Edge is just marginally better than Chrome as they do not yet have the hegemony on the web. But that is the end goal of Microsoft.
I struggle to understand how you might skip Firefox because it was a hog in the past (it's free to try. It's been fine for years.), but are ready to jump in the loving embrace of another known bad, if not worse, actor.
To me "I'm being spied constantly and my data is being sold for profit" has much more weight than "once upon a time I had to restart the browser every other day"
I don't think Edge is looking for hegemony in the web at this point. Chromium-based Edge is marketed like Brave but with more "Corporate" friendliness. Edge is Microsoft barely holding to a legitimate toehold in web standards processes, with a skeleton crew as small as possible of developers. This Edge looks like the late stages of IE6: Microsoft has to ship a browser with Windows, because browsers are an important part of every OS, doesn't want to cede control to someone else's brand so needed to rebrand a "white label product" (and Chromium is now the largest "white label" for better and a lot worse), but overall got tired of paying for development staff on a money losing "product" and wants to focus on products that actually bring in revenue. (Which is also why Edge is the noisy home of coupon products and all of Microsoft consumer AI ambitions and so forth. You can see that's stuff making the company money, so that's why they are putting the most work into that kind of stuff.)
Very fast. Zero telemetry. Lightweight, natively built with WebKit, made for you and your Mac. Industry-leading battery life, privacy respecting by design and native support for web extensions.
+1 for Orion. Been using it on my work laptop pretty much exclusively (still need to do testing for my work in Chrome/Firefox), and it is hands down my favorite browser.
Now that 1Password natively supports Orion (they had a browser whitelist), I can probably switch back to it on my personal machines / iPhone, but Safari is still pretty sticky for my non-work life.
I'm giving Orion a try every couple months because the premise is great but unfortunately for me it's so buggy that it's unusable. But then again I rely on a lot of very modern web APIs like WebRTC. Hopefully one day it'll get there but it's a very long road ahead. Not sure where those bugs come from either because Safari doesn't suffer from the same issues.
I suggest not using Edge personally, unless you're big into the MS ecosystem. Edge has become a bloated mess, with MS adding all sorts of random crap (bing everywhere, telemetry, a buy-now-pay-later "feature", shopping, click bait news, etc). Yes you can disable most of it and pare it down, and you're sending your data to MS instead of Google, but it has left an extremely bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather just use Chrome in that case.
Microsoft also seems to have some real quality control issues too, shipping things to stable completely broken. I tried switching to Edge full time a couple years back, and in the few months I did I experienced some really glaring bugs that they would take forever to fix. I think there was a full few months where grabbing and dragging the scrollbar would cause the scrollbar to disappear and the entire web page to jut to the side, and the only way to fix it was to close the tab and reopen it.
Between that and all the constantly increasing push of their other products I eventually gave up and switched back to Chrome.
Firefox has been fine for me on a variety of macOS devices in the last 4 years, and it's currently on my M1 max macbook, and also my 2012 macbook Pro which is running OCLP and macOS 12. If it runs fine on that, can't see how you'd have an issue on any M1 device.
My attitude is that even if all the enthusiasts switched, its too small of a marketshare to matter, and its clear nobody wants to build on the Firefox platform - not even Brendan Eich.
Our best hope is for a fork of Chromium to be maintained by the Linux Foundation and for other vendors (and Electron) to use that fork instead. Just moving Electron over would provide significant momentum.
This exactly. I don't know why people are treating it as a binary choice - use Chrome when you have to, use something else everywhere else. People did the same with IE back in the day.
> Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)
I use Firefox for almost everything, and as much as I like it, it's sadly back to being a memory hog. The reason seems to be the process-per-origin-site thing that was introduced to protect against some attack, which causes my Firefox to have 20-50 processes, each with significant memory usage.
I use LibreWolf (a rebranded Firefox clone with less tracking) with TST and just recently I exported a few hundred tabs I didn't care for anymore so now I am down to 2-300 tabs.
I don't think it is as lean as some versions of old Firefox, but I have no problems with 500 - 1000 tabs (and I often run it next to a full IDE + VSCode + Firefox ++).
You can disable (almost) all of that. My FF only has 3 processes overall. Needed shittons of about:config tweaking to achieve it and it's probably not security best practices:tm: but hey, it works and my browser stops eating all the RAM.
I have not found a good way besides restarting FF. There is an extension but it wasn't reliable, as in unloaded active tabs and not unloading inactive tabs. IIRC the extension API didn't have sensible hooks so it was difficult.
I've been using Brave on an older Mac for nearly as long as it's been out, no complaints. I especially value getting adblock without need of an extension (which would introduce third-party vulnerability).
1. Safari (with this, I have trouble with some websites, particularly Google ones)
2. Firefox (good, but has been a memory hog in the past)
3. Brave (like that it's Chromium, but I worry about the odd features like crypto)
4. Edge (I just downloaded it. leaning toward this choice)