The main appeal of legacy Edge was that it was a serious browser for business users (or for individuals who were fed up with Google's data collection practices). So when Microsoft announced that it was going to move Edge to a Chromium engine, it sounded great. Legacy Edge, but with a Chromium engine – perfect. However, it's becoming more and more apparent that with every Chromium Edge update it's moving further and further away from that and it's becoming more and more of a consumer browser with more and more unwanted consumer features that needs to be disabled with every update (shopping, coupons, rewards, travel, MSN, Pinterest, promotional notifications, non privacy-friendly new tab page, etc.).
One such example is the new "Share" dialogue that was introduced in Edge 93. Not only is it not an improvement over the native operating system Share dialogue that was previously used, but it appears the only reason the Edge team replaced the native operating system Share dialogue with this, is so that it could be filled with non-removable social media ads. The new Share menu is a regression:
1) When sharing a link, it prefixes the subject title with "Check this out…". The Share menu shouldn't be putting it's own spin on the shared content. Do you honestly think some 70 year old business owner really wants to sound like a 15 year old American surfer dude? Or, if the subject is a serious matter, sound like it's something the sender finds exciting: "Check this out – Funeral for murdered schoolgirl this Sunday". Did the team who created this think the Share menu will only be used by teenagers sharing links regarding a Kardashian sister's latest outfit or something?
2) The URLs it embeds in an email body when sharing a link are not even links any more. If the receiving email client does not automatically parse the URL text into a clickable link for the user (Microsoft's own outlook.com web is one such email client that does not do this), then the link is not clickable by the recipient – the email is just a non-clickable plain text string.
3) The Share menu now comes with a bunch of unsolicited social media buttons (ads) in the Share menu – with no way to get rid of them. These are present even if the user does not use any of them.
It's coming to the point now where it's tiring going through every new release of Edge every month or two and having to disable a bunch of pointless stuff. Where legacy Edge used to be a professional browser used by professionals, Chromium Edge is erasing that. Even worse, in the case of the new Share dialogue, it's not even possible to disable it and just use the native operating system Share dialogue by default instead; the only Group Policy setting is to disable the Share experience completely, which is not what's wanted. It's not even possible to modify it in any way – such as remove the social media buttons. All there is is a button for "Windows Share options", which is missing the point.
I'm starting to come to the realisation that Microsoft Edge is no longer the best choice for business users, which is a shame because the product planners for legacy Edge were in tune with business-orientated users. The new direction Edge is taking doesn't seem to consider the reason why people were using Edge instead of Google Chrome in the first place.
