Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android, Microsoft Launcher

blogs.windows.com

152 pointsbfred_it170 comments

TL;DR: it's NOT using its own engine on Android. It uses Blink there.

"On iOS, we are using the WebKit engine, as provided by iOS in the WKWebView control. That means that from a compatibility perspective, Microsoft Edge for iOS should match the version of Safari that is currently available for iOS."

"On Android, we are using the Blink rendering engine from the Chromium browser project."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15408882 -> https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/10/05/microsoft-edg...

The reality is that a lot of sites query the UserAgent and deliver platform and browser specific sites. Google Search and Image Search are great examples of a crap experience if you're not using Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android.

Microsoft is skirting around this by using each platform's engine and providing the user the best experience they can.

\* Also they don't have a choice on iOS because Apple.

They can set the user agent to whatever they want.

Yes but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be able to interpret what they get in response.

This is a capitulation of Microsoft - instead of porting their engine to Android, they made a yet another Chromium/Blink shell. It is not what I expect from a big corporation.

I agree, this is about as impressive as some kid that builds his own browser in Visual Basic by drag'n'dropping in an IE control.

If you watch Channel 9, BUILD and .NET Conf presentations, many of the web dev ones were done with Chrome.

Apple doesn't allow 3rd party render engines in iOS. Everything uses same the same webkit engine Safari for iOS uses, including Chrome.

No way around it.

So Edge is the new Safari which is the new Explorer? /s?

Edge is a good browser, people seem to default to criticizing it because of its infamous predecessor. We should root for Edge, it is in the open Web best interest to have several browsers sharing the market.

I agree that it's good to have multiple browser _products_, but why is it better that MSFT has its own engine instead of investing in OSS ones like webkit/blink? This is the same question I have for Firefox. They can still achieve their privacy goals without having to invest in and maintain a separate engine. Is having a unique engine really all that beneficial in the long run?

- Because that would leave Google with near-total power to drive the evolution of the web, via their control of Blink's development.

- Gecko was around before either of WebKit or Blink, so targeting this toward Firefox is getting history backward.

1) They could fork it, adopt standardized changes, but continue to innovate on it if they like

2) That wasn't my point. WebKit derivatives clearly won. Does Firefox even need to also own an engine when their goals seem to be entirely around the browser product?

A fork that tracked Blink upstream would still leave Google with control over the direction of development. A fork that diverged from Blink would end up equivalent to an independently-developed engine.

Adopting Blink would, furthermore, impose a set of design and architectural constraints not necessarily in line with Firefox's priorities as a project. With Gecko they're investing in parallelism and pulling in more and more components from Rust/Servo, for example.

Firefox has been something of an underdog from its inception, releasing at a time when IE had already "won". Chrome taking that spot won't make Mozilla scrap everything and start over—this is familiar territory.

Of course, this is all ignoring the absolute upheaval and loss of momentum a total rewrite on top of Blink would wreak on Firefox as a project.

There should be some freedom to render the same page in different ways. Lynx is an extreme version, but there is lots of room to consider different platforms, environments, input devices and users.

Why? When I design a page, I know what I want it to look like. I don't want to have to waste a bunch of my time in compatibility hacks to get around crap that they do different.

You are asserting that the provider of the website should have complete control over the experience.

But not everyone agrees with you -- the readers want control, too, and it's their hardware, after all.

I always thought we had this backwards. We should abandon sending the UA altogether and design pages according to the standards. If a browser doesn't render then correctly, then tell the browser to fix their shit.

I realize that nowadays this isn't as simple as that, but if we had started along that path, things would be much better now.

IIUC, we _did_ start out that way. it was probably Microsoft that first started differentiating itself by adding non-standard features and functionality. EEE, ya know.

Unfortunately I don't have anywhere near the clout to be able to tell Microsoft to do that. And in the meantime, my users look at a broken site.

Then you should publish PDF's or JPEG's because the user agent has always had final say in how a page renders, your style hints are merely recommendations.

Its good technology-wise, but out of all the browsers I've touched, its the one that I feel like I have the least control over

One of the biggest reasons I can't use Edge is I think it's impossible to actually inspect an HTTPS certificate.

