 Pretty much ever since I started the channel, I've been looking for a replacement for Firefox. There are many reasons why this is true. For the last year or two or so, Firefox has been getting slower and slower and slower. It has failed to render many web pages for whatever reason Patreon won't load in it half the time for me. The banking website that I use won't load at all and has broken things when it does load. That's just two examples of several websites that just don't work well in Firefox. When you're a web browser, the one thing you have to do well is browse the web. Otherwise, you should call yourself something different. So because of these problems, I've been searching for an alternative to Firefox. I've not really found one. I've tried Brave, I've tried Qt browser, and despite really liking Qt browser, there are certain things in it that I just can't get past specifically the really bad ad blocking. And even though the ad blocking has gotten better in Qt browser, I still can't use it. Brave is just kind of horrible in my opinion. It has several things that just piss me off about it and I can't use it. I've also tried several forks of Firefox and those are varying levels of okay, but they always have something that piss me off and they have the same problem that Firefox has where certain websites just won't render properly in them because basically in the end of the day, they're just Firefox just with better privacy settings or whatever. So my quest has been going for almost a year at this point and I really do want to find something that is better than Firefox at doing the job a web browser is supposed to do. So one browser that I was never ever going to give a true chance to was Microsoft Edge and there are many reasons behind that. Most of them having to do with the fact that it has Microsoft in the title. I'm not a big fan of Microsoft software. I never have been specifically because Windows is trash and everything they do is an offshoot of Windows. That being said, I got desperate enough the other day when Firefox yet again failed to load my banking website that I decided I was going to give Microsoft Edge a try because I've tried everything else, everything else has things that piss me off about it. So I decided to install the beta of Microsoft Edge and give it a try and I really like it. I really, really do like it. Now I've been using it for a couple days now and I'm going to go through a few of the features that I truly enjoy and then I'll talk a little bit about whether or not I'm going to be maintaining my use of Microsoft Edge. So let's go ahead and jump in. So this is what my install of Microsoft Edge looks like and there are a few things here that I'm just going to point out that I really, really like. So the first one is vertical tabs built in out of the box. Now I'm not one that uses vertical tabs all that often you can do it in Firefox with an extension. They're fine. They have a lot of options with that extension and stuff like that. So they're really good. But with Microsoft Edge, for whatever reason, the fact that they're built in actually make them a little bit more usable and their functionality seems to be more native than with the extension in Firefox. Another thing that I really like about Microsoft Edge is that it puts tabs to sleep and by that I mean that if you don't go to a website or one of your tabs here along the side for a certain amount of time, it actually takes them out of memory so that they're not taking up resources and puts them to sleep. Why haven't we come up with that idea before? It's fantastic and now I understand that every browser or whatever has a certain mechanism for not loading up tabs that you're not using. But most of them, if tabs have already been loaded, they're in memory and that's where they stay until you close them. With these, you don't have to close them. You still have them open. They've just gone to sleep and you can tell that they've gone to sleep by being kind of grayed out here and that's really cool. Now I'm not on a system that has low memory or low resources. So it doesn't, it's not that big of a deal but I really truly enjoy that feature. Another thing that I really like in terms of tabs and stuff like that is that you can add the tabs that you have open to a collection so that if you close all those tabs, you can actually just reopen those tabs by opening up that collection. That's really cool. You can also create groups. So if I open up another tab here and go to say it in nine to five Linux or something, whatever, I can actually create a group, add tab to group and we'll just call this Linux and we can add this tab to group, the Linux group and now I have a tab here and I can actually collapse or at least I should be able to collapse that. I may have to actually enter. Yeah, you have to have another tab open but once you have another tab open, you can collapse that group so that they don't take up so much space. So if you're a tab hoarder, which I know a lot of people are, you can actually go through and group those tabs. Now, I don't know if like Chrome has this. I haven't used Chrome in ages. So it's possible that something like Chrome has this functionality, but this is great. I love that. I'm not really a tab hoarder, but I could see myself actually using this because I have certain tabs that I have open all the