A few months ago,
I uploaded a video where I was using Microsoft Edge
as my main browser on my M1 MacBook Air.
It's safe to say there was a bit of a freak out
and some controversy in the comments section.
So I thought I'd make this video explaining why.
Let me give you a brief rundown of what I'll be discussing.
Firstly, although I do like Safari
and still recommend it for many people,
I stopped using it for now
due to increased crashing and freezing.
And also the lack of supported browser extensions,
including many popular ad blockers.
I'll also discuss why I chose Edge in particular
and maybe why you would enjoy using it too.
Edge received a huge update last year, especially for Macs.
And it's now based on Chromium,
which means you can use all the Chromium extensions on it.
It also has some super cool features
like Collections to group and organize tabs,
a suspend tab feature to suspend unused tabs,
which will decrease usage of RAM and swap memory,
and the ability to use vertical tabs to save space.
This video isn't sponsored by Microsoft, by the way.
It's entirely my own opinion and findings.
But this video is brought to you by Squarespace.
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More on that later.
And before we get started,
I still do recommend Safari for 95% of people.
It is a great browser with lots of features,
specifically privacy features.
And it just integrates so well with Mac OS
and the Apple ecosystem as a whole.
So for most people, I still thoroughly recommend Safari.
That being said for me,
there's a couple of issues with Safari
that sort of pushed me away from it
over the last few months.
Number one is for some reason,
the most recent versions of Safari
have been crashing for me a lot more than usual.
This is happening on other Macs as well.
So it's not just this particular Mac.
The other thing is that the extensions available on Safari
is nowhere near as diverse as say Google Chrome,
for example.
So I tend to use a lot of extensions for programs
or websites that I frequently visit.
I also like to use some kind of ad blocker
such as uBlock Origin.
Not for YouTube, I actually pay for YouTube Premium,
which is like 15 bucks a month.
But I mainly use it to prevent things like Facebook
or other websites from just slamming me with ads
and tracking me all over the internet.
The other thing is that a lot of websites
just aren't really compatible with Safari.
It's a lot less common these days,
because Safari is obviously improving every single day.
But there are a lot of times
where I have to actually stop what I'm doing in Safari
and load it up on a Chromium-based browser
for it to actually work and display properly.
Now you might also be asking why I don't use Google Chrome.
It's pretty easy.
Google Chrome is a massive resource hog.
It's not really well optimized for Mac at all.
So I just recommend just not using it at all.
I actually do personally really like Firefox.
And I've used it quite a lot up until the last few months.
But I'll touch on that a little bit later as well.
So moving on to Microsoft Edge
and why I actually like using it.
So about a year ago, Microsoft did a huge update to Edge.
And they actually made it Chromium-based.
Now, if you're not familiar with Chromium,
it's an open source project
that generates the source code used by Chrome, Edge,
and other browsers.
Okay.
So let's get down into the specifics
as to why I use Microsoft Edge.
So I will switch to the screen.
Okay.
So first of all, let's talk about extensions.
So because Edge is obviously based on Chromium,
you get access to all the Google Chrome extensions
without all the Google tracking.
Now, obviously, Microsoft will still probably track you
to some extent, much less than Google in my opinion.
But if you are worried about tracking that much,
you'd be using a hardened version of Firefox,
or perhaps just Tor.
But that's a topic for another video.
So if I come to the Chrome extension store,
you can see that I can actually add all of these on here.
So HTTPS Everywhere, that's a really popular privacy one.
So if I click add to Chrome, so that's really great to see.
And on something like Safari, you just can't do this at all.
Unless of course, it's on the App Store,
which many of these are not
because Apple won't approve them.
Now you can see up here,
I actually have uBlock Origin
which is a really, really cool ad blocker.
It's quite powerful and super customizable.
Again, totally not available on the Safari extension store.
Now there are some really, really cool features
native to Microsoft Edge,
which I'll discuss a little bit later on.
But first I want to talk about
just how stable Microsoft Edge is.
So Microsoft has actually done a super, super good job.
Now I've been using this browser for about three months now,
for about eight to 10 hours a day, doing tons of stuff.
So running a website, YouTube channel, downloading stuff,
extreme multitasking, like 30 or 40 tabs open.
And it's crashed maybe like once, maybe twice.
Whereas on Safari, I'd get probably once a day.
And even on browsers, such as Firefox and Chrome,
they would crash more often than what I've found on Edge.
Although this is my personal experience.
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So let's move on to the cool features.
So the first one is Collections.
So if I actually come up here
and I click on the Collections tab, you can see
that you can actually kind of create little mini folders
for different collections of browser tabs.
Now, this is really, really cool
if you have, say, for example, a to-do or a follow-up.
And these tabs would just sit on your browser
like I have right now.
You can see I have about 15 to 20 tabs open.
And they would just sit there for weeks on end
until you actually got around to doing it.
So Collections is a cool feature
because it allows you to group and close out these tabs.
But still keep them
in kind of like an organized bookmarks bar.
So you can see here, I have some articles
and videos for this particular video I was going to make.
And if we come back, I have a follow-up collection.
And this is the stuff that I need to follow up.
But I just don't want it sitting in my browser bar
the entire time until I actually get to it.
So, in my opinion, it's a pretty underrated feature
and isn't really something you get in other browsers.
Now you may have actually noticed throughout this video
that a lot of these browser tabs here
are actually grayed out.
And that's because Microsoft Edge
has a built-in suspend feature.
Now this is a plugin
I've used quite frequently on other browsers,
specifically Google Chrome.
And the way it works is if you're not using a browser tab
for a certain time period,
it's actually going to suspend that tab.
So it's not using up RAM
and system resources in the background.
So this is built into Microsoft Edge natively.
And I found it actually works pretty well
even better than some of the actual add-ons and extensions
you can get for other browsers.
And the really cool thing
is that if I click on one of these tabs,
say for example, this particular share search
that I Googled a couple of weeks ago,
or this particular shopping page.
It loads up very, very quickly,
whereas again, with previous extensions I've used,
they do take quite some time.
Now you can of course pin tabs as well.
So if I right click here and I go to pin tab,
it's going to move it off to the left,
which means I can't accidentally close it out.
So that's really cool for students.
For example, if you're citing or referencing something
and you don't want to accidentally close it, you can pin it.
Now, obviously this feature isn't unique to Microsoft Edge.
But it's just been implemented really well in my opinion.
Now like many browsers these days,
it does have a lot of privacy features built-in.
So if we come into the preferences
and we go to Privacy, Search, and Services,
you can see you have different levels of privacy
and tracking prevention here.
So you've got Basic, Balanced, and Strict.
You can change this.
You can come in here and block specific trackers,
which is kind of like what uBlock Origin lets you do.
Or you can just turn it off altogether.
Now I'm not necessarily going to praise Edge for this,
because basically most browsers offer this these days.
But it is a really nice addition.
(gentle music)
So to me personally,
I don't think there's actually a best browser out there.
I think it actually changes every couple of months
as new browsers get updates, they get better over time,
or they get worse over time, or they improve,
or they add features that you maybe don't like.
And it really does depend on your personal preferences.
Now for me personally, again, I really do like Firefox
for the reason that it's very, very privacy conscious.
So you're not going to have the tracking
that Google Chrome, for example, would have.
And to a much lesser extent Microsoft.
And you do have the option of really hardening Firefox
through extensions and customizing those extensions,
like uBlock Origin.
Anyway guys, hopefully you enjoyed this particular video
and you enjoyed my take
on the current browser offering for the Macs.
If you do want to know anything, comment down below.
But apart from that, I'll catch you in the next one.