Chrome or Edge? Edge or Chrome?

So just to be clear – I work for Microsoft and love the place, however I’m also an avid fan of my iPhone, Apple Music Subscription, Amazon Kindle and a slew of hardware and software products from multiple companies.

To ensure I discover new products I often try to explicitly break a usage habit in order to experience new ways of getting things done. Breaking past habits has introduced me to Sonos (which replaced the speaker system I really loved), Samsung Galaxy (which replaced my iPhone, albeit for a short while) and Google’s Nest thermostat which I really love.

So once in a while I like to try and break a habit that really settled in for me and see if (and how) the world has changed on me while I was hiding away in my comfort zone.

This time I decided to target the mother lode – the software product I use the most and lean on to get things done on a regular basis – the Chrome browser. I decided to stop using Chrome and try Microsoft Edge, the default browser on my Windows 10 laptop.

In the spirit of diving in I decided to uninstall Google Chrome from my laptop and committed to at least five days with the Edge browser.

Here is a short description of what happened:

Day 1:

I uninstalled Chrome today … feeling lost ... Took me a while to find the Edge icon (which everyone I know calls the Explorer icon). I feel very much out of my comfort zone which is always a great indicator some interesting change is about to happen … Finding some relief in Churchill’s words – ‘To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often’.

Finding my way around Edge is pretty straight forward so not too many challenges to report.

Day 2:

Started my day looking for the Chrome icon … took me a while to recall my new reality – felt confused but shook it off and started my Edge browser.

The good news is that the Internet just worked – I considered installing a recommended Windows App but did not see the immediate value (I have never been much of a Chrome plugins user so I was not really missing those).

Found how to delete cookies with a keyboard shortcut, personal email worked and after some easy setup I was able to access and save credentials for all other personal accounts (although most of access to my personal accounts is done via iPhone apps these days I still like to keep the browser option). My morning round-up of internet reading went pretty smoothly and provided a similar experience to what I have grown used to with Chrome.

Day 3:

Starting to break the habit, the Chrome icon is no longer missed. Edge is speeding along at a noticeable rate on my Windows 10 and is very stable. I’m also taking a liking to the 'Latest News' widgets Edge provides every time I start a new tab. Foreign language sites work just fine as well. Looked up some speed comparisons and found this one from Google.

Day 4:

Now that the habit is starting to wear off I’m acknowledging that the extra speed is an important piece of the puzzle for me. I don’t really miss much at this point. Browsing continues to be smooth. I have found that most of the keyboard short cuts are available. As you can imagine I now tell people about this experience.

Day 5:

Decided to stick with Edge for a while – it actually works really fast so not seeing a great reason to go back to Chrome just yet. I am being told Edge does not integrate with some password managers which is a big deal for anyone relying on those for their day-to-day browsing.

Conclusion:

I think I broke the habit but will not call the change a slam dunk just yet since I’m sure I did not consider a bunch of Chrome features other people use. For me it comes down to the comfort of a simple and fast product that helps me get what I need in an efficient manner.

It is important to note that I used the Chrome browser without plugins, also on mobile I always use Safari (should probably try to break that habit as well).

I’d love to know what others are thinking - please leave a comment if you are also attempting to break your browser habits as I would love to hear how a change in browsing experience is treating you and what other aspects of the change are important to you.