Firefox has a really nice reader mode, it will soon get a much better PDF viewer and it doesn't come with much bloat. You can also use LibreWolf to fully minimize bloat in Firefox and enjoy the additional privacy benefits.

Yeah, I'm a browser nerd. I love seeing what's out there, testing different features, etc. So I'm usually jumping between two browsers in addition to my daily driver at any given time. I used Edge as a secondary browser for a few months when the MacOS beta became available and as far as performance is concerned it was a legitimately good browser. You're also right, it had some nice features of its own that made it worthwhile as a Chrome alternative (assuming the obvious privacy issues were not a concern for someone, it was at least a decent lateral option to consider.)

By the time I eventually got around to revisiting Edge recently I was disappointed to find they've made an absolute mess of it. It's the most bloated piece of crap on the market.

there was a time when Edge was a really nice browser. Probably the best of the chromium browsers.

Except the tracking bits. Like Chrome, but worse.

It's funny that a lot of this is people with bullshit jobs trying to justify their existence. A company this big gets bloated internally with staff - especially middle management - that will manipulate information to prevent themselves from becoming redundant, so they will insist that their specific project is super important and they absolutely need every engineer working for them, because their prestige and pay are connected to how many people they manage. So then your software fills up with useless junk until the problem gets so bad it can't be ignored. There's a big internal shake-up and products get rebranded but most of the organisational bloat remains, so the cycle starts again.

Do you consider Edge to be worse than Chrome?

/edit: I asked because they said "You want us to use Edge" when evidently many people do use Chrome, and I don't see Edge being noticeably worse than Chrome.

And Google's, Apples, etc, etc.

Mind, I'm not saying that to excuse any of them.

At least at one time MS "produced" (that is to say, acquired) some really great software (Office 4.2 was a massive game changer). But they couldn't wait for everyone to be always connected to implement their telemetry game (which they were actively developing in the mid 90's).

Apple standing on the side: 👀

Yeah, it's baffling that they don't learn these lessons, but these kinds of corporations already exist to exploit customers by witholding their products until money is exchanged - in fact they have whole departments dedicated to preventing piracy - so the general lesson of "don't enshittify your product to attempt to exploit customers" is sort of an existential threat to them.

So they must avoid the lesson, and they do that by replicating that same exploitation relationship internally with their employees, creating a low-information environment where the actual creators of the product cannot be honest with management about what the product needs, and customer service can't relay the feedback they get from customers. Any information that does get to management, they are free to ignore. Every command flows top down, just like the money flows bottom up.

Most stuff on Steam runs very well these days. Anti-Cheat and DRM are the main reasons stuff doesn't run.

wInDoWs bAd hUrRdUrR

Based Linux runs almost the entire web while cringe Windows is used to play fancy video games

VSCodium- all of the perks, None of the telemetry tracking. Minimal tweaks to a config file lets you use the same plugins that “only” work in VSCode.

For a breif moment, you were the entire user base on Linux.

My solution was changing over to another operating system. I've had it to here with Microsoft, and with Proton on Steam being great as it is I really had no more excuses to stick to Windows.

Not just switching the default; have a go at removing Edge entirely, its a huge PITA.

You've gotta manually take ownership of Edges files, including its updater service, force that service to close and delete it, then finally delete the files for Edge itself. If you do that out of order, or you install certain system updates; it'll reinstall itself so you have to do it again.

From there some simple things like the news+weather taskbar widget and the start menu search will no longer open/function. (they ignore your default browser setting and forcibly use Edge)