Edge on Linux: Thoughts from a Linux user

Ruarí

Microsoft just released the Edge browser on Linux. Browser geek Ruarí Ødegaard reviews the new arrival and answers questions Linux users might have about the new browser.

Click here to see the full blog post

LonM

No PlayReady? That's odd. I hate DRM, but at least there's some competing implementations of EME on windows. If this is a first sign that PlayReady is on its way out we will soon be in a place where google holds all the cards on what we are permitted to do with our web browsers.

Ruarí

@lonm: It could just as easily be that they have not yet ported PlayReady to Linux, so they went with this for now.

LonM

@Ruarí Ture. I wonder how this affects things like netflix. It used to be that you could only get HD netflix through PlayReady, not widevine, so I guess linux users still have the lower quality streams even in edge.

iPristy

I wonder, why they do that, just to support it's own agenda but anyway you don't need to use it. Linux is modular so you use what you want to use, anything else can be uninstalled. I'm happy with Vivaldi on Ubuntu LTS.

Steffie

su -
pacman -Rns edge
zypper rm edge
apt remove edge
dnf remove edge
exit

Hadden89

Yep. I really doubt most linux users will use Edge. Especially the "GNU-GPL2-all-the-way" ones

Priest72

Seems like microsoft are sneaking in the back door of nixland with edge...wonder what other microsoft goodies are on the horizon.

Hadden89

@Priest72 Windows media player? Powertoys for MS Linux integration?

Ruarí

If you just want to try it for a few minutes without actually installing, you can quickly test it standalone (as I did) on Slackware.

P.S. I am not too worried about providing these instructions because I don't see many Vivaldi users sticking with Edge for very long!

Steffie

@Ruarí My root account just desperately emailed my user account & begged her to not install Edge. I promised her that she need have no fear; neither Edge [nor Bono] shall ever land in my SSD, til the day that snowshoes become de rigueur in Hades.

Chas4

I guessed a few years ago Microsoft was switching to Chromium for Edge when a lot of the Chrome security reports were from Microsoft. A bit later I learned that they had already been using Chromium for Skype and Microsoft Teams. Only in the past few years has Microsoft been playing publicly with Linux. Recent builds of Windows 10 can have Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 installed. Wonder how their test version of Edge runs in that.

LonM

@Hadden89 They are currently working on Sysinternals for Linux, recently releasing ProcDump: https://github.com/microsoft/procdump-for-linux

luetage

My opinion: Why would anyone in their right mind use a Microsoft program on Linux? Utter madness.

ultravio1et

It's a excellent browser. I heard very good things about its memory management as well
I was actually listening to this blog with Edge's read aloud option

This browser has now overtaken Firefox in the global user stats

I never thought I'd be saying this but Microsoft has got a lot better in recent years

Catweazle

Edge is certainly not the worst choice in the Chromium arena. In general MS seems to have a good relationship with Linux, even offering distros in the MS Store which quite astonished me.

luetage

@Catweazle A good relationship!? You are blind to the motives. Microsoft still dominates the desktop market, by incorporating the subsystem for Linux, there is less incentive for people to either switch to Linux, or run it as 2nd operating system. That’s all.

@ultravio1et As for Edge, it still does quite poorly. Better than Firefox says little these days. First of all we shouldn’t forget it was Firefox which cut into the dominance of Internet Explorer first before Chrome took over. Secondly Firefox is the only major browser which doesn’t come preinstalled on any major OS. Safari is on iOS and macOS, Edge is on Windows and Chrome is on Android and ChromeOS. Hard to compete in this environment.

So why would Microsoft release a version of its browser for Linux? Simply to bolster its standing in the browser wars. These days your browser got to have Sync and it needs to sync to all operating systems, which in turn requires you to release a version of your browser to all of them, unless you want people to switch to a different browser altogether. Microsoft doesn’t embrace Linux, it wants to reduce it to absurdity in the desktop market. More so than it already is…

matsbtegner

Interesting article. You can easily convert RPM-packages on Slackware using the rpm2tgz (rpm2txz) utilities if you want to list them using pkgtools. RPM is also included with Slackware so you can force-install RPMs using rpm -ivh --force --nodeps <package-name>

Ruarí

@matsbtegner: Using rpm to install directly on Slackware is generally a bad idea but in this case even more so as the cron jobs that setup an YUM repo will get setup. I have always considered rpm to be present to help with repacking but it should not really be used directly IMHO.

Yeah rpm2tgz exists but it is just as easy converting a deb. You can just unpack with ar and tar and then use makepkg on the extracted directly.

P.S. If you want to test Edge without install, it is super easy.

matsbtegner

@ruarí: Thanks for the tip regarding DEBs. I guess that's what you use in the SlackBuild-script for Vivaldi on SlackBuilds.org.