It has all the sincerity of the big bad wolf promising he won't huff and puff anymore. So either this is a trojan horse of some kind, or it's just straight up 'try to make you feel good bullshit' with no intent on delivering on the promises. Sure, they need a browser in the OS install, but they could just as easily wrap an existing engine in their own shell if they needed to do so without all the effort of writing a browser from scratch (or god forbid, whatever security hole ridden mess they end up with trying to strip down IE to a browser that isn't super proprietary). Microsoft doesn't do anything without a plan for return on investments, and I don't see how this will produce that. I don't get the upside for MS to invest all this time and energy in a standards compliant browsers when there are already two massively populate open-source standards-compliant browsers. Second, while this is an awesome story, it smells like a giant load of bullshit. yet another browser that will generate tickets when an end user uses a banking website that's committed to security by only supporting IE8 via activeX. Soon the only thing it'll have in common with its ancestral predecessor will be its blue "e" icon.
300,000 new lines of code have been added, with more than 4,200 fixes made to improve Edge's interoperability and compatibility with other browsers. Microsoft says that in total, some 220,000 lines of code, and 300 old APIs, have been removed from Edge. Physics simulations and artificial intelligence showed the biggest gains.Īll told, Edge is shaping up to be a very different browser from Internet Explorer 11. Turn on the asm.js feature, and performance doubles, making it three times faster than the old browser. In a WebGL benchmark using the Unity 3D engine, Edge without asm.js support is about 50 percent faster than Internet Explorer 11.
The Edge build released in Windows 10 build 10074 last week includes experimental asm.js support (though it has to be enabled manually), and some benchmark scores published by Microsoft suggest that it can provide some huge performance boosts. Joining extensions in the "planned for some time after the Windows 10 release" timeframe are support for the Object RTC specification, used to build realtime voice and video communications in the browser Pointer Lock, used to constrain pointer movement (important for gaming) and a greater variety of Cortana scenarios.Īs for a final feature that should make it in the first version, Microsoft announced back in February that it was investigating adding support for asm.js, the high performance JavaScript subset, to its Chakra JavaScript engine.
Microsoft has also proposed development of a system in which browser developers could, in a limited way, enable trial usage of experimental features so that new capabilities can be tested "in the wild," but in such a way that doesn't allow experimental or non-standard features to become entrenched.
Instead, developers will have to enable experimental features using configuration flags. Significantly, this means that it's no longer going to use the vendor prefix system for providing early access to features that are still experimental or in the process of being standardized. In Edge, Microsoft is also committing to not adding new proprietary stuff in the future. All of these and more will be handled by the new extensibility system when it's available.
Internet Explorer currently has lots of extension points for developers they can add, for example, custom download managers, custom protocol handlers, context menu entries, sidebars, and security filters. The new extensibility support will be quite broad. There's no specific timeline on when they'll be added. Although Microsoft has demonstrated the popular Reddit Enhancement Suite running in Edge with (the company says) minimal changes from its Chrome version, the initial release of Edge won't support these extensions. However, these aren't coming immediately. In their place are Chrome-like extensions built in HTML and JavaScript. It doesn't, however, mean no Flash that's a built-in capability. This means no plugins, no toolbars, no Java, no Silverlight.
The two traditional ways of extending Internet Explorer, ActiveX and Browser Helper Objects, are both gone. Microsoft has given perhaps the fullest rundown of what's not in Edge this week. We already knew that Microsoft Edge would remove much of the legacy technology that's found in Internet Explorer. Microsoft has spent the past few days talking about the new browser formerly known as Project Spartan: what it will do, what it won't do, and what it won't do yet but will do soon.