I tried out Microsoft Edge for Linux

If you had told me five years ago that Microsoft would create software for Linux (besides Skype), I would have never believed you. But now, I've tried out Edge for Linux. Because that's a thing now.

And Edge and Skype aren't even the only ones. Microsoft Teams too, is now available for Linux, and it seems there's more to come. Microsoft even has their own APT repositories now. Personally, I find that an interesting development. Apparently, they are slowly giving up on their Windows operating system (which, by the way, has carefully already made the switch to Linux by adding native Linux support in Windows).

So, in that light, Microsoft Edge for Linux is not all too surprising. Curious as I was, I installed it, to try it out. It feels weird: Microsoft software running natively in Linux, without Windows emulator or anything.

When the Microsoft repositories are added, installation is easily done with APT or any other software manager. But for the whole Microsoft experience, you can also install it the Windows way: go to the website you'd least expect and download it there, after which you can manually open the installation file which will install Edge for you. Thanks, I'm not that much of a Microsoft fanatic. Let's have the software manager do all that for me.

Upon first launch, Edge welcomes you with, of course, the license agreement that you need to accept. It's proprietary software, after all.

If you have a Microsoft account, this is the moment to login and share your information with other devices that run Microsoft-software. I don't have that, so luckily I could skip without signing in. And that's it: it's all set up and works fine. Good for me, because as a web developer, I try to open my creations in different webbrowsers, to see what it looks like on different platforms and to test if everything works well, and Edge was until now the one I couldn't test in. Opening my website, it seems to look the same as in Google Chrome.

And that's no surprise. When I open the About page, it is mentioned that Edge is based on Chromium, the open source version of Google Chrome. Realising that, it is no wonder that Microsoft came with a Linux-version of their browser. After all, Google Chrome is available for Linux too, so a Linux version of Edge could easily be forked from that.

I've used it for a few days, to see how it responds. So far, it works fine. Videos play fine and web-apps such as Google Drive run smoothly. It looks like Google Chrome and Firefox have a new competitor on the Linux platform.

Last modified: 14 July 2021 17:38:37.