If only Teams was developed by the largest stakeholder in the Windows native app ecosystem. It would be a perfect chance to show off native UI tooling that would make other companies want to develop for that platform. Oh well...
While somewhat true, to its credit Teams is using basically the same UI stack for its web-based product (teams.microsoft.com) and its "native" desktop app, so there's a win there.
Also, the Teams desktop app has moved from Electron to Edge WebView2 - which is a Microsoft product.
This blog highlights one of the reasons I’m so skeptical about AI replacing software engineers. All of the analysis, decision to put forth telemetry and build that system, then take the results and figure out how to redo the UI (and decide to make that a priority)… I don’t see any path towards this in the near term using AI.
I once switched from Firefox to Chrome on old PCs because Firefox felt intolerably slow. I still use some of these PCs, including semi-old ones on which Firefox feels tolerably slow so I use Firefox. I expected Edge to be at least as as fast as Chrome but no, it feels more slow than Firefox. It also asks many questions (no, I don't want to make it the default nor to sign-in, nor to let it itself cookie-track me, and this still is not everything it asks about) every time it updates.
I don't disbelieve that people have performance problems with Firefox, but I've been using it since before it was Firefox the entire time and I've never run into it being intolerably slow. Maybe it is because I never have more than a dozen tabs open at once, or maybe it is because I never use facebook or some of the other popular sites and maybe those are really heavy.
And yes, I do sometimes use Edge and Chrome, mostly for my work machine, because sometimes the company internal web products are developed on and tested only Chrome and on occasion things don't work for FF. Those don't feel any zippier to me.
FWIW I've been using Edge for 4+ years now (since Chromium) and I've never had it ask me any questions on an update. The worst it did was restore my tabs after updates when I specifically configured it to never restore tabs, but that's been fixed for some time now.
I wonder if the "new" Firefox is about as good on old PCs as Chrome as it improved quite a lot with Quantum/Photon. For me the switch to Chrome was also caused by the abysmal performance of Firefox at the time, but I immediately switched back when the performance was at least tolerable. Granted Chrome is still the faster browser from what I've seen in benchmarks and reviews.
> I wonder if the "new" Firefox is about as good on old PCs as Chrome as it improved quite a lot with Quantum/Photon.
On old PCs - not much, just slightly better. Perfect on modern PCs though so I se no reason (other than testing) to use Chrome on non-museum computers.
Oh my yes. Having just set up a new Windows PC, the amount of dark patterns involved in convincing me that my PC would be completely useless if I didn't send absolutely everything to Microsoft was kind of shocking.
It also then started uploading literally my entire user folder to OneCloud - without asking. It just did it.
Absolutely correct for the current version of Recall. Hard for me to imagine that sharing of "anonymous" reporting of data to "select partners" for "quality and performance" reasons is not in the roadmap.
I was using it for a long time for enterprise stuff but the same happened with Edge what happened with Windows: it became bloated and annoying and it’s too much work to turn off all privacy intrusive features.
I've been an Edge user since release. As Google dominates the Internet commercial spyware business, Chrome isn't an option I'm comfortable with. I used Firefox for a couple of years, but unfortunately it really fell behind in performance, at least on Windows. So Edge it is - and to be honest, I'm pretty happy with its performance, stability and privacy customizations (including the private VPN I use for the Google Search, as using Google Search from a regular VPN service gives me annoying "bot" challenges).
I have Chrome, Edge and Firefox installed and I never understood the performance complaints about Firefox. There is no difference in loading times between any site I frequent. I believe this is a wrong meme to be honest.
Edge was a decent browser for a very short time when it was just a minimal browser. Around the time they switched the engine. Today is in no way better and in quite a few parts even worse than Chrome.
I don't care if you get a puppy with every Edge based Bing search, I'm not using the browser that you're shoving down my throat and up my hind end so hard they're meeting in the middle.
If M$ didn't make it so that exchange email exports only worked in Edge, I would never use it at all.
> Edge monitors its UI responsiveness via telemetry collected from end users’ machines. We intentionally did this collection for all the parts of the Edge UI, not just for the web pages that we render. What did we learn from this data?
Building a lot of spying is one option
Another could be to simply get a "a device without an SSD or with less than 8GB RAM!", launch the app and observe all the slow glory yourself
And yet another is doing a bit more architecture design work upfront and... not use React in the first place instead of doing rewrites
I started using Edge due to work being on the msft suite and I’ve been positively impressed with its performance. It handles way better than Chrome, especially with multiple tabs.
It’s even faster if you avoid a product with Microsoft bloat. What they’re been doing to Windows 11 with widgets, celebrity news, and failing to respect user’s default preferences is atrocious.
The extreme clickbaityness of the msn homepage that is in the browser and the start menu makes me have a very bad feeling about windows. I do not like it at all. I would assume the Windows PMs would not like it either but I guess someone has some target that they need to reach?
I feel like it underscores what a cheap/bad product windows feels like. Even though, technically it is fine (and I know you can turn it off, but defaults matter!!)
If edge is the browser you use for downloading Chrome, maybe Windows is the OS you use to get and install Linux? I feel sorry for people who's employers mandate Windows or are dependent on some Windows only critical software. I know its not everyones cup of tea but its really nice over here in MacBook land. If you're not somehow held hostage on Windows, maybe drop by a store sometime and give OSX a roll? I haven't been forced to run Windows in about 10 years and I haven't missed it one single time.
