It’s no secret that we’ve been enthusiastic about Microsoft’s new, Chromium-based Edge browser for a while now. But that enthusiasm has mostly been limited to “a default Windows browser that doesn’t suck,” rather than being for any particularly compelling set of features the new Edge brings to the browser ecosystem.
In a folksy announcement this week, Microsoft politely declared its determination to step up our expectations from “doesn’t suck” to somewhere on the level of “oh, wow.” Microsoft Corporate VP Liat Ben-Zur spent plenty of time enthusing about the way the new features are, apparently, already changing her life.
The only thing that has me excited about the new Edge is that Windows will finally have a proper default browser that isn’t either complete garbage (Internet Explorer) or ignored by every web developer ever (the old Edge).
Most “exciting” new features are available as addons for like ages. No need to switch browsers yet.
Although the “smart copy” might be interesting in some cases.
I switched from Chrome to Edge as soon as the stable version came out. Not out of any particular need, all Chromium-based browsers feel the same way from the usability perspective, but just to give a hand to the only browser that has a chance to put a dent in Chrome’s market share.
>give a hand to the only browser that has a chance to put a dent in Chrome’s market share.
But it IS Chrome. It has the same basic rendering engine as chrome, which makes it vulnerable to the bugs and flaws in Chrome. This also leaves the web largely at the whim of one corporation again, but this time it’s Google.
Chromium/Blink and Internet Explorer/Trident are just two sides of the same coin. I don’t doubt that Chrome is better than Internet Explorer, but it will have the same problems. The web stagnated because IE6 was so prevalent, and wasn’t truly disrupted until the Firefox craze of the mid 00’s. Variety spurred innovation, and eventually IE became more modernised, and more competitors to IE popped up, such as Chrome and even Safari for Windows. This spurred a great development in web technologies, improving both HTML(HTML5), CSS, and various scripting languages like Javascript.
Since all browsers seem to be based on Blink/Chromium today, we are again in a period of web stagnation. There is no real competitors to Chrome anymore, Google has finally won the web battle. But if history teaches us anything, a complete browser monopoly is NOT a good thing.
The123king,
Yeah, it’s not good for diversity. It shouldn’t be as bad as IE because it’s open source and web standards are more mature now. However the last time I checked microsoft’s code dump for it’s chromium edge browser was incomplete and unbuildable, so ms-chromium-edge may not really be open source after all.
So M$ finally lost the browser wars… They have bigger fish to fry anyway. The desktop market is on the wain if not stagnated. The growing business is in the mobile market, to which M$ is failing. The cash cow there is lixensing for them. All that said, with Google, Apple, and Mozilla as the largest stakeholders in the browser market, When will people wake up to announce that Chromium/Edge sucks now? I see it as a wise move for Microsoft as they just did the electric slide from Malware and lack of privacy blame from the browser standpoint, and Google has a lot more work ahead of them as they are a company that thrives on marketing to which your privacy is a huge liability for yourself as the end user.
P.S. I use Chomium and Chrome interchangeably as they’re owned by the same company in the end.
Oh, most web developers didn’t ignore it exactly. They spent enough time on it to code an alert for the User-Agent check to make it clear that they don’t support Edge. These alerts still come up because of the UA string checks, even though Edge is now Chromium-based and works as well as any other browser based on Chromium.
I actually kind of like the new Edge. I haven’t switched over to it full-time yet on Windows, though I may. The one feature I really like is how you can make a web page into a sort of pseudo app. It’s just that little bit more than a shortcut, and can be really convenient for web apps I use a lot.
Meanwhile Bitdefender keeps blocking Edge from trying to use a bad certificate to connect to markets.books.microsoft.com. The only information I can find on it is that it might be used for the inline dictionary feature, which may mean anything I hover my mouse over may get sent over an insecure connection if my AV wasn’t blocking it. I think I’ll stick to browsers that aren’t trying to use bad certificates without anyone knowing. (A Google search reveals this has been a problem for months, there is no possible excuse at this point.)
I have used Microsoft Edge and I really liked it a lot. It is lightweight and full of utilities. It also has good support as all the bugs are fixed very quickly. I need a service to do my college work for me and my friend suggested checking https://essayguru.org/essay-proofreading-service. I don’t know about them much so I would like to know more about them and if you guys know some other good services then suggest them to me as well.
As a web developer I can attest that Edge has so many odd JavaScript errors that really shouldn’t be present given its new Chromium roots. I’ve had to ask several customers to try the new version expecting that the errors could not possibly persist, only to find out they do. It hasn’t gotten much better as I expected it to. It’s also just not a needed browser. I think it’s cute they really want to still make their web browser though–kinda.