Edge extensions got off to a slow start which hurt it quite a bit for me. Now it has a decent (although still small) number of extensions that cover most of the must-haves for me. It is my number 3 browser behind firefox and chrome.

I tried Edge on Windows 10 last year for a while, but had some issues with Outlook Web Access. And the way of managing proxies (among other things) is mixed up and confusing in Windows 10 - it has the old way of handling settings and a new Settings application. It’s not bug free and doesn’t satisfy basic conditions (searching for proxy in settings doesn’t work - need to know how to get to it). Anyway, back on topic - I switched back to IE 11. I have to try Edge again and see how it’s improved and changed during this time.

It looks like that's changed in the Insiders build I'm on (the one releasing later this month). I've got Proxy Settings under Edge's Advanced Settings menu:

https://i.imgur.com/zPHcYL3.png

And searching for Proxy gives me all of these options:

https://i.imgur.com/BDEzNWW.png

I have an Atom 2in1 and Edge is unusably slow and buggy on it. Chrome and Firefox work fine. It's also impossible to click and select part of url as it jumps around.

No.

Root for other browsers, sure.

But Microsoft's? No.

They wantonly abused their market position in the 90s & stalled the advancement of the web for years.

There many other worth products to cheer for rather than the latest offering from a habitual bad actor.

So the alternative is google who do the same damn things.

The real problem is this is still webkit/blink and ultimately control still goes to google.

Edge isn't great if you use tabs; it tends to lose them on crash/restart and doesn't make it easy to have lots of them.

It also seems to suffer from the same weird font rendering as a lot of Metro apps.

Edge isn't great period. There are too many janky UI and design choices - probably because it is part of that whole benighted Metro ecosystem.

The thing that really drove me nuts was how the address bar jumps around when you're trying to select part of a URL, which makes it so much harder than it ought to be when you are trying to click and drag with a mouse, let alone a touch interface.

Agree completely. I'm a heavy Windows/Office/.NET/F#/Powershell user, overall a fan of MS ecosystem, but Edge is still just plain painful to actually use day to day. Chrome remains far ahead. I'd say "1000 papercuts" but maybe 5-10k is closer.

Jumping address bar? Ohhhh yeah hate that one: https://twitter.com/LincolnAtkinson/status/88703561300998963...

One thing that catches me surprisingly often when I use Edge (which is very, very rarely, contributing to this), is that all the browser controls, like Back, stay in focus when you click them until you click something else. I don't think any other common browser has this behaviour, which is why I'm not used to un-focusing them, and the next press of space definitely does something I did not intend it to do.

Exactly this. I lose my open tabs every 2 weeks or so. I've reported this to the black hole of Edge feedback on numerous occasions. How hard can this be to get right?

I want to root for it but there are API differences (especially for video/text tracks) which make it hard or impossible to work with. And Microsoft hasn't yet come to the table (which Apple/Chrome/FF have been at and are very good with taking feedback from devs) to standardize on these APIs.

The developer tools of Chrome and Firefox are better. There are more addons. There is more customization.

Or we should shun it, so that if anyone else decides to use their monopoly power to try to destroy the web, they know the consequences will be long lasting.

We shun a browser, some other company sees that, and decides not to become a monopoly? Sounds implausible.

MSFT has new leadership and is cooperating much with open platforms more than ever before. Let's encourage that.

Lets encourage that if it is due. It looks like Edge is still proprietary. If they opened it up, I'd give it a shot. As it is still closed off, I'm personally not interested.

Edge is not a good browser. It is holding the web back with its slow adoption of HTML5 standards. (source: https://html5test.com/compare/browser/chrome-58/edge-12.html)

Edge still has a spoof referrer header vulnerability that's been known for more than 6 months now: https://www.brokenbrowser.com/referer-spoofing-patch-bypass/

The version of Edge you're linking to on HTML5Test there is two years and four major versions out of date. Edge 16 is more than 100 points higher on HTML5Test.

More generally, there's a lot more to making the web great than a blind sprint to adopt every API. Just because it isn't shipping doesn't mean Microsoft isn't a (very) active participant in the standards conversations, testing behind flags, etc. That is a huge part of moving the web forward.

