Faster Updates, Cross Platform, 4 Channels

Microsoft had made an announcement some time ago stating that they were adopting Chromium as the foundation of the Edge browser. They are making more information available about their plans. A computer will be able to have up to 4 Edge. In addition to the general release version there will be a beta , development, and canary channel where canary is the most experimental channel.

Microsoft is going to make a web view control available. This is a feature I wish had been available a couple of years ago. I worked on a project in which it was necessary to insert a Chromium based web view and that required making modifications to the Chromium source. Compiling Chromium can take hours!

Microsoft Edge is the only browser that has achieved a 100% score in accessibility evaluation. Microsoft is planning to make contributions to Chromium which should help improve the scores of Chromium based browsers across the board.  One example of a change coming from Microsoft is a media query for detecting when a user has turned on high contrast in either their computer or browser. The web developer can choose to change the appearance of a page accordingly.

Windows Biometric sign in is also going to be available to web sites (see navigator.credentials.get). This allows for a more secure way of logging in that doesn’t require a password. Edge also has a hardware backed feature named “Play Ready” that allows for secure playback of premium media.

The user agent-string for Edge Chromium will be Edg (that’s not a type, there is no E on the end). Note that the non-chromium version of edge uses the user token Edge instead. But it is recommended that instead of using the user agent string for enabling or disabling functionality in a web page it is better to use feature detection; new features are being added to browsers all the time and relying on the user agent alone can lead to a page not using a feature that was actually available within a browser.  Edge gets supports for module import and much better much better speech synthesis.