Melanie Richards recently introduced new and upcoming features for web developers and users that are being incorporated into the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge. Since moving to Chromium, Edge has been slowly gaining user engagement, moving to Firefox to become the second browser for desktop / laptop devices (according to netmarketshare).
Melanie Richards outlined at Microsoft Build 2020 the initiatives contributed to Chromium by the Microsoft Edge team to improve both the user and developer experience for the Edge browser. Microsoft has made more than 3,000 commitments in the Chromium project since it announced the change to the Chromium engine in December 2018. Those confirmations bring updates to the browser’s user interface, web platform, JavaScript engine, developer tools, Skia composition, and more.
In his presentation, Richards focused on a few select features related to the web platform, web applications, and developer tools. InfoQ previously reported on the collaboration between Microsoft and Google to update the form controls. The effort aimed to produce a more modern look, along with better touch support and accessibility. This is part of a larger effort that seeks to standardize in-page controls (Open UI).
Developers who rewrite their own controls mainly complain about the difficulty of customizing the appearance of the control evenly across browser engines. In a survey, developers pointed out the control as the main criminal and personalization objective. In fact, Jed Watson reported in React Conf 2019 on the popularity of his react-select component (2.5 million weekly downloads) and the difficulty of creating a good API for it.
Richards also demonstrated a Microsoft Edge feature that supports the high contrast feature of Windows. The function takes advantage of the forced-colors part of the new W3C media query level 5 specification and the CSS system color specification of the level 4 specification of the CSS color module.
Richards recalled that Edge now boasts a 100% HTML5 accessibility score, improved inking latency (important for touch devices), reduced scroll latency, increased memory, and battery usage. The mentioned improvements in performance, battery life and privacy seem to have convinced Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal who recommended that Mac users switch to Edge or Safari as their primary browser. In one test, Edge used 665 MB of RAM with six pages loaded, while Chrome used 1.4 GB. Another test showed a reduction in memory usage of up to 27% when browsing with Microsoft Edge.
Richards further demonstrated the role the Storage Access API plays in protecting privacy and how Edge prevents user tracking. Richards also showed specific features that support folding devices and faster client-side media editing.
The new Edge also caters to web applications. On the one hand, PWAs benefit from significant additions to their capabilities at Edge. PWAs can be run when logging in to the operating system (Edge 83 / Windows 10), they can register key-based shortcuts, start automatically when the user clicks on certain URLs, customize window controls (for example, the window title bar) and more. On the other hand, WebView2 allows developers to embed web content in native applications.
Developer tools (development tools) can now be used in 11 languages and benefit from better accessibility across the board. The DOM can be viewed in 3D, allowing for faster debugging that involves z-index:
As with Chrome, developers can preview inbound features with beta, dev, and canary channels. New beta and stable releases are released every six weeks. Origin testing is also available in the Microsoft Edge Origin Trials program.
Microsoft also announced in Build that the new Edge browser, which was previously only available as a manual download, will be delivered via Windows Update as an automatic installation, replacing the legacy version of Edge (exceptions may apply for Enterprise customers). This may explain the recent increase in Edge’s market share, which is now the second browser on desktop / laptop devices (according to netmarketshare).
Other features not discussed in Richard’s talk were featured in Build 2020. They include Collections, a function that helps users to organize, save and share content (links, images, text, notes and more); a collaboration with Pinterest for content discovery; a search in the sidebar; new sync and customization options for IT professionals; and more.
Microsoft made an exhaustive and informative list of upcoming or current features available online, along with a description of the problem, the motivation for the new feature, and the designed solution (Microsoft Edge Explainers). The entire talk was recorded as part of Microsoft Build 2020 and is available online.
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