The Sad Reality of Microsoft Edge

Microsoft Edge for many of us it's the browser that's probably best known for its annoying Persistence of trying to convince you to use it like yeah you've probably seen these popups appear every time you want to get a different browser but really is that the sole reason why Microsoft Edge is so disliked and why Google Chrome is still the number one browser and Edge is sitting at a respectable but undeniably small 5% market share Mark well let's discuss Microsoft Edge first came out in 2015 with the release of Windows 10 and it marked a big change as it was completely different from Internet Explorer and just oh just thinking about Internet Explorer brings back some bad memories but yeah it was a huge improvement with it bringing a lot of new features similar to Google Chrome which even back in 2015 was very popular well I say a lot of features except one crucial one but we'll talk about that later now just being a decent browser in 2015 wasn't enough to overtake Chrome far from it and today that's even more true you see Edge isn't a bad browser overall I'd even argue that it's pretty good it's smooth it is extremely reliable which isn't always the case for all browsers that's probably because it's chromium based which happened in 2018 when Microsoft completely rebuilt Edge it's also available on many different platforms including Apple's Mac OS and Linux and even Microsoft's Xbox which allows you to use your console as a PC which is actually kind of cool Edge also boasts loads of different features like this sidebar now at first I thought why would you need this but honestly this is a really nice addition you can have your favorite sites here and quickly open them close them and reopen them later and I found this extremely useful to use for sites that I need a couple times a day you might say why not just use bookmarks instead isn't that the same thing well I'd say no because with a bookmark you have to open a new tab but this like I've said you can close reopen and close again at any point point on any page you're currently at and it's just easier to access and small details like this I really like because it optimizes your browsing experience it saves you time and I love that now if you like to have a million tabs open like me you probably are used to having group tabs and here's another win for Edge grouping tabs here is arguably better and more intuitive than on Chrome because you can just put one tab on top of another and again that's just more intuitive than having to right click on a tab and select the option for grouping on Chrome again it's a small difference but it's still nice what's also nice is this split screen page option which allows you to well view two pages at once on either side it works really well and because it's independent from the windows built-in multi viw Windows feature that I found using a lot and more than I thought actually and it's great for when I need to maybe compare different pages really quick like sometimes I'd be switching tabs when I need to check differences between like maybe two products on Amazon really quickly or something like that but with split screen I can just split the screen like trunks split freza in Dragon Ball and view two pages at once awesome oh and the PDFs like wow this is the default PDF viewer on Chrome yeah you can zoom in you can resize the page flip the page have a little two-page View and here it is on edge you can draw on your PDF you can add additional text to your PDF you can translate directly from your PDF and while I'm not a big fan of Microsoft co-pilot you can even access it really easily here and let it generate answers or searches for you if you're willing to wait that is because well Microsoft co-pilot is still kind of slow at first I was confused when I read the comments on one of our polls about Edge on and how it is like for some of you it's a dedicated PDF viewer but after trying it myself I get it now it really is nice and these features would really be useful for school workk or if you have to work with a lot of PDFs in general like yeah it's great just like how a lot of folks think that vertical Tabs are great on edge but they're not great for me no seriously I Tred to like vertical tabs I really tried them out and I I just I don't get the hype it looks neat sure but I'm so used to horizontal tabs that I couldn't switch that's maybe because you have to kind of wait for the menu to pop out and there's a couple of second delay to that I think verticality is better suited for that sidebar that I mentioned earlier for sites that I need every now and then and the tabs being horizontal let me see their labels and and and just really recognize them better but maybe it's just me and I should give vertical tabs you know a a better try later on however I'd say it's still very nice that edge gives you the option of having either horizontal or vertical tabs while on Chrome there's really not an option for that well there is an extension but it doesn't work that well to be honest it's also nice to have an option of switching your internet location with ease and with Ser shark bpn you can do that with the choice of connecting to over a 100 bpn countries so whether you want to watch content securely or keep your real IP hidden serf shark has you covered it is also useful for gaming as me and my friends recently got back into playing GTA online and that game is absolutely notorious for having terrible security of modders being able to access your IP address which they can later use for dsing so by connecting to Surf shark I could still enjoy the game at low K while knowing that my real IP is secure grab Ser Shar today to support our Channel and remember to use the code academy to get three extra months when buying a subscription now back to the video did you know that you can get beans from using Edge uh uh what what beans well not literally well kind of literally beans cookies cabbages apples and potatoes you can get it all by using Microsoft edge and a