I wanted to test it out to see how well it works. With just one tab open, there are 13 instances of ‘msedge’ tasks running. It’s consuming quite a bit of CPU for being so idle. It also lags a bit visually. It’s almost imperceptible, but it’s there. Opening menus has a small lag, for example. As does typing this text – though it’s not using an insane amount of CPU cycles.
It’s definitely a dev build, and I’d expect the final product to be more polished. I am unable to login to the browser, so I can’t share settings and a profile across multiple instances. That doesn’t yet work, but it does give you a helpful message that lets you know that it’s not yet supported.
I do not see me using this as my daily driver, nor even one of my many browser instances that I have configured for different tasks, but here we are. It has a nice dark mode available by default. I haven’t tried to install any extensions or anything. It’s an intuitive browser to use, as would be expected as a Microsoft product.
It was trivial to install. They provide a .deb or an .rpm. So, you shouldn’t need to work hard to install it on quite a variety of distros. You can find it packaged here. This is, interesting, the first MS product I’ve used in a very long time. I don’t even us VS Code, though I probably should give that a try.
I suppose that I’d keep running it, if I actually cared. After all, my running it would report my uses back to the mothership and they’d theoretically improve the browser because of it. Alas, I really don’t care. It’s great to see MS releasing opensource software. It’s great to have another browser alternative. I just don’t care enough to do anything about it.
