Almost to the Edge

Dammit Microsoft. I tried to use Edge, I really did. The old Edge was pretty meh and while it would be great to have competition in the browser space, I fully understand why it was ended.

The good

The new Edge though, the one based on Chromium? It’s great! It’s got the benefits of Google Chrome without reporting everything you do back to Google, and while there are valid concerns about what it might be reporting to Microsoft the reality is that I’m running Microsoft Windows already, if I can trust a company with my OS then in my opinion the further risk of the browser is… Acceptable.

And it’s a great browser! Synchronization works reliably, it’s fast, sleeping tabs and performance mode both significantly reduce energy (aka, extend battery life when mobile). Tab Groups are genuinely useful and intuitive. SmartScreen is still annoying, but I bet it saves inexperienced users from some malware attempts.

And installing any webpage you like as an app is awesome, it makes great web interfaces like Fastmail and Toodledo feel almost like native apps (hiding the “browser” part of the experience), and it’s more seamless than even Chrome itself.

The bad

Sure, it’s not perfect. Microsoft is desperate to get people to Bing and for some reason your search engine choice isn’t synchronized between browsers but DuckDuckGo is listed by default and switching the default search is no big deal.

We can’t have nice things

But recently Microsoft has decided to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot in the browser space. Again. Edge has started begging me to reset my settings to Bing, the New Tab page mysteriously re-adds all the junk linking to Microsoft News, Bing AI Chatbot appears and seems to re-appear after the settings to remove it were changed.

And we can’t forget the coupon malwareShopping features service which may optionally scan your connected email.

I’m done. Under the hood it is a good browser, maybe even a great browser, but I’m tired of hunting down all the crap that needs to be disabled just to use it. And for some unknown reason the settings for all the most annoying (an invasive) stuff don’t synchronize, so you get to disable it over, and over, and over, on every machine, every user profile, every browser profile.

There are choices

I’m done. I like to try out Firefox every once in a while but Mozilla is doing a bit of the same (coughPocketcough), so I’m trying LibreWolf instead.

Firefox based, but privacy focused, extension copmatible, Firefox Sync compatible (Bookmarks, Extensions and (some) settings synchronize). It has some dumb defaults, like resetting cookies for every new session but I respect the privacy-first approach and I’m willing to fiddle with a few things to make the web borderline tolerable.

I’d be open to a Chromium-based privacy-focused browser too, but I couldn’t find one that synchronizes bookmarks and settings between my devices, and life is too short to reconfigure every last thing over and over.