Take Grid as an example - we were the last browser to ship the updated spec, so you could say we "held it back." But we also originated the first version of the spec and worked closely with the community, standards bodies, and other browser vendors on making sure what ultimately shipped cross-browser this year was great, useful, and interoperable. Is that holding the web back?

(Disclaimer: Edge employee)

To add another example, WebVR API cleanup was inspired by Microsoft that joined the group working on this API. Edge isn't yet shipping WebVR, but they are helping with the work.

Good example! Though, for the record, WebVR 1.1 is shipping in EdgeHTML 15. Fair to call it a preview, since consumer headsets won't be available until later this month with the Fall Creators Update, at which point end-to-end support will work out of the box.

Firstly you're comparing today's Chrome with an Edge copy from more than 2 years ago. Secondly, html5test scores are bullshit. It gives a points utterly arbitrarily; you still get 5 points for continuing to implement rejected specifications like Web SQL, while actually useful features like the FileSystem API or WebAssembly gets you nothing.

I've never used Edge and have no particular interest in it, but html5test is basically a way for Chrome users to feel good about themselves.

(Not to say that Chrome users shouldn’t feel good about themselves for other reasons, just not their browser’s html5test score)

Why are you comparing the latest version of Chrome to Edge 12, which according to Wikipedia was last released August 27, 2015?

I struggle to get too excited about Edge on iOS because it's not really Edge is it. It will just be like Firefox which uses the built-in iOS WebKit-based rendering. So it's effectively Safari doing the rendering with some wrappers around it like syncing Windows favourites and sharing open windows with your Windows PC?

Maybe some corporations which have Windows on the desktop, but where most employees use iOS devices on the go, will find some use for this.

I'm guessing this is the case with Chrome as well?

Yes, and it's because of an Apple policy. They don't allow other rendering engines.

It is not that they do not allow other render engines. It is that APIs to dynamically execute native code are locked down on platforms such as Windows Mobile and iOS. If you cannot dynamically execute code you cannot build a JIT JS engine which makes your webbrowser too slow compared to the competition.

This is a policy who's primary goal is to ban other browser engines. They make exceptions for lots of other app types like games.

I guess in theory you could build a browser on top of a game engine, or is that just insane?

Tribes 2 had a full web browser in the game. It was a continuation of having a full IRC client in the first game, Starsiege: Tribes.

(Tribes 2 also had the IRC client. The IRC client initially drove players into chat channels to help them find ongoing games, and dropped a link when someone left IRC to join a game. It was decent matchmaking in 1998, and helped build the community as well.)

The browser itself wasn't as insane as writing the entire game menu in OpenGL, which at the time was uncommon. Game devs cited this choice (instead of using a simpler menu) as causing a 6-month delay in the project, leading to much less testing and a game that crashed frequently for the first few months after release. The ubiquitous "Unhanded Exception" pop-up became a meme for years after.

Pretty sure they don't allow you to download and execute code even if not using a JIT, unless it is an educational app. There are multiple policy reasons browser engines can't be on iOS.

This is true, though they do also explicitly restrict using other engines for web browsing:

2.5.6 Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

Indeed it is. Sadly!

I don't really understand how Edge having its own rendering engine would make me any more excited for it.

The performance of Edge is comparable to Chrome or Firefox. It is a really great product. The sad part is, that they were keeping it Win10-only for several years. I think, that if they made Edge available for every platform and every OS earlier, they could have 20 - 50 % of the market by now.

The funny part is, that there is NO EDGE FOR WINDOWS. Precisely, Edge is for Windows 10 only, which is the minority of all Windows devices today. There is no Microsoft browser for Windows 7 (by a browser I mean the one that is regularly updated). MS announced the halting of IE development a long time ago.

On the other hand, there's no real point in supporting Windows 7 now. It's only two years away from EOL.

Firefox ESR still supports WinXP, and it will be supported until the end of 52ESR which I think is in March.

The point of supporting Win7 is that about 50% of Windows users are still on it. That's not going to change quickly even if support ends. https://www.neowin.net/news/windows-7-loses-market-share-in-...

