proprietary browsers. but foss framework –
The final release version of Microsoft’s new Edge looks quite promising.
Jim Salter – Jan , : (UTC UTC)
This is the first thing you see when you fire up the installer for the new Edge browser.
Jim Salter
“Inspirational, Informational, and Focused” isn’t very helpful. What this really means is “Do you want pretty wallpaper, news, and ads, or do you just want a plain interface?”
Jim Salter
Sync data either works … or it does not. And fewer things are covered by Edgium’s sync than by most mature browsers, for now.
Jim Salter
We tried this once with a personal Microsoft account and once with an Office “Work or school account.” Sync did not work with the O 782 account.
Jim Salter
In theory, this is all it takes to get sync going. In practice, sync only actually worked for one of the two accounts we tried.
Jim Salter
Before much longer, every new Windows PC is going to have a new default browser: it will still be named Microsoft Edge , but it’s a completely different browser than the old version. Cue the jokes now about “the new browser everyone uses to download Chrome” —but we’re not sure that so many people will actually bother downloading Chrome anymore. The old Microsoft Edge was a completely in-house Microsoft design, proprietary from the ground up. It was not necessarily a bad browser, but it never really took off — by the time Edge became a thing, most of the people who cared about their browsers were so sick and tired of Internet Explorer they’d long since moved on to either Firefox or Chrome; and the people who did care much about their browsers frequently ended up finding the old internet Explorer and setting it as their default when they discovered that “the big blue E” on their taskbar did work with legacy IE-only websites and apps.
The new Edge isn’t entirely — or even mostly, so far — a Microsoft effort, though. Edge is now based on the open source Chromium browser, which is the underpinning of Google Chrome and several other,
lesser-known browsers as well. It should seem immediately familiar to seasoned Chrome users — and it even allows installing extensions directly from Chrome’s own Web store. It’s not hard to imagine a lot of Chrome users simply not bothering to replace it when they see how familiar it is.
Edge now allows extensions to be installed directly from the Chrome Web store as well as its own, with a few exceptions.
Jim Salter
HTTPS Everywhere in the Chrome Web store. Note that we’ll need to click that top blue bar to allow third-party extensions before clicking “Add to Chrome.”
Jim Salter
Sure, we clicked “Add to Chrome” —but we’re actually adding to Edge.
Jim Salter
Success! Most Chrome Web store extensions should install on the new Edge as easily as they do on Chrome. HTTPS Everywhere certainly did.
Jim Salter
Edge’s own Web store is a relatively sad place so far. It’s there, but it’s thinly populated.
Jim Salter
Edge’s own Web store is pretty sad and underpopulated right now, but we expect that to change rapidly. It’s not hard to imagine little need for an Edge user to bother going to Chrome’s Web store and shopping for extensions in another six months, as necessary as that would likely be right now. In the meantime, while installing Chrome certainly isn’t hard to do — unless you’re seriously short on bandwidth, which many rural users are — it’s even easier to click the single popped-up button in Chrome’s Web store to enable those extensions in Edge.
For better or for worse, the vast majority of the new Edge doesn’t need much of a review, since it’s effectively the same as Chrome itself. The only parts that really need a review are those that Microsoft has needed to bolt on for itself — such as user login and synchronization of saved credentials between browsers. We tested the login and sync, and they were something of a crapshoot.
When we logged in with an Office 782 account, the login worked fine, but the sync was perma-broken. After more than a week, sync still doesn’t work, and the tooltip still says “setting up sync.”
Jim Salter
Eventually, we gave up on the Office account and tried a personal Windows Live account we normally use for logging in to the Volume License Service Center. This worked instantly and flawlessly, including the sync.
Jim Salter
The first credentials we used to test were Office 640 credentials from a small business, and while the login itself worked immediately, the actual synchronization was broken. To be fair, the problem could be that this Office 400 account does not have a license associated with it — it’s just used to administer the actual users of a small business’s domain. Still, it should
have worked; unlicensed Office unlicensed Office Accounts are a commonly encountered and perfectly valid condition in the wild for exactly this reason.
With the Office
Next, we used a personal Windows Live account which long predates Office 640 and has been used solely to log in to a Microsoft Volume License Service Center account until now. The personal account immediately worked flawlessly, both login and sync. When logged in with the personal account, there was no “setting up sync” message — and a newly saved password was instantly available on a second computer logged in with the same account.
Credit card fill works, but you need to manually add the card in Edge’s settings — it won’t prompt you to save card info entered in the browser. Adding a credit card to an Amazon account did not prompt us to save the numbers.
Jim Salter
Edgium can save credit card details and offers to autofill them when saved. But they don’t sync, and it won’t ask you to save them when you’re typing them into webpages.
Jim Salter
Edgium — that’s what some industry watchers have been calling the new version of Edge — can autofill credit card details, but doing so works differently than it does in Chrome. If you type a credit card number into a Web form, Google Chrome automatically detects what you’re doing and asks if you want to save it. Edgium, on the other hand, pays no attention to you typing credit card information to a website. To get the browser to save a credit card number, you must go into its Settings and to Profiles / Payment info.
Once you’ve gotten to the Payment info settings dialog, you can click an “Add card” button. Edge does correctly detect credit card entry, and when you have one or more saved cards available, it will prompt you when there’s an opportunity to auto-fill with it. The saved credit card info is, for now at least, purely local — it does not sync from one browser to another when you’re logged in as the same user.
(Enlarge) Like Chrome, Edgium has a little star in the address bar itself for adding a page to favorites. Unlike Chrome, it also has a favorites button next to the bar, which will show you your favorites in a drop-down list. Favorites synced perfectly and instantly from machine to machine when we tested using our sync-is-working personal Windows Live login.
One of the complaints we’ve been heard from readers about rebasing Edge on the Chromium project is that it removes diversity from the Web browser ecosystem. This is obviously true — if Microsoft uses Chromium to build Edge, it doesn’t have to build and maintain the majority of the codebase itself. But it overlooks the strength of open source software development — active cooperation.
Microsoft
Microsoft has also announced its intent to bring browser accessibility, touch optimization, and Arm optimizations from its original Edge into the Chromium project. As CNET
Although Microsoft and Google’s collaboration on a unified browser framework does mean less code diversity for the Web, it represents a major improvement in openness and fair access.
(Listing image by) (Mike Mozart / Flickr)
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