Im not at all opposed to Linux either but I can run a real shell on OSX and all my scripts.sh run just the same locally as they do on my cloud Linux deployments - and thats enough for me personally.
Indeed. Although to their defense Powershell is pretty decent as well, it just isn't as widely spread and not as universal as bash. Don't know if it conforms with posix, but that is doubtful. Still as solid tool.
But all that doesn't help if the OS gets trashed by bad project leads and Microsoft seems to employ a lot of those. Their technical mistakes are dwarfed by their strategic ones. And companies being locked into their environment providing a record income probably don't help with Microsoft really trying to be competitive instead of milking users as much as possible.
Why doesn't Microsoft realize that Edge just isn't happening?
I was a *huge* Microsoft fan boy for decades. Like, I eagerly awaited releases of the products I used like Windows and Visual Studio and Excel and on and on. It was thrilling to use NT with the Windows 95 skin when it was available in beta. Sorry to nerd out so hard, but I just loved their products. Now they're just making Windows worse and worse and worse. It's almost as if they want to harm Windows.
The other day I had to help my 80 year old Dad with his Windows PC. Microsoft wanted him to "finish" setting up his PC that he has been using for 18 months. Okay, he accidentally clicked yes and then ended up somewhere that was trying to make him sign up for a Microsoft account. Yeah, my Dad doesn't even know how to do that! We had to turn off his PC to get out of it and then I had to look up how to make sure it never happens again.
Why so many dark patterns MS? My Dad already paid you for Windows. Why do you need to collect more and more and more? HE'S 80 YEARS OLD! LEAVE HIM THE F** ALONE!
As a result of all this, but especially the telemetry, my Dad's on Google docs, my Mom is on Google docs, my family is on Google docs. Never going to use 360. Nope nope nope. Sure, Google has dark patterns, but at least I know that about Google. Microsoft pretends that they aren't like that, or wants to have that brand image, and meanwhile, they're busy trying to suck up all your personal information and spy on you with telemetry and send your keystrokes to their servers.
The funny thing is that my Dad only had a Windows PC so he can run one app: Chrome. His entire internet life is in Chrome. Everything syncs with his phone. It's just NICE. You can't even imagine how much easier this makes his life and ... mine :)
So yeah, I don't want more Microsoft software in my life. I want less. Zero, would be ideal, but that's not the world I live in.
> The funny thing is that my Dad only had a Windows PC so he can run one app: Chrome.
So get him a Chromebook or a tablet? He doesn't need Windows to run a browser.
If he does still want Windows for some reason, there are ways of de-bloating the installation. It takes some initial technical work, but in the end you can be relatively sure that it's free from all intrusive software. You still have to be vigilant of Windows Update, but you can also turn that off, and run it manually, or cherry pick the updates you want.
Microsoft makes it difficult to run a clean version of Windows, but if you still want to use it there are ways of cleaning it up.
I'd echo this comment... years ago I got my mum (now 86) to switch to a Chrome device as the only thing she does is email, facebook and manage her bank account.
Prior to this, I had quite a lot of tech support I had to do with her when she was running a Windows PC - for all sorts of things. Since then, never once have I had to do so, other than website help (i.e. what she's doing on a site). I'm no fan of Google (and use Firefox as my browser and have for years), but Chromebooks just work for these kind of use cases, and are the reliable appliance that computers should be.
There wasn't even something wrong with Edge when it started. It was basically Chrome, but preinstalled. But now they had to fill it with bloat and spyware...
It's unfortunate that the entire world is headed this way. I've been bullish about tech for my ENTIRE life. Since I was a kid. But it's a weird feeling, all the data collection. Europe has the right ideas about this.
Edge was pretty bad before they replaced it with Chrome Edge.
The rendering engine was nicer than ie, but they built a queue between the UI and the browser engine, so navigation including the stop button didn't interrupt the work in progress until it polled the queue, which could be seconds later when it had gotten stuck (as browsers do), and then it would go ahead and do the many actions you had queued up.
> Why doesn't Microsoft realize that Edge just isn't happening?
I mean, they're basically outsourcing a lot of the heavy lifting to Chromium, which is a pretty rock solid piece of technology.
Being able to do that while adding a layer of customization and metrics/analytics/telemetry/features/whatever on top of that with their branding is pretty much ideal from where they stand.
Given that most people won't bother with switching away from defaults, it feels like a smart move to me. Most people aren't even aware that there should be alternatives to the dark patterns, nor have ever used an OS like Linux.
Honestly, I recently got some Apple devices for a freelance thing and while their UI/UX is a breath of fresh air, I also ran into some weirdness, like Firefox not working with my VPN on the MacBook or not having uBlock Origin on the iPhone. Meanwhile, I'll be strongarmed with replacing my Windows 10 install with Windows 11 sooner or later, whereas Linux is generally nice, except some games and whatnot just won't work (sometimes due to lacking interest for Proton support, other times due to developers and anti-cheat), as well as there are the occasional issues (audio drivers and Wi-Fi drivers still come to mind, depending on the hardware, especially the cheaper netbooks I have historically been using for note taking). I'm getting a bit sidetracked, but feels like every OS and piece of software out there has some issues, for a variety of reasons, many of which we shouldn't be dealing with in the first place!
Have you thought about setting up Linux for him? Linux works great and if your Dad only uses web apps then Linux with Firefox should work perfectly for him!