There is Edge for Windows. It's called Edge. Windows 10, is believe it or not, Windows. Any computer running Windows 7 or 8.1 can still (yes, it can) be upgraded to Windows 10 for free. So the only Windows PCs which cannot run Edge were those manufactured prior to 2009.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no good reason to be running Windows 7 or 8.1. All of the telemetry anti-features were backported into those versions, Windows 10 is inherently better at security, and trust me, if I can get the legacy software I have running at work running on Windows 10, legacy app issues aren't a problem either.

I’m one among many I know who upgraded my work system from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and regret it even after a year! The upgrade process was smooth, but every once in a while, it won’t allow me to login - it will just repeatedly throw an error saying my credentials are invalid (though they’re not). The solution is to try switching login methods, turn off the network, wait for several minutes or some combination of these. The number of times I’ve been away, returned to my system to get into a Skype for Business call, only to find I can no longer unlock my system is not even remotely funny anymore. I have learned to be around several minutes before any call so I can fight, if necessary, to get in! I’ve read forum posts on many sites, but don’t have any solutions. My system is set to auto-update Windows. So it’s not that I’m not on the latest or that MS has fixed it.

So no, there are very, very good reasons, IMO, to stay on Windows 7 or 8.1 (where this problem didn’t exist). I actively recommend others not to switch to Windows 10 because of this. Of course, YMMV!

You're arguing in favor of OS segmentation on a developer forum. Please no!

Disclosure: I work for Microsoft.

Because developer comfort is all that matters and users be damned?

I would bet there would be less bugs overall if everyone was always using the latest version since it would reduce the test matrix.

He's arguing in favor of a working system. If MS can't get win10 to work properly, then OS segmentation is the solution, not the problem.

90 percent of Windows 10 users that I know updated from Windows 7 unintentionally and most of them complained about it. Such updates form Microsoft have quite bad reputation. You can't just say "Hey do this irreversible software change and trust us, that you will be satisfied". I am ready to accept it e.g. from Chrome OS, but not from Microsoft.

While I agree that most users (of Windows, Chrome, OSX, iOS etc) are forced/tricked onto the auto-update treadmill, atleast with Windows and OSX I can re-install the older version. With iOS and such it is _impossible_ to downgrade. With Chrome I suppose if you get some kind of non-web installer, you can go back and then disable the update service, but that probably is an unsupported configuration and very likely going to break at some point.

To your last point, I would say I am ready to accept it from anyone except an advertising company whose only primary means of making money is by sifting through my personal data and spying on my online activities. With MS, I have little doubt that they "would if they could", but at-least for now, they wont, since they're making more money selling actual products.

People will complain if the colors change. I mean it's not great when things change from under your feet, but it's a OS update is a "we're doing this for you"-kind of deal. People who upgraded knowingly are generally satisfied.

You can reverse any Windows 10 upgrade for 30 days, whether it was an upgrade from 7, 8.1, or a different version of Windows 10. The revert process works... most of the time.

> All of the telemetry anti-features were backported into those versions

You don't have to install them, installing only security updates was still am option last time I checked it.

On top of it, even if you install them they can be turned off completely, and they are turned off by default, contrary to Windows 10 where you can't turn off telemetry.

> Contrary to popular belief, there is no good reason to be running Windows 7 or 8.1.

Yes there are. Windows 7/8.1 performs better and more snappy.

Windows 7 (and 8.1 with a classical standard menu extension to hide "modern" parts) has a more consistent interface unlike Windows 10 ui which is all over your face with inconsistent menus, colors, sizes etc. stinking out of everywhere. Half baked app choices with some modern and some classical apps and you don't know which one will open from which settings menu.

Forced updates whenever Windows feels like. There is no option out because pesky users can't be trusted.

How does the free upgrade happen these days? I thought that was over in 2016? If it is still available somehow I have some machines I would upgrade.

If you use assistive technologies, you can still upgrade for free [1]. In practise this allows anyone to upgrade as it doesn't seem to particularly test for active use of an assistive technology.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/accessibility/windows10upgra...

The "Get Windows 10 app" is no longer available, but the Media Creation Tool will upgrade any PC running Windows 7 or 8.1, and you can fresh install Windows 10 on any PC using a valid Windows 7 or 8.1 key and it will activate. This is true even for versions of Windows 10 released after the "end" of the upgrade offer.

