Reddit’s biggest PC enthusiast subreddit, /r/pcmasterrace (PCMR), is a great source of information for new and veteran PC gamers. It’s also a great source of memery and mockery — with Microsoft often finding itself the at the butt end of every joke.
As with any social media, trends ebb and flow, but lately PCMR has been getting into it battling it out over web browsers, notably Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox.
Microsoft Edge is the firm’s modern replacement for Internet Explorer, which became notorious for lagging behind competitors in the speed department. Internet Explorer memes often poke fun at how slow it is, offering information decades out of date as it struggled to keep pace with the modern web, powered invariably by Chromium these days. Indeed, Google’s engine has now found itself into Edge itself, since Microsoft threw in the towel trying to make EdgeHTML a thing a couple of years back.
These days, many people seem to concede that Microsoft Edge is actually a decent browser. I personally use it (unironically), mainly because my Outlook email syncs all my passwords and clipboard across devices. There’s very little difference when it comes to the user experience between Chrome and Edge, but many prefer to go with Firefox instead, for its open-source nature and privacy focus.
In any case, the battle of the browsers remains a hot topic on PCMR and beyond, and for fun on this chilly British Wednesday, I decided to round up some of the best memes from the community.
Being mean to Microsoft Edge
A lot of the discourse around Microsoft Edge revolves around how hard it is to fully remove it from your system. There are ways to disable Microsoft Edge and change your defaults to Chrome or Firefox, but Microsoft has this irritating tendency to force defaults back to Edge in between major updates. There are ways to force Microsoft Edge to never automatically reinstall too, but Microsoft tends to make the methods as obtuse as possible.
Either way, it makes for some fun comics and memes.
microsoft_edge_popped_up_on_my_computer_this from r/pcmasterrace
i_feel_like_microsoft_edge_is_getting_less_hate from r/pcmasterrace
Google Chrome devours all the RAM
Chrome memes tend to mock how much RAM it can soak, as Google took it from being relatively lightweight in its early days to a full-blown trojan horse to push its ChromeOS platform.
One redditor went as far to build a sword out of RAM to combat the rise of Chrome.
im_preparing_to_take_chrome_head_on_wish_me_luck from r/pcmasterrace
this_is_your_ram_and_this_is_your_ram_on_chrome from r/pcmasterrace
sus_chrome from r/pcmasterrace
What about Firefox?
Everybody seems to love Firefox on PCMR, although according to global market shares it’s only just barely ahead of Microsoft Edge, sitting at around 8%. In any case, it’s fun to root for the “little guy,” and Mozilla Firefox being an independent non-profit seems to have user’s best interests at heart, over advertiser’s best interests.
Firefox actually seemed to trigger some of the more recent browser wars with its denunciation of Google’s potential new limitations on ad-blocking tech. Naturally, Google’s entire business model revolves around ads and the profiling of its users to serve as relevant ads as possible. Firefox doesn’t have any such incentives, and its most recent Manifest v3 version for browser extensions seems to offset some of the potential limitations created by Google’s own version.
imagine_increase_of_firefox_downloads_due_to_pcmr from r/pcmasterrace
What browser do you use?
With the jury out on how much Chromium’s new update will impact ad blocking, we could see a shift towards Mozilla Firefox throughout 2023 if ads start to get out of control again. Chrome and Microsoft Edge both have a lot of “convenience” features baked in, such as password syncing with associated platform accounts. For those who are privacy conscious, browsers like Firefox are offering an alternative platform in a world increasingly dominated by big tech and their algorithms.
Where do you stand on web browsers in 2023? Drop a vote in our poll, and let us know!
