Edge is dead, long live New Microsoft Edge

This January Microsoft started to roll out its all new Edge Browser using Google’s open source Chromium web rendering engine.

The browser wars of the 90s with Netscape, IE, Mozilla, et al, seem like such a distant memory now, but it was an exciting time of constant and rapid innovation as the web worked out what it wanted to be. I was working in London with Global Internet one of the big ISPs in the UK when dialup internet started to become widely available and browsers competed to be bundled with any product they could possibly find. The browser wars were fast moving, and I remember Netscape 0.8 being updated to 0.9a and immediately installing the latest version, only to drive back to South Wales and arrive at a friend’s house later that weekend to find Netscape 0.9b was available.

For years developers wrangled with the different rendering engines in each browser and managing the compatibility issues to ensure pages and functionality worked similarly across browsers and platforms. It was a time consuming and costly exercise, but this gradually reduced as browser matured and moved to automatic regular updates and acceptance of standards.

So, who ultimately won the browser wars, arguably Chrome through the dominance of Google. Perhaps highlighted best by Microsoft’s switch to Google’s open source Chromium web rendering engine in their latest Edge browser.

It is obviously crucial that Edge can reproduce results exactly as Chrome, as this in now the ‘standard’ for browser presentation, and the army of beta and release testers confirm this to be a success. You might then question why we need two browsers doing the same thing? But there is a significant difference, one crucial element of Edge that may pose a significant threat to Chrome and even Google.

Edge offers tracking protection, set to ‘Balanced’ as default which reportedly prevents a quarter of adverts not being displayed. Further, the ‘Strict’ setting effectively delivers advert blocking much like third party software. This is a real challenge to Google’s business model and those businesses that rely on tracking browser habits.

Finally, developers who sadistically long for IE will find there is an ‘IE mode’ for Windows only, essential for enterprise customers who have legacy applications to support. So just when we thought IE was dead it is still there in the background!