The only thing stating the upgrade offer has ended is "The Windows 10 free upgrade through the Get Windows 10 (GWX) app ended on July 29, 2016." Which is technically true, but the free upgrade is still offered through other methods.

"The funny part is, that there is NO EDGE FOR WINDOWS. Precisely, Edge is for Windows 10 only, which is the minority of all Windows devices today."

Bizarrely, Microsoft Edge is not supported for Windows Server, which is the edition that Microsoft license for virtual desktop infrastructure. Want a modern browser on your remote Windows desktop? You can't have the Microsoft one.

Had to happen sooner or later. I just wish Microsoft had not tied Edge so deeply into Windows 10 (did they not learn from doing the same with Internet Explorer?) as at the moment it is limited to updates as part of the OS (Windows Update) and not the Microsoft Store.

I believe that is actually changing this month with the release of the Fall Creator's Update. This is very similar to Android, where originally core apps had to be upgraded with the OS, and were later spun out into being updated via the app store.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3193871/microsoft-wind...

I think part of the reason for this is that you shouldn't be web browsing with old software. It's unsafe for you and others that your hardware could damage.

But apps should be update-able separately, not as part of an operating system update. That doesn't make much sense. Especially on mobile when you might want to only update single app currently relevant to you without blocking your phone for 40 minutes doing a huge update of everything. Also limited bandwidth.

We've not been in a world where the web browser can be separated from the OS for at least 7 years.

I 100% agree, it does limit releases too...but they are changing this with the next Windows release. They are going to make Windows more modular too in the future.

More information about Edge Mobile is available here, however not many technical details (e.g. whether the Android version is just a WebView or if it's the real Edge)

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge-mobil...

On Android, we are using the Blink rendering engine from the Chromium browser project."

Source of those statements: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/10/05/microsoft-edg...

So it's more like Faux-Edge. I guess it still provides a benefit for Edge users who want to sync their data and whatnot. It's just not too interesting beyond that.

At least Firefox Focus (based on Chromium, too) is a "private by default" kind of browser, who those who care about that experience and don't want to mess with settings or don't know how to set it up so that it has maximum privacy. Speaking of which, it would be nice if Firefox Focus also provided an easy-to-use option to enable browsing over Tor.

All browsers on iOS are not using their own render engine, Apple doesn't allow it.

So what you really getting is a UI wrapper around the built-in browsers. The only advantage is synced passwords and bookmarks and some Microsoft specific apps.

This is the case with all of the browsers on iOS since Apple doesn't allow other rendering engines in the app store.

But not on Android. They could port their engine there, like Mozilla Firefox.

It'd be nice if they made it open source too.

And it'd be nice if iOS allowed real browser alternatives instead of requiring everyone to use WKWebView.

Back in the days of the Acid tests and when vendor prefixes for experimental features were the norm, and a visit to caniuse.com was often met with disappointment, discretionary users cared as much about a browser's layout engine as the application's surrounding chrome and features.

But as web engines have been moving closer to feature parity (as well as Chrome and Firefox's combined dominance of marketshare), the bonus features of the application are rising in importance. (Some) people want their bookmarks, their synced passwords, their addons, their (sometimes-captive) integrations; this is the space that Edge competes in now.

The same applies on iOS, for slightly different reasons. On iOS everything is slightly different, you get the same rendering engine every which way. There, the only way to differentiate yourself is by extra features.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever pull a Kindle and rollout custom Android device that replaces Google services and and apps with Microsoft equivalents.

They already sell a Samsung Galaxy S8 "Microsoft Edition" in their stores, which comes with their apps pre-installed. I wouldn't be surprised to see them push that even further.

They already tried that with Nokia X.

I shall add it's funny they keep saying "Microsoft Loves Linux" but refuses to release any of their major desktop client software for Desktop Linux.

Well it's a question of ROI. How many Linux users are there really that can't wait to install Microsoft software on their desktops? People who use Linux as their desktop operating system are probably using open source alternatives of any MS client software.

And for Office they would use browser version which works fine. It makes no sense for MS to invest resources into this since there isn't enough interest to justify the investment.

