I like Microsoft, and I like their core business: Windows and Office. After all, I worked there for quite some time, and got few great friends there too!
But I just can’t understand why Microsoft still can’t make it to a useful browser! It’s already been almost two decades of painful browser marathon, which started with the once-great success of IE6 (and then the IE6 hell following).
Edge with Windows 10 sucked. It was possibly a good browser for someone’s grandma, but not for me. Main point: lack of extensions. Second point: lack of support across most of SPAs. Third point: lack of clearance “what’s next” for Microsoft.
Recently, with the recent upgrade to Windows Creators, I got the new Edge as well. I was excited: on my Insiders machine, I often use Edge, just to check how their progress goes. And I was glad that there’s finally Extensions’ support there, with my favorite LastPass extension, too.
As part of my “Creators Excitement,” I decided to switch from Chrome to Edge on my “hottest” notebook, the one I use mostly, hourly, minutely, etc.
So I did. And it was lovely honeymoon (well, honey-half-moon, actually).
But today I’m switching back to Chrome!
Why? Here’s why!
- Edge seems to perform badly on battery. Yes, Microsoft claims it’s very economic towards my notebook’s battery, but you just can’t use it, while on battery! It *misses keystrokes* in my extensions. If I want to do “Copy to clipboard”, I have to *repeat* this operation, until (finally) something gets copied to the clipboard.
- No UI/UX feedback that “it’s thinking.” You type an address in your browser bar, hit ENTER and then… nothing happens. It looks like it’s loading some Javascript or other files in the background, or at least you hope so, but you don’t see it. You go in the browser bar, and then you hit ENTER again, and *then* something starts happening, maybe!
- Impossible to put “active” scriplet in my bookmarks bar? Why? It was possible before, but not now?
All this brought a lot of irritation and feeling that “it failed my expectations again”. I’m very sorry. Because I also liked the idea of getting aside Chrome, just for a change. But it seems it won’t happen. Not today, and maybe anytime soon.