I see a lot of opinions masquerading as fact in this thread. Including some silly characterizations of Microsoft that just frankly don’t at all sync with the direction Satya Nadella has pushed the company. It’s probably beyond the scope of this thread, but Microsoft’s embrace of open source software has been significant. It’s push to offer software and services that interoperate with direct competitors, and to offer its software and services on competing platforms, is in stark contrast to their historical behaviors.
Microsoft makes the Windows Operating System, virtually all desktop operating systems ship with a pre-installed web browser. It is a relatively reasonable position that the company that make the OS maintain its own web browser for its users. Everything I’ve seen out of their production of Edge over the last few years appears to be a genuine faith effort to promote a friendlier way of doing this than what had been their historic norms. Both friendlier to competitors and friendlier to its customers.
I really think a lot of people who have opinions like those expressed in this thread would benefit from doing a deeper dive into the ways Microsoft has really changed its business strategy in the last 5-7 years. Note that I’m not presenting the old Microsoft as “bad” or the new Microsoft as “good”, I’m simply saying it’s not accurate to characterize them as the same. As an investor I follow Microsoft largely out of economic interest, and I think Microsoft spent a good 30 years doing a lot of the same stuff companies like Google and Amazon are doing now, and after essentially getting its nose bloodied in some respects with the transition of much computing to mobile devices, and years adrift under Ballmer, Nadella came in and basically reimagined the company as an enterprise that can make better inroads by really focusing on quality services. Key to this value proposition is that Microsoft services should work with anything and that includes competing software packages. The new release of Edge is a very very small piece of that larger picture, if you look at the stuff they’ve done like letting users launch a Linux bash shell in Windows 10 (which itself runs on a real Linux subsystem, and is not an emulation), to porting lots of their developer tools and enterprise products to run on platforms that work on lots of non-Windows operating systems, to their cloud services platform letting users host Linux VMs and non-Microsoft databases etc.
I don’t think Nadella is doing this because he’s a “nice guy” and Bill Gates was a “mean guy”, I think Nadella just recognizes Microsoft of 2015 was in a different place and a different business climate than Microsoft of 1995, and it needed to behave differently to have the same level of success. I’ll note at present this business strategy appears to be working very well. Microsoft was viewed as something akin to an also-ran, only viable because of legacy OS sales, when Ballmer was gracefully “retired.” At present it’s largely financially on par with more flashy tech titans of today like Apple / Amazon / Google. Microsoft’s market cap sits at around $1.65T (Apple - $2.03T, Amazon $1.65T, Google $1.03%), and while it has the lowest revenue of the four ($143B vs $259B Apple, $280B Amazon, $161B Google), its income is quite high showing its impressive profitability ($96B in income on that revenue vs $97B Apple, $114B Amazon, $89B Google.)
The real way that Chromium Edge kind of fits into the picture is probably more with its enterprise application and developer offerings. Lots of companies develop applications using Microsoft technology, or deploy enterprise applications written with other technologies, and these most commonly have a web interface. Developers wanting to make sure their product works correctly have to do browser testing and enterprise IT departments like to know what browsers will run what software the best. Edge being its own rendering engine largely complicated this process in many ways, by adopting Chromium it removes all of those questions more or less, but it also lets Microsoft aid its customers in having their cake and eating it too.
For example no longer do corporate IT departments have to worry about the rendering of HTML on Microsoft’s browser vs Google’s browser, but Microsoft’s chromium version of Edge has a large number of features relevant to enterprises that Google Chrome doesn’t offer. Calling it a “cheap Chrome knockoff” is frankly silly, it most likely has significantly more developer resources committed to it than any other project using Chromium other than Chrome itself. You can also see that Microsoft has made a significant number of commits to the Chromium project: https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/author:*.microsoft.com+AND+status:merged
There’s a litany of features that are only offered in edge chromium that would be of interest to lots of enterprise / business customers: availability to deploy ClickOnce applications (new/soon to be released feature), better integration with Windows group policy admin, better integration with Office365/OneDrive. There’s also some actual areas of performance where chromium edge has been outperforming other browsers, albeit take such things with a grain of salt–browser performance often varies considerably from one task to the next and shifts a lot every time browsers push new updates out.
The comment that Microsoft/Edge has a “worse” update schedule is also kind of puzzling, you can look at the Edge developer site and the Dev / Canary release channels and see that they’re basically releasing new Edge versions in a manner more or less identical to how Google Chrome is updated by Google.
While a lot of the new Edge’s differentiating features are (unsurprisingly) related to better integration with Microsoft services, they have developed basic UI features that aren’t in the other chromium browsers at the moment, in the realms of tab management, the “collections” feature, and a few other minor things.
All that being said, the reason a Windows 10 user is being made aware of this now is because the release of chromium edge to end users is a recent thing and Microsoft wants you to be aware of their new offering. I wouldn’t really read anything nefarious into it. You’ve had the old rendering engine version of Edge on your Windows 8 or 10 machines likely for many years without realizing it.
All that being said, there’s no reason if you’re happy with Firefox to switch away from it. I think any neutral observer would concede of the browsers, Firefox is the most protective of end user privacy. After that it’s editorializing a bit, but I would simply note that Apple and Microsoft mostly do not make money the same way Google does, any revenue these companies make from online advertising is a very very small portion of their company’s profits. Google is almost entirely dependent even after years of diversification for online advertising to drive company profits. So the reality is Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Edge have a very different set of motivations behind them. At the end of the day for most people, Google’s use of their browsing data from Chrome to serve up better ads and fine tune Google’s “user profile” for you, probably has minimal to no negative impact on your life. But some people aren’t happy with the arrangement and understandably have concerns in trusting a big company with their personal data when that big company is in the business primarily of commoditizing and selling that data.