“Refuse” is a fairly strong word and suggests there is a Linux version available and just withheld. Software and features don't just appear out of nowhere.

Indeed. Not to mention that Office Online works just fine in a browser under Linux.

This assumes there are Linux users that actually want to use the Edge browser though

I know what you mean. For Edge there's probably not many folks who would be interested, but Office, for one, is still something that's desirable for a lot of folks who use Linux just because of numerous compatibility issues with LibreOffice.

It's a lot easier to just run Office in Wine. It's been a few years, but the last time I tried, that worked.

Honestly, if they were going to have a Linux client at this point, I would expect it to just be an Electron wrapper around the Office 365 webapps.

Wine does not run Office 2016.

Which flavour?

With flatpaks and Appimages these days, you don't really need to target any distro anymore.

Can Edge for iOS be selected as "default browser" in iOS so it is by default used in all the places Safari normally handles? The "send to PC" thing _is_ nice, but only if available everywhere and consistently.

No, App developers are able to find out if Edge (or Chrome or Firefox) is installed on your device to give you an option to open links inside it, but most apps don't do that and you still can not change the default browser.

Shame.

Then maybe Microsoft could create a share extension that uses this new Windows feature to "collect" URLs from an iPhone?

No, Apple doesn't allow that.

Alas, visiting the signup page https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge-mobil... from Edge on Windows 10 asks me to visit the page using Edge on Windows 10: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DLYLTmHWsAEnlPF.jpg

Update: they're looking into it: https://twitter.com/MSEdgeDev/status/915934723754516481

Mobile browsers could use a shakeup, but Edge is not super interesting to me. The Microsoft Launcher (which is implied to just be a re-branded Arrow launcher) on the other hand is fucking great. For me it's been Arrow or Nova for the past few years.

When we have Firefox focus for Android, I wonder why would anyone use this. Microsoft can dream about capturing the user base unless they open source it (which won't happen anyway).

Why would a user use Edge on iOS/Android when they are using platform native rendering engines (webkit/blink). what is the value add here (Working with a windows 10 PC?)

> Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android brings familiar features like your Favorites, Reading List, New Tab Page and Reading View across your PC and phone, so, no matter the device, your browsing goes with you. But what makes Microsoft Edge really stand out is the ability to continue on your PC, which enables you to immediately open the page you’re looking at right on your PC—or save it to work on later.

This is for people who use Edge on their PC and want everything to sync with their phone.

I assume synchronization with your Windows PC (bookmarks, passwords, etc).

Installed, got temperature in Farenheit in the weather widget, found no settings to use Celsius, concluded it's not near polished enough.

Back to Google Now Launcher.

Per the blog post, we're not localized broadly in the preview, but will be adding more locales/languages as we head towards a stable release. Hope you'll try it again!

there is an option to get Celsius. click on the gear icon on the weather app or on it. itll show the options. genius

It's a preview, dude.

Does it make use edgeHTML or Chakra though?

if firefox can't do it, there's no way ms can

It’s no different than Chrome or Firefox on iOS. Standard WebKit rendering with an MS GUI and syncing features to feel more like edge and integrate with the rest of their stuff better.

Sounds like it’s the same on Android too (only using Chromium).

Chrome on iOS is starting to diverge from Safari, sorta: they inject a bunch of JS to each page to essentially polyfill a bunch of stuff that iOS doesn't provide.

One of the most common requests we hear from people who use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 PCs is "we want our browser experience to move to our phones".

That's funny, my most common request is "IT'S BEEN LIKE 5 YEARS, CAN YOU GUYS FINALLY SUPPORT ALL OF THE INDEXEDDB API? EVEN SAFARI DOES IT NOW!"

So sad when poor multinational corporations simply don't have the resources to compete with obscenely wealthy organizations like Mozilla. Maybe they should try open sourcing their browser so the community can pitch in?

> most common requests we hear from people who use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 PCs

Are there really people using Microsoft Edge out there? I mean, because they want to, not because they have to?

I've been using it almost exclusively on my laptop for the past few month as an experiment. And honestly it's a perfectly fine browser that basically just works as well as any other browser. That being said I cannot come up with any good argument why you should switch to using it instead of whatever you are currently using.

