

You mean the browser that literally states in their privacy policy that they assign an id to your device and send a ping every 24 hours containing this id and some other metadata including a part of your IP address with which they perform a geoip lookup to approximate your location?

Which they're planning to remove

https://vivaldi.com/zerotracking

I'm not sure if I understand this article correctly but as far as I can tell, they kinda contradict themselves. While they talk about not collecting anything (which I understand as “we disable phoning home in its entirety”) they later talk about removing the id and still wanting to get the same information as before minus the id. While I appreciate the move, I have two problems with it:

  • The headline is imo misleading because while they technically won't track you, they'll still force you to send some telemetry data, leading directly to problem two,
  • You'll still not be able to opt-out entirely like, for example, on Firefox

MS Edge Has a superior PDF editor with very good workflow for textboxes, pen input support. I use it just for editing/annotating PDFs.

I use edge on linux every now and then. I keep two browsers to separate work and personal stuff and I use edge as my secondary browser (for personal stuff on the work OS, for work stuff on the personal OS). My main browser is Vivaldi.

My reasoning is that it has very good tab management features and I'd still rather use a Microsoft browser than an Opera browser. With just those two requirements there's not much else to use out there.

I used to because they gave out free coupons for various things (like Amazon). The issue I had with it is that the right-click menu for Edge on Linux overrides the OS and that of a browser. It was annoying enough to go back to Firefox.

I collect Microsoft points so Edge gives bonus every day & integrates with bing. It's also good for reading pdfs and epubs cause it has nice tts which does not sound like a retarded robot played through a tin can like the linux native one.

I hate Microsoft but I have to agree it has some really nice products. Personally for me, I just don't like edge because it's somewhat bloat. I mean, look, if you have a high powered machine, you will probably love it. But yeah, I like firefox best, I can't imagine leaving it. Just too addicted to the features, can't live without them.