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Comment by dstaley | Hacker News Reader

I'm really curious why they released to stable with so many basic features missing. For example, your bookmarks won't sync between devices (although that was recently re-enabled in the preview channels). It sounds like they're not pushing out automatic updates right now anyway, so I'm not sure what this announcement amounts to. Why not wait until the 20H1 Windows 10 feature update (which sounds like the update that will include the stable version of Edge) is released to mark the first stable version? Just seems like a weird release schedule.

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The blog posts mention that releasing it today is a shot across the bow for Enterprise. Given Enterprises like their year+ efforts to "test" software before ever deploying it, they want Enterprise to start that process today, ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it.

It's also a very subtle signal for several reasons to release it the day after Extended Support for Windows 7 ended. On the one hand, it supports Windows 7, so there is a possible mixed message there, which is why it is subtle. On the other hand, some of these Enterprises should realize that the last time the browser team at Microsoft did a release like this after/ahead of a Windows EOL they highly revised their browser security support policy. (Back with IE11 adding support for a couple older versions of Windows and Microsoft immediately dropping support for IE <11, despite earlier "bundled with Windows support timeframe" promises.) It can be seen as a very subtle "IE is dead, move on from it, already, you dinosaur customers".

> ahead of 20H1 when all consumers presumably will be pushed to it

I'm not sure it will be part of 20H1. https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/01/15/upgrading-new... says:

> If you’d prefer not to install Microsoft Edge manually, you can wait for it to be installed in a future update to Windows 10, following our measured roll-out approach over the next several months. We will start to migrate Windows 10 customers to the new Microsoft Edge in the coming weeks, starting with a subset of Windows Insiders in the Release Preview ring.

I'm guessing 20H1 will be released sooner than several months.

That says they are starting now, so they are starting with 19H2 (in Release Preview to start, which is still 19H2 by the way, then into the wilds). "Several months" here could mean they want everything done by 20H1 (somewhere between March and May, given the usual pattern). I don't know if that also means that they are planning to move to packing New Edge in the RTW images for 20H1; so far 20H1 on Insiders still seems to have Edge Classic. But the clear thing is that these are clearly parallel rollouts right now.

They released Edge before it was ready too. They never did give it any kind of sane bookmark management.

I actually gave Edge Dev an honest try for a few months using it as my only browser. At some point it just stopped syncing bookmarks between my various computers (all Windows), and that was the breaking point for me. I went back to Firefox. I may give it another go if they can fix sync.

I use Edge (Canary) as my primary browser and appreciate how minimalist it is.

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