Edge dies a death of a thousand cuts as Microsoft switches to Chromium
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An unnecessary coupling between browser and operating system made compatibility too hard.
...The company's browser will still be named Edge and should retain the current look and feel. The decision to switch was motivated primarily by compatibility problems: Web developers increasingly test their pages exclusively in Chrome, which has put Edge at a significant disadvantage. Microsoft's engineers have found that problematic pages could often be made Edge compatible with only very minor alterations, but because Web devs aren't using Edge at all, they don't even know that they need to change anything.
The story is, however, a little more complex. The initial version of Edge that shipped with the first version of Windows 10 was rudimentary, to say the least. It was the bare bones of a browser, but with extremely limited capabilities around things like tab management and password management, no extension model, and generally lacking in the creature comforts that represent the difference between a bare rendering engine and an actual usable browser. It also had stability issues; crashes and hangs were not uncommon.
Microsoft's own telemetry showed that many users did give Edge a chance, but as soon as a problem was encountered—a crash, a hang, or perhaps a page that didn't work right—they'd switch to Chrome and never really look back....
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So MS fell off the Edge?
#HumptyDumptyWasPushed
too soon? -
This will make developers a bit more happy knowing they will be using the same engine.
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The engine may end up being an "Enterprise Mode" like IE I think?
Edge as a browser works well but with a few show stoppers that killed any further usage for us:
1: Downloads mysteriously won't start or just plain stop for no reason.
2: Edge ate my favourites way too many times.The containerized Edge, Application Guard I think(?), is a great idea. If Edge was as good as they had hoped it would provide a fantastic sandbox experience to protect users from drive-by attacks and bad GET commands from e-mail clients.
At least we are not getting stuck with the legacy ActiveX that keeps rearing its head every once in a while because of IE.
