I'm going to offer a different take; I like this! I kinda stopped paying attention to Edge after it went Chromium. The old Edge engineering posts were very interesting.
Anyway, I just fired it up to check this feature and didn't get the experience the author implies. The shopping notices appear as right justified text in the address bar then collapse right into the little shopping tag. I have to click this tag to see the shopping information pop-up.
Viewed an Amiibo on Amazon and it told me I had the best price, but it also told me the price has increased recently. In the pop-up, that I clicked the tag to produce, I could see price history on the item over the past few months.
Pretty cool and will try this out over the next month or so of shopping I think.
Same as experience here, i.e. it's not a popup but an icon in the address bar which needs manual user action to trigger (it also supports voucher codes).
I do not like the feature, but it's not as UI intrusive as the article suggests; it is however privacy invasive. Despite disabling multiple edge features related to telemetry, this is a new default-on option.
I like Edge enough that it's my default browser on Windows, Android and secondary to Firefox on Linux. However, one or two more features like this and I may use something else.
I think the context is missed here. It's a useful tool, but should it be an active-by-default feature shipped with the browser? It doesn't add security and doesn't enhance speed. Wasn't it more acceptable if this was an add-on?
You could say the same about several features in Chrome or Firefox or any other browser. Does Firefox need to have Pocket by default? Does chrome need to have integration with Google? Organizations build browsers due to their self interest, so just talking about security and speed is a small part of the decisions that the product team might make.
BTW I always wonder what kind of profit Pocket might bring to Mozilla. They own it anyway.
The integrated Pocket does show some "suggestions" on the default new tab page. But I don't see any ads on them, and sometimes they are pocketed articles from paid-subscription resources like e.g. The Atlantic. It it's a kind of paid content advertising ("we pay you to bring more readers to this ad-free text page"), it can't be a very lucrative service.
Disclaimer: I actively use Pocket, but I'm not a paying subscriber of it.
If “adding security” and “enhancing speed” were the only criteria for enabling features, then every browser would ship with JavaScript disabled. You might claim this would be a good thing, but, I’m pretty sure the average web user would disagree.
Anyway, I just fired it up to check this feature and didn't get the experience the author implies. The shopping notices appear as right justified text in the address bar then collapse right into the little shopping tag. I have to click this tag to see the shopping information pop-up.
Viewed an Amiibo on Amazon and it told me I had the best price, but it also told me the price has increased recently. In the pop-up, that I clicked the tag to produce, I could see price history on the item over the past few months.
Pretty cool and will try this out over the next month or so of shopping I think.