microsoft released its edge browser originally known as project spartan in
2015 which wow was that only four years ago
feels like a lot longer than that you know what they say time flies when
you're having fun anyway out of the gate edge brought
some interesting features to the table like a reading mode and the ability to
easily mark up and share web pages but it was also slow and memory hungry
and it lacked support for the thousands of helpful browser extensions that you
could get on chrome and firefox so while it peaked at 20 market share
among Windows 10 users in august of 2015
its subsequent slide over the following months and years indicates that most of
those people were probably just using it to download chrome
so then in late 2018 after four long
years of progressively more desperate tactics to get people to please
please just try it please microsoft decided that rather than trying to fight
chrome they would enter the belly of the beast becoming chrome then destroying it
from the inside just kidding i mean that might be what
they're doing we actually don't know but what we do know is that there's a
freaking chromium-powered edge browser out there
in the wild and we spent the last couple of days finding out whether it's the
next big thing or the browser equivalent of two kids stacked on top of each other
wearing a trench coat so they can get a ticket for your pg-13 task bar
today's video is brought to you by Corsair the Corsair ironclaw RGB
wireless mouse features a native 18 000 dpi optical sensor a comfortable palm
grip and sub 1 millisecond slipstream technology check it out at the link
below
for the uninitiated chromium is google's free and open source software project
that forms the foundation of google's mainline chrome browser builds which by
contrast are not open source so what that means is that anyone
including microsoft can take that foundation and potentially build their
own browser on top of it and actually microsoft is far from the first company
to do this some of the more well-known third-party chromium-based browsers
include opera brave amazon silk and
samsung's aptly named internet now the new chromium-powered edge is not fully
launched yet but microsoft is publishing developer builds as they get closer to
the full rollout and that means that we can try it
right now so we're going to be using the Windows 10 version but this is kind of cool the
new edge will actually be available on Android iOS and even macOS
so let's get started when you open a new tab you get some
layout options focused has some frequently visited
sites and a simple search bar unfortunately powered by bing
but fortunately with the option to change it to google search duckduckgo or
ask jeeves or whatever and the next up is inspirational layout which adds the
pretty microsoft background of the day to the mix or the informational layout
which adds an msn style new section on your first boot up of the app it will
probably prompt you to import your chrome data including bookmarks or
favorites your saved passwords your autofill entries and your browsing
history but if you're not 100 sure about
the switch you can also do that in the settings later once you do that it actually begins to
feel eerily like you're using a microsoft skinned version of chrome
though right down to the menu layouts so most of the settings that you'd expect
to find are there but like it's weird because they might
be located in a different sub menu it's like using a chrome from an alternate
universe where like the snap never happened what is it
spoilers for spoilers you had more than a year to
see the first part
perhaps the weirdest part though of the new edge experience is installing chrome
extensions now by default the new edge only allows you to install a small
number of microsoft approved edge
insider add-ons but in true chromium
fashion you can allow the installation of any extension from the chrome web
store by simply clicking allow extensions from other stores
with that said there's no guarantee it'll work lastpass for example wouldn't
let us sign in on edge now thankfully there was an edge version already
available and that one worked fine we're just saying that whether it's for
security reasons or other compatibility reasons microsoft says that the list of
official add-ons will increase as they go through and verify them so it's not
that they're taking a walled garden approach they just want to make sure that the user experience is okay
so then if you were like amped to switch from chrome to edge we just want you to
keep in mind that you might not have all of your
chrome features exactly as you like them
also making matters worse if you are one
of the edge faithful hi
microsoft's chromium-based reboot might be a bit of a bummer for you too because
a fresh start means that the current build is even lacking some of the
features of old edge so these include setting aside tabs
style of support oh that's kind of rough for you surface
pro users out there and an official dark mode although you can at least enable a
beta version of that last one in the flags now the edge team has promised
that those features will return and they've also committed to new ones like
easily shareable tab collections a three-tiered privacy control system and
best of all an internet explorer compatibility mode i'm actually not
joking about this that is a godsend not only for nostalgic masochists but also
for corporate and it workers that are stuck using legacy apps that just
won't run on modern browsers and the edge engineers say they're not
only creating new features for their own browser they're also submitting
suggestions to the chromium open source project which might influence other
chromium-based browsers and even chrome itself
for any of this actually matter though edge has to perform as well as chrome
firefox or the others and
actually given edge's reputation as the browser it probably has to perform even
better so we ran chrome new edge old
edge and firefox through a handful of benchmarks
html5 test for pure html5 performance
basemark for a mix of javascript and graphically intense workloads and
webexpert for a wide sampling of tasks intended to mirror everyday browser use
and i gotta say for a fledgling browser the new edge held up all right it kept
up pretty well with chrome although both of them lost to firefox and webexpert
and it beat both the old edge and firefox in basemark now it did have the
worst pure html5 performance out of our
tested browsers but then we ran the test again using https instead of http which
brought its score up to a tie with chrome so then at least from a pure performance
standpoint the new chromium-based edge is immediately a big step up from the
old edge and extremely close to chrome in terms of what you can expect from
day-to-day browsing so with a well-performing feature-rich
extension-heavy alternative to chrome on the table other than firefox of course sorry
firefox fans you guys are still a thing um we should just all be celebrating
then right like competition is good right
not so fast so we've talked a lot about what a
chromium-powered edge browser means for the user experience
but there's another huge question that the existence of this
chimeric concoction brings up is google about to fundamentally own the
ability to set their own standards for
how the internet is developed because here's the thing depending on where you
get your stats chrome has been sitting at around 65 to 75 global desktop
browser market share with edge around five and the supposedly defunct internet
explorer still hovering around five to ten percent
now firefox and safari still have healthy enough user bases but think
about this once this new edge actually launches and
edge and internet explorer users hopefully switch over as much as 85
percent of the internet could be dominated by browsers based on google
owned software that gives google an unprecedented level
of control over the way the internet will continue to change
and while google has developed many standards and protocols that have
benefited all web users like the speedy protocol that formed the basis for http
2. they've also been responsible for some shady
locked ecosystem type stuff in the past like changing youtube so that it ran
worse on non-chrome browsers wait i'm just trying to think was that
before or after they removed don't be evil from their corporate motto can you
remember yeah i mean either so the thing is all of that could be much ado about
nothing and for their part google has said they remain committed to the open
web and will continue to work with others in the web browser ecosystem but
we still thought it was important to not just try out new edge in this
video but to also point out that if you
subscribe to the age-old wisdom about absolute power and absolute corruption
and all that you might want to at least give firefox
a try or safari
sure or safari this video is brought to you by the drop
x alex cavalli tube hybrid amp it was
built from the ground up by drop and alex cavalli a long time favorite from
the audiophile community it combines solid state and vacuum tube amps it's
got an entirely new circuitry design it delivers the required current for planar
magnetic headphones and thanks to its high voltage it can drive dynamic
headphones to perform their best it's got a one year warranty and you can
check it out at the link in the video description
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description you don't have to buy it you can just
download it it's cool um yeah also down there is our merch store
which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should
totally join