Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge follow-up has leaked, and The Verge took a look at it.
For an early version of Edge built on Chromium, Microsoft’s new browser feels very polished. It’s also very fast to launch and browse around with. If Microsoft can keep up this good work and keep Edge optimized in the future, I can’t see a reason to need to use Chrome on Windows anymore. I would never have recommended Edge before as it was often slow, clunky, and didn’t always work with websites properly. This new Edge feels entirely different, thanks to its Chromium backend.
That’s odd, since one of the main reasons I used Edge for a long time was just how fast it was compared to Chrome. I’m not so sure I like the idea of Edge with Google’s Blink.
now you can choose the icon to launch blink.
I also found Edge a significant improvement over Chrome and Firefox in my commercial uses, it took some time for Edge to come good but once it matured it worked very well within our constraints. But because we are not invested in one platform we have always encouraged diversity, we do not want a browser mono-culture and this has been favorable to us on several occasions particularly when bugs appear in one browser or another.
We used the individual preferences of people as a tool to encourage the use of a range of platforms, and we have always discouraged developments that preferentially favor one platform or the other. I find it ironic that many who promoted Linux over Windows for reasons of diversity and security, now want to push everyone to Chrome!
cpcf,
Are there actually that many who wanted edge completely out of the equation though? For me, it was always about valuing diversity. Admittedly, more often than not, this pit me against microsoft because they’ve often been behind the mono-cultures that threatened diversity, but for me it was never a goal to have firefox or chrome “win”.
I’d really like to see more balance, I just don’t know if what I want is futile. All too often we just leave it to the markets with laissez faire policies, but these inevitably create “winner takes all” economies whereby one or two players at the top dominate while practically everyone else gets wiped out.
You’d like CIS countries from a decade ago (just look at that http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/all/russian-federation/2011 , roughly equal shares of Chrome, Firefox, IE and Opera). But sadly they are now Chrome-dominated, like everywhere else…
How is edge “a significant improvement over Chrome and Firefox” in your commercial uses?
I won’t claim to be an expert in browsers but primarily as Thom mentioned we found Edge to fast and very responsive, reliable in that we had less per user issues. Ironically our biggest support issue was getting people off IE. Although, historically we’ve found Opera to be the most problematic, which is a pity because in recent times it seems to have improved significantly. I usually test across five platforms, Edge/IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Given the long term direction of MS we’ll probably drop testing for IE soon, we do not need to worry about the general population or governments and our legacy platform users typically have Firefox. Prior to Edge sorting itself out we use to direct users to Firefox, when Edge sorted out it’s wrinkles we stopped recommending a browser altogether.
Almost certainly the reason for the better Edge experience was the lack of available extensions and plugins which we do not need, many of which seem to come at high performance costs and would be our most common source of errors!
Very few of our web-based business systems (patient records, payroll, financial reporting, etc) supported Edge; only Chrome, IE or Firefox. So this is great news for us. And most users just assumed Edge was IE because the icon is the same, which isn’t helpful.
I’m slowly migrating all of our computers at work to Windows 10 given the upcoming Windows 7 end of life, and one of the best things about 10 from a regular user standpoint has been Edge. As Thom said, it’s generally faster and more responsive than Chrome or Firefox, and it supports the best ad blocker out there (uBlock by Raymond Hill).
Now that Edge will be just a wrapper for Chrome, I’ll have to consider installing Firefox on every workstation as the default browser. I don’t restrict which browser our employees use in general as long as it’s not some dodgy malware infested junk, but for default Edge will no longer be an option soon. We aren’t some super-secret agency by any stretch, but I never liked the idea of Chrome sending analytics about our company to Google without our consent or control. At least with Windows 10 and Server 2016 I can mitigate Microsoft doing the same thing via Group Policy.
The theory is that if they’re using Chromium (which is the open source version of Chrome) it doesn’t have any of the analytics stuff in it. In fact it’s one of the main differences between the two projects, that and I think Chrome installs some of the closed source codecs and such by default.
Personally I’m a firefox man, and only ever load up Chromium in the rare time when I’m having an issue with a site and wonder if it’s Firefox’s fault. Generally it isn’t. I also use Epiphany, which is webkit based as well.
Now is Edge using Chromium, or is it just webkit based, and the same engine??
The new Edge is based on Chromium.
leech,
I have no authoritative information on it one way or another, but I wouldn’t just assume that there are no analytics in it. Microsoft could have added it’s own so I wouldn’t be surprised that what it collects is similar to google.
For sure! Just saying that by default (in theory) Chromium would not have anal tics.
That’s a bold assumption, considering a couple of years ago the Debian package maintainer for Chromium discovered it was downloading and installing a binary blob that was recording audio with no notice and no opt-out. The blob was found to be reporting that audio data back to Google. I trust Chromium no more than I trust anything else from Google.
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=786909
Not Webkit, Blink.
It is funny, my experience is the total opposite, i have always felt that Edge was clunky compared to Chrome. I wonder if it is a hardware thing where maybe Edge works better on some configurations? Maybe a RAM or IO thing, i know Chrome is memory happy, mine is eating 6 gigs right now (nearly 100 tabs open, seems i need to clean up) but it still performs great.
I guess Microsoft felt the need to do something since Edge was not taking off at all but… There was a number of reasons why I wasn’t using Edge but going to Chromium just makes me even less likely to use it.
Not using Edge… starting to be serious about opting out of Chrome. Their effort, so far, seems to constitute yet another move to dominate an internet resource. This is evidenced by the idea that Microsoft is going to make the Skype Web Client, only work on Edge/Chrome. They don’t have to, and from what I understand it works on other browsers. It’s an immoral move. Not interested in Edge.
That would be disappointing, it seems most successful communications platforms rely on ubiquity. If true they must be heading towards a vertical market, might make sense with Linkedin integration growing by the day!
I’ve taken apart the entire package that leaked, and it’s basically chrome canary 75.0.3xxx.0 with some microsoft stuff added in and all the urls removed or swapped for microsoft urls.
By and large most of the files and dlls are identical or near-identical to those released by google.
The number of strings that differ is slight. The limitations that apply to chrome, apply to edge.
Edge has an extension store that works with this browser already,
additionally there’s a toggle in the extensions panel and a banner ad on the chrome store which suggests they intend to preserve compatibility with chrome extensions.
I use Nano Defender from the Chrome store + Nano Adblocker + Youtube Enhancer.
I tried to repackage the browser for use but broke it.