time. The same thing with collections. I have certain tabs that I open up every single time I open a browser. Just the fact that I can open all those tabs with one click is kind of awesome. Now, other than that, this is basically just Chrome. It does have some neat settings. So if I go up here to the settings panel, the settings they have gone through and completely rewritten from Chrome and it looks more kind of like what the Vivaldi settings do, but it's not quite as customizable as Vivaldi, but it has some really cool stuff. So you can go through and you can choose your themes here and stuff. You can go through and change the start homepage. Basically, all the stuff you think that you can do with a regular browser. And then there's some things for certain privacies and stuff not. I probably should change that district. But I mean, at least they're trying to be a privacy-focused browser. I doubt they succeed. The thing is, I don't care all that much. Yes, I enjoy my privacy. And yes, I want privacy on the internet, but I'm more interested in having a functional browser. And so far, the thing that I like most about Edge is that it's fast. I can go through and load up YouTube and it just loads. It's very, very quick. If I open up Firefox here and then go to YouTube, you may not have noticed that, but it's a little bit slower. And over the course of the day or whatever, you just notice it's getting slower and slower and slower. The more tabs you have open, the slower it gets. It's not a great experience. I mean, that wasn't there wasn't too slow. But like I said, this is the only tab basically I have open. Normally, how I use a browser, I have multiple instances. I have some on one tag. I have some on another tag or whatever, because I'm, you know, segregating my work in my reading or whatever that I do. And the more instances of Firefox that I had open, it was always, always going slower. And that's not a great thing because I want my web browser to be fast. Now, if Firefox had only been slow, I probably would have been okay with it. Like I can put up with websites that load just a little slower than everything else, just for the fact that I want to use open source software. I want to use an open source browser. I want to support Mozilla, even though they drive me crazy all the time. If it was just that, I would have been fine. I would have continued to use Firefox, but there's also websites out there that just won't render. And most of them are ones that I absolutely have to have Patreon, my bank, Facebook from time to time has just broken things in it for whatever reason. Now I don't use Facebook all that often anymore. But it's still annoying to go there and have errors pop up. And I haven't had any of those problems in Microsoft Edge yet. So the thing is, is like I said, I wanted to support Firefox for the longest time, and I wanted to continue to use it. But the little things that it just doesn't do well that it needs to do well have driven me away. And surprisingly enough, it's the Microsoft Edge browser that has gained my support for the moment. Now, there are a few things that are a little annoying about Microsoft Edge. For one, you can't hide the extension icons up at the top unless you have the extensions menu enabled. I just want to hide all that stuff. I want to get rid of it. I don't need the extensions icons to show up at all unless I tell them to. So that's annoying. Another annoyance is that I can't actually go through and customize the CSS like I can with Firefox. I like customizing the Chrome around it. And you can't do that with Firefox because or with Microsoft Edge rather, because it's just not what they do, right? It's not Firefox is open. The Microsoft Edge browser is not even though it's based on open technology or whatever. So yeah, I've switched to Microsoft Edge. Whether or not I stay with it or not is going to be a good question because the thing is, I feel guilty. Like I'm a Linux guy. I'm a FOS guy. And I want to support Linux and open source software. I really truly do. And I'm willing to put up with some pain points in order to do so. So I feel guilty about not using Firefox and whether or not that guilt will eventually drive me back to using Firefox. I don't know. Maybe possibly we'll see. At the moment, I'm really enjoying Microsoft Edge. And it makes me feel a little dirty to say it. So in the comments below, let me know if you've tried Microsoft Edge, whether or not you liked it or let me hear your thoughts on my switching to it, because I'm sure there are some people out there who have very high, very low opinions of Microsoft and you'll want to share those, of course. So do that in the comment section below before I go. I'd like to let you know that you can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. You can support me on Twitter at the Linuxcast. And you can find all of the contact information that you'll need to contact me in the video description below. Before I go, I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons, Devon Chris, East Coast Web, Gen 2 is Fun 2, Marcus, Megalyn, Donnie, Sven, Jax and Knife and Tool. I got you kind of cut off there, Jax and Knife Tool. We'll fix that right now. You're a brand new subscriber. Thank you for supporting me. Mitchell, Mr. Fox, Arts Center American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.