A common request is your need for Microsoft Edge to span the breadth of operating systems in your environment. Last October, we made Microsoft Edge available on Linux in preview channels (Dev and Beta channels) and today, the browser is generally available for Linux via the stable channel. This milestone officially rounds out the full complement of major platforms served by Microsoft Edge through stable channel: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and now Linux. To use Microsoft Edge on Linux, users can download it from our website or retrieve it using the command line from a Linux package manager.
I hear Edge is a decent browser, but I think it’s safe to assume it does its best to trick you into using Microsoft services. I really see no need for this in my Linux environment, especially since it’s just Chromium, and there are far, far better Google-free Chromium alternatives for Linux.
There I am migrating away from Windows 11 and 100% to Linux and Microsoft try to ruin my day by porting Edge to Linux.
It’s interesting reading MSX was another Microsoft trojan horse. I didn’t know that.
MSX? You mean the Japanese home computer?
How was that a trojan horse?
The last time I checked it was not possible to build the MS edge browser from source or even see what microsoft changed from chromium because so much of the code was missing from their source repository. AFAIK they’re complying with the chromium license(s), which doesn’t technically require them to publish the entire source, but still I was disappointed that I couldn’t see what microsoft was doing in their fork of the browser and that they want to keep it a secret.
Google doesn’t publish the full source for their chrome browser either. I’d recommend foregoing all proprietary browsers and only using FOSS ones where the code is fully public.
I’m not anti closed source. The problem is the unethical monopoly attached to it and the issue of having no vote in the matter. That tips the equation.
As for Google I’m trying Quant as my default search engine. It’s a French owned search engine.
After using Qwant for some time, myself have switched again, this time to search.brave.com . For my use cases the results are better. The downside is that both search engines “fill the holes” with bing results.
As an alternative, there is Mojeek (that one uses only it’s own index), but that index “is not there yet” as a realistic daily driver IMHO.
The problem is the indexes. It’s not just the data but the interpretive algorithm and the various weights placed on various things. That’s “the index” when seen from the complete view.
I’ve found Google can present search results which are a narrow interpretive reality. Anyone new to a subject wouldn’t necessarily know this. I’ve been suspicious of Google since their search results lowered in quality after the first few years. They’ve been cleared by investigations into commercial biases but I know when something isn’t right when I look at the first page results. If I didn’t know the subject and primary sources of information I wouldn’t know this.
I’m guessing it’s not going to be easy to build a better index. Quant was different but wasn’t subjectively worse and was better in some ways but I couldn’t say it was better overall.
Edge is actually a great browser, but I stick to Firefox for philosophical reasons, both on windows & Android… FF is very good too. Of course, uBlock Origin is a must! DuckDuckGo as the search engine. I tried the Brave search, but it didn’t feel right, same for Qwant & Search Page and so on… DDG just works…
I really wanted a MS browser on linux for a long time for the same reason: Websites were written for Internet explorer. I built and used sites that were ie only ( I’m sorry everyone, not my decision) . I had a green light at work to use what ever tools I wanted, but the end product must be for IE and no extra work was supposed to be done to support other browsers. . So I did my best to abstract away a need for IE in my code, but I couldn’t reject my coworkers ie only coding. So while I had a linux/bsd box, I couldn’t actually use it for a lot of things…
Aswith OpenGL my view is code to the standard and opimise and tweak later. It’s legitimate to use multiple browsers to test code against a standard as different browsers may catch different things. Then there’s the abstractions and fixes. The management bias you’re up against is as bad as with some companies beign Nvidia only during development and discovering their games crash on general release. AMD/ATI get the blame while the fault is the game code not being standards compliant.
I’ve had to work with difficult environments like yours. I found once they pass the tipping point where everyone is set in their ways you can’t fight it.
I think there were some ancient versions of IE that ran on Unix.
I remember running IE on Solaris for giggles in the 00s.
There’s a feature that I really like in Edge, automatic sleeping tabs after a specified inactivity time. I’d be really glad to see that in Vivaldi as well.