I literally don't get why microsoft is doing this to Edge. It used to be a pretty nice browser (when they rebooted it with a chromium engine, that is), even if I kind of disliked the UI. But now it's just the most tasteless feature dump of almost any browser I've seen. Even just opening it for the first time is a chore. I really wonder what's the internal politics around it. Is it victim of a lack of product "ownership" or management? Is it just multiple teams from different groups (office, teams, games (!)) doing whatever they want and just mashing everything together?
Edit: The absolute worst thing about it is how obscure and weird it can be with your microsoft account. I hope you never ever decide to log in with an AAD-linked account on your personal device :). I tried using the Teams webapp on mobile edge and it basically hijacked the browser, started requiring intune (just to use the browser!), meaning that obviously it didn't allow me to use the webapp at all without it (which was the entire point of trying the webapp). But it works just fine on Chrome! Amazing.
There have been ads in the Start Menu for years. Time for the browser to start earning its keep I suppose.
I've had a Mac for several years and am sad to see what's happened to Windows since the Win 7 days. I was tempted to go back as Apple's pricing for 16GB configurations is extortionate, but the Win 11 changes make that a dealbreaker.
Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 provides a very different experience compared to for example Apple Safari on MacOS.
It feels like like a shitty commercial zone with advertising billboards everywhere. I don’t want points when I use Bing, I don’t want to know how the stock market is doing today, I don’t want to “save” money on my shopping, I don’t care about the latest stupid thing some extreme rights person said, I don’t need a huge ugly logo to access GPT4 while the GUI is minimalist.
And I don’t need a well documented scam in my web browser.
What changed five years ago, that Microsoft suddenly became so active again?
I mostly forgot about them for almost two decades. From around 2002 to 2018, I did not use any of their products or services. And in my interactions with other indie makers, I heard about them less and less.
Then in 2018 they suddenly bought GitHub. And were back on the radar of every developer I know. With Azure, they became a bigger and bigger datacenter player. Then last year they made huge waves again, this time with Github CoPilot. Then this year, they were the first to put AI into a popular search engine. Before Google! And now they might become the first to put a crypto wallet into a popular browser.
Microsoft is 48 years old, but 2/3 of their market cap has been created in the last 5 years.
Great leadership from Satya Nadella since 2014 seems to be the leading explanatory factor here. A sequence of very good decisions and products coming one after another. You forgot to mention VSCode as well which has now become an industry standard code editor. They have really focused on great developer experience.
I never use Edge except during work at my current job. Management there has basically mandated its use and does not test any internal sites for anything other than Edge. Indeed, many sites refuse to work even in Google Chrome, but they work fine in Edge. Timekeeping is one major example. As soon as Microsoft fully deprecated Internet Explorer, my current employer basically switched from Internet Explorer to Edge. My point is that while it may not be popular in the overall market, it does play a major role in some organizations, since it may have a large captured audience in effect.
often it’s “modern authentication” for the webapps as the gateway to locking into Edge. The sync facility in Edge is tied to it too. There’s a plugin for Chrome.
> Microsoft is 48 years old, but 2/3 of their market cap has been created in the last 5 years.
Unsure about the rest, but a quick search shows that 75% of Apple and 50% of Google market cap was created in the last 5 years. So some of the effect is a general tech boom that has been captured by Microsoft as well.
Google is much younger though. And its 50% are in line with the NASDAQ.
Apple had a crazy run under Tim Cook. While Steve Jobs is rightfully remembered as a visionary who built one of the biggest companies in the world, over 90% of Apples value was created under Cook.
recently reinstalled windows on a machine to play some games, and holy hell Edge is an absolute monstrosity of popups and just things I like to call "product BS". Reminds me of the toolbar hell we used to have way back when.
Installed Firefox immediately and will never look back.
From the screenshots, I gather that if you purchase cryptocurrency via Edge, coinbase or MoonPay will pay Microsoft an affiliate fee. Well, it's a kind of advertising, isn't it?
The phase after the hype dies down is called “The Slope of Enlightenment”. Hopefully that’s true for crypto, since the space has incubated a lot of good but poorly-executed ideas.
Microsoft helping climb the slope of enlightenment doesn’t sound like a half-bad idea.
My hunch is that someday crypto will be accrued and used like frequent flyer miles or credit card rewards points. But the "better than any alternative" part is that they'll be more fungible than rewards points.
