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Microsoft's move to use the Chromium engine to power its Edge browser was announced last December and the first public preview version is available. The Canary versions, updated daily, and Dev versions, updated weekly, are available for Windows 10. Versions for other operating systems and a beta update every six weeks are promised.
Chromium is the open source browser project run by Google. It includes the Blink rendering engine (Google's fork in Apple's WebKit), the V8 JavaScript engine, Google's software-based sandboxing and the browser's user interface. Google relies on Chromium for its Chrome browser and a number of third-party browsers, including Opera, Vivaldi and Brave, also use Chromium.
As a result, each Chromium browser offers more or less the same performance and web compatibility. That's partly why Microsoft decided to change technology: the company was tired of updating its own EdgeHTML engine to make sure it behaved the same way as Chrome and now offers equivalent to Chrome in the most direct way possible. I'm using a version 74 (which is a bit out of date at this point) for a week and I have not seen any difference between Edge and Chromium Dev when it comes to viewing web pages. In principle, a page can treat Edge differently (its identity is reported as a rather ugly "Edg / 74.1.96.14." I assume the typo is an attempt to ensure that it is not identified as a current Edge browser variant.), but in general, there is little reason to do so.
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A small difference lies in the initial setup experience, in which Edge asks you to choose the layout of your home page. You can have a graphic presentation rich in Bing.
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Or a layout similar to Edge, rich in news.
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Or a spartan disposition of type Chrome.
Microsoft has been working on the Chromium open source project to enhance important areas for the company: ARM64 compatibility, integration with Windows accessibility features to improve support for screen readers and other technologies. support, and touch and scroll performance. Until now, there is little to see from this work. The differences we see are in various elements of the user interface and in some plumbing services.
The Edge tabs are a bit more square than those in Chrome, for example, although they still are not the square tabs used in the traditional Edge browser and they currently lack Fluent features such as translucency, mouse rollover effects, and thumbnail previews. The Edge icons are also a bit thinner. Parameter pages, in particular, have been reorganized to give them an impression closer to Windows 10 than to Google. The Extensions page has been redesigned in the same way, with Microsoft offering both its own post store and supporting the use of the Chrome desktop store.
The integration of services remains a work in progress. With the old Edge, Microsoft had just started setting up a rich synchronization between devices to ensure that your browser history, registered usernames and passwords, extensions, etc. ., were roaming between devices and computers. The weakness in this area was probably one of the biggest weaknesses of the browser compared to Chrome or Firefox. For the moment, this remains the case in the new Edge. Microsoft plans to offer account integration and rich synchronization comparable to Chrome, but this has not been done yet. So we only have to share a basic history. Other integration work is more complete: Edge uses Microsoft's SmartScreen service to block sites known to distribute malware, for example, and the search is managed by Bing rather than Chrome.
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Perhaps the biggest difference area currently is the Settings page.
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The version I have used is version 74, one behind the current development branch of Chromium.
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Generally, the settings look much more like Windows, which I prefer.
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The complete trio of previews will be available at a later date.
This includes integration with Microsoft's PlayReady DRM system, in addition to the Chrome-supported WideVine DRM software. Currently, Edge is the only browser allowed to stream 4K video from Netflix, and this limitation may still be true even when stable versions of the new Edge are available. If so, it would be one of the few areas of functional difference between Edge and Chrome.
These changes aside, it's really striking how much Chromium Microsoft depends on. This extends to the development process; Canary / Dev / Beta strings are removed from the Google process and even the compiler is not unique to Microsoft. While Chrome under Windows was initially compiled using the Microsoft C ++ compiler, Google switched to the Clang / LLVM toolchain last year to simplify development. Microsoft compiler. This remains the case today and, as a result, while virtually everything Microsoft develops is built using Microsoft's own development tools, Edge is now compiled with Clang.
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