Google's Chrome is the laggard here, but Google is ramping up its browser privacy effort. It's related to Apple's anti-tracking technology already in Safari and Brave, too. Edge also dovetails with Microsoft's sign-in technology used in businesses so your Edge login information is the same as your email.Īs for privacy, Edge is taking a similar approach to Mozilla's Firefox by trying to block a list of known sites that track you online. Productivity is represented by features like Collections, which lets you amass information from lots of websites as you're planning travel, researching a paper or otherwise digging deeper into the web. So why switch to Edge? Two reasons, in Microsoft's view: productivity and privacy. Chrome dominates browser usage, accounting for 64% of web activity, according to analytics firm StatCounter. If you're like most people, you probably aren't noticing web compatibility problems because you're already using Chrome. More and more, it's Google's web, and we're just living in it. Some bemoan the loss of Microsoft's independent influence, but the practical reality is that it held minimal sway. Those allies collaborate with Google, but Google still holds outsized influence compared with the remaining browser engines, Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari. Shifting to Chromium - a decision already made by developers of Samsung, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and others - adds even more influence to Google's vision for the web. Microsoft isn't yet pushing the software to your PC. 'The new Microsoft Edge is now available to download on all supported versions of Windows and MacOS in more than 90 languages,' Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Windows, said in a blog post. The new version of the browser has a different logo - a circular crashing wave tinted blue, green and aqua that's reminiscent of the old blue IE 'e' icon. Using Chromium resolves those compatibility problems. The new version of Edge marks a fundamental change in the browser: a shift to Chromium, Google's open-source foundation for the Chrome browser. The software giant couldn't couldn't keep the browser compatible with enough websites, however, and customers started dumping it. Introduced in 2015, Edge was part of a modernization effort that stripped out old Internet Explorer code. Microsoft stripped the beta label from the browser on Wednesday, and you can now download it from Microsoft's Edge website. Microsoft spent the last year giving its Edge software a browser brain transplant, and now the company is convinced it's smart enough to help everyone who uses it.

Microsoft edge for mac review