Same. I use Edge at work because it’s less evil than chrome and I’m logging into O365 anyway. Firefox for personal stuff.
I haven’t had too many problems with Edge myself. I use Kagi for search without issue. Don’t see any native ads. It’s fine.
Brave has vertical tabs built in too, though they're behind a flag. But similar implementation as Edge and they work well.
last time I tried them they were extremely glitchy. have they been fixed?
I think a lot of the glitchiness had to do with the tab bar changing size if you didn't have the bookmarks bar always on or always off. That's fixed now, and the tabs look pretty, too.
IMO this is one of the great tragedies with MS Edge. The UX is so much better than standard chromium but because of all the other crap that MS puts into it, I just can't use it. If MS open sourced Edge and someone created an "UnMicrosofted Edge", I would use that in a heartbeat.
Currently the only place I use it is on my work laptop where I don't have any personal info and just generally don't give a crap about privacy since I'm inside my company intranet, bitbucket or jira all day. It's honestly really great for that sort of thing because the vertical tabs let you have 50+ tabs open and still read what they are, but there's just no way I would use it for anything personal or outside of work.