It was fine, but it's a symptom of a greater annoyance of MS trying to launch Edge as much as they can when I'm not interested in using it. The Windows search bar still launches Edge for search results, and it's never even on purpose because why would I use that for web searches?

I only get them when the search box goes "You typed 'Snipping Tool' so you probably wanted to search for 'Snipping Tool' on Bing. Let me open that in Edge for you."

I did actually use IE as a frequent browser for a while when I had a Surface, on account of touch scroll/zoom being really bad in Firefox and Chrome at the time. But that was the only thing it had going for it.

EDIT: and as someone else points out, Edge's PDF viewer is now Chrome's PDF viewer and it's not as good

It's a symptom of browsers getting embedded PDF readers, which is a trend that was stared a while ago - long before Edge was a thing. Edge had to keep up with user expectations in this regard, so it also got one. But then, if you're already shipping a browser with the OS, and said browser has a PDF viewer, it's hard to justify also shipping (and supporting!) a separate app with the same functionality.

Safari has displayed PDFs forever and yet Apple still ships Preview. It’s quite good in fact.

Edge Classic's PDF Viewer was good, but now Edge's PDF Viewer is just Chromium's and it isn't as good, has half the features (especially for the long-form reading comfortability of the old Edge Classic / Reader), and is a higher security risk (Edge Classic / Reader ran in the UWP sandbox, Chromium PDF is a C++ app running native with much less sandboxing out of the box; Firefox uses PDF.js running in the JS VM/sandbox).

You can also run PDF.js on Chromium browsers with the extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-viewer/oemmndc...

I mean, I think it's great Windows ships with a PDF viewer, so that you don't have to install a PDF viewer just to read the manual for some other application.

But I've definitely felt the support burden of having three different PDF viewers on a given client PC, along with multiple configurations between them. (You can turn on and off the PDF viewers in each browser, and often embed Adobe Reader into the browser, for instance.)

It struggles on longer documents for me. You'll scroll and things will be blurry for a second or two before popping in. Personally I'm a big fan of Drawboard PDF on Windows.