Keizer on Web browsers: Being the default does little good

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Nice bit of analysis from Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer: The browsers bundled with operating systems, notably Microsoft’s Edge and Apple’s Safari, fell
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Elly

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Got to agree with Greg on this one. What I have seen of Timeline it works erratically with Office 2016, not at all with Office 2010 and of course it doesent work at all with Firefox Quantum yet, although I am sure that’s probably not going to change unless M$ has a change of heart. As for IE11 not had a chance to test it with Timeline at all, but as I suspect, it wont. Pretty much IE11 is relegated on my Home Machines (Win10 1709) to Desktop “Shortcut creator” something that Edge pretty much lacks the single click ability to do. Similarly the ongoing refusal to create/import “Favicons” in the favourites menu reliably is a now a nearly 3 yearly omission.
Yeah I know its purely cosmetic but on the face of it ease of use, without having to wade through loads of cryptic descriptions, makes it in my eyes, “more user friendly;” Performance with Edge and Firefox is broadly comparable. 3 years on and still some glaring omissions from Edge you have to wonder if its maybe time for M$ to get it together and maybe include some backward compatibility with the competition and some of its older Apps/Software/utils. etc still very much in use as this trend downwards isnt going to abate methinks, that’s if they really care?

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Addendum seems like a 3rd party utility fix’s the missing Favicons problem, again, you can find it here: http://www.emmet-gray.com/articles/edgemanage.html. its something similar to “Faviconiser” only a little more advanced and to my mind more flexible. Now if they could only fix the “Create Shortcut on desk top” you may be able to add one to the Edge usership numbers. Not sure if that’ll make a big improvement in the user percentages. Although must confess to being a devotee of Firefox Quantum these days.
Now wouldn’t you have thought if a 3rd party developer can fix this with a simple util. then how come the mighty resources of The Redmond Giant could not or would not?

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My biggest problem with Edge is that I never saw a good use-case for it.  If I want a powerful browser, I have Chrome/Firefox/Opera.  If I need to fiddle with something or drop back to a known good browser for compatibility’s sake I have IE.  Edge does nothing that Chrome can’t, and has none of the compatibility of IE.

Its Metro design is “simple” in the sense of obstructing easy access to tools or settings I commonly need to access (a running theme with recent Windows), and it seems like it still tries to push a “Microsoft-way” of doing things as I can barely get it to work with sites that I’ve never had a problem with in any other browser.  If I wanted to make my browsing experience harder I’d install Lynx, and at least that might offer something useful.

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I don’t think Timeline could move the needle anyway, when it comes to web browsers. The features offered don’t offer anything web browsers don’t already offer. The only advantage is that you could have that mixed in with some Microsoft Office stuff. But I’d guess that most web browsing really isn’t connected with Office work.

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Multistep process to change the default browser on Windows 10?????  What does he mean as the process is no different than on earlier versions of Windows.  Start/Control Panel/default programs/choose your default browser from a list of all installed browsers.  Then don’t forget to tell that browser, when it asks, that you want it to be default.  (Maybe it won’t ask because you changed it on this page).  You could also just tell your favorite browser, when it asks, that you want it to be default.  The process has not changed at all, at least on 1709, when I got this six month old computer and immediately installed Basilisk, and made it default. Plus, while you are there on the Default Apps screen you can take the opportunity to choose defaults for the other apps.

I take issue with the notion that Edge is worse than IE 11.  I don’t like Edge and seldom use it.  But I can’t use IE 11 at all as it takes all my browsing urls that it has kept in history and puts them in a drop down box when I use the Run box. (Yet the normal commands you would likely be entering into the Run box are not kept and that box is always blank on Windows 10). That is awful and neither ever happened on Windows 8.0 Pro or XP Pro.  Plus, IE 11 refuses to keep a history of ALL sites I have visited in a given session.  THAT is weird and unacceptable.  Edge correctly keeps a history of ALL websites I have visited…not an arbitrary list of just some like IE 11 does.  (IE 10 keeps all history but maybe that is because Windows 8.0 went unsupported 1/16 so maybe some patch since then would have messed it up also).

