I tried Edge and bing, God awful. You just feel their desire to take control of your experience of the web. On the flip site, made me see how much Google own us all.

I use ddg everyday and I hate it. I resort to Google shortly after. Not personalised so I guess I am missing out on decent returns.

I tried ddg, but i found myself adding !g a lot, so i just switched back.

try Brave’s search service

Have you tried kagi? I‘m finding it better than ddg and often on paar with G.

+1 for Kagi. It's been my default search engine since Jan '22 and I'm very happy with it. On the rare occasions when I use Bing or Google I'm reminded all over again why I'm happy to pay for search.

I’m having the same experience. Anytime I’m not satisfied with kagi’s results, I try Google and that’s usually worse.

What's wrong with Edge? I started using it when Chrome started eating my RAM, it's been mostly unobtrusive and unnoticed, like a good browser should be.

I installed it on Mac to use Bing Chat.

It immediately took over my whole screen, in a completely weird way that no native Mac app ever did before (in my experience, though I don't use that many Mac apps).

How much better could the memory profile really be if they’re using the same rendering engine?

Can't speak for anyone else, for me I've mostly liked it. But I use a separate password manager (bitwarden) and disable most of the embedded addons (shopping, etc). So it's a bit mixed.

Edge keeps trying to turn on sync-to-Microsoft. I keep saying no. Once, I think it turned it on without asking.

I assume it has more telemetry than Chrome... anyone checked?

I wanted to be the default browser, ok. It wanted to import all my info.. no thanks there was other nastyness I don’t remember.

Then it showed me so much junk and crappy news on new page, it was pure propaganda.

That was the end of it. I know it’s possible to configure all those things, but the starting experience was soo bad I got away quickly.

It is classic microsoft behavior. They don't create apps, they create traps. The end goal is just to make people slaves of their software. The software they create is just "leverage" so they can trap more and more of you or your business.

It seem to me that Google at first was focused on making the best products but ended up in a very similar place. Absolute power corrupt absolutely.

This is indeed a theme for large software companies, but Microsoft has perfected it over the years. The way they turned open source and web technologies to further their goals is just another reminder. Many companies are now entrapped into Azure-related software that can only survive in a Microsoft world.

Right, I just wanted "new tab" to open about:blank -- doesn't seem possible. You get their news feed on every new tab.

I've been using perplexity.ai for anything that's not a site/company/person name look up.

I used bing chat (supposedly using gpt4) and it was far more annoying than openai free chatgpt (supposedly using gpt3.5)

Somehow Microsoft found a way to make it worse?

Agree, prefer to pay for chatgpt then using Microsoft’s free crapware.

Of course they did. That ought to be their slogan. "Microsoft: finding a way to make it worse since 1975"

Yes, I wonder why is so difficult for people to understand this. Microsoft wants to make your life worse, even when they have good software.

I find it hard to believe that they WANT to make my life worse.

I think that they are simply ok with making my life worse if it makes their life better at all.

exactly.. its not very usable. They don't even have to innovate anything. just copy ChatGPT interface and display the results.

I have access but don't have a box with Edge running on it nearby to use it. What about it was worse? A few friends tell me that uniting chat with the LLM makes it hallucinate a lot less and makes it easier to check its work, but they only used it a couple times.

I'd pay Microsoft monthly if they'd just give us untethered gpt-4 access, the same from the API, for those of us on the waitlist. I don't care if it wants to marry me, haha - I think being able to maybe full around with the settings could make it play nicer too.

Boomer. The kids use reddit and tiktok.

The original redditors are the boomers of HN. The crowd has changed quite a bit though. Still lots of good stuff on there.

For almost all technical queries, I've found GPT-4 to be vastly superior.

Most of the time, my search queries are just to find websites. Like I'll search for "[movie] rotten tomatoes" or "[book] wiki".

I've found duckduckgo to be a good enough replacement for Google for such queries.

Arthur or Harvey?

If I used the preferences of commenters here as a basis to make investments I’d lose all my money pretty quickly.

I was able to use Google twice today so was able to offset your dent.