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It’s unlikely that Edge is going to “extinguish” Chrome or the Chromium projects, but this approach may be enough to give pause for veteran Mac users with long memories. Justice Department, which accused it of trying to snuff out competition in the browser arena. This approach got the company into trouble with the U.S. Microsoft’s use of the Chromium platform to make a Chrome-like browser that’s better than Chrome may remind the skeptical and cynical of the company’s “embrace, extend, extinguish” mantra from the 1990s. However, Edge has a handy feature that lets you view search results in a right-hand sidebar – and the search engine for that can’t be changed from Bing. You can do that in Edge, though the starting default is Microsoft’s Bing. While I was interested in replacing Chrome, I wanted to keep Google as the default search engine. Microsoft also leans toward its own services in Edge.

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Its sync works with versions of Edge on Windows, Android and iOS. That’s kind of a shame, because one other benefit is that Edge is cross-platform. I’m not sure where Edge got them, but fortunately I could turn off sync, re-import my Chrome data and I was good to go. I imported my Chrome bookmarks, passwords, extensions, personal info and more, but when I turned on sync using my Microsoft account, my bookmarks were replaced by a set of old bookmarks that I had not used in years. I didn’t care much for the way Microsoft has implemented sync. Not everything is lollipops and roses, though. It feels more Mac-like to me than Chrome.

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Edge looks like a Mac browser, not like a Windows browser with a Big Sur facelift. Microsoft also has designed the Mac version to fit in with the macOS design language. (Microsoft has its own store for native Edge extensions as well.) I’ve not found any among the 24 installed on Chrome that don’t work on Edge. This time around, they’re much more stable. I tested Edge for Mac when it was first available and it was hit-or-miss whether Chrome extensions would work reliably. You can also set Edge to use Strict levels when you use InPrivate browsing, which is similar to Chrome’s Incognito mode.Įdge’s Chromium roots means it can use most of the extensions available for Chrome. Microsoft Edge offers users three levels of protection against tracking. (See Forbes contributor Zak Doffman’s piece on Chrome’s privacy excesses.) Though Edge and Chrome are similar, they differ greatly on privacy.įor example, Edge gives users three levels of tracking protection from which to choose – Basic, Balanced and Strict, with Balanced the default. Of course, one of the many reasons both Mac and Windows users are wary of Chrome is because of the amount of data it harvests from users. Chrome doesn’t have this (though there are extensions that emulate it), but Microsoft Edge does – and it’s a lot easier on the eyes, with a manila-colored background. Safari users enjoy an excellent Reader Mode feature that strips out ads and other distractions, providing you with just text. Chrome has this in a feature dubbed Tab Freeze, but with Edge you can control how long before tabs are suspended.

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As I work with the two, Chrome consistently uses significantly more memory than Edge when the same pages are loaded.Īnother example where Microsoft is ahead of Google on resource management: Sleeping Tabs, which suspend web pages after a specified amount of time to free up CPU and memory. When I launch Chrome on an Intel-based Mac running macOS 11.2.3, it takes around 900 megabytes once loaded. Although Edge is built on the same foundation, Microsoft has tuned it better. Firefox was known as a memory and resource hog at the the time, a reputation that now dogs Chrome. When Chrome originally launched in the late 2000s for Windows, it was touted as a leaner alternative to Firefox, which in turn was considered an alternative to Internet Explorer.

But it’s not the only feature that makes it a great browser to use on a Mac, and certainly make it a better pick than Chrome. T took me about 10 minutes of using this new version before I was sold. Microsoft Edge for Mac with vertical tabs pinned open.