Nobody?  Totally incorrect. Try, why do few people use Edge?

anonymous wrote:

Nobody?  Totally incorrect. Try, why do few people use Edge?

That’s a valid point.

Perhaps a better title would be “Why does ANYONE use Edge (in its current form)?”

Even though I don’t use IE or Edge, I don’t consider this move a good thing. Basically Google pretty much has a monopoly on the browser market.

I’ll stick with Firefox, thank you very much, and I’ll continue to make donations to support Firefox (and likewise for Thunderbird which I use for email and RSS/Atom).

Because we don’t want another Internet Explorer; i.e. a defacto-monopoly on web browsers and web standards. The irony here is of course that we still wound up with one, it is just called Chrome instead. At least Chrome is truly cross-platform though, at least for now. Maybe if it gets big enough Google will deprioritize Chrome development for anything that isn’t Chrome OS or Android one day. Especially because the US as it exists today could not care less about punishing companies who abuse their monopolies, as long as said companies are not censoring conservative viewpoints on social media.

To answer his question: because Edge is only serviceable, nothing more, nothing less. It works, and if it’s all you’ve got, it’ll get you by. It is the Yugo of web browsers.

Other browsers do more and integrate with their ecosystem better.

I’m a bigger fan of Edge (old) than Chromium Edge. Chromium Edge, IMHO, has no place in the world. If I want a Chromium browser, there are much better, more feature-rich choices.

I am not a fan of chrome and don’t use it.  I’m hoping Edge (chromium) is demoted from being a core component in the operating system (since it really should NOT be in the first place), and can be truly and completely uninstalled if desired.

It is very unfortunate that we are seeing the IE scenario played out again but with chrome.  I cringe every time I’m told a website only works properly with chrome.

zero2dash wrote:

To answer his question: because Edge is only serviceable, nothing more, nothing less. It works, and if it’s all you’ve got, it’ll get you by. It is the Yugo of web browsers.

Other browsers do more and integrate with their ecosystem better.

I’m a bigger fan of Edge (old) than Chromium Edge. Chromium Edge, IMHO, has no place in the world. If I want a Chromium browser, there are much better, more feature-rich choices.

Yugos could drive off the lot.

I suspect that some of it has to do with how recently Edge was introduced.  Windows 10 arrived in 2015, and Edge, of course, was introduced with it.  By then, people had already settled on a browser, which for most of them was Chrome.  Even if Edge was “just as good” as whatever they were using, that alone would not be enough to get people to switch.

As long as people are happy with what they are using, they are going to keep using it.  Quite evidently, people are satisfied with what they have, and as long as that’s the case, they’re not likely to even try something else (no matter how much the OS nags them), let alone make the switch.  In order for MS to lure people to Edge from what they’re already using, there would have to be something that was so much better in Edge to get people to overcome inertia.  Did Edge do anything that people care about much better than Chrome?

This is Mozilla’s problem too, only they don’t have the “home field” advantage on the most-used desktop OS in the world like Microsoft does.  Mozilla has persisted for years in trying to remove all features that distinguish Firefox from Chrome.  The logic seeems to be that since most people use Chrome, that must mean that the Chrome feature set is what people want, and Firefox’s continued low market share means that its feature set isn’t what people want.  Therefore, they conclude, if they match the Chrome feature set, they will get users too.

Mozilla hasn’t yet realized, even after all these years of watching the “be Chrome” strategy fail, that the people who do consider the Chrome feature set to be optimal already have a browser that meets their needs perfectly, and they’re not going to even consider something else as long as that’s the case.  In order to lure users away from Chrome, Mozilla would have to do something that people are interested in much better than Chrome.  Mozilla is going the other direction, trying to remove every thing that makes it different than Chrome.  Is it any wonder that Firefox has been declining in market share for nearly the exact length of time that it has been trying to copy Chrome?

When your opponent has an entrenched product, you can’t be “just as good.”  You have to be better in some significant way that your target audience cares about, and it has to be a big enough thing to get people to overcome the inertia that leads them to keep doing things the way they are already accustomed to.  You also have to do the stuff that your entrenched opponent does as well as that opponent.

When IE 6 was the entrenched opponent, it was relatively easy to improve upon, as IE 6 was a terrible product in many ways.  Chrome, by many people’s standards, isn’t (I don’t like it, but I am obviously in the minority).  Firefox, in the last few years running up to Quantum, was more customizable with its powerful addons, but it was much slower, and the 32-bit version (which for many years was the only version they offered for Windows) used up all available contiguous RAM and crashed a lot if you opened a lot of tabs, while all of the other browsers had long since moved into the 64-bit realm.  In those days, it stuttered and juddered as you scrolled, while Chrome was smooth and easy.  It did addons better than Chrome, at least from a “power” point of view (in terms of security, it demanded more scrutiny), but it did the basics so poorly that it didn’t matter to the vast majority of people.

Firefox eventually got a Windows 64-bit build, and e10s, and it had improved massively by its last pre-Quantum release, v56, but just one version later, they chopped off the one killer feature that Firefox had, in favor of Chrome-style extensions that were far less powerful.  The new Firefox still wasn’t (and isn’t) as fast as Chrome, but now it also doesn’t have addons that do more than Chrome’s addons.  In some cases, the new Firefox addons that are modeled after Chrome’s addons, actually do less than the Chrome addons.

Little by little, every thing Firefox does that is different and (to some) better than Chrome is being chopped off.  That’s supposed to lure Chrome users over… how?  “Just as good” isn’t good enough, and Mozilla’s attempts to sell privacy as their “killer” feature hasn’t worked, as it is quite evident that most people simply don’t care (and those that do can use a de-Googled Chromium derivative like Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, or Iridium).

