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Edge used to be unique,but then they just copied chromium.... It had much smaller scrolling which was great on touch screens. Now I have no reason to use it.
opera also used to maintain their own browser engine if i remembered correctly, but they all just dipped
Opera did have its own engine; it was a proprietary one named Presto.
And it was really great and innovative for its time. Presto was pressing the envelope for so long while other browser engines were happy to do the bare minimum.
It's really a shame they just moved to making their own Chromium skin but making and maintaining a Browser engine is expensive. It really is quite impressive that Firefox has lasted this long.
Yeah, didn't Opera invent tabbed browsing? Huge game changer.
They had one more thing that was the bomb back when 56kbit was enviable, and that was that when you turned off the image loading (some browsers still support "offline" mode, this was a subset of that) it would still display any images that it had in its cache - so you could read your news with the common page elements rendered but not spend time downloading huge article images.
I'll shut up now before I reveal my age... 😅
Their Java mobile browser and early smartphone browser was pivotal for early cell data plans.
They sure did! That was the main reason why I swapped to Opera from Firefox forever ago. I believe they also were the first to make the landing page where you could click regular sites that you wanted to go to as well as saving your browser session when it's closed or crashes, restoring it when you next launch.
I think part of the problem was websites needing to work on other browsers too. When it's your own engine if a website doesn't test against it, the website might be broken. So then the websites say they don't support such and such browser.
Less of an issue when its all chromium.
We run into problems on safari a lot like this since my partner keeps using it on her Mac.
That wasn't really part of the problem. The most used browser engines are often some of the most irritating and frustrating to deal with, just look at Internet Explorer for most of its existence. Safari is an obnoxiously widely used browser because Apple enforces its use on iPhone no matter the browser you use and it has a bizarre update schedule tied to OS version. This causes many iPhones to have ancient versions of Safari.
The problem here is not that there are or were too many browser engines, it is big companies making their browser engines in anticompetitive ways.
We're "lucky" that Blink, the engine that runs all Chromium-based browsers, is currently keeping up with browser standards. For now. Who knows if Google will keep it that way or decide to change course and move away from FOSS standards.
It is dangerous to put so much stock and power into a single huge corporation like this. A large variety of innovative and competing browser engines is far healthier than one dominant engine.
Edge used to be unique, and sucked for it.
It has basically no extensions she it sucked in that way yeah. But it's scrolling was super smooth. I love that aspect.
It wasn't good as an overall package, but it was unique,m with unique strengths and weaknesses. I miss it.
@dustojnikhummer @average650, Vivaldi the only which can use BingChat apart of EDGE
I primarily use Vivaldi and have for years now.
I do wish they moved away from chromium, but I get they just don't have the manpower.
Only reason is free access to GPT 4 and Dall-e
hey hi what do you mean? one can access gpt4 and dall e from ff?
For free?
Except that GPT4 in Bing seems to suck every time I try it.
The bing ai thing works on Firefox if you just change your user agent
On the flipside, atm Edge seems to be the better Chromium choice (if you don’t have a Microsoft hate boner).
Let's be clear: it's a very good browser, very HTML5 compliant, and perhaps one of the best browsers...
...Assuming you don't care about insane amounts of spyware - AND not having a lot of really cool browser add-ons (those having spyware and memory leaks is a separate topic, but I want to acknowledge these problems).
Edge makes more calls home per second than any other piece of software on my computer. I looked at my live log and it was a literal stream. Nearly every single action you do is tracked and sent.... (waves hands confusingly up in the air in circles) ...somewhere. Likely Microsoft, but I really don't know.
Almost all of Windows is like this too. I hate it so much. There's just no great way to have nice things right now.
@SCmSTR Linux, Firefox, Lineage OS
So I need to install Windows to use a “better Chromium choice” than Vivaldi?
Edge is available on Linux
Afaik Edge is available on Linux too. Haven’t tried it there yet as I am on the edge (hehe) about switching from Windows to Linux as daily driver.
Edge is on Linux, and brave is pretty good as well imo
Edge is available as a DEB and RPM, as well as Flatpak
I’m happy with edge. Been using it since the beta. Helps that my personal email is @outlook and I am an annual subscriber because of a work discount, so it has that nice ecosystem sync.