Microsoft is making a lot of progress when it comes to rebuilding the Edge browser, by using Google’s Chromium’s rendering engine. They have made a page exactly for explaining what Chromium will have new. They also come with the confirmation that the browser will allow its users to install progressive web apps (PWAs) right from the web and from the Microsoft Store.
The company wanted to release the new Edge in the beginning of the year for Windows 7, 8.1 and 10, and also macOS. It’s been said that the experience will be of a blend of Chrome and the classic Edge. Edge will come linked to a Microsoft account, and not to a Google account, so users will have to import all of their passwords, their browsing history and favourites.
What is the key improvement for Edge?
The biggest improvement that Microsoft will give Chromium is the better accessibility. This program comes with Microsoft’s existing functionality for reading a webpage, but it does not have the feature to write a webpage with a stylus. Also, dark mode is also available only as an experiement.
As said before, Microsoft brings Edge’s scrolling feature to Chromium, in order to improve scrolling when you use a mouse, which can be really helpful when scrolling an Excel page.
The company has made a dedicated page on GitHub for all the additional features that it wants to bring from Edge to Chromium, such as a native caret browsing for going through a webpage by using keyboard keys and shortcuts. In present, this required installing a certain extension on Chrome, and Microsoft’s approach is quite inefficient.
The company has also showed how the icons will be handeled for the Dark Mode and the Light Mode, saying that the web app developers should have a certain way of automatically adjusting their branding and their icons, in order to suit each context from the operating system settings.
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.