By Michael Muchmore1
Edge is stripped clean of the offending code in IE that made it such a target for malware there’s no ActiveX, browser helper objects, or VBScript support. It uses the new EdgeHTML rendering engine instead of the much-maligned MSHTML one, and it doesn’t identify itself to sites as IE, but rather as a browser compatible with the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome4, and Safari. It also uses the new Chakra JavaScript engine, which more than holds its own against other browsers’ engines when it comes to speed.
Starting Up
There’s just one way to get Edge: upgrade your PC to Windows 10. When you do so, Edge is installed as the default browser. In a move similar to that used by Apple on iOS and Mac OS with Safari, you can’t uninstall the browser, but of course you can install any other browser you like and use it as your default. The browser is also the default on Windows 10 Mobile. If you need Internet Explorer for a site or intranet that requires it, it’s still available on Windows 10; just type “Internet” in the Cortana search box next to the Start button and you see it as an option. I tested Edge on a Surface Pro 35 with a Core i5-4300U CPU and 8GB RAM.
Interface
When you first run Edge, you see a tutorial explaining its special features. But you also see the clean, flat design that’s all the rage in software design, with simple 2D controls whose functions are obvious. Tabs are simply squared off, and arrows on the left for navigating back and forward, as well as the refresh button are large and suitable for touch input. You can choose between light gray and dark (nearly black) modes, the latter of which I like because it puts the focus on the page rather than the browser frame.
In a design choice that gives Edge perhaps the cleanest look of any browser, the address bar doesn’t display at all if you use the search/address box in the middle of the start/new tab page. You simply navigate to the address without having to jump up to the address bar on the window border. If you’re already on a website, you can tap into the address bar, which takes on the same color as the rest of the toolbar until you tap or click on it, when it turns white like a traditional address box used in previous browsers. Yet another interface-cleanser is that the Favorites bar doesn’t display unless you turn it on in Settings. On subsequent runs of the browser, you see a new Start page, with a search bar at the top, then a row of touch-friendly tiles for your most-visited sites, and larger tiles below that for a newsfeed of the day’s big events, the weather, your reading list items (more on that in a moment), and your sports team scores. Interspersed with these are tiles for suggested app downloads. It’s all a lot more engaging and useful than a browser that just has a branded search box and nothing else on its new tab and home page. If you’re not into it, you can simply start tabs with a blank page. A Home button is also optional on the main toolbar. At the right side of the browser’s top border are the rest of the controls: a book icon for Reading Mode; a star for adding Favorites and Reading List items; a text-lines button that opens the hub, which includes Favorites, Bookmarks, History, and Downloads; the Web Note button; and an overflow button that opens more settings. I’ll discuss each of these below. The sidebar for Favorites and the rest can be pinned if you want it to always show.
Tabs show a speaker icon when a background tab is playing audio, something pioneered by Chrome and helpful for tracking down noisy tabs.
Reading Mode
Reading Mode in Edge is similar to a feature found in Firefox and Safari, and it’s a godsend with today’s ad-infested Web, especially if you’re reading online news or information sites (this one included). You can choose from three looks in Settings: Light, Medium, and Dark. The last is great for night-time Web reading when your eyes are nearly shot. There are also four font sizes to choose from, but you can zoom a Reading mode page to any size you like. Reading mode is only available for article-style pages, and seeing those without ad pop-overs and auto-playing videos is very refreshing. You see its book icon animate, as if flipping through pages, when you land on a site that it works with. I actually prefer the way Firefox’s similar feature works, though. You can control its appearance in similar ways with a slide-out left-control bar, saving you a trip to Settings.
Reading List, Downloads, History
The Reading List feature has nothing to do with Reading mode; instead, it’s a second way to save sites you’re interested in for later perusal. It joins bookmarks, or as Microsoft calls them, Favorites, in hub panel, and you add a Reading list item with the same star button you use to add a Favorite. Choosing the Reading List lines-of-text button instead of the star shows a thumbnail of the page you want to save. To view your actual Reading List, you use the next button after the star on the main toolbar, another text-lines icon. Here you see the list of sites you marked with smaller thumbnails, but when you click into one of the sites, it’s highlighted at the top with a larger one, as a sort of Now Reading indication. But the pane is not the only place you see the list you also see it on the browser’s very useful start/new tab page. This could be very useful if you read those long New Yorker articles that require more than a single sitting.
The Downloads panel works as similar features in other browsers do. A bonus here, though is an indication if a download is suspect. One of my downloaded files was followed by, in red type, the message “This program is not commonly downloaded and could harm your computer.”
