Browser Wars - the results are in!

The browser wars - the endless battle for market share in internet browsing - are as old as the World Wide Web (which nerds will know is a different thing to the internet and generally is what we mean when we say "on the internet"). In recent years things have got interesting in a few ways, and I thought it was worth looking at them. Spoiler - I'm going to try and persuade you to try the new version of Microsoft Edge!

The big beast these days is of course Google Chrome. Depending on your source, it is home to between 70-80% of all browsing sessions. The other desktop browsers - principally Firefox, Edge and Safari, all struggle along under 10%. But since the release of the new version of Edge, which is based on the same underlying software as Chrome, it has started to make inroads. Interestingly, looking at the data the gains appear to be at the expense not of Chrome but of Firefox - perhaps suggesting that there was a group of users who wanted Chrome functionality but didn't trust Google enough. Chrome loyalists have stayed where they are, perhaps not seeing enough benefit to justify the move.

There's plenty of articles out there comparing browsers. You might be surprised to learn the consensus is that Edge is the better tool in terms of performance, security, privacy and accessibility. I won't rehash all of the content, it's linked above. Instead, I'll tell you why I use it:

Integration with Office 365

You can sign into Edge using your existing 'Work or School' account, meaning if you use Microsoft for your work email, you already have an account that will work in Edge. That's nice, but it goes further. The default homepage is a view that shows your recent files from SharePoint and OneDrive, links to your most frequently used SharePoint sites and even a 'Discover' panel of files you have permissions to which may be interesting (based on age, content matching with your own files, frequency of contact with the author, etc).

As you can see in the image, the homepage also includes the Office 365 applications menu from the portal, meaning you can jump straight from there to the Office app you need without going via anywhere else, which is handy.

If you really want to go full throttle integration, using Bing as your search engine will simultaneously bring you results from the web, your SharePoint, calendar, even PowerBI dashboards in your business.

Profiles

For those of us with multiple online identities, Edge makes life very easy. You don't have to be a criminal to want that, either. I work in consulting, so I switch between our own environment and customer environments quite often. Even if you don't do that, you may want to keep work and personal browsing separate - don't let the tracking cookies (of which more later) bleed from one part of your life to the other. In the past, and broadly in Chrome still, the only real way to do that was with Private Browsing, which worked but did mean recreating the entire session from scratch every time.

In Edge you simply create a new profile, log into whatever it may be and then switch back and forth as you need to. It's more secure, it avoids clashes if you have multiple accounts for the same service, and it's really simple to do. Anyone who does work online for multiple clients will benefit from this.

Tracking Prevention

We're all a bit wiser to the ways in which tracking cookies and other little nasties will follow you around. Edge makes it really easy to put a stop to that. There are three default options - Basic, Balanced and Strict - allowing you to quickly tell Edge how defensive you want it to be.

Interesting side-note - the Strict option is so strict it breaks quite a lot of Office 365! That's because it uses a single central authentication cookie which is then accessed across the suite, but since the Strict option prevents site accessing cookies they didn't create, Office breaks. Fortunately, it's easy enough to add an exception with a button in the address bar.

Extensions

Essentially, this is a piece of mind point rather than a benefit. Because Edge is based on Chromium, the open source software that Chrome is based on, any Chrome extensions will also work in Edge. In fact, you can go to the Chrome Extension page and install directly from there if you want, and it's just as easy to do. There's no difference.

Performance

It's just quicker. I can dress that up in various ways, but the simple fact is pages load faster, clicks respond faster, videos start playing faster... It's quicker, is what I'm saying.

So there it is - reasons to use Microsoft Edge. You can get it here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge and I don't think you'll regret making the switch!