Yeah, I've been really impressed with Edge. If I had started using Edge instead of having all my stuff in Firefox, I probably never would have bothered switching.

The developer tools on Edge are not on par with Chrome or Firefox. That is one reason I stay away. I don't mind using the browser once in a while when I need more sessions than my Chrome profiles.

I switched for battery life. Chrome just crushed my laptop.

Yea, I've heard that, but I honestly have noticed a practical difference between Chrome and Edge.

Typing on a surface pro/windows tablet is crap on chrome?

My Windows dev friends seem to like it. If you're into the Microsoft ecosystem, it seems reasonable.

I tried it out as an alternative to IE 11 at work (where I run Windows to do CAD and industrial automation stuff), but I returned to IE out of habit. Either browser seems to work fine, though there are occasional issues with newly-designed sites and apps, I think because they tend to be designed and tested on Chrome/Mac.

Edge's user agent I believe is specifically chosen to look like Chrome to most websites. I believe they have said they had a lot of issues modernizing IE because people's "detect IE" hacks would assume IE still needed those hacks, and it would in fact end up breaking the website when IE improved.

Edge's user agent is almost a parody of how bad UA strings have become. Its basically claiming to be every major browser at once.

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.

Except Internet Explorer.

http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/useragentstring.php?nam...

IE version 6: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0b; Windows NT 5.1)

IE version 10: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/6.0)

IE versi--wait, what (?!): Mozilla/1.22 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows 3.1)

That last one made me wonder if someone was trolling an auto-collection system or if a zero somehow got added by a Network™. Offtopic but had to add it.

The problem is that Google refuses to adopt modern Windows standards and integration with their Windows products such as Chrome, resulting in a sub-par Windows experience on modern touch & pen enabled Windows devices and many frustrated users, not to mention worse battery life than needed.

https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6hozrf/new_surface_...

https://np.reddit.com/r/Surface/comments/6o8t9m/what_interne...

Google is notorious for their half-baked Windows support

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835776

Chrome has nothing that's on par with the Edge's built-in "Set Tabs Aside" session manager (even retaining tab history)

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/01/31/micro...

among a few other things https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge

and more coming in the Fall Creators Update

And since Edge is a modern UI UWP app, it has better fullscreen multi-tasking

https://np.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/65t3tg/so_edge_ha...

On my pc its performance is great. I’d use it if it had more extensions.

I did for a while, Chrome is a resource hog compared to Edge. iirc I stopped using it because of issues with passwords not auto filling consistently (it sounds like a small deal but it gets old having to open a password manager 10 times a day with a 20 something character password)

How about leaving it open, (auto) locking the screen every time you leave the pc? It should be as safe, if you trust the screen locker.

The main problem was the auto locking, I set my PC to go to sleep after 10 minutes (it's a really power hungry setup)

I'm not familiar with Windows nowadays. If it wakes up locked and asking for a password you are fine. That's the setup of my Ubuntu laptop.

Lock the PC, leave it on a desk, it goes to sleep. You come back, wake it up, type in the password to unlock. The weakest link is remembering to lock the pc. Auto lock after some minutes is ok only at home.

The password manager locks when the computer goes to sleep, I'm not sure that it's optional behavior (and if it was I'm not sure I'd want to disable it)

> Are there really people using Microsoft Edge out there? I mean, because they want to, not because they have to?

I have the exact sentiment with Safari. I'm on an Macbook Pro and iPhone and still use Chrome everywhere.

Safari on iPhone has better side-by-side tab viewer, reader mode, content blocker, and better thought out UI shortcuts than Chrome.

Also how is the battery life on OSX?

Yes, specially because it makes better use of my GPU.

So I usually use FF as main browser, Chrome for the developer tools when debugging some nasty issue and Edge when doing graphics intense work like watching videos.

I do. It is a great browser for the tablet. But in addition I just like it for regular usage as well. Only the developer tools are a bit unstable.

I use it from time to time because I have somehow acquired three or four different Microsoft IDs, all of which have access to different resources (somehow you're supposed to be able to link these, but I've never been able to get that to actually work), and I can't sign into all of them at the same time with Chrome.

