Sorry Mary Jo, ChrEdge sort of kills me. I pronounce that more like Cher-Edge and Edge isn’t a singer…
Anyway, there are very few things I like about CrEdge more than Edge but since buying the Surface Pro X, I’ve been installing nearly everything I use regularly as an app. I’ve known about this, and used it slightly on my desktop, but it’s never been a big deal until recently. I commented on it on a game discord server, and signed several people up for CrEdge thanks to the feature.
Deciding to play with it further I use Edge on Android (never used a different Android browser, so maybe this is perfectly normal for all of them), and I was able to install TWiT as an app through it as well! This feature is actually less exciting to me personally, since I’m in the process of removing everything from my Android and getting off Google services entirely, but since Android is the most used OS in the world, it’s still a really cool feature for a lot of people.
So, I’m curious if anyone else uses the ‘install as app’ feature on CrEdge, and what websites/services they’ve found respond best to it?
I’ve got my bank, Teams, OneNote, CSSE/JSU Coronavirus tracker, TWiT, Twitter, Discord, A few specific subreddits, and about two dozen web games installed using it.
I actually enjoyed it, I did prefer a full tab experience myself for a lot of things but I am looking forward to having the mindset of “as an app” for some key places I go to.
Though since I moved to a Linux Distro as my main OS and CrEdge (Chrodge? No…) isn’t available for Linux (yet) I have stopped using it.
I’ve never been a big fan of most browser experiences anyway, so being able to get rid of the rest of the browser is actually causing me to use sites and services I otherwise have entirely avoided.
As for being able to use it on Chrome, I assumed it was possible but had a friend tell me there are sites he can’t install. I don’t personally use Google sites or services, so I’ve not tried on Chrome, but the feature is missing in Vivaldi and Brave.
I had high hopes that CrEdge would finally allow me to use Edge for my employer provided Office 365 account (old edge had incompatibilities with some Office web apps). It certainly did eliminate all those compatibility problems however an even larger productivity killer emerged, CrEdge does not allow removing or changing the search engine on the new tab pages’ search box.
Over the years I’ve gotten so used to Chrome and Firefox using my selected search engine for both address bar and new tab page search that I no longer pay attention to which one I’m using. My normal usage also has me clicking the new tab plus sign before doing a search for my next research topic. After dozens of times ending up with unhelpful Bing searches and having to retype my search in to the address bar to get a useful result I gave up on using CrEdge since it was damaging my productivity.
I do know this is one of the things on the roadmap to ‘fix’. I’d never noticed this before since I’ve been using Bing for years anyway. I actually end up with an almost opposite problem. I use so few Google services, and haven’t ever used Google as my main search engine that when I accidently do use it, the results are almost useless. I don’t know how to form queries on it, and it doesn’t know how to give me results I’m expecting.
I could see this being annoying for the other 97.8% of the population that doesn’t use Bing, though.
Yeah I saw that when researching the problem. Users have been complaining about this obvious deficiency since early previews of the browser. According to the road map, for 25 weeks Microsoft has been considering if they will change the behaviour with no decision yet.
The most annoying thing to me about any Chromium based browser is bookmarking.
I don’t use bookmarks, I don’t want to see the bookmark bar… but it’s always there on a new tab page no matter what.
The behavior is there in Vivaldi, CrEdge and Brave at least, which makes me think it’s universal to Chromium, and it’s annoying.
I’m hoping to see the Edge tab setaside feature added back in, but sets is working well enough for now.
In any case, installing things as apps and getting rid of the rest of the browser around it has been very nice for me.
There should be an option when you right click on the bookmark toolbar at the bottom of the popup to show the bookmark toolbar, and uncheck it. I see that in Chrome, but I use the bookmarks so I keep on.
Yeah, that’ll undisplay it everywhere except a new tab. On new tabs an empty bookmark bar shows up for me, with no way to turn it off.
Chromium project even says it’s a ‘feature’ because apparently there’s no way to navigate off a new tab page without bookmarks, even when you don’t have any bookmarks.
Damn, I just tried it. That is a stupid feature. Just another reason I use Firefox on my personal system.
The tyranny of mono-culture is creeping into browsers.
Just saw that the excerpt changed this morning because Microsoft edited the post. The new roadmap post says they’ve accepted the Bing removal feature request and plan to implement it in March!
