At Microsoft’s Build conference, they announced a new feature coming to Edge that enterprises will love. The legacy websites that many businesses still rely on will not be updated or redeveloped for modern browser support.
This ultimately leaves a business with a choice, go spend a lot of money to replace the whole system or continue to use the legacy app in an old browser, many choose the later.
With most web developers and even Microsoft themselves recommending you get the hell off IE, most websites simply don’t work in IE or at least some features, so the user experience is frustrating at best.
To resolve this issue, businesses have often rolled out Chrome, or stuck with the default in Windows 10, Microsoft Edge. After recently releasing dev and beta builds of Edge using the chromium rendering engine, we got a window into a better future on the web. This new version of Edge will be rolled into a future feature update to Windows 10. With an ability to install Chrome extensions, it enables IT departments to leave the default browser there, while giving users the plugin architecture, favourite sync and many other features they now expect.
Now with the announcement that Edge will be able to dynamically switch to the legacy IE rendering engine, rather than opening an additional IE window (like when Enterprise Mode is used), it looks like its the ultimate browser solution and we can finally avoid having 2,3 or even 4 browsers pinned to the taskbar.
I’ve been using the Canary build of Edge (with Chromium) since it was released a couple of weeks ago. The experience has been great, there’s literally been no issues. The browser is every bit as good as Chrome, but with much less strain on system resources. If you want to give it a try, you can choose between the Canary build that gets updated everyday, or the Dev channel that is updated weekly.
Collections
Microsoft have also announced another new feature for Edge. Collections is based on feedback from customers in user studies, interviews, and feedback that its easy to lose track of where you are, and too difficult to turn the chaos of your tabs and windows into actionable information.
Collections is designed to tackle this challenge, using cloud-powered intelligence and an intuitive interface to help you collect, organize, and share content as you travel across the web.
Intelligent export to apps like Word and Excel preserves the logical structure of your content, so you can turn a loose collection of paragraphs into a handout with citations, or turn a shopping list into a spreadsheet sortable by price.
In terms of platform support, Edge may be the most widely supported browser ever when this is complete. Soon there’ll be versions for Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, MacOS, Android and iOS. If you want to give it a try for yourself, check out
microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/download