Lots of our customers who were previously IE users have become Edge users. Its the new default on PCs

That's why I mentioned "because they want to", not just because it's installed by default.

I feel like it's a bit of an odd metric? It's like saying whether people want to use File Explorer. There's alternatives, but it doesn't enter the calculus of a lot of people.

It's not "do you want Edge on your phone", it's "do you want your desktop browser on your mobile" for a decent set of people, I think.

This article is from last year, but at the time Chrome had approximately 60% and Firefox at approximately 15% of the market[0]. It's not like people don't know that other browsers exist. Even non-technically savvy people know about Chrome. I'm sure a lot of that share comes from Android, but a large number of people go out of their way to install it on their desktops.

Sure,there are some people who will never consider installing another browser, but do you honestly believe that those people will go out of their way to install Edge on their phone over Android or Safari which are installed by default? I will concede that the app store does make it easier for someone to install a third party browsers, but how many of those people are going to know that Edge for mobile exist or go out of their way to install it?

If they are happy enough with Edge because it is the default on Windows, they'll most likely be happy enough with Chrome or Safari on their mobile. Yes, people who elect to use Edge because they like it and not because it is the default may choose to use it on mobile, but I can't imagine that number is very high.

I do not have data to prove this, but do you honestly believe that the number of people who can name a File Explorer alternative is anywhere close to the number of people that can name multiple web browsers? I find that incredibly hard to believe and a poor comparison.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/firef...

It’s been two years. And I bet normal everyday users aren’t asking for that.

It's been 2 (nearly 3) years since the final version of the official spec, but 5 years since any significant changes to the spec draft. IE10 was released in 2012 with a partial IndexedDB implementation, and Edge is still missing features that Chrome and Firefox had 5 years ago.

And I was being facetious, I know I'm not a normal user. Some normal users would like to play a video game I wrote that won't run in Edge due to missing IndexedDB features, though.

Yeah, but I'm willing to bet normal everyday users don't use terms like "browser experience" either.

In fact, I'm pretty sure that anyone who understands the concept of different browsers (rather than referring to whatever standard browser they have as "the internet"), uses Edge primarily to download Chrome or Firefox.

I’ve used edge. It’s fine.

If MS had lots of people complaining about sites that didn’t work or said ‘Edge not supported’ to people who went there and that was because the site needed IndexDB I’m sure they would have added it. It clearly isn’t a huge issue for them.

I can see people saying ‘If I use Edge my phone doesn’t sync bookmarks and stuff like Chrome so I use Chrome.’

I don’t think saying things like ‘people only use it to download Chrome’ is helpful. It’s not IE 7. It’s a perfectly fine browser.

Yes, it was partially tongue in cheek.

That said, most of those who understand there are multiple browsers likely do so due to a time when, yes, IE was -terrible-...and so all their saved stuff, preferred plugins, etc, are in Firefox or Chrome. So their first act on getting a new computer is to reinstall and sync that stuff. Not "give that new Microsoft browser a spin".

There was actually a time in history when Internet Explorer was arguably the best browser on the Mac!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac

There was a time when IE was arguably the best browser for Windows. Unfortunately, this time was about 20 years ago.

it still lags behind in supporting various things. i had hoped edge would show a commitment to features and standards, but alas.

Such as?

I mean are they real problems or are they the bleeding edge stuff people are always mad Safari doesn’t have yet?

After a Win10 user does that, they will have not one but two unused browsers lingering on their PC (both IE11 and Edge). I name this ship Bloaty McBloatface.

I don't use it as my main browser but it starts basically instantly, is reasonably snappy and uses far less resources than either firefox or chrome. If you don't have your browser open all the time it seems like a reasonable alternative.

Mozilla is obscenely wealthy as charities go. It must be one of the world's most asset-rich charity in the world. Billions of dollars...

You are right about that. They even financially support other projects that are not as rich: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/moss/

Anyone know someone working on Edge? Maybe MS can apply to that program and get some extra funding?

Stop trying to make Edge happen.. its not going to happen..

http://caniuse.com/fetch

No tiles in launcher? Garbage.

lol

Could you please not post if it's not going to be civil and substantive, like the guidelines ask?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It allows custom default search engines.

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