Gadgetory

Microsoft released its edge browser originally known as project Spartan in 2015 which wow it's not only four years ago feels like a lot longer than that you know what they say time flies when you're having fun anyway out of the gate edge brought some interesting features to the table like a reading mode and the ability to easily markup and share web pages but it was also slow and memory hungry and it lacked support for the thousands of helpful browser extensions that you could get on Chrome and Firefox so while it peaked at 20 percent market share among Windows 10 users in August of 2015 its subsequent slide over the following months and years indicates that most of those people are probably just using it to download Chrome so then in late 2018 after four long years of progressively more desperate tactics to get people to please please just try it please know Microsoft decided that rather than trying to fight chrome they would enter the belly of the beast becoming Chrome then destroying it from the inside just kidding I mean that might be what they're doing we actually don't know but what we do know is that there's a freaking chromium powered edge browser out there in the wild and we spent the last couple of days finding out whether it's the next big thing or the browser equivalent of two kids stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat so they can get a ticket for your pg-13 taskbar today's video is brought to you by Corsair the corsair iron claw RGB wireless mouse features a native 18,000 dpi optical sensor a comfortable palm grip and sub 1 millisecond slipstream technology check it out at the link below for the uninitiated chromium is Google's free and open source software project that forms the foundation of Google's mainline Chrome browser builds which by contrast are not open-source so what that means is that anyone including Microsoft can take that Foundation and potentially build their own browser on top of it and actually Microsoft is far from the first company to do this some of the more well-known third-party chromium based browsers include opera brave Amazon silk and Samsung's aptly named Internet now the new chromium powered edge is not fully launched yet but Microsoft is publishing developer builds as they get closer to the full rollout and that means that we can try it right now so we're gonna be using the Windows 10 version but this is kind of cool the new edge will actually be available on Android iOS and even Mac OS so let's get started when you open a new tab you get some layout options focused has some frequently visited sites and a simple search bar unfortunately powered by Bing but fortunately with the option to change it to Google search dr. ko or Ask Jeeves or whatever and the next up is inspirational layout which adds the pretty Microsoft background of the day to the mix or the informational layout which adds an MSN style new section on your first Buddha pub the app it will probably prompt you to import your chrome data including bookmarks or favorites you're safe passwords your autofill entries and your browsing history but if you're not a hundred percent sure about the switch you can also do that in the settings later once you do that it actually begins to feel eerily like you're using a Microsoft skinned version of Chrome though right down to the menu layouts so most of the settings that you'd expect to find are there but like it's weird because they might be located in a different submenu it's like using a chrome from an alternate universe where like the snap never happened spoilers spoilers he spent more than a year to see the first part perhaps the weirdest part though of the new edge experience is installing Chrome extensions now by default the new edge only allows you to install a small number of Microsoft approved edge insider add-ons but in true chromium fashion you can allow the installation of any extension from the Chrome Web Store by simply clicking allow extensions from other stores with that said there's no guarantee it'll work LastPass for example wouldn't let us sign-in on edge now thankfully there was an edge version already available and that one worked fine we're just saying that whether it's for security reasons or other compatibility reasons Microsoft says that the list of official add-ons will increase as they go through and verify them so it's not that they're taking a walled garden approach they just want to make sure that the user experience is ok so then if you were like amped to switch from Chrome to edge we just want you to keep in mind that you might not have all of your chrome features exactly as you like them also making matters worse if you are one of the edge faithful hi Microsoft's chromium based reboot might be a bit of a bummer for you too because a fresh start means that the current build is even lacking some of the features of old edge so these include setting aside tabs style of support ooh that's kind of rough for you surface pro users out there and an official dark mode although you can at least enable a beta version of that last one in the flags now the edge team has promised that those features will return and they've also committed to new ones like easily shareable tab collections a three-tiered privacy control system and best of all and Internet Explorer compatibility mode I'm actually not joking about this that is a godsend not only for nostalgic masochists but also for corporate and IT workers that are stuck using legacy apps that just won't run on modern browsers and the edge engineers say they're not only creating new features for their own brows they're also submitting suggestions to the chromium open-source project which might influence other chromium based browsers and even chrome itself for any of this actually matter though edge has to perform as well as Chrome Firefox or the others and actually given edges reputation as that new browser it probably has to perform even better so we ran chrome new edge old edge and Firefox through a handful of benchmarks html5 tests for pure html5 performance base mark for a mix of JavaScript and graphically intense workloads and web expert for a wide sampling of tasks intended to mirror everyday browser use and I got a say for a fledgling browser the new edge held up alright it kept up pretty well with chrome although both of them lost to Firefox and web expert and it beat both the old edge and Firefox in Basemark now it did have the worst pure html5 performance out of our tested browsers but then we ran the test again using HTTPS instead of HTTP which brought it score up to a tie with Chrome so then at least from a pure performance standpoint the new chromium based edge is immediately a big step up from the old edge and extremely close to chrome in terms of what you can expect from day-to-day browsing so with a well performing feature-rich extension had the alternative to Chrome on the table other than Firefox of course sorry Firefox fans you guys are still a thing um we should just all be celebrating them right like competition is good right not so fast so we've talked a lot about what a chromium powered edge browser means for the user experience but there's another huge question that the existence of this chimeric concoction brings up is google about to fundamentally own the ability to set their own standards for how the internet is developed because here's the thing depending on where you get your stats chrome has been sitting at around 65 to 75 percent global desktop browser market share with edge around five and the supposedly defunct internet explorer still around five to ten percent now Firefox and Safari still have healthy enough user bases but think about this once this new edge actually launches and edge and Internet Explorer users hopefully switch over as much as 85 percent of the internet could be dominated by browsers based on Google own software that gives Google an unprecedented level of control over the way the internet will continue to change and while Google has developed many standards and protocols that have benefited all web users like the speedy protocol that formed the basis for HTTP 2 they've also been responsible for some shady locked ecosystem type stuff in the past like changing YouTube so that it ran worse on non chrome browsers wait I'm just trying to think was that before or after they removed don't be evil from their corporate motto do you remember yeah I mean either so the thing is all of that could be much ado about nothing and for their part Google has said they remain committed to the open web and will continue to work with others in the web browser ecosystem but we still thought it was important to not just try out new edge in this video but to also point out that if you subscribe to the age-old wisdom about absolute power and absolute corruption and all that you might want to at least give Firefox a try sure or Safari this video is brought to you 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