New Microsoft Edge

I have installed the new Edge browser on my Mac today. I’ve been a Safari loyalist for years, but I’ve noticed more sites having issues with it.

I’ve never been a fan of Chrome because Google and advertising and have generally used Firefox as my alternative browser.

But wow, Edge has impressed me. It feels faster than Safari, it’s not ugly and it seems to have reasonable tracking protection. I also run a Pi-Hole on my network, though, so maybe it should take some of the credit for that.

All up, I’m impressed. This is not the Microsoft of my youth.

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if you don’t count microsoft own tracking (see previous posts)

Maybe your Pi-hole should take much of the credit for that :wink:

It is awesome! By far the best Chromium browser out there. The collections feature is really handy.

There are also many upcoming features. :grinning:

Best of all, the dinosaur game is replaced with something much better! :surfing_man:

Reasonable tracking? Actually it’s the opposite.The last post in this thread before yours (from me, in May) - which said that Edge had the worst telemetry policy. Why? Because they employ special, persistent hardware-based IDs on every person’s browser, making them worse than Chrome. Here’s the report, which you can read yourself.

From a privacy perspective Microsoft Edge and Yandex are much more worrisome than the other browsers studied. Both send identifiers that are linked to the device hardware and so persist across fresh browser installs and can also be used to link different apps running on the same device. Edge sends the hardware UUID of the device to Microsoft, a strong and enduring identifier than cannot be easily changed or deleted. Similarly, Yandex transmits a hash of the hardware serial number and MAC address to back end servers. As far as we can tell this behaviour cannot be disabled by users. In addition to the search autocomplete functionality (which can be disabled by users) that shares details of web pages visited, both transmit web page information to servers that appear unrelated to search autocomplete.

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It’s the worst in terms of your privacy.

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Microsoft requires verification access to msftncsi.com for everything from Windows to Skype to Outlook to Office. And once you connect telemetry data can be transferred. If you choose Edge browser you need Pi-Hole plus not use any Microsoft products, and even then it may be possible to triangulate and identify you from telemetry plus 3rd-party data.

(Even if they don’t know who you are specifically they can make $$ tailoring ads to you, as Facebook does, based on geolocation updates, demographic information, sites visited [and for Facebook, friends’ portfolios].)

Aside from that, if you enable URL autocomplete (on by default, but you can turn it off) every domain you type in automatically goes to bing.com before you go to the domain you want to visit.

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I was (almost) kidding :smiley:

The less I touch MS things the better, anyway.

Thanks to the covid I had to install teams app on my Mac, there was no way to avoid it. And I am not happy about it :frowning_face:

I find creepy the analytics mail they send telling how long you have read mails form a particular sender and things like that

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The PixelBlock extension (for Chrome and Chromium browsers) notifies you with a red eye on the message to indicate when a tracker attempt has been used to notify the sender if you have opened or read the email… and blocks the tracker. May not be 100% comprehensive, but I see it working when I use Gmail in the browser.

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Thanks for the reply.

I’d love something similar that works in mail.app, since I use it for all my emails.

The easiest, simplest, cheapest (free!) way to stop tracking by pixel is by turning off all images when viewing email. On iOS you can disable images by at Settings > Mail and scrolling down to “load remote images.” Inside macOS Mail it’s Preferences > Viewing > “Load remote content in messages”

There’s also this macos/AppleMail plugin which makes all images attachments.

Or this Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool yes

Interesting, thanks, I’ll try.
I don’t know if MS does something server side to emails (maybe just adds tracking pixels), because I got the report on mails from clients with no images whatsoever and the only interaction I had with tem was by email (no skype/teams and so on).

I believe tracking is available from Microsoft on some 365 business tiers: I know they offer folder tracking and RSVP tracking, but I’m not sure what they offer wrt email. (Even if they don’t it’s a popular 3rd-party add-on option for Outlook, Gmail… everything really.)

Their Outlook mail app does offer mail recipients a tracker-blocking option in Android, perhaps iOS too.

