I recently discovered that you can get Microsoft Edge for Linux (🤢🤮) and am curious… does anyone here use Edge for Linux, or have you ever? What was your reasoning for using it?

EDIT: Well, you all have provided some interesting perspectives I hadn’t ever considered. Including one which means I’ll have to install Edge, so… thanks, I guess. 😂

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    3·
    1 year ago

    Ironically NCSA Mosaic ( the first graphical web browser ) became Netscape which became Mozilla which became Firefox. Internet Explorer was mostly written from scratch.

    Around IE5 or so, Microsoft pulled way ahead of Netscape and they basically put Netscape out of business. There was almost no competition for them and they had massive market share which is way IE6 became the anchor weighing down web standards for a decade.

    Firefox eventually brought competition back to the browser market and in fact dominated for a while ( with close to 70% market share ). Most of the rest was Microsoft and, until the end, IE was home grown tech from Microsoft.

    Then Google introduced Chrome which began a long, slow slide in market share for everybody else. Today, IE is gone and Chrome not only dominates like IE used to. Most of the alternative browsers use the Chrome engine ( Blink ), including Microsoft Edge. Firefox is down to low single digit market share.

    At this point, the only real Chrome alternative is Safari which remains popular on the Mac ( and iOS of course ).