Gettin' a bit Edge-y.....

A while back (November last, to be precise) I posted a piece on my old Blog (The World According to Travellin' Bob - http://travellin-bob.blogspot.com) in which I compared experiences on the main browsers out there.  I came down in favour of Chrome, closely followed by Edge with Firefox a close third.  In the time since then, I've continued to shuttle back and forth between them, but for me there has been very little in it.  But in the last week my views have crystallised.  Here is why.

Truth be told, as I wrote previously, all three of them are decent browsers for the average Joe Public, non-techie user.  They are all easy enough to set up, they all can run quite happily with multipe tabs open, they all offer security and privacy tools, password management and ad-blockers.  Pages load fast enough, they're all stable......basically if you just want to use them to browse the internet, manage e-mails, watch the odd YouTube video and listen to internet radio stations they're all fine.  I could get to my Google Photos and Music Libraries from all of them with no issues, ditto my Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts.  So how to favour one over the other?

In terms of set up, there wasn't a lot in it.  Edge comes baked into Windows 10 as the default, so you actually don't have to do a thing if you accept the default security settings, unless you want to change the Home page and add a bunch of Favourites (which, let's face it, everyone does).  But doing that was easy.  Chrome?  Downloaded it in a couple of minutes, copied over all the Favourites and passwords from Edge in another 30 seconds or so, and voila -  good to go.   Firefox was a bit more fiddly - the download and install plus copying over Favourites was simple and took the same sort of time.  But then there was a bit more fiddly stuff, around Security and Privacy.  This was done via a couple of Extensions that needed to be downloaded and defined - simple enough, but added time, and according to all the articles and comments I'd read in a number of sources doing it gives you a much more private and secure browser than either of the other two, without compromising on performance.  Which is what Mozilla has always insisted is its raison d'etre.

I used them all, depending on how I felt on any given day.  After a while, it seemed to me that Edge was dead settled and I knew how it would behave on any day.  Firefox was fine and fast, but Chrome tended to slow up if I had more than three or four tabs open - something I had noticed previously.  So I Uninstalled it and made Firefox my default, thus taking advantage of the "increased security and privacy tools".  It worked fine, and if I fancied a change, I just launched Edge.  Happy days.

But then Firefox, too, started slowing down.  I started using Edge more, and found that it didn't have the same problems.  Loading was definitely slower on Firefox.....and in addition, on certain frequently used (and extremely popular) sites Firefox never seemed to save my Cookie settings - I had to renew every time.  This becamse incredibly irritating, as I didn't have the same problem with Edge.  Still not convinced by it, though, I had another trawl through the web and read up on some more recent comparisons.  Edge still seemed to be suffering and less secure than Chrome or Firefox.....

I took a deep breath, Uninstalled Firefox (again) and replaced it with Chrome (again....).  And carried on doing my stuff......and there was, indeed, little to choose between Chrome and Firefox.  Then I read an article about the new release of Firefox, saying it was blindingly fast, added new privacy functionality and was, essentially, a Chrome killer.  I ummed and ahhed - then when it took five attempts to load a page I got fed up, dumped Chrome (again!) and installed the brand spanking new Firefox......and groaned.  It was no faster to me than the previous release had been (no surprise - when these things are benchmarked by the tech press the differences tend to be in tenths of second or even less - so not noticable) but annoyingly no faster than bloody Chrome.

That's when I started to think the hell with privacy - I've been using Chrome and Gmail for the best part of ten years, ditto Facebook, Microsoft tools a bit longer.......there is precious little "new" private information in my life, so they almost certainly have everything already.  I can't think, off the top of my head, of anything that wasn't part of Cambridge Analytica's haul back in 2016 - that's if they even bothered with me.  Final straw - I saw an article that said the new Chromium based Edge was released, I could simply update my old Edge and get all the (alleged) benefits of Chrome with most of the security and privacy of Firefox - in one place.

The conversion from legacy Edge to Chromium Edge was indeed simple (it took less than 30 seconds with no import of passwords and Favourites needed since they were all there).  I started using it.  And I have to say, as a completely untechnical user - the only code I know to any extent is the Morse Code and I've forgotten most of that - and hence as unbiased as you could possibly get, Edge, the new Chromium Edge, is bloody good.  It looks good, very clean, very Chome-esque as you would expect.  It is VERY fast - or at least seems that way: pages definitely are loading faster for me.  The Security and Privacy settings are very simple to set - there are three levels of each, the key features of each displayed in very simple terms in the choice box, and the default (which in my view anyway) seems to cover everything the average Joe Public user would need.  No changes required so I wenr Default.

There is also a tool that shows you how many Trackers have been blocked by the approrpriate tool - in the two days since I set it up and started using it exclusively, as my default, it has blocked over 7,500 trackers, of which a full one-third are from Google.  Even Facebook is way down the list with only around 200.   So it seems to me that A) as far as I know there is no report in Firefox that gives that breakdown and B) I can't see Google blocking its own trackers in Chrome, then Edge is doing everything it's supposed to, and all I need.

For me, the battle is won.  I haven't (yet) seen or experienced any of the "issues" with Edge that have been highlighted in various articles by the tech press, and I don't think I will.  I suspect they are using specific test scripts that are designed to break any browser and covering actions that Joe Public is highly unlikely to use (or even know about).  I don't think Firefox is doing much better on the Tracker blocking either: I can't see how (or why) Edge would block one Google tracker, for instance, and allow others.  But I'm open to any explanations....as long as they are in layman's terms not techie mumbo-jumbo!

Edge is fine.  I've Uninstalled Firefox, the (slow) blindingly fast Chrome killer.  I've set it as my default browser - it's the only one I have on my machine in any case.  And unless something truly cataclysmic happens I won't be buggering about with browser wars any more.

This Joe Public is very satisfied, thanks very much.