Also, I made a mistake about that plugin - it doesn’t block images, it allows you to optionally make images included in emails appear as attachments and not be displayed inline.

they do advertise them a lot, for sure :smiley:

(discourse don’t want me to reply to you anymore… we’re being selfish talking to each other :frowning: :stuck_out_tongue:)

Someone clearly hates Microsoft Edge with a passion… :sweat_smile:

Regardless, I’d argue that Google Chrome is the worst offender when it comes to privacy.

Justin, you ignored the thread’s discussion of Edge’s significant privacy issues, ignored the analysis done showing Microsoft hard-coded IDs into the browser so they could track users, then prosyletized, “awesome! By far the best Chromium browser out there”. And when that discussion continued your response was to post something from a Windows fanboy subreddit and refer to me as someone who “hates Microsoft Edge with a passion”? smh

If privacy isn’t important to you feel free to say so. But I think for most of us it is.

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@bowline I don’t love all the tracking either. That’s why I don’t use Gmail and avoid Chrome.

I had noticed the overuse of Bing, which is annoying.

Is there an alternative Chromium-based browser we can trust? I thought Brave was it but seems not.

So it’s either Firefox or back to Safari? At least I know that Apple’s USP is about privacy. But the browser itself is falling behind.

There are other privacy-oriented Chromium browsers besides Brave, but their updates tend to be sparse and they have much smaller dev teams working on them. I’ve used two. One is the Epic Privacy Browser, which like Brave ripped out Google’s tracking code, and by default it deletes cookies, history, and cache on quit. It has a built-in optional proxy service that can be enabled at the user’s discretion, and “Ad and user activity trackers are blocked by default on Epic browser which prevents any user tracking to occur. The browser also blocks cryptocurrency miners from running on the users system. The browsers’ fingerprinting protection blocks access to image canvas, font canvas, and audio context data. WebRTC IP Address Leaking is blocked by default as well.” The other I’ve used is SRWare Iron, which is even less well-known, and appears to be sporadically updated.

For me it’s still Brave. Firefox is a solid alternative, and it uses many extensions for Chromium like Decentraleyes (which I discussed here). And Firefox has an equivalent to the Gmail tracker-blocker I use too.

But Firefox it has a relative dearth of extensions that I like to use, or find useful, like one that turns any web page into an ePub, or extensions that improve the UI and services or Flickr, Facebook, Reddit and Gmail, or revamp the YouTube interface and block ads, or tells me the fonts on a web page I’m visiting, etc etc. I have around 30 extensions in Brave right now (though I only turn some on, like that epub extension, when needed). Brave also includes a Tor browser (not something I use) and now automatically pops up a button to find an archive.org version of a webpage if the page is missing (aka 404 error).

A year ago with Safari 12.1 Apple disabled the ability to disable hyperlink auditing, AKA click-tracking. Although Apple implements protection against cross-site tracking, both Safari and Chrome also disabled the ability to stop click-tracking; Brave and Firefox still have the protection on by default. (And Edge? No idea.)

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Actually, I didn’t ignore the discussion.

Take your time to read the Reddit post. If that subreddit is a Windows fanboy subreddit, then this forum is a Mac fanboy subreddit.

Don’t judge a book by its cover. :wink:

It has had an ad blocker for almost two years now.

Maybe, but it is barely noticeable in real-world usage.

It was an opinion, not a fact.

By all means, use Brave if you want to. It’s not a bad browser.

An unsupported one, which ignores significant privacy issues.

When I downloaded Edge on the Mac - which is the CHROMIUM browser, as opposed to the Webkit-variant on iOS - it did not let you change the search engine. And the Mac version does NOT come with ad blocking.

And you pooh-pooh Brave’s faster speeds despite video evidence (here’s another one!).

I did. It doesn’t acknowledge Edge’s privacy issues, and it compares it to Chrome for other features. Two browsers that track users, with poor user privacy protection compared, yet you seem to think that somehow validates your unsupported assertion that it’s the “best Chromium browser” - some anonymous user’s comparison that doesn’t include any other Chromium browsers. Pretty weak tea.