You can view visited sites from the last hour, today, yesterday, last week, or older. Something I miss here, though, is the ability to search within your history, and there’s no full history window like that offered by Firefox. But if you start typing part of a page title, it drops down in the address bar’s list of visited sites.
Cortana Integration
Most browsers let you look up selected text with a right-click menu option, but Edge puts a twist on this, with Cortana6 integration. When you right-click on selected text, you see an Ask Cortana option. Instead of opening a new search page, this opens a sidebar with a definition, photos, or relevant Web results, often from Wikipedia. The Cortana integration takes another form as well. Sometimes she suggests a modern Windows app if there’s one for the site you’re viewing, or she may offers direction and a menu if you land on a restaurant website.
Annotations
Have you ever wanted to share or save a webpage with markup and comments? Annotations may be Edge’s flashiest feature, and it is cool, but I must confess that I haven’t used it much in the real world. That may just be a matter of learning a new behavior instead of simply using my Snagit hotkey for all screen capturing. To get started, while on a webpage you tap or click the pen-and-paper icon. This turns the top browser border purple and adds several markup tools: a pen, a highlighter, an eraser, a note box, and a clipping tool. Each of these works fine with a mouse, but it’s more fun to use your finger with them on a touch screen.
When you’re done marking up and trimming a page to your heart’s content, you can either save it as a OneNote page or share it out to an email address, to another app, to a social network, or basically to any app that accepts shared images. If you save it as a OneNote page, you can give others editing rights for some collaborative editing. An email recipient simply gets a JPG image with a subject line combining Web Notes with the page title. It’s a well-done tool that I’m sure many could find useful.
What’s Missing: Extensions and More
Edge, like the rest of Windows 10, is dubbed a service, meaning it’s a moving target, with continual updates that bring new features and capabilities. That’s a good thing in Edge’s case, since, as the still somewhat-immature browser lacks many of the tools found in Firefox and Chrome, not to mention those found in the extras-focused Maxthon7 and Opera8. Microsoft has told me that an extension feature is on the way, and that turning a Chrome extension into an Edge extension should be trivial. But for now, since extensions aren’t yet supported, you can’t use valuable tools like password managers and some security plugins. A couple of smaller things are missing, too: For example, there’s no full-screen view like you get with IE when you hit F11. The browser does allow Web video, such as that found on DailyMotion or Vimeo, to display full-screen. Another quibble is that you can’t yet right-click on a photo on a webpage to set it as your desktop background. You also can’t open a group of Favorites from a folder all at once.
Performance
A main point of Edge is to be faster than IE. How fast? On some widely used benchmark tests (including Google’s own Octane 2.0), it actually beats Chrome, which people have a perception of being faster than everything else. In general, Edge feels snappy, though for some sites it makes you wait too long to scroll down, and sometimes switching tabs with a lot of tabs open is slower than it should be. Performance is most easily and repeatably measured by JavaScript benchmarks. But browser performance involves more than just what shows up on synthetic JavaScript benchmarks, though, since loading webpages has multiple components aside from JavaScript. HTML and CSS parsing, network interaction, prioritization of which content is loaded first, prefetching, handling mouse moves, DOM events, painting the window with content, and caching strategies all play roles. Effective use of graphics hardware acceleration is another consideration.
I tested on the Surface Pro 3 with a Core i5-4300U CPU and 8GB RAM, clearing all browser’s caches, quitting all other apps, and removing all extensions (not a problem in Edge at the moment). I ran each test five times, threw out the highest and lowest results and averaged the rest.
JavaScript Benchmarks. SunSpider, formerly the best-known JavaScript benchmark, has been superseded by JetStream, which combines routines of the former SunSpider with some in Octane along with others from LLVM9 and Apache10. For a few years, Internet Explorer took top place on this test; the new version is designed to be more real-world, so it takes a lot longer to run, and actually runs through its 39 tasks thrice. Its result is also now “bigger is better,” whereas it used to report elapsed time in milleseconds.
Graphics Hardware Acceleration. Microsoft has published a series of benchmarks to demonstrate how use of a PC’s graphics processor can accelerate some webpage-rendering tasks on its Test Drive site11. I use PenguinMark, since it produces a comparable score, and tests a wide variety of capabilities, including HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3, Canvas, WOFF (Web Open Font Format), and more. It also displays cute, coat-bundled penguins in the snow and plays my favorite Chipmunks Christmas song. The amount and speed of snowfall gives you a visible idea of how a browser is performing, too. On this test, Edge came out much better than Chrome Firefox.
