Microsoft is so aggressive pushing edge. Not just at consumers but at work as well. Personally I don't see the benefit since it's become a Chrome clone, why not use the real Chrome if you want it. Though I'm a Firefox person.
But for me personally MS has proven not being able to handle a browser monopoly with IE which became stale when they reached that goal. I don't want to support them getting there again.
An argument to use Edge: because it's not Google. That's enough for me. Anything that brings competition to any Google owned property is something good in my humble opinion.
You are effectively still supporting the Chrome monoculture. It’s like people “fighting capitalism” while wearing 2nd-hand Nikes: somebody already paid for those Nikes, and you still really want to show you have Nikes, reinforcing the perception of Nike as a valuable and powerful brand people should wear.
I would support virtually any company competing with Microsoft in the OS space, not because I'm afraid of a Windows monoculture but because I'm afraid of the effect and power monopolies can have. Let's say Microsoft open source Windows' kernel (now that would be interesting!), and a new company comes with their own custom OS built on top of it, I would definitely support them, even though the technology is the same.
Would it be better if there would be a different, new system, based on new technology? Perhaps, from a technology point of view at least, but that's a completely different topic.
Nobody that builds on technology owned or controlled by somebody else is independent in practice. Google makes choices in Chromium development that will condition the market even when the final browser is not Chrome.
Say google wants to "accidentally" sabotage GMail for Firefox users, as they've done in the past. They make a slight change, and it will just silently percolate to all Chromium clones, who will never have enough manpower or money to scrutinize all updates and understand what they are for (that is the whole point of reusing someone else's code).
So no, it's not a different problem. If your tech depends on someone else's tech, you are still commercially and strategically helping the parent company. I know this sounds annoying and preachy, I wish I could state it in more appealing terms, but it's the unvarnished truth.
> Let's say Microsoft open source Windows' kernel
The point of building an "alternative" on top of this codebase would be to have compatibility with other Windows software. Hard forks rarely ever succeed even in opensource, let alone when the parent group of developers is still going strong; so "altOS" would have to stay close to the Windows standards. MS could still steer the market by tweaking APIs, and your "alternative" build would have no choice but to follow suit. And of course, desktop developers would still target Windows and take the fact that it also runs on "altOS" as a bonus. So, effectively, you'd still be aiding the MS monopoly stay in place.
This is what all those Chromium derivatives (Vivaldi, Brave, Ungoogled, etc) effectively do: they maintain Chrome's entrenchment and let Google stay in control of web standards.
I understand your point of view. I use Firefox exclusively in private. But I need to support Chrome in development, and Ungoogled Chromium is a good alternative for me - it's neither Google nor Microsoft. Most of us do live in capitalist societies, and therefore, I think, we have no other choice than to have to use it's tools to try to improve them.
How so? Chromium is the single most important reason Linux is now a viable desktop option, with even all of the M$ Office apps, Outlook etc. working as PWAs. Not to speak of i.e. Discord, WhatsApp, Slack, Teams ...
Not necessarily. Any monopoly-like situation is unhealthy, no matter who controls the market (remember when Firefox was the king? The apparance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air). What we need is real diversity and power balance.
I agree! Having more than one (or two, if we include WebKit - but Blink is a fork of it, so ...) relevant browser engines would be great. But as it stands right now, the fact that I can build apps that have all capabilities that the end user would expect (push notifications, background sync, "Add to homescreen", offline capabilities) in the most popular browser out there and the fact that the latter is FLOSS (Chromium - obviously Chrome is not) means that IMHO we are in a much better place than a few years ago when web dev meant JQuery and IE8 polyfills. And that shows - I can now use only a browser, independent of the host OS, to do all of my days work (using Theia/VSCode in the browser is a joy) and even entertainment (remember when a proprietary OS and a proprietary native app was required to stream video?) completely from a free/libre and open source software. If that means that I have to accept a libre browser monopoly for now than that's much better than having to accept a proprietary host OS IMHO.
Firefox was never “the king”, you clearly live in a bubble. I don’t think it ever even reached 40% of the market, businesses were still eating whatever Microsoft told them they should eat.
> The appearance of Chrome was a breath of fresh air
Not really. The appearance of Safari was a game changer, and only because Apple was basically forced to give WebKit/KHTML back to the community thanks to the LGPL. Webkit triggered the wave of embedding that made its engine a de-facto standard in development circlets, so that it was the obvious choice by the time Google had to pick one for strategic reasons.
There is an alternative timeline where KDE just used BSD, Apple just took their code and kept it closed, and Chrome never happened.
if you office 365 at work, the browser login is shared with office 365 and the home page can be set to a page that integrates with your onedrive/teams/groups/sharepoint files.
On a side note, it is somewhat insane to me, that the new edge limits syncing of work account info to enterprise only customers, and non office 365 users.
If they would allow sync functions for all tiers, it would be really hard to advocate chrome over edge.
other than their complete asshole force update method, which is a different topic, but insanely frustrating.
The do it in tiers they choose, so random people across the company are getting it at different time. Even if it is undo, and rolled back, they will redo the upgrade the next time updates are done. Because of this, there is a growing amount of bad blood against the new edge.
And let us not forget the stupid fucking name, having a conversation and researching shit, "new edge", "old edge", "chrome edge." Have the stones to rebrand when you make a significant product change.
But for me personally MS has proven not being able to handle a browser monopoly with IE which became stale when they reached that goal. I don't want to support them getting there again.