That's right, no need to wipe your glasses as that's a real headline here. Microsoft are bringing their Microsoft Edge browser to Linux in October.
Not a huge surprise, as this was already confirmed previously but having a launch month is the next step. Writing on the Windows Experience Blog, Liat Ben-Zur, Corporate Vice President confirmed the Linux launch plan:
Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily takes its next step: starting in October, Microsoft Edge on Linux will be available to download on the Dev preview channel. When it’s available, Linux users can go to the Microsoft Edge Insiders site to download the preview channel, or they can download it from the native Linux package manager. And just like other platforms, we always appreciate feedback—it’s the best way to serve our customers.
What's not entirely clear is what they mean by the native Linux package manager, since there's a few. Most likely though, since they (like a lot of others) target Ubuntu directly, they might mean the Snap Store.
All of this is as Microsoft appear to continue treating Linux less like a hostile target, and more like something to take advantage of themselves. Linux has ended up being a big part of Microsoft, from integrating it into Windows with Windows Subsystem for Linux and Linux is a popular and supported choice by Microsoft on their cloud Azure platform too. Heck, they even admitted they were 'on the wrong side of history when open source exploded'.
It's going to be a bit of a hot topic, and I'm sort of dreading asking this because the comments will be quite colourful but here we go anyway: will you use it and what do you think of Microsoft getting certain applications on Linux?
Personally, I am all for it. A key part of the computing experience is having access to the applications you like and want to use, even if it's a browser with a few key differences - it all adds up. The more Linux gets, the better.
Note: this is actually not the first modern Microsoft application to arrive on Linux, as Microsoft Teams became available on Linux late last year. There's also Visual Studio Code and Skype too which have been on Linux for some time now.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Kimyrielle Sep 22, 2020
It's therefore good news.
Quoting: AwesamLinuxI believe the main purpose of this browser is to ensure that the Office 365 suite has a browser they can test against, and guarantee the service works with. Large enterprise customers demand solutions that are cross-platform as they have often mixed environments. So the browser could perhaps be a good thing, maybe a sign of Microsoft moving towards providing platform agnostic services/software rather than forcing Windows down everyone's throatsoffice 365 works without any problems with firefox on linux... we have it at work and i didn't have any problems yet (ok, i still use thunderbird and libreoffice most of the time)...
but maybe they intend to add additional stuff which then only will work with their browser but they don't want to anger the linux business users; they can then just say: "use our browser, it's also available on linux, everything else is rubbish anyway"... that would be the pessimistic outlook...
Kimyrielle Sep 22, 2020
Quoting: x_wingWake me up when they release office.
Unlikely. MS wants everybody to use Office 365 anyway, and is very likely to make local versions less and less desirable over time, until the elbowed everybody into their cloud. The last thing they're likely going to do is add new platforms to stand-alone office.
Quoting: KimyrielleQuoting: x_wingWake me up when they release office.
Unlikely. MS wants everybody to use Office 365 anyway, and is very likely to make local versions less and less desirable over time, until the elbowed everybody into their cloud. The last thing they're likely going to do is add new platforms to stand-alone office.
Didn't they already announce there'd be no further standalone versions? Or somewhere in the near future. That's going to be a wonderful time for people when required to store everything in the cloud. Especially considering a newspaper article I recently read, where they reported on how quite a few Microsoft cloud accounts got suddenly disabled without any notice or explanation and people had a hard time to get them re-enabled to get back access to their personal stuff (of which they of course didn't make a backup somewhere else as cloud storage is super-safe). Seems that they are using some kind of bot / AI to make such decisions. And decisions those things make are still rather questionable, depending on the learning process.
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