lot of other stuff too like Amazon gift cards and Xbox game pass and I mean a lot of stuff yes Microsoft rewards are fully incorporated into Edge and I mean that this thing is clearly a big deal since Edge has a whole dashboard just for tracking these rewards and such like no joke just by using Edge and being with searches you can earn yourself points every single day as well as doing various tasks like opening up specific searches and you can just get free stuff right now while this would never push me personally to go and use any type of specific browser as it still takes up a lot of time to build up the the amount of points to get something worthy or useful I still think it's kind of nice that you can grab yourself a gift card or something every now and then just for browsing the browser and maybe doing a little silly daily task every now and then but okay with all this in mind with all the features that edge has why is it struggling to gain market share in the browser Market well I think it comes down to a few reasons first it has an image issue it seems like every other month we see news or read articles or watch videos of edge doing something silly like how badly want you to switch to using it and things like that these kind of things really stick in people's memory I think we all still remember how difficult it was to switch your default browser on Windows not too long ago where you have to change every link type to your preferred browser instead of edge or the whole Fiasco of how Edge was copying your Chrome tabs and opening up them on bootup this sort of stuff does a lot of damage to the overall image of the browser even if some of these are just annoying tactics of trying to get you to switch building on that point let's not forget this this is the default browser home screen on edge or as I like to call it bing Heaven you see in bing Heaven you get to see ads and widgets of the most random things headlines of the silliest stuff ever you show this to anyone and I bet the first reaction will be what is this mess now Chrome has this figured out its homepage is very clean and doesn't look like it's trying to show you a million things at once but listen if you click on this option here on edge you can hide most of the stuff with just a few clicks and now you have a nice and clean browser but guess what most people don't care they won't be out there looking for this little option and as it is with everything in life first impressions mean a lot I won't lie to you when I say that my first impression of edge was bad because when I opened it and I saw this cluttered full of ads home screen I thought I'm staying away and I'm installing Chrome ASP but going even deeper some folks might criticize the fact that there's so many things that edge is trying to do in terms of features that maybe it's a bit too much like sure you have the sidebar and the vertical tabs and the safety features and the co-pilot and the additional apps and the split screen thingy and the essential browser performance options and the edge workspaces but all this stuff all these features to some people might seem a little bloat wey if we can call it that like they don't do any harm and I get why Microsoft has chosen to add them but it can give a perception of like whoa there's too many features that you may not need of course you can disable them and I'd say chrome doesn't have this issue as it's very simplistic in the way that it looks and presents its features also one thing I forgot to mention on the point of First Impressions was that when Edge first came out it didn't support any type of Chrome extensions and chrome at this point already had a huge extension library and the support for this extension feature was only added a year later and even then the library of supported extensions wasn't that huge so a lot of people thought like oh if we I'm not going to have my favorite extension on edge then I'm not going to use it I also wanted to mention being as a search engine in general it's not a terrible search engine by any means but it is still different from Google in the way that it works and presents the results and while you can always switch it to something different you will lose some of the Microsoft points that you could get if you care about that but the last reason why Edge isn't more commonly used is because of the same reason why I think Linux is in the number one desktop OS people are just so familiar with chrome because it's their default browser at least for the majority of Internet users there's not enough good things about Edge to make people switch at and at the the same time there's not enough bad things about Chrome to make its users consider other browsers so my conclusion is simple Edge is good it's a good browser past all of its bigness let's call it there's a lot to like it has solid features some that aren't even available on Chrome even if there's like wonky extensions for it but like I've said people just don't care you can have the greatest browser in the world and unless it makes you a sandwich every day in the morning it won't overtake Chrome though I will say it surely is convincing a lot of students to install it enticing them with its co-pilot integration helping you do homework and it's PDF Vier which like I've said is really like honestly really good maybe that's the key to success building a strong feature set for specific people and sort of pulling them in that way and not showing me 20 popups convincing me to switch just like how Microsoft will be forcing its users to switch to Windows 11 after 2025 because Windows 10 end of life is coming that year and so go watch this video next where we look back at arguably the best Windows OS that you can use today Windows 10 I'll see you in that video and bye for now

Channel: Surfshark Academy

Views: 36,126

Keywords: surfshark, surfshark academy, microsoft edge, windows edge, edge browser, microsoft edge browser, microsoft edge 2024

Id: 0PA-Tn9TlzE

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2024