![]() I was never quite sure why that was the case, but as Microsoft will now happily acknowledge, that meant that millions of users on older Windows versions were left behind, and even those on Windows 10 often didn’t get the latest, most compatible version of Edge because their companies remained a few updates behind.įor better or worse, Chrome has become the default and Microsoft is going with the flow. Microsoft also admits that it didn’t help that Edge only worked on Windows 10 - and that Edge updates were bound to Windows updates. The company doesn’t expect that Edge on Mac will gain any significant market share, but it believes that having it available on every platform will mean that more developers will test their web apps with Edge, too. Hence Microsoft’s efforts to bring Edge to the Mac, 15 years after it abandoned Internet Explorer for Mac. And with the web as big as it is, the long tail of incompatible sites remains massive.īecause many web developers work on Macs, where they don’t have access to Edge, testing for it became even more of an afterthought. In part, that’s because Edge never quite gained the market share where developers cared enough to test their code on the platform. ![]() What Microsoft had to do, after all, was reverse engineer its way around problems on certain sites. While it was investing heavily in fixing those, what we’re hearing from Microsoft is a very pragmatic message: it simply wasn’t worth the investment in engineering resources anymore. Over the years, especially after Microsoft left the Internet Explorer brand behind, Edge had, for the most part, become a perfectly usable browser, but Microsoft acknowledges that there were always compatibility issues. What’s clear, though, is that Microsoft is acknowledging that Chrome and Chromium are the de facto standard today, both for users and for developers. Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. The company expects to release a first developer preview early next year. But at some point in 2019, Microsoft’s EdgeHTML and Chakra will go away and Blink and V8 will take its place. There’s no code to test today and the first previews are still months away. It’ll be a while before any of this happens, though. In addition, Microsoft is decoupling Edge from the Windows update process to offer a faster update cadence - and with that, it’ll bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and 8 users, too. And once that is done, Microsoft is bringing Edge to macOS, too. The Beta channel is updated every six weeks, the Dev Channel is updated weekly and the Canary Channel is updated daily. You’ll need macOS 10.12 and above to get involved.The rumors were true: Microsoft Edge is moving to the open-source Chromium platform, the same platform that powers Google’s Chrome browser. Microsoft is launching three insider channels for the Edge previews. For example, providing useful and contextual actions through the Touch Bar like website shortcuts, tab switching and video controls, as well as enabling familiar navigation with trackpad gestures.” Microsoft adds: “Additionally, we are designing user experiences that are exclusive to macOS, by leveraging specific hardware features available on Mac. Importantly for MacBook Pro users, Microsoft is planning to support the Touch Bar hardware on the laptops, which offers dynamic and contextual shortcuts for users, depending on the current activity or app in use. “You will continue to see the look and feel of the browser evolve in future releases as we continue to experiment, iterate and listen to customer feedback,” Microsoft says. As such, Microsoft is matching conventions for fonts, menus, keyboard shortcuts, tile casing and more. We are tailoring the overall look and feel to match what macOS users expect from apps on this platform.”Īs for the current version, Microsoft says it is staying true to its own design language, but it offering enough for Edge to feel natural on the Apple platform. In a blog post on Monday, the Edge team wrote: “Microsoft Edge for macOS will offer the same new browsing experience that we’re previewing on Windows, with user experience optimizations to make it feel at home on a Mac. There isn’t much to distinguish the two versions at the moment, but Microsoft says it is dedicated to building a “Mac-like user experience” for this version of the Edge browser. ![]() The first preview version of the Chromium-powered browser is now available to download from the Microsoft Edge Insider site for both macOS and Windows 10. ![]() The Microsoft Edge web browser is back on macOS, thanks to the PC-maker’s decision to switch to the same framework as Google Chrome.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |