Monday, May 30, 2016

Living Far From the Edge ...

I've been using Windows 10 for quite some time now. It's running on an "older" machine - a Dell Studio 1555 with one of the early duo core CPU's, the "Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo  T6600". It doesn't support hyperthreading (which is another problem for me), and runs at about 2.1GHz. Not too bad, and I upgraded it sometime ago with a 500GB SSD, and a total of 8GB RAM. Oh, and an FHD, non-touch, LCD display. I'm actually pretty impressed that Win 10 works very reliably on this 5+ year old machine.

The Edge browser, on the other hand, is still just one more piece of crap from what is turning into a longer and longer line of crap from Microsoft. My complaints about Edge basically come down to two:
  • I can't change the "new tab" page to be my own home page.
  • I can't block all the fracking ads and trackers from loading that turn the browser into a dog-shit slow lump of lead.
As it turns out, I like Bing, and I use Bing as my home page in all my browsers. In IE, I could specify what page I wanted opened when I clicked on the "new tab" button.  While Firefox and Chrome don't have that feature natively, I could install some simple extensions that allow me to fix that problem.

Similarly, I use Ghostery to block useless intrusive ads and trackers - my other browsers load MUCH faster than Edge.

While I like the Edge interface, the lack of control about what I am presented is just too big a disappointment.

Good luck with all that "We are in control" bullshit, Microsoft. It might work in China ...