Unity WebGL Benchmark. Now that Edge supports WebGL for game-level graphics, I also check browsers’ Unity WebGL Benchmark scores. The Unity WebGL is a great-looking benchmark that runs through visually demanding Mandelbrot sets, cryptography, and gaming physics scenarios, both 2D and 3D. One test is adorably named, “Instantating sic and destroying a lot of Teddy bears.” Firefox is the undisputed leader on this test, nearly doubling the competitors’ results.
Startup Speed. The time it takes browsers to be ready has become less of an issue across the board, but for another point of performance comparison, I timed how long it took each browser to start up both cold (after a reboot) and warm (subsequent startups). I waited till CPU activity had dwindled to a percent or two for the cold startup tests. I hit Stop when a search bar appeared in the browser’s main page window.
Memory Use. I tested browsers’ RAM footprint by loading 12 media-rich websites into all the browsers at the same time and note their Memory entry in Task Manager. I had to make sure the sites actually loaded, because some browsers like to save you resources by not loading background tabs, Chrome and Opera in particular showed a lot of empty tabs when I first clicked on them. As you can see, Edge blows IE away in terms of memory efficiency.
Standards and Compatibility
Edge is a big step above its IE ancestor when it comes to support for new Web standards, and it will soon be even better on this measure. Already the Preview build of Edge includes support for Flash and PDF viewing. You can see demos of many of the new capabilities, along with performance tests, at the Edge Test Drive site. And you can see the list of ongoing support additions on the Platform status12 website. Two standards that Edge doesn’t yet support but soon will are asm.js, a Mozilla initiative that allows near-native code execution; and WebRTC, real-time communications. The latter is the technology that allows Skype-like communication using a webcam and microphone within the browser. The flavor of the spec Edge will support (and already does in the preview version13) is ORTC Object Real-Time Communications. In the spirit of coopetition, the two co-authors of this W3C spec consist of one Google employee and one Microsoft employee. You can read about it in gory technical detail on its W3C page14. For a comparison of Web technologies supported the HTML5Test15 website awards points based on the number of functions recognized by a browser, with a maximum of 555. As you can see, Edge scores quite a bit better than IE, but has a little catching up to do. The current Preview version of Edge gets 402, well behind Firefox and Chrome, but well ahead of IE. Keep in mind that many of the functions tested for are used by hardly any sites.
Security and Privacy
Edge offers significant security advantages over IE. Like Chrome, it runs in a sandbox, just as every modern Windows Store app does. This means browser processes are isolated from the rest of the system, so site code can’t mess with the rest of your PC’s operation and other programs. It also maintains IE’s SmartScreen Filter, which blocks known malware-harboring sites and flags suspicious downloads. Also, by simply omitting ActiveX, VBScript, and Browser Helper Objects, it gives hackers less opportunity to wreak havoc.
The 64-bit version of Edge is the only one allowed on 64-bit PCs (most, these days), and that provides better security due to a much larger address space for Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR16). Chrome and Firefox, by contrast, are still installed as 32-bit applications by default.
Unfortunately, Edge dispenses with IE’s Tracking Protection feature, which prevented unwanted sites from sharing your browsing information with other sites. The lack of extension support probably explains this, and we may see the feature reinstated in updates. PCMag’s guru, Neil Rubenking outlines Edge’s security in Microsoft Edge Brings Bigger, Badder Security to Windows 1017.
The Edge in Web Browsing?
Microsoft’s new browser is refreshing in many ways. It’s drastically faster and more compliant with modern Web standards than its predecessor, Internet Explorer. And by some measures Microsoft Edge is faster and safer than Chrome and Firefox. But it’s still slightly behind on new Web standards support, and it lacks the extra goodies that those more-mature pieces of software offer. For a full-featured, fast-performing, and extensible Web browser, our Editors’ Choice is Mozilla Firefox.
References
^ Michael Muchmore (www.pcmag.com)
^ Windows 10 (www.pcmag.com)
^ Firefox (www.pcmag.com)
^ Chrome (www.pcmag.com)
^ Surface Pro 3 (www.pcmag.com)
^ Cortana (www.pcmag.com)
^ Maxthon (www.pcmag.com)
^ Opera (www.pcmag.com)
^ LLVM (llvm.org)
^ Apache (httpd.apache.org)
^ Drive site (dev.modern.ie)
^ Platform status (dev.modern.ie)
^ already does in the preview version (blogs.windows.com)
^ W3C page (ortc.org)
^ HTML5Test (www.html5test.com)
^ ASLR (en.wikipedia.org)
^ Microsoft Edge Brings Bigger, Badder Security to Windows 10 (www.pcmag.com)