Tech View: Microsoft’s Edge Browser is new and improved

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. That seems to be the sentiment of Microsoft when it rather quietly introduced its new, open-source-based version of its Edge browser earlier this year. Inquiring minds want to know, how does the new Edge stack up against other browsers? Are there any “gotchas” to be concerned about?

First the good news. The new Edge is based on the Chromium open-source project, as is Google’s flagship browser, hence its clever moniker, Chrome. In fact, Edge looks and runs a lot like Chrome. Presumably, Edge will be able to take advantage of innovations developed in the open-source community, thereby leading to a better overall product.

Developers will find it easier to develop applications for both browsers and those applications will be a lot alike. A full set of extensions are already available for Edge.

Testing shows Edge to be faster than its peers, but of course, speed is relative and dependent on many things, including the computer on which it runs, the available bandwidth, and the target website. Anecdotally, Edge “feels” fast and lean, not bloated down with features that most folk don’t use anyway.

Edge also integrates well with Microsoft’s flagship cloud offering, Microsoft 365. The web-based versions of Office, such as Word and Excel run smoothly under Edge. There is, however, a somewhat widely-used feature for mapping drives in SharePoint that is not available in Edge and still requires Microsoft’s legacy browser, Internet Explorer (IE). This feature is helpful to those who have transitioned off of old-school file servers onto SharePoint and/or SharePoint Online. In its defense, Microsoft has for some time now discouraged use of this feature but a lot of folks still depend on it.

The bad news has less to do with Edge itself, moreso with IE. The browser you love to hate. The browser that killed Netscape. In its heyday, IE completely dominated the browser market. Even after inroads by Chrome and Firefox, IE still maintained a majority of browser market share. But now that Edge is the new kid in town, Microsoft is phasing out IE.

IE, based on a proprietary platform, caused headaches for developers worldwide. Websites and applications had to be developed for IE and “everyone else.” The technical differences between IE and its competitors basically meant that the IE version was a completely different product. And because of its dominance, when a developer could only afford to create one version of a product, inevitably this would be the IE version.

As a result, there are a tremendous number of browser-based applications today that ONLY run under IE. They won’t run under Edge, much less Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. Microsoft itself still has features, such as SharePoint mapped drives discussed above, that require IE. Many in-house custom applications have been developed to run only under IE; these will need to be completely redeveloped. Edge has an IE compatibility mode but the jury is still out on how well that works. Like most compatibility modes, it is likely to be good but not great.

The silver lining is that IE 11 will be supported for the life of the operating system on which it runs. So for Windows 10, this is at least May of 2022, and likely at least a couple years beyond that.

John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of Information Technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. He can be reached at jagsalud@live.com.