This cripples IE for anyone valuing browser history.  (I keep history in gecko based browsers for as long as they will keep it which is now two years or more).  With IE 11 on Windows 10, you have to erase all history…before closing the browser if you intend to use the run box and don’t want a bunch of visited websites to appear in the drop down box.

Edge, on the other hand, works correctly and you can keep history and it never is populated in the Run drop down box.  So, for me, IE 10 on my Windows 8.0 Pro machine is fine but IE 11 is unacceptable on Windows 10 Pro while Edge is ok except for how extremely ugly it is on my 24 inch wide screen Dell UltraSharp monitor.

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I’m the Anon that said IE11 is better than Edge.  Never knew about the run dropdown list issue with IE in Win10, I’ll need to check on that.

Edge is worse than IE11 for everything I use IE11 for.  Say I need to use a website that hasn’t been updated since the days of IE 6 or I have to use some corporate-ware; these are my use cases for IE.  It’s not my daily driver, so history (which IE11 renders useless) isn’t as important as the ability to easily turn on/off proxy settings, muck about with ActiveX run permissions, or drop into dev mode to emulate a site in previous versions of IE.

If I want to do anything similar in Edge I need to open Tools and… click on Open in Internet Explorer 11…  Edge offers no value over Chrome/Firefox, and as I said I find updated sites don’t seem to run as well or sometimes even properly in Edge while they do in any other browser, IE included.  Edge definitely offers some advantages over IE11, not denying that, but those same advantages are easily covered better in other modern browsers.  For those upgrades, it fails to deliver the compatibility that IE has/had.

This is a bit moot as we both agree that we don’t like Edge and rarely use it.  That’s my problem with Edge.

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HiFlyer

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(Same Anon, can’t edit to add this)

Put another way, IE has a reason to exist on my computer, Edge doesn’t.

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Mele20 wrote:

I keep history in gecko based browsers for as long as they will keep it which is now two years or more

Why?

Yes, certainly you may choose to handle your browser history in whatever manner you prefer. But seriously, why?

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HiFlyer

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Download Bomb bug in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi and Brave
Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer not affected.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/download-bomb-trick-returns-in-chrome-also-affects-firefox-opera-vivaldi-and-brave/

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BobbyB, HiFlyer, Microfix, Kirsty, Elly

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Edge has been designed for idiots (at least, that’s what Microsoft thinks end-users are) and even after 5+ years of development, Edge (formerly Spartan) sucks big time. Edge does not even offer tracking protection (works great with IE), allow users to block unsafe content (IE has tons of options), or cares about privacy. Anyway, Edge is a joke and one shouldn’t waste a second to ditch this junk.

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Here is a list for 12 fixes when Edge does not work: – https://windowsreport.com/microsoft-edge-windows-10-crash/ – it is dated July 3, 2018 – so it may be helpful for some (?)

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Microfix

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I personally like Edge. It is fast, and the interface is clean and simple. I haven’t used it much, but when I have used it, I have enjoyed the experience.

I don’t use it at home, because I don’t have Windows10 at home. But if Edge would work in Windows 8.1 or 7, I would probably use it.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I like the idea of Edge. I like the original reasons that gave rise to the birth of Edge. I like that Microsoft did seem to understand what was needed for a browser at the beginning. I don’t know how it turned out in practice, because…

I don’t like how Edge handles privacy, how Microsoft shove it and Cortana and Bing down our throat. Therefore, I never use Edge, I don’t trust Microsoft no more and it doesn’t matter if Edge works great or not in practice or if it provides the same value than Firefox, because it doesn’t have what Mozilla have: my trust.

 

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Elly

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The biggest turnoff of Edge for me is that it is the only browser I can think of that doesn’t allow the user to save web pages onto their pc.

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