Since many users of PCs use laptops, the Edge strategy of promoting the lower power consumption of Edge was a good one, but Chrome closed much of that gap, while maintaining its huge advantage in the other areas.  Chrome also works on non Windows 10 PCs, whether they run older Windows versions, MacOS, or Linux.  By the time MS threw in the towel on the non-Chromium Edge, Edge was still available on less than half the PCs that Chrome was.  When people migrated to 10, they kept using what they were using before, which by definition was not Edge.

If Chromium based Edge were the one released in July 2015, Edge may have kept IE’s high market share. Instead they released an unfinished “Project Spartan” based on Store app IE11. Too bad Microsoft mangers do not understand what customers want, often until it’s too late.

And never discount the influence exerted by businesses such as banks in fully moving their support from IE to Edge.  Our local banks still work better with Firefox than Edge.

I used Edge exclusively until MS announced that they would gut Edge and wrap it around Chromium.  I want nothing at all to do with Google, Chrome, or Chromium.  I use Startpage as my search engine, which anonymizes my search requests to Google.

I now use Firefox, and am pleased with it.  Startpage is just fine.  I don’t get prioritized search results.  I’ve checked some of the IP addresses Startpage uses on my behalf for Google searches, and they come from all over the place.  It’s like I’m on a VPN as far as Google can tell, and it’s free.

My main issue was with Favorites. The first versions of Edge didn’t import all of them. Next it was syncing. Some computers could be synced others could not. My phone a, Lumia 930, almost synced but then one day it went crazy and I ended up with 5,000 plus Favorites which I had to delete one at a time. It took the first year of Game of Thrones reruns to get rid of them all.

Firefox just works for me. It syncs everything including the add-ins and security settings. I only make a few minor changes to the interface on a new installation.

Let’s face it, the first thing you do with a new browser is import and organized your favorites. Once that’s done, you want it to be the same on other devices. Screw that up and there’s no point on going any further.

For how many years (?) Microsoft stupidly persisted (blame Ballmer, and his slavish followers) in building and limiting availability of its only current browser to its current version of Windows.  Full stop.  Anybody using an older Windows version, or later iOS or Android, couldn’t install a working current Microsoft browser if they wanted it.  As a practical matter hundreds of millions of end users found fully sychronized current browsers like (mainly) Chrome, Firefox and Opera at least as good and Microsoft’s best and available even for Linux.  Scales only recently seem to have fallen from eyes in Redmond with the advent of Edge on Android, and possibly even Windows 7 when the new Chromium-based one is released.

Edge was handicapped from the start. Didn’t help that it only ran on Windows 10 and struggled for months before extensions were introduced. Edge chromium probably won’t help market share much given the lack of Chrome clones success. But Microsoft did the right thing adopting Chromium which will save on developer costs. Chrome at this point will be hard to unravel in terms of its dominating market share.

The reason I don’t use Edge is because I don’t like it. Some things don’t work as well for me with Edge as with other browsers.

microsoft does 1 thing really well

it makes an OS

other then that forget about it.  it lost the battle of web browsers years ago.  it should stick with the fundamentals.

office 2010 was great all the rest forget about it

FireFox and IE11 Blues: The problems with FireFox really started, I think, when its developers refused to allow DRM content to be streamed through their browser. Very principled of them, but not what people were looking for. Then HTML5 players came along for streaming video, but MS did not introduced an HTML5 player in IE11 for Windows 7, the big one at the time, only in its version for Windows 8.1 Were they trying to get more people to cross over to 8.1? Who knows . Instead of an HTML5 player users of IE 11 on Windows 7 needed, and still need, to use Silverlight, which is why MS keeps on sending patches for it now and then. I did not have complaints about Silverlight, but it is better to use a browser that implements the current standards, not some offbeat application that tends not to be compatible with the rest of the world, in this case with some of its streaming services.

The Quantum version of FireFox somewhat made it less versatile than it used to be by introducing tiles and making it a bit harder to have what one wanted there instead of the commercial links provided by Mozilla. And, for all the talk of being very fast, it run slower on my PC than previous versions.

Then I learned here of the existence of Waterfox, I tried it, and it was everything I wanted in a browser for my own needs, no more and no less. I also tried and sometimes use Chrome, but Waterfox is my main browser. I have it installed in my Windows 7 PC, my MacBook Pro laptop. I stopped using IE 11 more than a year ago and now see no reason to go back to using it. And Edge? What is that?

My employer has rolled out a new group policy wherein a shortcut for Edge gets pinned to my taskbar every time my machine starts.  And every time, I unpin the shortcut.

Focus on the fundamentals.  Excellent point.

I don’t trust MS browsers any more..simple as that! Last I used many moons ago was IE9 for some websites that firefox would not display properly at the time.

Come to think of it, it’s better the devil you know, so for me it’s a no brainer, Firefox or derivatives such as waterfox/palemoon/ cliqz/ icecat (on linux)  based on longevity of experience mainly due to  security, further non neutered security extensions enhancements and the ability to about:config tweak to your hearts content. safe in the knowledge that your homework is saved in the prefs script file for saving as a backup.

If it’s the “old” Edge based on Spartan (aka. EdgeHTML), then I not only use it anymore – I have uninstalled that version of Edge using this tool from the Winaero web site

on the other hand I am using “ChrEdge” or Edge Chromium stable version 77.0 to view this Askwoody web site recently