Frequent flyer miles are just a marketing gimmick. They're not "useful" as in serving an irreplaceable purpose; frequent flyer miles could be outlawed tomorrow and the world would not be a worse place in any way.
Considering KYC requirements, volatility, and environmental impact not sure how crypto money in browser would be a net benefit for anyone except speculators and crypto exchanges.
If people are paying with stablecoins on top of ETH (like the ERC20 version of USDC, for example) then neither volatilty nor environmental impact is a serious problem.
What part of the "Dozen 'stable' coin fails in the past years" lesson are you having difficulties with?
There can never be a "stable" offer in this space. the stability comes from "free to print money" organisations and the only acceptable such organisations are governments (not ideal, certainly not 100% stable but the only viable one). Everything that still contributes to keep up the speculation hype value of these cryptocurrencies (and a wallet by a wellknown players does contribute to it) is a net negative.
>What part of the "Dozen 'stable' coin fails in the past years" lesson are you having difficulties with?
The part where the major stablecoins (eg. USDC or even Tether) hasn't failed yet, and the "dozen" you speak of are the equivalent of shitcoins that never had any traction in the first place.
USDC is not stable. They have long ago removed their 1 to 1 peg with the USD because it was unsustainable. They are printing money and the value is being kept up only on the speculative expectations of the market. Like all other shitcoins they can not guarantee anything when things start to go down. Noone can guarantee anything. Those shitcoins that never had any traction according to you have cost billions to the people.
Some see it as a feature yes, but it's not sustainable.
In fact I would say that we are already behind the hay day of wild west crypto and are entering the phase of regulated fiance. Investors are already discovering why some of those regulations exist in the first place (latest example FTX) and governments are done standing at the sidelines.
Hahahahaha. Yeah, sure cryptocurrency never comes crashing down. It certainly would never lose 60% of its value in 6 months. That would never happen. What a perfect store of value. /s
I assume you're not arguing this but crypto isn't really a solution for this problem.
Regardless, I think given the wild west of crime and fraud a world without banking surveillance would allow I don't think that's a great plan, and I doubt legitimate banks would be for it either given the legal grief they would be constantly in, assuming that you still believe that assets should be able to be seized or frozen in case of identified illegal activity, and if not a bank now needs to be comfortable knowing it's enabling human trafficking and terrorism.
Why should a bank be willing to do business with you if they can't identify you?
considering that the Tax Authorities have money today, while 'bros are looking for some.. I would guess that MSFT is on the side of the money.. that means, track your INCOME and the TAX that is due. mark my words
I'm not arguing that crypto is dead, but adding a random crypto-related feature to Edge is not a strategy, it's a "me too" bit that just seems odd.
Brave has a built-in crypto wallet but it makes some sense in their offer, this one does not seem to.
Unless you think large amounts of people will migrate to Edge because it has a built-in wallet? It does not seem likely to me, but I'll be happy to be corrected in a few years.
That would have been my comment last October when most of us were already pretty tired of it, then there was an “NFT Winter” that lasted through the real winter which was caused by (1) the FTX blowup, and (2) the gold rush of the ignorant and indolent who suddenly thought ChatGPT would write their pitch deck for them.
Lately though I am seeing posts where blockheads are trying to rally and I think these are not written by ChatGPT because they are too disagreeable.
The thing is that crypto prices haven’t really collapsed and the true believers haven’t been punished enough to really change their behavior. I wish I could say people just quit trading so the prices aren’t real but looking at the charts I can’t really justify that but maybe it really is just the same two crypto bros trading.
As for MSFT they are usually (3) slow on the draw, and (4) work harder than anybody to annoy their users. They have been quick to get on the ChatGPT train, however, because they’ve always wanted to make Excel make up fake books for your organization, have Word write your homework and PowerPoint make your pitch deck for you with no consideration if the output is right or wrong and there is no way they’ll let another firm beat them to it.
>maybe it really is just the same two crypto bros trading.
That may be the case for some of the shitcoins, but it hasn't been close to true for BTC and ETH since institutions got into crypto a few years ago. They are still trading btw, some of them made an insane amount of money from the crash.
Edit: The absolute worst thing about it is how obscure and weird it can be with your microsoft account. I hope you never ever decide to log in with an AAD-linked account on your personal device :). I tried using the Teams webapp on mobile edge and it basically hijacked the browser, started requiring intune (just to use the browser!), meaning that obviously it didn't allow me to use the webapp at all without it (which was the entire point of trying the webapp). But it works just fine on Chrome! Amazing.